Check out this great article about MIT Hacking Medicine Grand Hack winning team, CAKE, in MedCity News – here’s a brief summary:
Turns out, startups are pretty demanding, and have a high attrition rate. It takes both grit and passion for the concept to stick it out, and Chen and Zhang helm the startup with a new team in place. The rest of us are simply cheering on their efforts.And they’ve advanced pretty spectacularly since.
To this point, Cake has almost completely bootstrapped its operations. But now, Cake is in the diligence process with a number of angel investors, looking to raise its first round of equity. It’s forming collaborations with Brigham & Women’s Innovation Hub and Massachusetts General Hospital…
For many hackathon participants, the major takeaway is a weekend of thinking out of the box – with some networking tied in for good measure. For others, like Suelin and Mark, it was the genesis of a
See, the hackathon is an adrenaline-laced microcosm for startup development – forcing like-minded people to work hard in a room together. It’s a sprint that helps kick off the marathon needed to build a successful startup – in essence, forcing the iterative process to go at hyper-speed.
But the real beauty of a hackathon isn’t necessarily to build that better mousetrap – rather, it’s meant to cobble together a team that can help refine the initial idea. That you already had.
As a healthy 26-year-old, I don’t think about death often. But earlier this week, it was staring at me right back in my face, in the form of an app. The app was asking me questions about my final wishes, some I normally wouldn’t have considered, like do I want my friends and family to have a stiff drink on the anniversary of my death?
After quick consideration, I decided, yeah, actually I would. It’s a nice thought. But then it asked me a few questions in the form of yes or no statements that were harder to answer, like “I feel at peace with how I’ve lived my life so far” and “It is important for me to never be a burden to my loved ones.” They were definitely harder than the ones asking if I wanted my funeral “to be a unique celebration of my life” or if “I have a backup plan for my online account passwords.”
I can’t ever remember thinking about end-of-life issues for myself before. But that’s kind of the point with CAKE, a Boston startup that is developing an app that aims to make it easier for people to think about these sort of things.
