Sako

Here are my 51 learnings from 50 hackathons in 2024! Endless shoutout to all the organizers, sponsors and hackers for driving the pace of innovation in a region where it’s already sky-high. 🙌 🚢 After reflecting on this journey, I’ve grouped my learnings into these key themes: ✅ 1/10 Hackathons: The Heartbeat of Innovation 1. Definition of hackathon: With ideas you don't have, with people you don't know, with tools you haven't worked with: SHIP USEFUL THINGS FAST! 2. Hackathons are the freestyle dance of innovation, unlike the routine exercises of gyms or corporate life. They keep your engineering and entrepreneurial skills razor-sharp. 3. Hackathons are a great way to challenge yourself, step out of your comfort zone, and embrace creativity. 4. Hackathons unleash collective intelligence that can ripple into positive impacts beyond the event. 5. Hackathons are the perfect environment to collaborate in non-corporate, non-academic settings, enabling individuals to bring out their best.

@rpoo enjoy it Ross!!! try also cold plunge in Bay🙂👌

touching some grass

The older I get, the more I realize intelligence is overrated. Intelligent people are more likely to overthink, overplan, and overanalyze. They hide behind motion that doesn't create progress. They fear the judgment of others if they're proven wrong. The truth is that intelligence is abundant. Courage is not. The people you admire are the ones who had the courage to act. They aren’t more talented than you. They aren’t smarter than you. They just took action when you didn’t. I often wonder how many extraordinary people wasted their entire lives waiting for permission that never came. Permission isn't granted. It's taken. You get to tap yourself in whenever you want. You can just do things. Courage beats intelligence.

@meh_agarwal 🔥

Hollywood isn't dead. It's evolving. And we're leading that evolution. We just shipped Koyal v2.5: The best Agentic AI filmmaking platform. It goes from your script or music to full video with consistent characters, settings & storylines. Large Production houses, music labels & ad agencies use @KoyalAI for storyboarding & pre-viz. Smaller studios use it for making content they never had the time, budget or resources to create. Write a scene. Direct the camera. Build a world. @KoyalAI brings it to life. Here's what's new: - Go from script to video: Write a scene with dialogue, pacing, emotion. Koyal fully realizes it. Using the best voice models on the planet. - Direct the camera: Push in. Pull back. Drift through a scene. Real 3D camera blocking. Shape the shot the way you see it in your head. - Build a world that stays:Lock in a location and return to it. Your scenes stay consistent from the first frame to the last. Plus: dialogue, SFX, annotations for editing, and more control over every shot. Under the hood, we benchmark 40+ models weekly with real humans so Koyal always uses the best available (more on that next week!) Our agents pick the best models for each scene in run-time so you focus on the story, we handle the complexity. You don't need to prompt a film, you can direct it. With Koyal, we're looking to replace the camera, not the filmmaker behind it. Try it now at beta [dot] koyal [dot] ai DM me for credits!

@marianebekker 🔥🚢

You.com just launched a Research API — meaning you can now plug deep, real-time web research directly into your apps. No more hallucinations, no stale data. Just live intelligence, on demand. 📄 Docs: #what-is-the-research-api" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">docs.you.com/research/overv… ⭐ Sign up: you.com/signin?redirec…

Get $100 in free credits (no card required) and try it here: you.com/signin?redirec… Thanks to You.com for sponsoring! PS: My favorite search tool at hackathons! AND my first sponsored post, let me know how i did :) #AI #BuildInPublic #ResearchAPI

I just ran a complex policy research question through You.com Research API! 🚢 Agentic search, exhaustive mode, 45 seconds, cited sources. This is what search should have always been!

Saturday 2/14 ‣ The Board Walks meetup.com/the-board-walk… @theboardtalks ‣ Build What You Love - Women in Tech Hackathon luma.com/ic3l89gi @aivalleyio @courtneythko @victorsuortiz ‣ AI Meets Robotics – Launch & Fund Your Own Startup (Edition 1) luma.com/ai-meets-robot… @lablabai @GoogleDeepMind @theaievangelist @Robotcom @gokiwibot @Marianebekker @sakows

@GeorgeKurdin @usemonk @zhou_squared ❤️🚢

Revenue automation software has a credibility problem. Numbers appear in dashboards. And accountants are told to just trust them. Our team at @usemonk took a different approach. We set out to make every number traceable and defensible. Today, @zhou_squared shares our product philosophy on building for accounting/finance professionals. We’ve been fortunate to have the support of our customers and experts in this build. Thank you for continued feedback!

