Pre YC AI Hackathon by Restack

Why I decided to attend

The last two weeks have been tough for me. I parted ways with my Co-Founder after 18 months of late nights and weekends devoted to our startup ideas, but we didn’t achieve major success. Looking for inspiration, I came across this event on Luma. I bought bus tickets, booked an Airbnb and went to Berlin.

The event

I went there alone, so I tried to talk to as many people as possible. The good thing is that founders want to pitch their ideas, and people looking for a team are open to others ideas, so it’s easy to connect and find a team. I met a lot of great people and I’m really thankful for the opportunity.

My team

At first, I took part in a few brainstorming sessions with different participants. Finally, I joined Caspar and Felix, who were working on a Financial News aggregator app. The project was scoped so we could finish it end-to-end within two days. I think I contributed well to the team, but in retrospect, I feel I focused more on networking than on building the application itself. Thankfully my team understood - networking is also a big part of a hackathon anyway.

The project

We decided to submit our application for the hackathon final and Caspar did the pitch. This hackathon was focused on projects aiming to apply to YC, so some were prebuilt. Thus, it was difficult to compare our mini-app to other more complex projects and it’s hard to tell how we performed compared to other teams.

The outcome

I’m very competitive, but this hackathon was not about winning for me. The greatest value came from the people I met. A big thanks to my Team and to Francesco, Sebastian, Felix, and Seb for truly inspiring conversations.