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.