How the World's Best Startup Residency Helps Founders Excel

How do you go from MHacks to you're then leading HF Zero a decade plus later? Take me through MHacks in terms of that experience for people who don't know what it is, and hackathons, and we're gonna get all the way back to where you're at today.

Yeah, so the origin story is like, you know, I grew up in Miami, or right outside of Miami in Hollywood, and I didn't have that much exposure to technology, but I ended up getting a full ride to the University of Michigan, and it was my dream school. And that got me out of the state. I'd pretty much never seen snow before. And like, holy shit, like I got hit in the face with like everything when I went to Michigan. I mean, it was like amazing meeting so many smart people working on so many different things. Snow for the first time for a really long time. Like the snow doesn't let up there. And then I went to my first hackathon. It's called Hack A2thon for Ann Arbor. And I didn't even really have a working computer at the time. I had like this like note notepad for like taking notes.

Yeah.

But it didn't really— like, you couldn't write code on it. Didn't really work for anything else. So I show up to this hackathon pretty much without a computer, and, and I was very entrepreneurial. I had all these ideas. I wanted to find someone to help me build like the website for them. And everyone was like, dude, you don't even have like a working laptop. Like, what are you doing here? But one guy took me under his wing. His name was John Grizzly Beals. And he was like, I won't build this website for you, But I'll let you use my laptop and I'll teach you how to build it. And at the end of that weekend, I had built my first website ever. It was called door-k.com. K was for knowledge. And I still remember calling my mom in South Florida and being like, Mom, go to door-k.com. She like puts in her email and it like shows up in our Rails database in Michigan. I was just like, Mom, like, what? And so fast forward, I got hooked on hackathons. There weren't that many. So I'm taking Greyhound bus, Megabus all across the country. And I went to all the other ones and then I was like, wait, there's no more? And I realized, no, we need to start, we need to start more hackathons. So I decided to start MHacks at the University of Michigan. Um, and, and we pretty much, we rented a, one, one of like the startups in Ann Arbor rented a van and was gonna go do like a tour of the big engineering universities in the Midwest. And they invited us to go with them. They're like, hey, do you wanna come and like talk about these hackathons? And I was like, yeah, definitely.

That sounds great.

So we'd just gotten back from, from Penn Apps at Penn. We're driving to Purdue, Indiana, Illinois, like all these big engineering universities in the Midwest. And we would show up to their CS 101 classes and I would ask the professor, I'm like, hey, we've been going to these hackathons. I was on fire about this shit, man.

Yeah.

It's like, we've been going to these hackathons on the East Coast. We're bringing one to the West Coast. I wanna invite your students to come and like actually build things. And pretty much all the professors were like, yeah, yeah, you drove all the way from Ann Arbor, sure. Midwest is friendly like that, you know?

I'm from Wisconsin, so I understand.

You understand, right? And so I pretty much told them, I was like, hey, we've been going to these hackathons. Oh my God, it's amazing. It's the best thing ever. Like, I was like high on it, you know? And then I was like, if you get 50 signups from your school, we'll send you a bus. And we ended up sending 8 buses like snaking through the Midwest all the way from Iowa, from the cornfields of Iowa to that first MHacks. And it was the largest hackathon in the world on our first go. And at the end of that, I gave a speech where I was like, look, there's no good reason the largest hackathon in the world is happening here at Michigan. It's a good school, but it's not the best school. The only reason this isn't happening at your school is you haven't started it yet.

Yeah.

And so I gave everyone my Facebook link, told them, hit me up, I'll come to your school, I'll help you either get it started or if you already have a hackathon, scale it up to this size and end up getting hit up by like students from almost every school that attended, dropped out 2 weeks later. and just hit the road, started traveling to all these different universities from Waterloo, MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, like probably 40 different universities and helping them scale up their hackathons, just really spreading hackathons. I wasn't getting paid at all. I just loved doing it. Yeah.

What was the ambition back then building hackathons? You weren't even paid, you said, but you loved it clearly. What was the ambition? What did you want this to become?

