Speaker 1: Yes. Now we're entering Hwong Engineering Center. Here at Stanford
Speaker 1: h It's a freezing, cold, rainy Friday night in February.
Speaker 1: The campus is a ghost town, but inside the hall
Speaker 1: it's hoppen. Hundreds of people are lined up to register
Speaker 1: for something called tree Hacks, Stanford University's annual hackathon. It
Speaker 1: will last for thirty six hours straight. They're mostly high
Speaker 1: school and college age kids. Lots of them are wearing pajamas,
Speaker 1: pushing roly suitcases and wearing backpacks. They're looking at their
Speaker 1: phones and scanning the crowd for friends. One of the
Speaker 1: great things about learning computers science. Yes, it's like a
Speaker 1: superpower and you feel like God when you're able to
Speaker 1: create something out of nothing. That's Cliff Whitesman. He's in
Speaker 1: his final year at Brown University. I'm able to sit
Speaker 1: in the dining hall beyond my computer, build an app,
Speaker 1: launch it, have seventy thousand users within a month. I
Speaker 1: just came up with an idea, built it. Pre Hacks
Speaker 1: is an elite gathering of more than six hundred extraordinarily
Speaker 1: motivated students. Many of them study computer science. All of
Speaker 1: them build new technology for fun and of course bragging
Speaker 1: rates They're not doing it as a means to like
Speaker 1: get money or whatever. They're just doing it for the
Speaker 1: sake of doing it and for the sake of creativity.
Speaker 1: And that's why that's memo Duran, And he works at Amazon.
Speaker 1: You see, there's another group of people arriving for this
Speaker 1: coding contest too. They work for the biggest tech companies
Speaker 1: in Silicon Valley. Memorous job is to mentor the hackers,
Speaker 1: help them figure out how to use Amazon's Alexa voice technology.
Speaker 1: And I saw reps from Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft
Speaker 1: all circling the hackathon. They were showing students how to
Speaker 1: use their company's latest technology while impressing them as potential employers. Right,
Speaker 1: and that last part is crucial. These kids, they may
Speaker 1: be here just for the fun, but for the technology companies,
Speaker 1: this is serious business. Hackathons have turned into a battlefield
Speaker 1: for the best software engineers of the future. Hi. I'm
Speaker 1: Brad Stone and I'm Lozette Chapman, And this week on Decrypted,
Speaker 1: we're going to explore the rise of hackathons and the
Speaker 1: role they play in the technology ecosystem. The hope is
Speaker 1: that these bright pajama wearing moderately sleep deprived students that
Speaker 1: you just heard from, students who are often still years
Speaker 1: away from finishing school. The hope is that they will
Speaker 1: become the future Mark Zuckerberg's of the world, and that
Speaker 1: they will power the next generation of innovation in Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1: And because of that, for technology companies as well as
Speaker 1: venture capital investors, a lot is hanging in the balance
Speaker 1: at these NERD slumber parties. Will take you inside one
Speaker 1: such hackathon today. So about these talent wars, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of talk about how there's a shortage of engineers
Speaker 1: right now in Silicon Valley. Well is that? What exactly
Speaker 1: do we mean by that and what are the implications? Well,
Speaker 1: you can see it in the salaries. You know, starting
Speaker 1: engineers can earn a hundred and twenty five thousand or so,
Speaker 1: but it can easily go up to two hundred thousand,
Speaker 1: three hundred thousand dollars or more, because one excellent engineer,
Speaker 1: when truly exceptional, one that writes brilliant, clean CRISP code,
Speaker 1: is worth fifty of his or her counterparts. And remember
Speaker 1: you're losing at engineer is usually your competitors gain. Right,
Speaker 1: So why did the tech companies need these hackathons. Why
Speaker 1: not go to places like India or China or somewhere
Speaker 1: else in the world and find the talent that they're
Speaker 1: not finding locally. Well, they want them nearby an in house. Now,
Speaker 1: let's go back to Stanford's engineering Hall. I want you
Speaker 1: to meet Jeff Shaw. I own a pair of Snampchat
Speaker 1: spectacles and they're really awesome. Like I was about to
Speaker 1: stop using Snapchat, but then like I bought Harris spat
Speaker 1: Coles and its eye opening. Jeff studies philosophy at Lewis
Speaker 1: and Clark University in Portland, Oregon. He likes country music
Speaker 1: and tinkering with everything from cars to computers. And then
Speaker 1: I realized, like, um, not all my friends gonna see
Speaker 1: what I do. So I'd love to make version where
Speaker 1: everyone gets to see what I do is so you know,
Speaker 1: face would be a good great platform for that. Jeff
Speaker 1: has a track record at hackathons. He won forty dollars
Speaker 1: for building a payment app at a recent one sponsored
Speaker 1: by Mercedes Benz. Tree Hacks doesn't have big prizes, but
Speaker 1: Jeff says that's not what motivates him anyway. I'm not
Speaker 1: here to demo this product. Um, I'm I'm just here
Speaker 1: to build stuff. I love his idea. So did his
Speaker 1: Facebook spectacles work? Well, we'll get to that right now.
