Yes. Now we're entering Hwong Engineering Center. Here at Stanford h It's a freezing, cold, rainy Friday night in February. The campus is a ghost town, but inside the hall it's hoppen. Hundreds of people are lined up to register for something called tree Hacks, Stanford University's annual hackathon. It will last for thirty six hours straight. They're mostly high school and college age kids. Lots of them are wearing pajamas, pushing roly suitcases and wearing backpacks. They're looking at their
phones and scanning the crowd for friends. One of the great things about learning computers science. Yes, it's like a superpower and you feel like God when you're able to create something out of nothing. That's Cliff Whitesman. He's in his final year at Brown University. I'm able to sit in the dining hall beyond my computer, build an app, launch it, have seventy thousand users within a month. I
just came up with an idea, built it. Pre Hacks is an elite gathering of more than six hundred extraordinarily motivated students. Many of them study computer science. All of them build new technology for fun and of course bragging rates They're not doing it as a means to like get money or whatever. They're just doing it for the sake of doing it and for the sake of creativity. And that's why that's memo Duran, And he works at Amazon. You see, there's another group of people arriving for this
coding contest too. They work for the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley. Memorous job is to mentor the hackers, help them figure out how to use Amazon's Alexa voice technology. And I saw reps from Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft all circling the hackathon. They were showing students how to use their company's latest technology while impressing them as potential employers. Right,
and that last part is crucial. These kids, they may be here just for the fun, but for the technology companies, this is serious business. Hackathons have turned into a battlefield for the best software engineers of the future. Hi. I'm Brad Stone and I'm Lozette Chapman, And this week on Decrypted, we're going to explore the rise of hackathons and the
role they play in the technology ecosystem. The hope is that these bright pajama wearing moderately sleep deprived students that you just heard from, students who are often still years away from finishing school. The hope is that they will become the future Mark Zuckerberg's of the world, and that they will power the next generation of innovation in Silicon Valley. And because of that, for technology companies as well as venture capital investors, a lot is hanging in the balance
at these NERD slumber parties. Will take you inside one such hackathon today. So about these talent wars, there's a lot of talk about how there's a shortage of engineers right now in Silicon Valley. Well is that? What exactly do we mean by that and what are the implications? Well,
you can see it in the salaries. You know, starting engineers can earn a hundred and twenty five thousand or so, but it can easily go up to two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand dollars or more, because one excellent engineer, when truly exceptional, one that writes brilliant, clean CRISP code, is worth fifty of his or her counterparts. And remember you're losing at engineer is usually your competitors gain. Right,
So why did the tech companies need these hackathons. Why not go to places like India or China or somewhere else in the world and find the talent that they're not finding locally. Well, they want them nearby an in house. Now, let's go back to Stanford's engineering Hall. I want you to meet Jeff Shaw. I own a pair of Snampchat spectacles and they're really awesome. Like I was about to stop using Snapchat, but then like I bought Harris spat
Coles and its eye opening. Jeff studies philosophy at Lewis and Clark University in Portland, Oregon. He likes country music and tinkering with everything from cars to computers. And then I realized, like, um, not all my friends gonna see what I do. So I'd love to make version where everyone gets to see what I do is so you know, face would be a good great platform for that. Jeff has a track record at hackathons. He won forty dollars for building a payment app at a recent one sponsored
by Mercedes Benz. Tree Hacks doesn't have big prizes, but Jeff says that's not what motivates him anyway. I'm not here to demo this product. Um, I'm I'm just here to build stuff. I love his idea. So did his Facebook spectacles work? Well, we'll get to that right now. We're just getting underway. I mean it's only midnight on Friday night. People are rushing around forming teams. The scene. It's chaotic, girl, I am looking, I cannot find my team. Crisis.
But many teams form on the spot at the hackathon. If they don't know each other at the beginning, well they definitely do by the end. Technology companies like IBM and Microsoft have been holding hackathouns for decades, but the number of college events has recently exploded. Seventy one hackathons in North America alone this year. That's three times a week. You have hackers build things straight, well not totally straight. I mean they do take naps once in a while.
