We Hacked Our Hackathon | 50-Day Journey of Ingenuity & Elegance
Author: Sarah Sharif
Mar. 6, 2020
I slid the arrow across and clicked submit — just like that, I sent forward a final calendar invite to a workshop host.
We were all geared up to sprint into our client event. SXSW wanted to host their annual hackathon event with an exciting, new addition: a climate crisis challenge. I was thrilled to get involved with this event in Oct 2019, I hustled proudly alongside the team for over 5 months to be show ready, little did I know how impactful this day would be on me, let alone the world. The announcement of the SXSW cancellation and a series of other statements triggered a mini heart attack.
After 30 seconds, I transitioned into what I call my “deep survival” mode. I discovered how far I can turn off emotions and engage in logical thinking while also balancing my imagination to provide the solutions I knew were possible. I immediately consoled colleagues and a few local business owners and then tapped out for the evening considering I had completed my duties for my client and attended their huge team announcements. It was then time to shift focus on to Capsule.
Capsule was supposed to be an in-person, large-scale, 4,000 person event where the world could come to Austin, Texas for 2 days, and hack together for our climate crisis — and all of a sudden, it was not possible. I had spent all of Friday evening writing a Disease Mitigation Plan — Saturday was a blur — and when I woke up on Sunday, I had to get started on our life raft. I began researching new venues for a smaller scaled event, virtual options, and how our business continuity would be impacted including the loss of valuable time and work.
Mar. 9, 2020. Great, it’s Monday.
My deep survival mode had pushed me to retreat. I listened to my team, managed their emotions, and began to draft a plan. I met with our head of culinary who happened to also be an excellent event organizer, Jason Freshly, and our event producer for Capsule, Mike Hanley. Both collectively had over 40 years of experience — yay! We brainstormed several ideas including the use of a virtual, interactive, map-based platform.
We explored several other venues options and had luckily been able to engage an offer from WeWork in downtown Austin for the use of their space. We pounced on this offer since the dates were available and if approved — we could most certainly make this solution work. Everyone would be able to come to town, we could serve fancy refreshments, and focus on building a dynamic atmosphere to spur connection.
Wrong. A new roadblock. An announcement was shared from the City of Austin, all large scale events were called off. Period.
We started from scratch with a new entirely digital approach. We scheduled dozens of demos with several entities including Wurkr, Sococo, Uber Conference, Zoom, and others.
Wurkr — Great for small groups
Sococo — Excellent virtual office experience, love the rocket ship floors
Uber Conference — Great for smaller meetings
Zoom — Great webinar + large meeting platform
I know some members of my team were extremely nervous about this pivot and wanted to either do a smaller event or postpone it entirely. In my mind, it was more about facing this challenge head-on without deterring from our goal — the path of least resistance. Luckily, we were one of the fortunate events which could be entirely 100% online. I wanted to up the experience —beyond basic functionality —perhaps a face-to-face video component to connect it all.
Mar. 13, 2020. Think again. Another major roadblock. One of our Capsule supporters had a conflict of interest with our go-to platform.
I don’t think I need to share how the panic buying had set in across town, how a new level of fear was creeping through the streets, and now all the events were being dropped left and right. Yikes.
I had focused on finding platforms, searching for turn-key options, but this wasn’t the experience I wanted to craft. I was shuffling through meetings and answering constant questions — quickly, the stench of doubt began to lift from those lost in grief and unable to adjust to the shifting ground.
Time to rethink virtual events entirely by first deducing what makes events fun: Human interaction.
We had to pivot from these gamified, cartoon solutions, and focus on our solution.
How could I deliver a valuable event to our partners, sponsors, guests, participants, fans, and ultimately, provide something impactful for our planet?
I delved into research and listened to the emotional rollercoasters my colleagues were facing. My self-care was on hold — I had irregular sleeping patterns and my brain was in hyperdrive. Every minute, every second of my day was consumed with solving this problem.
Mar. 19, 2020. We discovered Pragli. There were no conflicts of interest. The platform was launching out of beta.
We had to iron out the roadmap to see which features we could play around with. The brainstorming started again. From scratch.
How would we use this platform? How would we visually display all of our participants? How would teams form? How would the UX influence their work and experience? How could we communicate as organizers? What about automation processes? What about those who couldn’t find a team? Would the virtual aspect lose the human element?
