The story that stays with me

A real problem, not a toy one

One story from my years organizing hackathons stands out. A team showed up to solve a real company's problem. It was unglamorous and very real: messy data that arrives broken, with missing cells, corrupted rows, and no clean structure. Today a person fixes that kind of thing by hand before anyone can use it.

Over a weekend, the team built a tool that automates exactly that. It caught and corrected the errors more reliably than a person could, and flagged whatever it could not be sure about. By Sunday, it worked.

The quieter thing the weekend did

Winning the case mattered. But the bigger thing was quieter. The weekend put builders in a room with a real company and a real problem, and showed them how much you can ship in 36 hours.

For two of them, that was the push they needed. They went on to start their own company. It is already generating real revenue.

Why this is the whole point

They did not need the event to meet. What they found there was the proof that they could build something real, fast, and together.

That is exactly what I mean when I say: create opportunities for people who go on to create their own. It is the whole reason we are building sprintd. There are so many more stories like this, and the next ones start at our October sprint in Zurich.