MHacks: From Dream to Reality
How we built the world’s largest hackathon in under a year
Sept. 2013: A year ago, MHacks was just four guys in a room throwing around a crazy idea; today, it’s the largest hackathon in the world.
How did it happen?
In this post, I’m going to do my best to explain how MHacks went from a dream to a reality that over 1214 hackers got to experience last weekend. In the process, I hope I can give some universal insight into scaling up hackathons.
The main assumption I’m making here is that bigger is better when it comes to hackathons. If you just want to read about actionable ways to make a great hackathon, then you should probably just wait for the individual, more specific posts that I’ll write as part of this series. This is just the story of how MHacks happened.
This is the (lengthy) introduction to my series on building phenomenal hackathons.
1. Fundraising — how did we pay for the hackathon?
2. Venue — how did we get a venue for the hackathon?
3. Outreach — why did so many hackers attend the hackathon?
4. Expo — how do you judge so many hacks?
Fall Semester 2012 Begins
Michigan Hackers takes campus by storm with a Jack Dorsey talk to kickoff the school year, followed immediately by a 25-person trip to PennApps, the largest student hackathon in the world at that time. This first big hackathon was life-changing. The entire trip was organized the week-of with travel subsidies offered by PennApps and support from UofM’s Center for Entrepreneurship to get three university vans rented last minute for the trip.
We come back from the trip completely on fire. Several of the students on the trip immediately change their majors, and just about everyone keeps building. Next thing you know, a group of 10 of us are flying to New York City for hackNY just a couple of weeks later. After coming back from this trip, we were even more sold on this whole hackathon thing. My partner in crime, Raj Vir, and I begin discussing the possibility of having one of these huge hackathons at Michigan. To gauge interest, we throw together a quick launchrock.
Shortly after these two trips, Raj Vir and I accompany Seelio, a local Ann Arbor startup, on their recruiting trips to Purdue and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. At different meetings on the trip, we throw around the idea of a huge Midwest hackathon at Michigan. These students are down — over 200 sign up on the launchrock. After hearing our stories, they want to get in on this whole hackathon thing. As soon as we get back, Raj posts on the Michigan Hackers Facebook group that he’s convinced we can throw a 500-person hackathon at Michigan the following semester. We are immediately met by huge pushback from the leaders of Michigan Hackers, as the thought of such a large-scale event sounds way too ambitious to them. The thread continues as Raj and I continue to hold our position that this is something we can pull off.
To make a long story short, we wind up in a meeting with the leaders of the hacker/entrepreneurial scene at Michigan. After pitching what we want to do, a debate ensues until Adam Williams, one of the founding members of Michigan Hackers, stands up and pretty much says that he’s down to put his weight behind this to make it happen — I’ll be thankful to Adam forever for believing in us.
We immediately get to work. Next thing you know, the chemical equation for a hackathon is on the whiteboard in the Techarb.
(Venue + Power + Internet) + Food/Drinks + Hackers == Hackathon
After running some quick numbers, we realize we will need about 50k in funding and a huge amount of outreach to convince 500 hackers to attend. We also need transportation for visiting hackers, and a venue that could fit everyone.
It really quickly becomes apparent that we need to get more A players onboard if we are going to pull this off. It’s November, and we want to throw the hackathon the first weekend of February. I send a text to two of the best people I knew: “Are you doing anything big with your life? If you want to be a part of something huge, come to EECS Haus: 600 E. Washington”
Sitting in the EECS Haus just a few hours later, Adam Williams, Daniel Friedman, David Fontenot, and Thomas Erdmann discuss what we would need to do to pull this thing off. It was possible, but we would all need to go HAM fundraising. I assure the team that I could find a big enough venue and build enough interest from other schools to fill it.
Right away, I pitch the school’s new entrepreneurship commission — looking back at it, I’m pretty sure no one at the meeting was ready for that pitch. I let them know we would need a venue to pull it off. Manish Parikh, the head of CSG at the time, pulls me over after and offers to do whatever he can to help us find a venue. The next day he introduces me to Loren Rullman, the Vice President of Student Affairs. After evaluating a few options, we move forward with Palmer Commons. The head of the building, David Disney, is potentially more excited than even we are and assures us that they could handle the event.