You know, they sleep in shifts, They drink insane amounts of red Bull, eat pizza, and from what I could sell, very few took showers or brush their teeth. I'm sort of curious, what does it what does it smell like? At one of these, it was a little funky. That's really gross. You know, the hackathons have changed over time. You know, it's no longer just guys or super technical people that are doing this as it was in the
early days. People interested in figuring out how apps and services actually work can participate, and it's gotten easier for them as tools and technologies have become more and more user friendly. There's been explosion of new tools available for anybody to create applications and create games and share them with the world. That's Dan Garcia from the University of California, Berkeley.
He teaches the Beauty and Joy of Computing and introduct re class for non computer science majors between Scratch and GameMaker and Unity. It's an incredible time and it's incredible space for beginners to create applications in games rather than just be passive users of them. He said that what used to take weeks to build, now you can do in a couple of hours. So what are the building blocks? I'm thinking it's Amazon Web Services or Google's cloud business or Microsoft is it is it payments to a p
i S. What are all these pieces? It's all those things broad exactly. And you take a p i S for example, they're kind of like legos. They don't have to start from scratch, pouring the plastic and you know, doing the mold. These are preconfigured chunks of code to do things like process payments, connect to Twitter, or even send a text. Hackers just combine them in new and interesting ways. So it sounds a little like competitive playtime.
It absolutely is, and it's playtime for people who want to build the coolest or most technically difficult thing while the clock keeps ticking down. By ten PM, hackers have all formed their teams and are starting to get to work. Around midnight, I checked out the four floors of Engineering Center where people were working. It's pretty facebook. A few
lucky ones scored conference rooms with whiteboards. Most were working at wooden tables lined up in rows, or they lounged on bean bags shaped like smiley faces and poop emojis. Some groups were still debating what to build, but quite a few had already decided. We want to build the slag for doctors, and we want to link still that patients and doctors are still in touch after the pat
patient gets the treatment. I'm gonna build a plug in for the Internet that will connect on text, either on Twitter or on blogs and disrepeatable news sources directly back to Russian state media sources. But we most recently decided on using the artist simulate like some visual and auditory disorders UM that you might not otherwise be able to understand, Like what if you have a visual disorder that impairs your like vision or someone you're hearing, or maybe some
kind of cognitive disorder that influences how you see the world. Sorry, that's a wide range of projects. I actually love the slack for doctors and patients. One did everyone stay hunched over their laptops all night? You know? I thought they were going to I was expecting to see everyone crowded around sitting there straight, but but they weren't. I mean, sometimes members would go off and and work at the
soldering station. Other times they'd go and meet with different engineers from Facebook and the like to get advice on how to use an a p I. And well, one girl, she just kind of wandered off looking for Uros, and like two hours later she still hadn't come back. The Grand Uros. Excuse now, dare? I asked, did you get any sleep while you were covering the UM? I did. I found this cozy little server room and I curled up on a table and I got a few winks
it was nice. But actually a lot of people did take naps, short naps, mind you, on tables, even just straight in their chair, like this one guy who was using earplugs in a blindfold just to ignore the chaos. And what about Jeff in his spectacles for Facebook efforts? Was he live streaming his life at this point? Well, by Saturday he had made some pretty good progress. He took an old baseball hat and he hot glued it
to a Raspberry pie. For our listeners, that's a super powerful computer that's about the size of a credit card and it's cheap. It's like thirty five. Um. So he attached a camera and a battery to the hat, and then he secured a WiFi connection so that he could live stream the camera to Facebook. Then he encoded the video so Facebook software would accept it and did it work? No? Why is there red code in the green? That does not mean you cannot open video device? That doesn't sound good.
That's the air that Facebook sending back. Okay, so yeah, so does that mean how do you get around that? Dude? Or this is that what you're figuring out now? Yes, that's what trying to figure out The Facebook representatives at the hackathon were there to help, but they couldn't figure it out. Jeff was scouring online forms all of Saturday.