Speaker 1: We're just getting underway. I mean it's only midnight on
Speaker 1: Friday night. People are rushing around forming teams. The scene.
Speaker 1: It's chaotic, girl, I am looking, I cannot find my team. Crisis.
Speaker 1: But many teams form on the spot at the hackathon.
Speaker 1: If they don't know each other at the beginning, well
Speaker 1: they definitely do by the end. Technology companies like IBM
Speaker 1: and Microsoft have been holding hackathouns for decades, but the
Speaker 1: number of college events has recently exploded. Seventy one hackathons
Speaker 1: in North America alone this year. That's three times a week.
Speaker 1: You have hackers build things straight, well not totally straight.
Speaker 1: I mean they do take naps once in a while.
Speaker 1: You know, they sleep in shifts, They drink insane amounts
Speaker 1: of red Bull, eat pizza, and from what I could sell,
Speaker 1: very few took showers or brush their teeth. I'm sort
Speaker 1: of curious, what does it what does it smell like?
Speaker 1: At one of these, it was a little funky. That's
Speaker 1: really gross. You know, the hackathons have changed over time.
Speaker 1: You know, it's no longer just guys or super technical
Speaker 1: people that are doing this as it was in the
Speaker 1: early days. People interested in figuring out how apps and
Speaker 1: services actually work can participate, and it's gotten easier for
Speaker 1: them as tools and technologies have become more and more
Speaker 1: user friendly. There's been explosion of new tools available for
Speaker 1: anybody to create applications and create games and share them
Speaker 1: with the world. That's Dan Garcia from the University of California, Berkeley.
Speaker 1: He teaches the Beauty and Joy of Computing and introduct
Speaker 1: re class for non computer science majors between Scratch and
Speaker 1: GameMaker and Unity. It's an incredible time and it's incredible
Speaker 1: space for beginners to create applications in games rather than
Speaker 1: just be passive users of them. He said that what
Speaker 1: used to take weeks to build, now you can do
Speaker 1: in a couple of hours. So what are the building blocks?
Speaker 1: I'm thinking it's Amazon Web Services or Google's cloud business
Speaker 1: or Microsoft is it is it payments to a p
Speaker 1: i S. What are all these pieces? It's all those
Speaker 1: things broad exactly. And you take a p i S
Speaker 1: for example, they're kind of like legos. They don't have
Speaker 1: to start from scratch, pouring the plastic and you know,
Speaker 1: doing the mold. These are preconfigured chunks of code to
Speaker 1: do things like process payments, connect to Twitter, or even
Speaker 1: send a text. Hackers just combine them in new and
Speaker 1: interesting ways. So it sounds a little like competitive playtime.
Speaker 1: It absolutely is, and it's playtime for people who want
Speaker 1: to build the coolest or most technically difficult thing while
Speaker 1: the clock keeps ticking down. By ten PM, hackers have
Speaker 1: all formed their teams and are starting to get to work.
Speaker 1: Around midnight, I checked out the four floors of Engineering
Speaker 1: Center where people were working. It's pretty facebook. A few
Speaker 1: lucky ones scored conference rooms with whiteboards. Most were working
Speaker 1: at wooden tables lined up in rows, or they lounged
Speaker 1: on bean bags shaped like smiley faces and poop emojis.
