FashionMetric team, which was selected as a wildcard for Grand Finals Demo of AngelHack arrived from Los Angeles couple days before the event. Before the event we had a little bit of a “startup drama” due to the fact that one of our developers has left the company the day before. But team pulled it together and even pitched to famous investor’s team via GoToMeeting.
AngelHack Grand Finals Demo is basically a “demo day” for hackathon teams. Teams are the winners of previous rounds from Boston, New York City, San Francisco and other cities. They were allowed to work on their ideas and even pivot and change teams during 2 weeks from the previous round. More that 30 teams from across the states flew to San Francisco to pitch to the group of investors and judges. And the rest of the world was able to watch the event live through UStrem. After the pitches and announcement of the winners there was a dinner with optional partying and socializing. Two winners took $25,000 each in seed investment.
There were very interesting teams. For example Fly.io which enables users to manipulate their laptop / desktop just by the eyes’ movements. Some teams members were nervous and others weren’t prepared to answer tough questions asked by the judges (like we :) ).
Our team FashionMetric didn’t score any prizes but we got valuable feedback from Thomas Korte – founder of AngelPad incubator and other judges. Interesting enough that many attendees later said that Thomas was harsh and they don’t agree with his point of view but our team don’t think so :) I actually agree that one of our slides with 9% segment of men who buy online is somewhat misleading.
The winners were Appetas – restaurant menu enhancer and GiveGo – charity meets sport. And the Special Award went to the youngest hacker, 15-year-old founder of ShareBrowse.com – customer support without installation and hassle. On the next day we went to Googleplex in Mountain View.
Accidentally they were having Seafood festival which slowed down our guided tour before tech talks and lunch. Special thanks to Greg and his team for organizing AngelHack!
That’s a sbulte way of thinking about it.