John welbeck rough draft ventures. trial#

You learn from mentors and pick up new skills.Learning to manage team dynamics will prepare you for the rigors of entrepreneurship. The product will inevitably pivot, but the team is there to stay. In the early days of a company, your most valuable asset in the early days is not the product, it’s the team and their ability to ruthlessly execute.

John welbeck rough draft ventures. trial#

Hackathons can be great trial run to benchmark how you and your teammates get along. In the same way some friends don’t travel well together, some don’t hack well together. That’s why even larger companies like Dropbox have made internal Hackathons a part of their culture and why Google pioneered the 20% time policy where employees can dedicate separate time to work on a project that inspires them.

This youthful energy is the heart and soul of startups. Instead of starting from scratch, hackers can leverage these existing frameworks to catalyze their projects. As part of their hackathon sponsorship packages, companies like Uber and Amazon deploy APIs and SDKs (read: nerd toys), which become the building blocks of projects. That’s what hackathons are like for engineers.

Remember when you were 8-years-old and you had that one friend who had all the coolest toys and Pokémon cards? Remember how playing at their house was the best day ever? You innovate by experimenting with new tech.The only way to get more of these resources is to deliver a product that impresses your customers and investors. When you’re working on a startup, you are low on cash and as a result, time. This is good practice for aspiring founders. Plus, most hackathons culminate with a demo where you present to an audience of peer hackers, engineers, and mentors, so you want to build a product you’re proud to show off. The best hackers manage their time effectively by prioritizing the tasks that need to get done and iterating quickly. There’s a lot to get done in this time: come up with an idea, form a team to work on it, and, of course, build the product. The typical hackathon is only 24 - 48 hours. Workflow, a program that connects mobile apps to automate things you do every day, was conceived at an MIT hackathon, went on to raise capital from Rough Draft Ventures, and was just recently acquired by Apple. GroupMe, the popular social messaging app that sold to Skype for $85M just 370 days after launch, for instance, was originally hacked at TechCrunch’s Hackday. Most hackathons are recreational (PennApps, the world’s largest collegiate hackathon, flaunts the motto “hacking for the hack of it.”) but for some hackers, hackathons are the catalyst for full-time projects. The hackathon community is appropriately active online, too: Facebook group Hackathon Hackers has a cult following of over 50,000 members and Hacker News has emerged as the 'The Reddit for Hackers.' Last year, more than 65,000 students participated in more than 200 weekend-long hackathons hosted by Major League Hacking (MLH), the official collegiate hacking league. As interest in computer science explodes across the country, hackathons have emerged a national phenomenon among coders on college and high school campuses alike.