Speaker 1: Some groups were still debating what to build, but quite
Speaker 1: a few had already decided. We want to build the
Speaker 1: slag for doctors, and we want to link still that
Speaker 1: patients and doctors are still in touch after the pat
Speaker 1: patient gets the treatment. I'm gonna build a plug in
Speaker 1: for the Internet that will connect on text, either on
Speaker 1: Twitter or on blogs and disrepeatable news sources directly back
Speaker 1: to Russian state media sources. But we most recently decided
Speaker 1: on using the artist simulate like some visual and auditory
Speaker 1: disorders UM that you might not otherwise be able to understand,
Speaker 1: Like what if you have a visual disorder that impairs
Speaker 1: your like vision or someone you're hearing, or maybe some
Speaker 1: kind of cognitive disorder that influences how you see the world. Sorry,
Speaker 1: that's a wide range of projects. I actually love the
Speaker 1: slack for doctors and patients. One did everyone stay hunched
Speaker 1: over their laptops all night? You know? I thought they
Speaker 1: were going to I was expecting to see everyone crowded
Speaker 1: around sitting there straight, but but they weren't. I mean,
Speaker 1: sometimes members would go off and and work at the
Speaker 1: soldering station. Other times they'd go and meet with different
Speaker 1: engineers from Facebook and the like to get advice on
Speaker 1: how to use an a p I. And well, one girl,
Speaker 1: she just kind of wandered off looking for Uros, and
Speaker 1: like two hours later she still hadn't come back. The
Speaker 1: Grand Uros. Excuse now, dare? I asked, did you get
Speaker 1: any sleep while you were covering the UM? I did.
Speaker 1: I found this cozy little server room and I curled
Speaker 1: up on a table and I got a few winks
Speaker 1: it was nice. But actually a lot of people did
Speaker 1: take naps, short naps, mind you, on tables, even just
Speaker 1: straight in their chair, like this one guy who was
Speaker 1: using earplugs in a blindfold just to ignore the chaos.
Speaker 1: And what about Jeff in his spectacles for Facebook efforts?
Speaker 1: Was he live streaming his life at this point? Well,
Speaker 1: by Saturday he had made some pretty good progress. He
Speaker 1: took an old baseball hat and he hot glued it
Speaker 1: to a Raspberry pie. For our listeners, that's a super
Speaker 1: powerful computer that's about the size of a credit card
Speaker 1: and it's cheap. It's like thirty five. Um. So he
Speaker 1: attached a camera and a battery to the hat, and
Speaker 1: then he secured a WiFi connection so that he could
Speaker 1: live stream the camera to Facebook. Then he encoded the
Speaker 1: video so Facebook software would accept it and did it work? No?
Speaker 1: Why is there red code in the green? That does
Speaker 1: not mean you cannot open video device? That doesn't sound good.
Speaker 1: That's the air that Facebook sending back. Okay, so yeah,
Speaker 1: so does that mean how do you get around that? Dude?
Speaker 1: Or this is that what you're figuring out now? Yes,
Speaker 1: that's what trying to figure out The Facebook representatives at
Speaker 1: the hackathon were there to help, but they couldn't figure
Speaker 1: it out. Jeff was scouring online forms all of Saturday.
Speaker 1: He tried swapping out hardware parts, even took an uber
Speaker 1: to the nearest fries, but by dinner time, with about
Speaker 1: two thirds of the hackathon over, it still wasn't working.
Speaker 1: Time was running out to come up with a new idea.
Speaker 1: Along with technical experts from Facebook and Amazon. I saw
Speaker 1: others from Google, IBM, Disney, and Microsoft. They stayed till
Speaker 1: late at night and they were back there early the
Speaker 1: next morning, wanting to help. Most technology companies consider this
Speaker 1: critical if they want to remain competitive. They can't get
Speaker 1: the newest crop of makers excited about using their they
Speaker 1: become irrelevant. So help me picture this. What what are
Speaker 1: the representatives from Microsoft and Facebook and Amazon? What are
Speaker 1: they doing at the hackathon? Well, you know, I thought
Speaker 1: they'd be circling around, you know, saying, hey, use my
Speaker 1: ap I, But it wasn't like that. It was a
Speaker 1: lot more subtle. Remember their sponsors, so they paid to
Speaker 1: be there. They got their tables set up with all
Speaker 1: their swag, and they're waiting for people to come up
Speaker 1: to them and passing out like swag what what? What
Speaker 1: good is are they passing out? They had all sorts
Speaker 1: of good stuff. They had special hoodies with inflatable pillows.
Speaker 1: They had warm fuzzy socks, blindfolds, ear plugs, water bottles,
Speaker 1: you know, all the normal swaggy stuff. So they were
Speaker 1: waiting for people to come up to them and then
Speaker 1: they could have a conversation. And they're holding events, they're
Speaker 1: holding talks exactly. They were holding talks on slack online
Speaker 1: and also uh they were having in person ones. In fact,
Speaker 1: Google had one on its cloud services at one am.
Speaker 1: It was standing room only one am session on cloud
Speaker 1: services that is Devotion. And Microsoft was also to the
Speaker 1: late night crowd and they brought cool toys. We have
Speaker 1: a couple of technical workshops on bots and cognitive services.
Speaker 1: We try to get students wrapped on our cloud platform.