He tried swapping out hardware parts, even took an uber to the nearest fries, but by dinner time, with about two thirds of the hackathon over, it still wasn't working. Time was running out to come up with a new idea. Along with technical experts from Facebook and Amazon. I saw others from Google, IBM, Disney, and Microsoft. They stayed till late at night and they were back there early the next morning, wanting to help. Most technology companies consider this
critical if they want to remain competitive. They can't get the newest crop of makers excited about using their they become irrelevant. So help me picture this. What what are the representatives from Microsoft and Facebook and Amazon? What are they doing at the hackathon? Well, you know, I thought they'd be circling around, you know, saying, hey, use my ap I, But it wasn't like that. It was a lot more subtle. Remember their sponsors, so they paid to
be there. They got their tables set up with all their swag, and they're waiting for people to come up to them and passing out like swag what what? What good is are they passing out? They had all sorts of good stuff. They had special hoodies with inflatable pillows. They had warm fuzzy socks, blindfolds, ear plugs, water bottles, you know, all the normal swaggy stuff. So they were waiting for people to come up to them and then they could have a conversation. And they're holding events, they're
holding talks exactly. They were holding talks on slack online and also uh they were having in person ones. In fact, Google had one on its cloud services at one am. It was standing room only one am session on cloud services that is Devotion. And Microsoft was also to the late night crowd and they brought cool toys. We have a couple of technical workshops on bots and cognitive services. We try to get students wrapped on our cloud platform.
We have about five Hollowans devices, ten surface pro Force so that students can check out and develop on um free cloud credits. I mean the really point, the point just to really get students to use the technology in a fun, easy way that's friction free. As the hackathons began digging into the technical nuts and bolts and began coding.
I kind of felt rude interrupting them. So I met more sponsors, like via McGee from IBM that work with the developers and they educate them on our technologies and tap them um use our services an API and build something. So how successful a strategy is this for companies? I mean, what's what's the return on investment for sponsoring a hackathon? You know, it's funny, Brad, I asked that a bunch
of times, and nobody could give me a number. They were all squishy, feel good, kind of futuristic answers like endearing themselves to future employees or um evangelizing their technology. I mean, these are bright, self motivated college students who will very likely go on to build great things in tech. Is there anything substantial they get in return? Like? Can they keep on communicating with these programmers? Yeah? Exactly. As sponsors, they can access the list of everyone that was there.
That means they definitely get a leg up in recruiting. That sounds valuable. Was it just tech companies? No, there were some venture capital firms that go to hackathons, like at Tree ACKs Andrews and Horowitz had a table, and of course Peter Teal's fifteen seventeen fund. They've made that their entire strategy, visiting hackathons around the country and doing the circuit. Yeah, in the tech community, we have mythologized innovators like Evan Spiegel and Mark Zuckerberg, who both began
building their companies when they were in college. So I could see why investors would want to prowl these hackathons looking for the next generation. Exactly, these these invest in raw talent. That's what fuels innovation, and they want to be on these kids radars. They have to be, and they want to be early, right because the first money
went big. Exactly, first money in biggest check out. And this is a group of college kids who, instead of going out and partying with their friends, are pulling all nighters in an engineering hall. Not for a grade, mind you, but for the sheer joy of creating something new and pushing their skills to the limit. So by now is that it must have been getting pretty late. How many hours have you been there at this point? Quite a few.
And you know, when I was walking around, I saw some groups hyper focused, surrounded by chip wrappers and chocolate kisses and cheese. It's and red Bulls and the like and acting like no one else in the whole world existed. They were totally in the zone, super focused, and other ones were taking a break and having a blast. I came up and you ladies are here and you're laughing. What are you laughing about? What is it funny? A lot of things, Yeah, mostly sleep deprivation. No, um, I
don't know. It's like it's it's almost like funny at the point where like you've been spending like all these hours trying to get like all these like random things to work, and it's like finally starting to like come together. It's like a little unbelievable. So it was relief and surprise basically when you've been trying like the same thing twenty times and then it randomly works. Okay, now give us an update on Jeff, the guy who was trying
to make Spectacles work with Facebook. Jeff, he was determined and he wasn't talking very much, so I just sat down and hung out. The last time we heard from Jeff, he had hit a wall. He had asked Facebook engineers, scoured online forums, but new parts from Fries, but nothing was working. Then he asked one more friend to take a look. I so you just screamed, what is it? What happened? So this problem we've been trying to fix for twice four hours. Um, we've found the solution. And
it's the stupidest reason ever. Um. So, as you can see, this is Facebook right now. So it's on Facebook live through my hat that I have. It's like live video. And we couldn't get to work because we left these quotation marks out of this one fragment that we have. Let me see the fragment of code. Yeah, family, you want to walk all right through it, it's just right where is it? So basically over here you can see we need these quotation marks and we had this link
like this, and that's why they work. As simple as that, As simple as that. But Jeff still had a few hours left until deadline. Yeah, but in that time he wanted to keep working. I mean, that's the whole point of a hackathon is to push your limits and keep building something until you run out of time. Yeah, Jeff, so we are is there audio? Hello? Hello? I don't hear anything, do you? So what are we just here?
