Seattle was having one of its unusual, much warmer than expected sunny weekends when things kicked off for AngelHack 2016. With the breakfast laid out, the front door manned with volunteers, sponsor tables set up, we were ready to go at the “Center of the Universe”, as Google’s beautiful event space in Fremont is called.
The opening ceremony was punctuated by keynote sponsor HPE’s opening remarks, as well as a guest appearance by Priya Dandewate the CEO and Chief Engineer of Tousled, uber of beauty, and winners of AngelHack Seattle 2014! By the end of the opening, a long line had formed of programmers, entrepreneurs, and designers, rearing to give their 60 second pitches to the 180+ strong audience.
The hackathon soon got underway with a lot of teams forming on the spot, and, of course, lunch. Teams worked hard, and made sure they heard how HPE’s Haven on Demand, Amazon’s AWS and Alexa, ESRI’s mapping solutions and Google’s Cloud Platform could solve their problems, and how WTIA worked hard to foster the technology scene in Washington State.
More than 30 teams kept coding hard through the afternoon, evening, night, and Sunday morning, to arrive at the 1pm deadline for coding. With pauses for a couple of pitch practice sessions, as well as a full blown nerf gun war around 1am. After hearing out our teams in batches, our judges wanted to have 7 of the teams come to the stage and pitch to everyone, followed by an intense grilling of questions.
Winners! Team Waste Not In the end, team “Waste Not” was crowned winner, with plans to build a business around being the middle man for uniting people in need of food with those who wanted to donate it. “What’s That?” was the runner up, as well as the recipient of Seattle’s first Code for Impact award, working on driving awareness of the ingredients in our food items.
2nd Place & Code 4 Impact Award winners! ‘What’s That?’ Our judges, Tyler Carper, Bob Crimmins, Daniel Li, Stephen Quinonez, John Sechrest, and Henry Wong were great with their feedback and offered mentorship to our winners to take on the rest of the winners from around the globe in the global AngelHack HACKcelerator program for 2016.
And our amazing volunteers Gaurav, Sarah, Diana, Marzuq, Thomas, Jeff, Forrest, Erin and Nagesh made sure things happened the right way throughout the event helping out AngelHack Seattle ambassadors Arleta Landon and Kerem Yuceturk.
Hope to see you all again for the next round!
