From Sept. 14 to 16, the University of Waterloo hosted their annual hack-a-thon, Hack The North.
The annual event brings students from all over the world to engage in a non-stop, 36 hour competition to create novel and interesting pieces of software and hardware to be assessed by a panel of judges.
To kick off the event, Chamath Palihapitiya, founder and CEO of the venture capital firm Social Capital and owner of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, gave competitors some advice:
“I would encourage you to do two things. One is be realistic. Which is, I do not intend to give you some glib thing about, ‘yeah, go solve breast cancer in the next 48 hours because it’s going to be great!’ It’s not true and it’s not accurate,” Palihapitiya said.
“What I do think is important is something else, which is: go prove to yourself that you can start something and finish it and not be afraid of being judged and failing,” Palihapitiya said.
Palihapitiya’s advice cut against the ethos of hack-a-thon and tech culture, wherein raw speed in workflow and the ability to whip up revolutionary products in little time — as in the time allotted for competitors at hack-a-thons — is valued highly.
Hack the North, for its part, scheduled various workshops and activities for competitors to engage in over the duration of the weekend, many of which may not have had direct relevance to hacks they may have been working on, but were on offer regardless.
“So it doesn’t really matter, to be quite honest, what you do in the next 48 hours in my mind, it matters that you take away that thread: [So you can say] ‘I started, I created a plan, I broke it down into small bits, I finished it, I’m proud of it and I don’t care how people judge it,’” Palihapitiya said.
“Now take that, amplify that and then go work on something hard and do it over the next ten years.”
Part of Palihapitiya’s break from that ethos could be tied to his career trajectory: from a successful tenure as an executive at Facebook, where he focused on user growth, to his founding of Social Capital, which focuses on funding companies that tackle some of the biggest problems there are in important areas like education and healthcare. Problems that, as Palihapitiya noted in his talk, can take a long time to solve.
Hack the North, for its part, scheduled various workshops and activities for competitors to engage in over the duration of the weekend, many of which may not have had direct relevance to hacks they may have been working on, but were on offer regardless.
There were workshops focused on using specific software tools and associated prizes from tech companies for submitting a successful hack built with those tools.
There were also therapy dogs, yoga and massage sessions in addition to more in-depth sessions on topics like virtual reality, machine learning, data science and block-chain currencies.
For those competitors who chose to sleep over the 36 hour competition, there were also air mattresses available for them as well.