Building StudentHack
The story and inspiration behind founding one of the first student-run hackathons in Europe.
When I refer to hacker, I mean an attendee of a hackathon: someone who builds a prototype of their idea which is also known as a hack. It’s not hacking into banks.
A few years ago, I remember thinking of an exciting new hackathon brand whilst at AngelHack London. I didn’t know what it was, what I would call it or anything on how I was going to do it. All I knew was that I’m going to do it smarter, harder and plain better than anyone else out there, period.
The hackathon industry
Hackathons have grown on a massive scale and it has killed the gap between recruiters and engineers. There is no gap. Every amazing engineer I know is making an impact somewhere in this world and that really excites me.
Almost every tech company runs a hackathon. Facebook runs internal hackathons every few months and that attracts engineers. Even airlines are getting on to hackathons. It has become an entire industry of its own — simply because the creative output is far greater than anything ever seen before and it can massively speed up advancements in almost every field.
Budget startups and top companies are increasingly moving towards hackathons as their prime source for top talent. Hackers themselves are large advocates of this—you identify awesome startups, potential co-workers and engineer cultures. It’s not about Google or Facebook anymore; it is about high growth startups that always put you in the driving seat, pay you competitively and let you take a gamble on being a part of the next big thing. You really can’t make recruitment more natural and exciting if you tried.
The early days
At this point, I was as clueless as one could be about organising anything, never mind an overnight hackathon. I have been to many hackathons already so I knew how I wanted it to be — but how to get there was a totally different story. How would I even raise money? How much would I need?
But before all that, I needed to get a venue. No venue, no hackathon. So I went to my tutor Bob and told him about the idea, and he got me connected with the head of department right away. I had overheard they wanted to run their own hackathon but never did so things looked bright.
The meeting was scheduled and I needed to get them on board. I hadn’t even thought of a name for it — but I knew it needed to be complimentary to how kick-ass the hackathon will be. After hours of relying on domain suggestions, I came across studenthack.com and bought it right away.
This was it. StudentHack, as I knew it, was born.
Preparing for pilot
The meeting went successful and a May 25/26 date was secured for the hackathon. There was one condition — the university wanted me to work with the then-VP of the Computing Society and I had to agree. Long story short, he turned out to be really awful at everything and I ultimately was left to run it all myself — but that’s a story I’ll tell another day.
What’s a hackathon without sponsors? The university alone didn’t cut it for me and so I went on my own ramblings for this. No sponsors, mo’ problems. Nobody heard of StudentHack and we had very little signups; it didn’t make for a good email never mind a good investment. I decided to focus on getting signups and other stuff before getting in touch with sponsors.
Weeks before the event, we had sold nearly all of our capacity. Turned out our event was in the exam period for many universities (except ours) which was a rookie mistake and it only made getting signups harder. But only now when we approached companies — we began pulling big names such as Microsoft and Treehouse as the numbers started to get them interested.
The university helped in getting sponsorship but turned out none of our sponsors had given us cash — only impressive prizes. This was great but there was things we hadn’t yet secured (snacks and swag) and so I hustled £250 from two sponsors and with some of my own money, we were finally ready.
Fast forward to May, an awesome 52 people turned up and we rocked it.
Bigger and better
After spending most of my summer in Kenya, I came back inspired to take StudentHack into a new direction. I wanted to build a hackathon that becomes an integral part of university culture and not just a dying fad.
The original plan was to run an event in November but I decided to push it back to Feb 8/9 to make it better. More than doubling the capacity meant the organising team needed to grow and that’s when I came across Syeef (we vaguely met before via mutual friends) who seemed like a driven individual and so I asked him to join — he almost instanteously accepted and joined us.
We’re now two organisers who share the same drive. This is when we became an epic hackathon. We actually raised sponsorship money to make the event awesome in many ways — shirts, lanyards, wristbands, swag, etc.
StudentHack is also a hackathon without fear of reinventing ourselves, partly because that’s the way I operate and it encourages us to move faster. Many of our experiments have silently been killed and others have worked— and we’ll keep doing lots more.
A few things that are now internal policy to StudentHack:
- Avoid cash prizes. Cash means career; career means competition.
- No profit. No salaries, no payouts. We’re broke students anyway.
- Mentor-ratio. An optimal participant to mentor ratio should be 10:1.
- Anti-Eventbrite. Why? Too expensive. Stripe ftw. And we can write code.
- Freshness. Hackathons are like parties. Give people great stories to tell.
- Move-fast-break-fast. If we fail, we cry it out and come back harder.
With over 1 million calories consumed between ~200 people, our Feb 8/9 hackathon was our most epic and defining hackathon to date.
The lessons I’ve learnt
As a participant, hackathons seem magical. Enough food and snacks to last you a lifetime, swag that compliments yourself and meeting people that all are all determined and increasingly well-connected. The first time you meet someone who was mentioned on TechCrunch, or maybe the first time you meet the CEO of a tool you religiously use. Hackathons do empower you.
As an organiser, hackathons are even more magical. You are always looking for ways to attract more people and make your hackathon the life-changing platform it deserves to be. Organisers are connected with both companies and participants so it becomes my job to potentially change someone’s life. Hackathons were also never designed to be serious and they shouldn’t ever have to be so — people should be building as per usual and really love doing it.
Hacker culture is something I really understood when I organised the pilot StudentHack. The idea of inspiring people to build more, learn more and develop experience; the same experience that gives hackers an increased chance at changing an old tradition into something better in this world. Even if you don’t succeed, someone will likely be wanting to give you a job.
The worst thing I’ve seen is really smart students with extensive academic background not being able to do anything impactful. I think it’s very easy to become overly disciplined in academia and to forget the real world — which is increasingly being dominated by the younger, less-disciplined generations. Hacker culture mixed with academia allows these talented students to develop a strong sense of discipline management in a way for them to still be creative but in a way that lets them apply their knowledge for impactful good.
Also, the most beautiful thing about a student-run hackathon is everyone’s hacking on something. Participants hack on code; I hack on the hackathon.
Thanks to @romainfrancez, @fareskalaboud and @syeefkarim for their feedback.
