AI for Work & Life

Hackathons need a “why” –

Why are people attending, why will the event be high quality, and why does it matter amongst the endless number of startup events?

Last week, I co-hosted an “AI for Work & Life” hackathon in NYC with Jacky Huang and Ryan Kim from Bain Capital Ventures.

The “why” for this event was simple: Jacky Huang.

For this hackathon, we brought together Jacky’s close friends to create tracks that reflect a reality that I’m sure most of us have been feeling — the lines between work, our personal lives, and AI are very blurry — and getting even more intertwined.

And we also created “quest prizes” sponsored by incredible AI startups for the hackers to win, including Vercel,  ElevenLabs,  Pika,  Ragie,  Structify,  Dataiku,  OpenRouter, and Pond.

The response was awesome. We received over 300 applications and hosted 90 hackers at HOF Capital's beautiful Noho offices.

TRACKS & WINNERS

The tracks made the hackathon special. Unlike the usual "AI for productivity" themes you see at normal VC-backed hackathons, this one was built by startups for actual builders — which meant the challenges were way more creative and simply just fun.

AI for Work Tracks

• Haize Labs: Domain Mastery: Create projects that require a large degree of subject matter expertise to evaluate (e.g., Legal Document Annotator, Math Proof Writer)

• Silna: Design solutions that eliminate barriers between patients and treatment – whether paperwork, confusion, or cost.

• Spur: Reimagine interfaces where humans and AI collaborate in workspaces (e.g., agents operating through Slack, comment threads)

Al for Life Tracks

• Cassi: Everyday AI: Enriching the everyday human experience with tech in and outside the home.

• Lore: Build something innovative around a niche interest you're passionate about (fandom, history, niche cultures, digital statehood)

• Flora: Craft the next viral internet sensation – a product so bizarre, compelling, and necessary it demands to exist. MSCHF-style creativity meets FLORA innovation.

Winners

So who won?! What did people build? Below are the winners of each track and their demos. For the full event recap, check out this Tweet: Hackathon Event Recap.

Track prize winners!

1. AdblockIRL (Mannan Shukla, Tarun Ravikumar & Arjun Ravikumar)
Brings web ad-blocking to the real world by detecting billboard advertisements in real-time and transforming them using computer vision.
Live Demo | Submission | Used: Flora | Winner: Flora Track, Mischief Style Creativity, Winner: The Most Imaginative Product (Pond)

2. Article-to-TikTok Converter (Teresa Mondria & Mori Liu)
A local-first app that transforms article links into TikTok-style feeds of bite-sized videos with AI-generated scripts and voice-overs.
Live Demo | Submission | Used: ElevenLabs, OpenRouter | Winner: Cassi Track, Everyday AI

3. Interactive Storytelling Platform (Quan Phan & Chinh Nguyen)
A platform where storytellers can create branching narratives on an infinite canvas, building entire worlds and characters with just text.
Live Demo | Submission | Used: Pika | Winner: Lore Track, Innovation around a niche interest, Winner: The Most Imaginative Product (Pond)

4. Prototype Manager (Tise Alatise)
A tool that helps create demos for new features based on different user personas, pulling data from Notion to make demos faster and less technical.
Live Demo | Submission | Used: V0 | Winner: Spur Track, Reimagine human & AI collaboration, Winner: Best Use of Data (Dataiku)

5. AI System Performance Improvement Platform (Alex Young)
A platform that autonomously conducts expert interviews to improve AI systems. Users upload contrastive sets of inputs/outputs, which are analyzed by an AI expert that identifies preferences and improvement areas.

Live Demo | YouTube | Used: ElevenLabs | Winner: Haize Labs Track, Domain mastery

6. HealthDog (Raymond Yoo & Kevin Shin)
A streamlined interface for health data that aggregates Apple Health information and uses AI to make it more digestible and actionable.
Live Demo | Submission | Winner: Silna Track, Eliminate barriers between patents & treatment

Quest prize winners!

1. Argue with Lex (Henry Dowling & Bryan Lee)

Allows users to argue with Lex Fridman on demand using AI voice technology. The tool listens for wake words using Pico on-device voice AI, then routes to ElevenLabs to start the argument. Plans to expand to other podcasters with RSS feeds and seek partnerships with those who don't publicly release audio.

Live Demo | Winner | Best Use of Voice AI (ElevenLabs), Winner: The Most Imaginative Product (Pond)

2. Glaze (William Barron & Sasha Yankovskaya)

Transforms Wikipedia rabbit holes into a 3D, hands-free exploration with AI-powered relevance mapping and camera-based gesture control.

Live Demo | Submission | Winner: The Most Imaginative Product (Pond)

3. Startup Buddy (Rut Mehta, Anha Mehta, & Harshal Bhatia)

Recreates the feel of talking to a smart group of friends with expert AI agents.

Demo | Winner: Best Use of Multiple LLMs (OpenRouter), Winner: Best Use of RAG (Ragie)

4. BidBuddy (Eugene Chu & Mary Liu)

A two-sided marketplace for used goods that enables sellers to list items for auction and buyers to place fractional bids to collectively fund the purchase price.

Demo | The Most Useful Agent (Dataiku)

5. Celestial (Linda Chen, Jiadai He, & Raistlan Schade)

AI Astrologer + Life Coach + Therapist. An AI app that delivers personalized, spiritually insightful conversations with mental wellness practices in one seamless experience.

Demo | Winner: Secret Quest (Hard Launch)

What’s next?!

Jacky said it’s his last hackathon for a while :)

But if you’re based in London or Paris, Zoe Qin and I have two more on the books for late summer and early spring. Make sure you follow AI Engine Hackathon or our newsletter for more announcements!

If you’re interested in upcoming SF/NYC events - we’re cooking up some other events and a poker night for Fall.

Follow us on socials: Jacky Twitter, Ryan Twitter, Jamesin LinkedIn

And/or if you play poker, fill out this form to be notified of our next poker night! Poker Interest Form Link

Special thank yous!

HOF Capital - Huge thank you to Fady Yacoub, Tahseen Rashid, Ava Robinson, Arooba K. for your support. You all are amazing.

Track sponsors and partners - Thank you for partnering with us! So many names to name here, but we appreciated you all showing up and your support - Alex Goldstein, Alex Li, Alli Pope, Anitej Biradar, Anushka Nijhawan, Ben S., Bill Shi, Bob Remeika, Dylan Zhang, James Sullivan, Leonard Tang, Leonie Engel, Melissa Arteaga, Michelle Ma, Panat from Cassi, Paul Bochis, Pavel Asparouhov, Samay Devraj, Shashank Goyal, Shreyas Ramanujam, Shena Sivakumar, Steve Li, Taichi Kato, Weber, Zehra Naqvi.

Co-organizers — Jacky Huang and Ryan Kim - so fun to work with you! Thank you for everything, and can’t wait for the next event. Zoe Qin, thank you for all the behind-the-scenes support and one million WhatsApp messages that are inevitable in any event organization.

Photos

All the track and quest sponsors!

Hacking!

Organizers!

Hackathon winners for the Pond Quest for Most Innovative Project! Let’s go! 🔥🔥🔥

I’m an investor at Chapter One, an early-stage venture fund that invests $500K - $2M checks into pre-seed and seed-stage startups.

If you’re a founder building a company, please feel free to reach out on Twitter (@seidtweets) or Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesin-seidel-5325b147/).