Powering through all of these questions, we went into full virtual event mode. We were exploring the platform, working with the two of the co-founders, and gearing up for a promising collaboration.
While this was occurring, I was still in my on-going loop of waking up, getting straight into my work, and not really moving until everything was mostly squared away. My days had task lists with over 100 items needing to be addressed, which were segmented between actual core business elements for Experimental Civics, working on client projects, AND managing the progress forward with the Capsule team.
Not to mention, my personal tasks, like putting on pants, brushing my teeth, brushing my hair, cooking something substantial, and actually decompressing before bedtime so I could sleep.
My event staff and I were meeting nearly every day to brainstorm approaches, outline new implementation strategies, and trying to establish a clear path forward.
I was tired — but crazy sprints are not alien to me. I’m extremely good at retracting from catching up with friends, limiting my Netflix hours, and using 10-min breaks to play with my pet to continuously ground me through intense days.
The world had changed dramatically before I had time to even catch up. What helped me was my deep survival mode and ability to see the opportunity at every turn. I was feeling like we could hit our stride and recover fast.
Mar. 24, 2020. We had just gotten off a phone call with Pragli — they were nervous about pulling this together under a tight timeline.
I know, as one entrepreneur to another, we are all calculated risk-takers, and the risk was just too high. The nail in the coffin for me was when there was a suggestion to move forward with experimenting, but it would limit out accountability, responsibility, and our ultimate success. I had had my fill of pivots, turns, twists, and surprises.
The painful part of this process was realizing I had to restructure the entire team as well as the event. I had to say goodbye to several folks within a span of a few days — but it was necessary to make space for those who could help me pull this off.
I‘m built for this.
For anyone who has worked with me — they know that I never work on fluffy intuition — but with hardcore facts on what is possible, what I know to be possible, and what is impossible which I can make possible.
Fact: I have everything I need to be prepared for any situation.
Fact: I have survived 100% of all hurdles in my life.
Fact: I have enough knowledge to redesign this entire experience.
I went to sleep so I could start fresh in the morning.
Mar. 25, 2020. Keep pushing. I went back-and-forth between platforms, but every single pivot was going to cost me an arm and a leg.
The truth — I didn’t have the budget to drop $32,000 on a one-stop solution. I had outgrown all the hackathon platforms which already exist and in my experience — they were always lacking in user experience, design, and the on-boarding to utilize their features was agonizingly slow.
I heard the voice inside my head repeat, “go back to your facts.” What did I know?
I knew I wanted a platform.
I knew I wanted a video conferencing aspect to the participant engagement.
I knew I wanted something visually appealing so people could find what they needed when they needed it.
*Ding*
In my inbox sat an email from Google. This email changed my life.
I forwarded it to my team and I immediately picked up the phone to chat with Google. I explained our event, I shared our needs, and I wanted to know if this was real.
Could I really use this upgrade?
I guess after being whiplashed so much the past few weeks — I couldn’t tell what was real. The person on the other line responded with patience, understanding, and walked me through everything.
Aha Moment.
After I hung up, I made the decision to build the event with our OWN dashboard, our OWN back-end development, and OWN front-end work. We were going to live link the shit out of the Capsule website. A mass web of hyperlinks masked by a stunning, easy-to-navigate dashboard.
I spent the next several days grinding on a first draft document with my flow of thoughts and ideas for making Capsule a great virtual experience carrying over the wreckage of the original plans.
I presented the first draft to the team for feedback, eagerly waiting to read their comments and ideas, with hope we could all agree to commit to this fresh endeavor.
Mar. 31, 2020, I started working on a 2nd brain-dump document, hoping this would shed some light in our upcoming multi-week sprint. It’s now 12 a.m.
I was beginning to really struggle with this schedule — but at the same time, I was struggling to be understood. I’ll think at some point, we all feel when our communication is off. I wanted to have everyone in love with the idea, but I realized how I should just lead forward by example.
I finished the second write-up and sent it along. I could feel the heaviness on my eyelids and it was time to quiet everything down — including my mind.
