This weekend, around 130 engineers and other code-happy people holed themselves up in central Stockholm for yet another two-day hackathon. Having lost count of how many similar events I’d seen on my LinkedIn feed, I gathered it was about time I went to one.
My interest in hackathons is really zero to nil; however, I caught a common affliction in our industry: FOMO.
I planned to attend a hackathon organised by Berlin-based {Tech: Europe} and legaltech Legora, with partners including Lovable, Founders House, OpenAI, Visionaries Club and OpenOcean.
Having left a baby-naming ceremony on Saturday afternoon, I arrived when the hackathon had just started.
After a while, I realised I was at the wrong one. An easy mistake to make, as almost all the same partners were involved. As a result, almost all the technology partners, including Lovable (and myself) spent the day scuttling between the two.
Neither were quite as I imagined. Some details were exactly as I’d expected: one hackathon had no female participants; the other ran into a logistical challenge when it came to ordering lunch. They reminded me of an accelerator like Antler on speed, but I was surprised to find so many people in the ecosystem willing to chip in at the weekend, and that people from as far away as Turkey had decided to fly in for this.
According to the Swedish organisers, Stockholm has real momentum now. It’s not just Lovable, Legora and the other more well-known AI startups, but also the newcomers. And many organisations want to be central to its success. As someone at Founders House told me, one of their goals is to increase GDP.
Yesterday afternoon, I revisited one of the hackathons — this time with my two kids — to see what had come out of all those hours and “much better sushi than we would buy”, as one founder put it.
Better vibe than London and Berlin?
The few pitches I managed to see were fairly varied: one was pitched as a Legora for construction as well as a Cursor for architects (it reminded me a little of when everything was a Spotify for y or an Uber for x); another had the AI news solution all media houses have been waiting for. I was perhaps a little too critical of the latter. Another team was working on a side project for its drone startup in stealth, which would automate a drone to fly up to someone spotted by a camera, trying to open the fridge to grab a soda.
The level of engineering skill also varied. The robotics engineers working on drones mentioned that Lovable just wasn’t a product they wanted to use, since they could not see the code, whilst others seemed happy to use the newly minted unicorn to make a landing page for their freshly cooked-up project.
Although I doubt that the new ideas pitched will lead to great companies, I have changed my mind about hackathons as a way to test new solutions on others and network. People seemed genuinely relaxed and keen to share.
As two non-Swedish female technology partners told me, Stockholm has a very different vibe compared to London and Berlin, where they have hosted hackathons before. “People seem much more open here,” they said.
Being Swedish, I know that isn’t true of Stockholm overall; however, perhaps this is where they all hang out. Next time, I may join as an attendee, just for the fun of it.