Right away, we pull together a list of all the corporate contacts we had across the country. Adam works on his connections through Michigan Hackers, and all of us go down the list emailing potential sponsors like crazy.
This wasn’t enough. A few weeks in, we meet again at Adam’s (EECS Haus) and decide we need to start cold emailing companies. We append just about every startup we can think of to the list, and keep going. Over Winter break, Dan even goes door-to-door throughout New York City bringing unsuspecting sponsors onboard.
Outreach
All the while, I surf the interwebs looking for every ACM, IEEE, and any other type of hacker org within an eight hour radius. Along the way, I find some really awesome leaders at different schools, who, in effect, became local organizers for MHacks. We pay for the bus, and they spread the message throughout their school and fill their seats. To fill most of the buses, we coordinate some really interesting routes that pass through a whole host of schools. All in all, it looks like we could probably fill about six buses. Around this time, Facebook comes on as our lead sponsor after weeks of negotiation.
We are still short on funding though. After Dan ferociously negotiates down the catering costs, we had raised only enough for 4 of the 6 buses. With about three weeks left until the event, I see an opportunity — the Dean of the College of Engineering is having open office hours. I take the chance, skip my classes for the day, and show up at his office with only the MHacks website on my laptop. I explain what we are trying to do and ask if he knows any way we could raise enough to cover the two final buses. He asks me to personally email him the proposal, and next thing I know the CoE is onboard to make it happen. The week before the event we pitch the Student Government to get some last-minute funding to finish balancing our budget, and a few hours later get the great news that they are in.
At this point, the idea of having a 500 person hackathon at the University of Michigan becomes really really real. We meet up and decide that the event really needs to have a huge focus on the hackers’ experience if we are going to step hackathons up to the next level. To make it happen, we reach out to Michelle Lu to head up the User Experience (UX) team for the event. I’m not exactly sure why she agreed to help, but with just over a week Michelle brings together and trains over two dozen awesome volunteers to help take the event from good to great. Not only were we going to have the largest student hackathon on our first go, but we were also going to give hackers an experience they would never forget.
After a week of being plagued by dreams of empty buses rolling into Ann Arbor, it’s Friday, February 1st. The buses come in full and the hackathon is crazy, but with the help of Mr. Disney’s awesome staff and Michelle’s badass UX team, we did it. 521 hackers to be exact.
Along with the hackathon, we got to try some cool things. Throughout the day on Saturday, we had a series of tech talks from different engineers, concluding with a talk from Professor Halderman that attracted nearly 150 students who sat on the edge of their seats from beginning to end. We even tried a new way of judging the event with an open expo instead of having everyone demo one-by-one in front of the whole crowd. Over 200 members from the public joined for the expo, and, although we had no idea how best to actually judge the expo, hackers loved being able to showcase their hacks to a nonstop stream of interested spectators. We also got to avoid the boredom of listening to the 127 hacks demo one-by-one in front of an extremely sleep-deprived audience.
After we concluded the event with our top 10 demos, loaded everyone up on their buses, and cleaned up most of the venue, we celebrated for a bit before trying to catch the superbowl (not sure if any of us made it through the whole game). I’m pretty sure all of us were still stunned that we pulled it off, and I still don’t remember too much of the hackathon, but I do know that it was something really special for all of us. A small group of really passionate people really can pull off what seems impossible.
Now, only a few months later, a 500-person hackathon is pretty standard. I’m really glad we got to be a part of that, and I hope the series that follows will help spread this culture to your school. Hackathons really changed my life, and I hope they change yours too.
This post has gotten a bit long, and I’m pretty tired of writing, so I’ll hold the follow-up about how we pulled the second MHacks off until a later date. Tom, the director of that hackathon, will probably do it more justice, as I dropped out before the second event and only helped out.
