Yahoo! Hack Day Q306: Making the “pitch”

I finished participating (remotely) in my second Yahoo! Hack Day. As with last time (and the other Hack Days that preceded my participation), the premise is that anyone in the company can drop what they are doing for 24 hours (noon Thursday to noon Friday) in order to work on a functioning prototype of anything built on Yahoo! technology. The participants then have 1 (to 2ish in some cases) minutes to present their Hack to a very large room full of peers and executive level judges. The entire event is webcast live across the world for anyone in the company to watch.

Last time, my team put together something that actually won an award! I’m not sure the outcome of yesterday’s events yet, but to me the awards don’t really matter that much. Instead, what is really thrilling is being able to take the podium (or play a recorded screencast with audio in the case of my Burbank-based team) and show off a “next big thing” idea to (a) some of the most influential and forward thinking people in the web space, and (b) some of the most powerful people in the company. Just for flavor on that latter point, the judges at yesterday’s events were: Jerry Yang (Yahoo! co-founder), Sue Decker (CFO), Chad Dickerson (head of Yahoo! Developer Network), Iain Lamb (co-founder of Oddpost), Larry Tesler (head of Yahoo! User Experience department), Marco Boerries (head of Yahoo!’s “Connected Life” division, including Yahoo! Go and other non-browser experiences), Phu Hoang (SVP of Platform Engineering), and Lucas Gonze (founder of WebJay).

In other companies the size of Yahoo!, having an opportunity to show off (or in my case, to fairly blatantly “pitch”) a new idea to a group of people at that level all at once would be an almost certain impossibility.

Thanks to Leonard for organizing such as great event and for the entire Yahoo! Tech Dev group for continuing to push the hacker agenda to a place of obvious executive buy-in.

Side note: I’m still amazed that my colleague and team member Ian Kennedy, who was up in Sunnyvale Thursday and Friday so couldn’t join the hack that our team worked on, was able to pull off his own hack in the way that he did. Read his post about it: 20 minutes! The rapid ideation and execution is awesome, Ian.

Photo from karraseen.

Tags: hackdayq306, yahoo, hackday

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