Quando VCs condotta hackathons... Hackday di Bangalore, Sequoia Capital

For 24 hours, Rs 4 lakh may seem a lot of money.

But this was the prize money awarded to the winning team for the Bangalore Hackday, organized by Sequoia Capital. You might think that this would be enough motivation for people to sacrifice their weekends. Of course. So, instead of catching up on their personal lives, 250 technologists raised to the Zuri Whitefield, Bangalore hotel, take part in the first hackathon led by Sequoia Capital in India.

Given how rare is the practice of hackathons in VC, I wouldn't be surprised if the Sequoia was the first VC firm in India to do so. This initiative has raised a lot of interest from the community of developers in Bangalore, with consequent 1400 requests to participate. Of these, the team at Sequoia had 450 applicants and 250 finalist turned up on the day of event.

The complete meeting zone at the hotel Zuri was booked and 250 developers began hacking away. The entire spectrum of the community of developers in Bangalore was there, ranging from startup and business employees and contractors also. Sequoia also made sure that technology experts from their portfolio companies as Sandipan Chattopadhyay, CTO JustDial and renowned technology experts as Joydeep Sen Sarma, founder of Qubole, were at the headquarters of mentor and judge the hacks for the duration of 24 hours.

The guest of honor, Bill Coughran, partner at Sequoia Capital, was at the event, to judge the finalists. Gautam Mago, principal at Sequoia Capital, shared that Bill was part of the team that set up Bangalore office of Google, and he had only flown down from the United States, only for the hackathon.

There were an interesting assortment of hack, like there was a constraint on what could be built. From games, to mobile app for web applications it also apps, infrastructure was a confluence of a variety of talents. Some very impressive hack we've seen were-

1) Jarvis – a raspberry-pi, who controlled the various OSs at the same time.

2) Punching game – an app like beat you boss. Only, involved taking a device and punching at a computer screen. The accelerometer reading device would result in a score on the computer.

3) TweetDial – Justdial had opened its API to hackathon, participants and this app has made great use of it. You could tweet what you mean by using hashtags and app would be DM responds.

4) Government information aggregator – the latter is close to my heart; a tool to aggregate government information to provide reporters with data.

The winners

Awards were given for three songs – mobile, web and infrastructure, each of which WINS Rs one lakh as prize money. Micromax mobiles, a portfolio company of Sequoia, with mobile phones to the 3 top rated hack from the audience. In addition to this, there was an overall winner, who won the Grand Prize of Rs 4 lakh.

A team from the start of payments, Juspay, won the mobile track for an app that aims to try to reduce the number of steps in mobile payments. The winners of the web track was a hack that was the working model of the project popular graphic search neo4j IMDB. (check it out here). Winner of infrastructure track was an awesome hack that brought mapreduce to the browser.

The overall winner was a work platform, which converted to ecommerce Web sites native applications.

In general, given the inexperience of a VC firm running a hackathon, I thought that Sequoia's team has pulled off a great event. Yes, there were some shortcomings with respect to infrastructure, but which do not glitch hackathon. Hopefully most VC firms take this initiative.

But the highlight of the event was happy going home developers, regardless of winning or losing. It didn't seem like they came for prizes. It was for the joy of knowing that 24 hours will result in an innovative product – something that any good hackathon can do.

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