With that success, that was him working through continued issues again in the nature of the hack he had gotten the microphone hooked up but hadn't quite figured out how to encode the audio, so it streamed through as well. So what happens to all these projects after they get them working in the hackathon wraps up? You know, That's something that surprised me probably the most when I was reporting this out, was that most of these projects, however
cool they are, don't go anywhere. Alex Ayatala, who helped organize Stanford's first hackathon and is now working on his startup What's Goodly, calls Hackathon's the graveyard of ideas of the project takes of the time, and the last which is about making the marketing and getting it on the app store and fix seeing bugs, making it so users can actually log in and sign up, which a lot of hackathon projects don't like just skip over completely. Um, that stuff can take eight of the time, so it's
just it's not no one's incentivice to do it. So you've got a bunch of projects that aren't totally built out and can't be used by the general population. Yeah, exactly. And a lot of people told me because they're working quickly and they just want stuff to work. The code that they write is usually really really bad. Oh I see, So they'll use like ten steps instead of one to perform the same function, which usually means it's clunky and
breaks more easily. Yeah, not ideal. And the other weird thing about hackathons is that the better the project does with the judges, the less likely the makers are to continue it after the hackathon. When you win that something, it's it's like as if you you completed it, even though you really didn't. That was Ebenezer Mamo. He won a recent cal Hacks hackathon with a project a team called test Lapathic. It basically allows you to control a Tesla car with your mind. My god, that sounds very
cool and vaguely dangerous. So how exactly did you do that? Well, he and his team used an e G headset, you know those mesh looking devices that you put over your head, and it has maybe a couple dozen little metal disks that attached, right, and they detect electrical activity in the brain. Yeah, exactly, Well, they used that to map the brain activity to certain actions.
Then they used an analog signal to broadcast it to an RC radio which controlled the motors in the Tesla to make it stop or go, No wonder they won. That sounds ingenious, but the creators didn't want to take it to the next level. For us, it was for fun. Um it's always for fun, and the secondary um purposes to really showcase what the next generation of human computer interfaces will look like. And for us, it's really all about showing people that it's possible and that limits and exists.
It's this funny thing that while the students are pushing the limits just for fun, they're being watched by all those recruiters and mentors who are waiting for them to grow up so they can hire them. So, Lazette, do you think you saw the next Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Spiegel at the Stanford hackath I don't know, Brad. I met some pretty bright people who were really motivated, and I also saw a couple of cool projects. It was there anything there that you could see out in the
real world. Well, I really liked this one robotic drink mixer because I've got a penchant from Margarita to say no more, I'll where can I buy one? It was a fun experience, though, and I can see some of these maybe going on or maybe it just stays in the graveyard. Who knows, maybe they'll be resurrected from the grave. I also loved Jeff's idea of taking something that was very proprietary and Menford Snapchat and repurposing it for Facebook.
That seems like a future that we should have where any device out there works on the different social networks that we all use. So as the hackathon at Stanford kicked down to the final minutes for people stressing out, well, there were still that fun vibe and people still had smiles on their faces, but you could definitely feel that
people were starting to get stressed. I mean, these are very competitive people who had just spent the last thirty five hours crunching on a project and they wanted to be as good as possible. Hey guys, good morning. I just want to let you know that you can want your have to be judged. Please submit it on death post by ted am for all the prizes and sponsor prizes you want to be judged for. So what was the actual finish, Like, you know, it was kind of anticlimactic.
I expected people to be high fiving and cheering, but nobody did that. It was just kind of quiet and even the winners of this hackathon, like Cliff, you know, the guy that felt like a god when he coded, he didn't even seem really fixated on it, And like Jeff said, it's really about the process of creation. And that's it for this week's Decrypted. Thanks for listening. We'd
love to hear what you thought of this episode. Record a voice message and send it to us at Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at Lazette, Underscore Chapman and I'm at brad Stone. If you haven't already, please subscribe to our show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, please leave us a rating in the review. It really helps more listeners find our show. This episode was produced by Pia Gtcari, Liz Smith,
and Magnus Hendrickson. A big thank you to Emily Busso, who edited the Prince story I wrote about professional hackath honors. It's different than academic ones. You can find it at Bloomberg dot com, Forward slash Tech. Alec McCabe is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.