Teams compete in a 48-hour hackathon to build Web3 business models for governance, currency, healthcare, and energy. Participants divide roles, crash-course each other on blockchain, design pitches and financials under pressure, and grapple with competing teams chasing the same ideas. One team places second and reflects on what they learned about collaboration and startup speed.
Chapters
Where you do have to actually work a little bit at like, you know, hustling and getting your ideas out there.
We have to come up with a Web3 business model and apply the business model to governance, currency, healthcare, transportation, and energy. And we have to do our We have to come up with our business model, and even we have to come up with the financial statements within 2 days.
You have 48 hours to come up with an idea and 48 hours to put this together. So this is just nonstop brainstorming about this idea and then just making a plan of action. People think years and years on an idea and can never bring it to action. Some do, some don't.
What I did see is that, of course, because you're in a group with a lot of founders, kind of that everybody is used to having the management role.
It's a team activity. You get very little sleep, and it's throughout the entire day.
All right, it takes strategy. It takes diligence, determination, and it takes teamwork. It's very similar. It's just the only difference between tech and football is there's an arena and there's a computer.
I was not familiar with Web3 prior to this challenge.
I was really nervous that I wouldn't be able to contribute, but actually it turns out we had a resident Web3 expert in our team who was able to make us all feel really Confident and comfortable talking about it.
I was familiar with the technology, right, but not with the industry.
Mariano was the one that knew the most about Web3 in our group, so he gave us a crash course.
I have very vague knowledge of it.
I—
right, there's a bunch of buzzwords in the world, right? We hear about cryptocurrency, we hear about NFTs, we hear about the metaverse.
I'm the only one that do business in Web3. So, so my job is to explain Web3 concept to everyone.
And this is all way above my head. I know absolutely nothing about new tech, Web3, NFTs, crypto. It was out of my waters.
And it could not be done by one person alone. It had to be done in a team.
You know, we all have different skill sets.
I am—
I'm not the technical person. I'm not the Excel person.
It's been very easygoing. The camaraderie of the team is everything to me. They're brilliant, intuitive, insightful, and very happy.
Working with my team at the Herothon has been a true privilege. I feel so lucky to have been able to work with this unbelievable group of talented people from all around the world.
We all have really big personalities, and I think it's, it's really hard to take a step back because as founders we want to believe that we're right and we're ahead of the pack.
Another team, Team Lightning, had the exact same idea, or very similar at least. So from there, we panicked a little bit. We all decided to collect ourselves as a big group, run over to an open wall so that we could draw on, and there we had a little bit of a disagreement. Do we change our idea, or do we stick with this one? If we stick with it, there may be 2 of the same ideas that are pitched at Pitch Day. If we change the idea, we have to come up with a new idea. Our team was kind of divided. Eventually, Buster convinced us to stick with the original idea. And from there, we started our process of designing.
You know, if you're building a startup, you have to remember in 2008, 2009, 2010, in the last recession, this is when some of the best companies of all time were started right around that timeframe.
I was really disappointed that we didn't win. But I think that when we look at, you know, the The problems that all the other teams were trying to solve, they were a lot more serious than ours. We were more like, you know, practical, fun, and we had a focus on like really how to monetize.
I personally don't like set the standard to win because now that's outside of our control, right? Like that depends on the judgment of someone else.
Unfortunately, our team did not win the Herothon, which, I'm gonna be honest, wasn't entirely shocking.
I thought all the teams did unbelievably well. It's amazing how much you can do in 24 hours, and so the results, I mean, I feel like we were all winners. Definitely for me, I feel like our team were winners because because we enjoyed every minute of the day.
Okay, so we came second. I was not very surprised because our team worked really hard, and, you know, after much deliberation, we realized that, you know, this is actually something that we could probably work on. So I wasn't very surprised with the results.
Well, I have to say, when the judges raised questions, And they gave some comments about our business plan. That is, I really think your business idea solves some concrete questions. From that moment, I have the feeling that we made it. And finally, they announced the outcome. I just, I just relieved because I already predicted that.