Demos are no longer impressive. As LLMs mature and the surrounding tooling accelerates, the vibes at hackathons change as well: In 2024, we were using AI. In 2025, we started building with AI, and “buildathons” and “build days” replaced traditional hackathons. Now we’re entering a new wave and the bar needs to rise again. A polished UI, a working POC, and a good story are no longer enough. By 2026, I’m personally setting a new goal to ship: ✅ product that generates revenue. ✅ research-level breakthrough. Let’s call it payathon for now, where customers are the judges to decide if they are seeing immediate value and willing to pay. What is a formula to charge? Output should be 10x of input. Building products and services that leads to revenue, which in-turn leads to win. Btw, I have pitched the idea to @AndrewYNg , he liked it as well, now we need to see it in action next year🙂 Really, excited to try it out!

who’s run a lot of hackathons? Am curious to pick their brain on what happens to the format given vibe coding etc Who should I talk to…?

@MammadKarim @andrewchen :)

@sakows @andrewchen here is the man

Here are my 51 learnings from 50 hackathons in 2024! Endless shoutout to all the organizers, sponsors and hackers for driving the pace of innovation in a region where it’s already sky-high. 🙌 🚢 After reflecting on this journey, I’ve grouped my learnings into these key themes: ✅ 1/10 Hackathons: The Heartbeat of Innovation 1. Definition of hackathon: With ideas you don't have, with people you don't know, with tools you haven't worked with: SHIP USEFUL THINGS FAST! 2. Hackathons are the freestyle dance of innovation, unlike the routine exercises of gyms or corporate life. They keep your engineering and entrepreneurial skills razor-sharp. 3. Hackathons are a great way to challenge yourself, step out of your comfort zone, and embrace creativity. 4. Hackathons unleash collective intelligence that can ripple into positive impacts beyond the event. 5. Hackathons are the perfect environment to collaborate in non-corporate, non-academic settings, enabling individuals to bring out their best.

🎯 Next Time: The Fix 1. Branch chaos | One person owns deployment 2. Feature creep | One feature, executed perfectly 3. “update” commits | Commit messages that aren’t garbage 4. Integration hell | Merge early, merge often | 5. Demo panic | Stop coding 2 hours before demo to practice

💀 The Harsh Truth You had the right idea (egg music was perfectly useless) but couldn’t ship it. Your git history looks like a team that panicked, thrashed, and gave up. Winners ship broken demos that work. You shipped nothing that worked.

When You ask AI to evaluate why you lost at hackathon. Loud and clear: You Lost Because You Couldn’t Execute

See you in 2026 at #AWSreInvent !

What an honor to take my last selfie at Re:Invent with legend @Werner, CTO @ @amazon! One of best keynotes I have attended in my entire life, every word had a meaning! The talk was about a new mindset for AI era, Renaissance Developer someone who is curious, polymath, owner, systems thinker and communicator! Must watch: lnkd.in/g3JY6dxJ Must read: thekernel.news/articles/dawn-… Thank you @awscloud Re:Invent team for truly taking pride at your work and bringing us together! Keep calm and now go build!🚢 It feels a bit sad to know that after 14 years of consecutive re:Invent keynotes, we won’t see Dr. Werner Vogels on stage next year. The Full Legacy – 2012 → 2025 2012: lnkd.in/guCUDmUe 2013: lnkd.in/gvhutrVu 2014: lnkd.in/grMect-3 2015: lnkd.in/g9SNC5Fi 2016: lnkd.in/gdGUmNvz 2017: lnkd.in/gZKQZEQU 2018: lnkd.in/grDqf6uC 2019: lnkd.in/gFXaTaMW 2020: lnkd.in/gAnvZDTX 2021: lnkd.in/gcZEQjum 2022: lnkd.in/gzqiUwgT 2023: lnkd.in/ggF8B5C5 2024: lnkd.in/g_37AzjT 2025: lnkd.in/g3JY6dxJ #AWS #AWSreInvent