Have you ever slowed down suddenly while driving, realizing that you pushing the brakes wasn’t going to bring the vehicle to a stop immediately? THAT is how this felt with decompressing my mind — there is a long lapse between closing the laptop screen to falling asleep.
I woke up the next day ready to continue the journey forward. The best thing about the morning is that the on-ramp time is significantly less than the evening wind down. I stretched my yoga mat on the space between my living room couch and the television.
My pet bird, Milo, looked on with wonder at the odd moves I was going through in my practice. I breathed hard. Immediately after, I whipped up a banana smoothie, chugged some herbal remedies, and a few shots of espresso — onwards.
I believe in strong systematic approaches rooted in capturing data, steering strategy, and paving solid workflows. No one, after going through as many shifts as I had, wants to be stepping on another sinkhole.
The shift was going to heavily impact all areas of our event with marketing being the least since we had not yet launched our March and April campaigns. We had time before our pillar of Earth Day to get those rolling.
I presented this to the team and there were mixed emotions. Change management is one thing, crisis management is another, and a complete 100% top-to-bottom makeover is not something any leader is prepared for.
I have taken organizational leadership classes and studied leadership deeply in my master’s program — never was I confronted with a case study where literally everything had to change with a fast turnaround from teams, workloads, outputs, design, and experience.
Apr. 3, 2020. The foundation was ready to be built. I started work on the Capsule blueprint.
I generated the different spreadsheet tabs, outlined the format, laid out the logic, set up color-coding, and made sure the information was digestible for ease of understanding what this thing was — but the completion of this would take me days.
I felt like I didn’t have time — in my mind, I had less than 2 weeks to make this pivot so we could survive with just a few scratches. Business continuity was at the forefront of my mind — figuring out how can we pivot without throwing items in the trash, and overloading on work.
I knew I needed more help. I scheduled 2 phone calls with two of my dearest friends and colleagues — Nida Kraila and Arantza Orengo-Green.
I spent the weekend mapping out a beast gameplan with wireframes and screenshots and working through questions.
How this would work? How I could share this idea with the team to gain the confidence of my team in our next steps? How would I even tell them about this pivot? How would I explain this to our larger audience?
Apr. 6, 2020. I took a deep breath. It was hard to keep the morale up. I was getting burnt out with all of the heavy planning, thinking, and being the stoic leader with answers. I began to deeply resent questioning, I was tired of saying, “I just don’t know.”
I think what really boils my blood is the “woe is me” and stagnant nihilistic attitudes that people can harbor which can be projected on to you. I know it’s fascinating to watch human behavior when there is no playbook.
I’m a bloody good problem-solver, entrepreneur, and mountaineer. I bring up mountaineering because it was when I was sitting at the base of Everest when I learned how powerful having a positive mindset is.
I had watched people stumble off during my 12-day hike to the basecamp — some would get sick — others would have this anxiety of wanting to be faster. Personally, I would just applaud myself for making it one day closer to being at the foot of the largest mountain on Earth in an environment you can’t train for instead of being down about a slower than expected pace.
You can’t be the voice of positivity for everyone.
*Ping*
A colleague, Peter Salib, shared this: https://monday.com/blog/remote-work/remote-hackathon-roadmap/
And there was a similar version to my blueprint. “HAH!” I screamed so loudly, “PROOF!” I now had an excellent example of great minds think alike.
Apr. 8, 2020. I briefed Nida and Arantza on our game plan. We were going to HACK our HACKATHON so help me, Zeus.
We were going to do a Thursday (light), Friday through Sunday deep dive into getting all 600+ links and Capsule blueprint work complete.
I created a team, slack channel — #DreamTeam obviously — but the goal was to complete both back-end and front-end development, but we needed someone for the front-end.
Here is the side story of the fastest hire in my life: Maya Rose Tweten.
I put up a post on Tuesday of that week asking for a Squarespace developer for a short-term project. I was bombarded with interest and immediately began scheduling 15-min interviews.
If there is ONE THING I hire for it’s the ability to simultaneously problem-solve and apply imagination.
You either get it or you don’t. I can tell within 5 mins if you and I can sync together or not. Maya hopped on a call within 2 hrs of my post and we discussed the project at length. She not only understood with exact precision but immediately problem-solved with me minutes after our call on some coding plug-ins and loading questions I had.
