AngelHack Sydney 2015, the second leg of the global series of hackathons organized by AngelHack took place at BlueChilli start-up space last weekend and it was a great success. Here are some numbers:
More than 100 people attended the event in person;
- During the weekend, more than 1,000 people followed the live-stream of the event on Periscope;
- 75 developers, designers and entrepreneurs formed teams to compete;
- Complete sell-out (as in tickets sold, not as in principles compromised!)
- 17 prototypes built and pitched;
- 10 judges and 6 mentors;
- 24 hours of non-stop hacking;
- 16 metres of pizza;
- 3 nerf gun wars.
The 17 teams worked very hard coding non-stop for 24 hours to impress the judges with their ideas. The crowd that invaded BlueChilli’s start-up space in Sydney CBD was also a very diverse one, with good mix of male and female coders and with an age range from 16 to 52.
While only a few teams were able to score prizes, including an exclusive invitation to join the AngelHack HACKcelerator program with the opportunity to fly to the US and pitch to Silicon Valley investors, the collaborative atmosphere allowed all participants to learn from each other and from the six mentors available during the weekend.
The winning team was DriveWay, an app allowing users to rent out their vacant parking spaces (AirBnb for residential parking spaces). Congratulations to the winning team of Samuel Polgar, Brendon Body, Lorraine Chung and Harry Johnson, who will be flying to San Francisco for a week of pitch training and an opportunity to pitch DriveWay at AngelHack’s Global Demo Day in October this year.
“There was a great energy and despite the competitive nature of the event, after more than 24 hours spent coding, eating and having fun together everyone felt part of a big family and were supporting each other. More experiences participants helped out younger coders and some great ideas were born” said Giovanni Ravone, AngelHack Sydney Ambassador.
We were absolutely stoked to see such creativity, passion and generous cooperation from the people who came along.
Thanks to the mentors who volunteered so much time and experience over the weekend:
- Tim Brian – Technical Lead at Rubik Financial
- Daniel Lam – iOS Dev Lead at Optus
- Serg Metelin – Head of Technology at Edge
- Manuel Betancourt – Team Lead at CodeSource
- Matthew Salisbury – Technologist Team Leader at HP
- Clayton Brown – Ecosystem Solution Architect, Amazon Web Services
And also thanks to the judges who helped us choose the best from a very high quality field of competitors:
- Cath Rogers – Investment Manager at Airtree Venture Capital
- Michael Swinhoe – CTO at Rubik Financial
- Harvey Sanchez – Head of Marketing, eBay
- Geoff Dolphin – CFO, Telstra Ventures
- Ian Gardiner – Business Development, Start-up community at Amazon Web Services
- Sharon Lu – GM Tyro Fintech Hub
- Catherine Eibner – Lead Startup Advisor at BlueChilli
- Kath Purkis – Co-founder & CEO at Her Fashion Box
- Katie Prendergast – Sydney Manager at Elance-oDesk
Finally thanks to the sponsors Amazon Web Services and Elance-oDesk who helped make this such a successful weekend!
[Written by Alan Jones, see the original at: http://www.bluechilli.com/blog/angelhack-sydney-2015-a-raging-success/]