So the vision I had then is the same vision I have today. When I started going to hackathons, the magic of a hackathon isn't what's going on at the hackathon. It's all the things that aren't going on in your life.

Yeah.

When you're at a hackathon, it's that you're not doing everything else. And when you subtract everything else away and you just drop into like that creative flow, I don't like Pretty much I started envisioning a world where people could just build and not have to worry about anything else.

Yeah.

And I was like, if we were able to create that space, even for a weekend, for our most creative people, for our most creative young people in college, but for our most creative people in general as a society, what could happen? And I was just witnessing at these hackathons like magic happening over and over and over again at MHacks3. The third app hacks, the startup that won was called Workflow, and code that was written at that hackathon is now on every iPhone in the world.

Wow.

Right. And look, hackathons aren't about the hacks. It's more about tapping into that flow, that other thing of building when you're letting go of everything else. Right. And so that's the same vision that we're still working on here at HF Zero. And it's still just the start. 'Cause like, I envision a world where people can just build and not have to worry about anything else, not just for a weekend.

Yeah.

You know, hackathons give that to you for a weekend. HF Zero gives that to you for 12 weeks. But I'm talking about like, for life, like in this post-AGI world, where are people gonna find meaning? Where are people gonna find purpose? In creativity, in expression. And I think at the root of what it means to be human, it's, it, there is this element of expression. That's just so core to it all. And so I actually think the way that people are living here at HF Zero, where like, yes, it's a grind, but also it's a flow. The way that people are living where they're really in flow on the thing they want to be birthing into the world, I can just imagine a future where that's available to like most of humanity.

Yeah. And the in-person piece of it is very interesting as well with what HF Zero is doing. I just talked to Jacob Jaber, who's the co-founder of Philz Coffee, and he's now investing in brick-and-mortar businesses. And it's like, he's so bullish on everything in person and investing in those businesses, especially with AI, because AI is going to do some phenomenal things. But the in-person aspect of building things, getting together, community, all of that is going to become even more important when you have this world of AI as well.

Yeah.

Which is having your residency in person. We're in SF right now. People are all here. The energy of that in person, it's unparalleled. It's a huge advantage you have, it seems like. Yeah.

I mean, the way that I think about it is you only have one life to live. And yeah, getting a bunch of people in person is a lot of work. It's way easier to do stuff remote. But if you only have one life to live and you could be living surrounded by like the most legendary people that you've ever met who are all in their flow creating, that is the optimal state. Yes, it is a ton of work.

Yeah.

To get those groups together. Like we, we put in so much work so much thought in thinking about the 10 teams that we're going to live with for 12 weeks. Like, if you're like doing normal investing, yeah, you're going to be on the journey for a long time. We're going to live with you for 12 weeks. So we spend so much time thinking about how do we bring together the right group with the right chemistry. And my co-founder Emily is just incredible at holding the space. and creating that harmonious community. And it's a lot of work to get— good founders have strong personalities.

Go figure.

Strong personalities. And to get the right group together and to get them to live together in harmony, I mean, like average age of our last 2 batches, 34, right? Like these aren't, these aren't kids. These are adults. These are repeat founders. A number of these founders have built billion-dollar companies. Some of these founders have taken companies public. They have nice apartments. They were doing great before they joined HF Zero. And so one, they're choosing to drop into the zone of their life to birth their life's work, which is so beautiful. And they're coming in with a really big personality. And how do we get you to live together in harmony? It is hard to get that group together in person in harmony. But when you do, there's nothing like it. This is the Like, I've never experienced anything like it. The closest product I can think of is college. And then, and then maybe besides that, it would be like cities. People are like, oh, do you all compete with this? I'm like, no, that's not our competition. Like, I want to build an institution on the order of like the university system, but for people who are in the prime of their career and want to birth their life's work. And I think like when this is done well and it's hard to do it well, I mean, we pour our heart and souls into this, When this is done well, this is like some of the best 12 weeks of people's lives.