From organizer to owner

The same weekend, a different job

I have organised five hackathons. All of them inside a student organisation, the last one a weekend for 600 people. A few months ago I started doing the same thing as a company.

From the outside the weekend looks identical. People walk in on Friday, they demo on Sunday. Behind it, almost nothing is the same job.

Ownership is the whole difference

Being your own boss sounds romantic. In practice it means full responsibility for the P&L. Every franc we spend is ours. Every problem that shows up is ours. There is nobody above us to escalate to and no board to hand the hard call to.

That reads heavier than it feels. The trade is that you stop asking permission. If something is wrong with how sprints are run, we can just fix it, and the only person who has to agree is my co-founder.

It made us faster than I expected

Every decision is one conversation away. If I need the total overview, it is one call. In a group of around a hundred people, a question could wander from one person to the next, and that one to the next, before it found an answer. Nobody's fault. That is just the physics of a big organisation.

I only noticed how much energy that ate once it was gone.

The planning horizon changed shape

In a student organisation, big means the next edition. You have one year, then you hand over. Everything you build has to pay off before the handover, so nobody builds anything that takes longer than that.

Now we plan into 2027, with more projects on the list than weekends to run them. That changes what is worth building. A one-year committee cannot justify writing its own platform. A company can, which is why the record of what a builder actually shipped follows them from one sprint to the next instead of dying with the event page.

What did not change

None of this exists without the years in the student organisation. The experience, the contacts, the network, the confidence, the people still around me today. That foundation is the only reason we could start this strong. If you are a student, join a student organisation and go to hackathons. Do both. It compounds.

And the weekend itself is untouched. Strangers on Friday, something real on Sunday. Everything above is just infrastructure for that, built by people who now get to keep improving it instead of handing it over.

Where that leaves us

The next one is 9 to 11 October in Zurich. Applications are open until 20 September.