Within 24 hours, we had signed a contract, made the first payment, and she was in. Brilliant! Now I had to catch up on all the 100+ items I had forgotten to take care of which consisted of onboarding an entire marketing arm for Capsule and getting the gears turning across all of our efforts.
Apr. 10, 2020. Our mini “Capsule” hackathon began. Things were moving fast.
After a 2-hour design huddle on a Friday and several meetings later, the group was off.
And I went off to sleep.
I slept through Saturday, missed my check-in meeting with them. I slept through until Sunday afternoon.
I pinged the team on Sunday — it was built. They had actually finished by mid-day on Saturday because everything was so logically laid out, that there weren’t many hurdles, questions, or mistakes to be made.
I wanted to cry in absolute relief and admiration for being able to pull this off. It has been such an adrenaline-fueled month with more emotions floating through my system than I could handle and I was coming out to see the bright light forward.
It was working.
I know I only slept so hard because I had complete trust and confidence in my team, our plan, the product, the direction, and just the uplifting conversations I had with them, filled with encouragement.
Apr. 14, 2020. It’s alive! Created in <8 days, saved $32K in tech expenditures, and avoided a $200K loss if the event was postponed.
The dashboard was all set to present to the team. We had done it. I could feel the tension lifting as the doubt and fear had no space at our table. We had our final product, including a custom login page from our homepage where users could jump into our dashboard and find a project to hack forward.
I presented this beautiful dashboard to our team and explained all the pathways we had built from countries, interest tags, challenge categories, to how we were going to provide a seamless experience syncing with Slack, Google Hangouts/Livestream for engagement, to other supportive resources.
Everyone was happy — from the team to our partners, and to our sponsors. Now we had to focus on steering all of our programming, schedules, marketing, and more.
We followed up with our speakers, keynotes, performers, panelists, webinar hosts, and all of our partners with the updates and confirmed their participation in Capsule.
Apr. 25, 2020. Today is Day 50 since the news. We have had 100% retention.
I’m in a deep self-love mode today, as I reflect on what the hell just happened with Capsule, with my life, with my friends, family — and where we’re heading next. We were able to gracefully pivot a large-scale in-person event into an entirely remote, flexible, digital experience.
Now we’re not out of the woods yet — everything about the event will tell its story — but we’re excited to have made this move.
I want to share 2 powerful, closing observations with everyone.
(1) Invest in Entrepreneurs
I pivoted a hard right and I wanted to share this story because the truth was this journey was a shock to my system with every inch in the new direction.
Entrepreneurs aren’t risky — we take calculated risks using our natural, deep logic.
Entrepreneurs are the builders of solutions — this is not a task for everyone, especially those with linear thinking.
Entrepreneurs are trained for the unknown — it’s where we live most of the time, and it counts tremendously in situations like this.
Entrepreneurs sacrifice at higher levels than ANYBODY else — from health, sleep, energy, personal life, family time, and self-care.
I’m a survivalist — I know my limits even when I don’t know them in a new situation and I can read my body and mind pretty well enough to know when I need to sit out. The mindfulness of this in of itself is an incredibly powerful tool. That type of resilience is what makes us different from the rest of the population.
Invest in us, trust us, win with us, fail with us, but I have the utmost respect for entrepreneurs. If you haven’t launched a business or startup before, then I encourage you to learn from entrepreneurs around you to elevate empathy.
We make things look elegant and smooth from the outside, but little do you know what it took to achieve that.
(2) Attitude Feeds Your Survival
I understand some people are trained to find flaws and always be in critique-mode — I’ve found this usually connected to a struggle with the self-love needed to fuel a happy disposition.
YOUR attitude determines YOUR survival. If you start with doubt, concerns, panic, you’ve already lost and you’ve missed the point.
When you approach problems as a game, as puzzles to be solved, the mystery is addictive and you won’t settle until you have the answer. You have to be obsessed with seeing all perspectives and findings ways to bring to the surface every ounce of knowledge you have stored in your brain.
I had quiet moments when I felt overwhelmed, but I knew I had control over my mind, my body, and my reactions. Every day I was course-correcting, every day I was imagining and reimagining solutions, every day I was lifting our team morale, every day I had to be of the mindset that we were going to reach calmer waters.
