Planet Jeffro

What a crazy weekend!  My team came in 2nd place at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon where 1,000 techies signed up, about 500 came to Pier 94 to play and nearly 100 hacks were demo’d on stage.

Our baby, PoachBase.com, didn’t win any monetary prizes (of which there were many).  Instead, we won a ton of TechCrunch press and will forever get to say we won TCD!  This is a big win for me as my teams have won each of the last 5 hackathons I’ve participated in. (More on those in another post)

Backstory:

My buddy San (of Showme) called me up a few months ago and said he was having a hard time hiring people, even though his startup had a healthy amount of funding.  He had a hunch that a lot of companies that enjoyed seed funding would have a much harder time getting follow-on funding for another round and this would be an opportune time to start connecting with the people working at those companies.  After all, they’d soon be searching for other jobs.

I filed that idea away and decided it’d be a great hackathon project… particularly for TC Disrupt because it was an ideal use of their Crunchbase directory.  And Techcrunch loves talking about anything that uses CB.

I pitched the idea to friends of mine with funded startups and they drooled over it. This is something that a lot of people are desperately trying to solve so they can save time in recruiting efforts and connect with the right people.

The idea:

So I ran with the idea and it hit me: PoachBase.  We’d pull data from crunchbase, analyze a few fields and determine (in a very general sense) how long the company has til it needs more funding. Then display the people who work for the company so it’s easy to connect with them on Linkedin or Twitter.

I sketched a mockup and jotted down a few notes.

Building a team:

Paul and I met at a Twilio meetup and we discussed the idea. He had already been analyzing this space on his own and jumped at the chance to parse the data, play with regression analysis in excel and consider some of the key attributes that determine when a company is on the verge of collapse.

Paul brought on Roman, an insanely talented designer with a knack for caricatures.

I knew Kennedy and had asked him to be a part of the team at the last hackathon we were at. He was named one of the most poachable players in NYC tech so that was pretty apropos.

Janan is a buddy of mine from Blueprint Health where he was a floating technical founder and ultimately joined Aidin and now works at Dogpatch.  He’s super cheerful and I had always wanted to hack with him.  He is actually looking to hire technical talent for Aidin (his ulterior motive to TCD!) and so it was a perfect fit since he knew the pain all too well.

(Janan and Paul)

(Kennedy and Roman)

The 20 hours:

We met up around 1pm on Saturday. They let us in a bit late and as expected it took us a few hours to get some focus.  It’s just too easy to socialize and hang out with fellow hackers and creatives. Too many ideas flowing and too much overlapping interests.  I swear they should just have a “hackathon” without the demos and competition!

Kennedy rolled in just before they served pizza at 7pm - he was delayed by another event, not his fault or style to be late.  As it turns out, it didn’t really matter.  ”The Machine” (as he is known) whipped up Roman’s designs into CSS/HTML in a few hours, easily doing more in 30 minutes than most of us did in the last 4 hours.  Roman leaned over to me and said “wow, where did you find this guy?  He’s good!”.

(Late night dogs.)

(A mountain of trash in the middle of our table)

The logo:

Roman was trying to come up with a logo.  His first stab was a treasure chest with a few men in suits coming out.  He wanted to go positive.  I wanted more bloody.  After all, it needed to embody the “poach” spirit if it was going to turn heads.

Me: “How about guys in suits walking towards and off a cliff.  But then there’s a little conveyor belt right at the edge that diverts a few of them into a box with a company logo on it.”

Roman: “That’s not a logo. That’s an intricate graphic design.”

Me: “Ok… How about a spear, impaling a guy in a suit?”

Roman: <incredulous>

Me: “Ok, how about a vulture ripping apart the remains of a guy in a suit.”

Roman: …

Me: “A startup hipster holding a tusk?”

Janan: “What about sharks??”

Roman: <draw shark fins in 10 seconds> “I like this as a logo.”

Me: “Can you put a sinking ship in the background?  And people falling off the ship?  Or a sinking ship with a few people in a raft…”

Roman: “No”

Me: “Ok…. how about blood in the water?”

Roman: <grudgingly> “Fine”

The data:

No offense TechCrunch, but your Crunchbase data isn’t particularly clean.  I spent the better part of the hackathon writing scripts to clean up lots of silly errors and things, like null dates or mismatched numbers on employees.

The night:

Kennedy and Roman knocked out lots of design changes while Janan got the backend to work.  Paul and I worked on the model but suffered quite a bit from poorly formatted or inadequate data.  We decided to just include Y-Combinator and Techstars companies (about 600 in all) rather than attempt to tackle 87,000 companies in the Crunchbase directory.  We knew it’d make a better demo anyway.

Janan got a 30 min nap.  Kennedy is a machine.  Roman lives in Staten Island so he had no choice but to stick around.  Paul and I headed out around 4:30am.  (I’m on the UWS).  I woke up at 7:45am and came back, armed with a pretty awesome pitch that was sure to please.

Demo prep:

At 9:30am teams could fill out a google form to get their place in the demo lineup.  A half hour later - like JV Basketball - a printed list was posted and everyone huddled around to see their number in the lineup.

We were #28 out of 93 or so.  First third. Not bad.  My sense was the earlier you go the more time people have to start tweeting about you. You can also enjoy seeing the rest of the presentations and not be stressed out.

Teams had 60 seconds (loosely enforced) to demo their hacks.  I had practiced mine about 20 times beforehand, even doing a West Wing style “walk and talk” with Kennedy.

(Calm before the demo-fest)

(This was a tweet search for “Poachbase”. I had a hunch it was going to light up very soon.)

The pitch:

Here’s Kennedy’s video of the pitch.

Here’s the Official TCD Video of all the hackathon demos. (jump to 42:00 for ours)

Video streaming by Ustream

A few key elements:

• I named all the judges. I was watching them during the other pitches and half of them were dozing off or not paying attention.  I knew long beforehand that yelling their names would immediately get them to perk up.
• I said the f-word. It was meant to be an earnest assessment of the situation.
• The solution, explained in one line.
• How?  Initially I wrote “blah blah blah” as a placeholder - to be filled in later with more detail about what we did. But when I thought about it I thought it made no sense to spend precious seconds on backend crap that, frankly, doesn’t matter that much.  Everyone I talked to about the idea had their own ideas for predicting deadpool status and I figured it’d be best to leave it up to the judges’ imaginations, to be determined at a later point.  In fact, Tarekh (one of the judges), mentioned to Paul that he liked when I said “blah blah blah”, but for the wrong reason: Tarekh thought it was a humorous way of saying “there’s no way we could solve this in a 20 hour period.”  Oh well!
• I called out “Message Party” as a place to poach from.  Turns out, one of their main guys is friends with Kennedy and in a pretty small circle of tech people I know. Whoops!
• There’s a fine line between confidence and just being a prick.  I walked it when I said “Poachbase… the most useful thing you’ll see all week. It’s live, use it, tweet it.  You’re welcome.”

Shortly after the pitch I ran into Colleen Taylor of TechCrunch who took us backstage to be interviewed.  (This was just as a “here’s a cool hack” interview - we were still about 60 demos to go.)

(Backstage studio)

Then… after deliberation… We won!

So yeah, we won 2nd place!  Prizes? Nope, nada.  But we did get some great press.  And we all know what happened to the last two TCD winners (GroupMe and Docracy)…