Speaker 1: We have about five Hollowans devices, ten surface pro Force
Speaker 1: so that students can check out and develop on um
Speaker 1: free cloud credits. I mean the really point, the point
Speaker 1: just to really get students to use the technology in
Speaker 1: a fun, easy way that's friction free. As the hackathons
Speaker 1: began digging into the technical nuts and bolts and began coding.
Speaker 1: I kind of felt rude interrupting them. So I met
Speaker 1: more sponsors, like via McGee from IBM that work with
Speaker 1: the developers and they educate them on our technologies and
Speaker 1: tap them um use our services an API and build something.
Speaker 1: So how successful a strategy is this for companies? I mean,
Speaker 1: what's what's the return on investment for sponsoring a hackathon?
Speaker 1: You know, it's funny, Brad, I asked that a bunch
Speaker 1: of times, and nobody could give me a number. They
Speaker 1: were all squishy, feel good, kind of futuristic answers like
Speaker 1: endearing themselves to future employees or um evangelizing their technology.
Speaker 1: I mean, these are bright, self motivated college students who
Speaker 1: will very likely go on to build great things in tech.
Speaker 1: Is there anything substantial they get in return? Like? Can
Speaker 1: they keep on communicating with these programmers? Yeah? Exactly. As sponsors,
Speaker 1: they can access the list of everyone that was there.
Speaker 1: That means they definitely get a leg up in recruiting.
Speaker 1: That sounds valuable. Was it just tech companies? No, there
Speaker 1: were some venture capital firms that go to hackathons, like
Speaker 1: at Tree ACKs Andrews and Horowitz had a table, and
Speaker 1: of course Peter Teal's fifteen seventeen fund. They've made that
Speaker 1: their entire strategy, visiting hackathons around the country and doing
Speaker 1: the circuit. Yeah, in the tech community, we have mythologized
Speaker 1: innovators like Evan Spiegel and Mark Zuckerberg, who both began
Speaker 1: building their companies when they were in college. So I
Speaker 1: could see why investors would want to prowl these hackathons
Speaker 1: looking for the next generation. Exactly, these these invest in
Speaker 1: raw talent. That's what fuels innovation, and they want to
Speaker 1: be on these kids radars. They have to be, and
Speaker 1: they want to be early, right because the first money
Speaker 1: went big. Exactly, first money in biggest check out. And
Speaker 1: this is a group of college kids who, instead of
Speaker 1: going out and partying with their friends, are pulling all
Speaker 1: nighters in an engineering hall. Not for a grade, mind you,
Speaker 1: but for the sheer joy of creating something new and
Speaker 1: pushing their skills to the limit. So by now is
Speaker 1: that it must have been getting pretty late. How many
Speaker 1: hours have you been there at this point? Quite a few.
Speaker 1: And you know, when I was walking around, I saw
Speaker 1: some groups hyper focused, surrounded by chip wrappers and chocolate
Speaker 1: kisses and cheese. It's and red Bulls and the like
Speaker 1: and acting like no one else in the whole world existed.
Speaker 1: They were totally in the zone, super focused, and other
Speaker 1: ones were taking a break and having a blast. I
Speaker 1: came up and you ladies are here and you're laughing.
Speaker 1: What are you laughing about? What is it funny? A
Speaker 1: lot of things, Yeah, mostly sleep deprivation. No, um, I
Speaker 1: don't know. It's like it's it's almost like funny at
Speaker 1: the point where like you've been spending like all these
Speaker 1: hours trying to get like all these like random things
Speaker 1: to work, and it's like finally starting to like come together.
Speaker 1: It's like a little unbelievable. So it was relief and
Speaker 1: surprise basically when you've been trying like the same thing
Speaker 1: twenty times and then it randomly works. Okay, now give
Speaker 1: us an update on Jeff, the guy who was trying
Speaker 1: to make Spectacles work with Facebook. Jeff, he was determined
Speaker 1: and he wasn't talking very much, so I just sat
Speaker 1: down and hung out. The last time we heard from Jeff,
Speaker 1: he had hit a wall. He had asked Facebook engineers,
Speaker 1: scoured online forums, but new parts from Fries, but nothing
Speaker 1: was working. Then he asked one more friend to take
Speaker 1: a look. I so you just screamed, what is it?
Speaker 1: What happened? So this problem we've been trying to fix
Speaker 1: for twice four hours. Um, we've found the solution. And
Speaker 1: it's the stupidest reason ever. Um. So, as you can see,
Speaker 1: this is Facebook right now. So it's on Facebook live
Speaker 1: through my hat that I have. It's like live video.
Speaker 1: And we couldn't get to work because we left these
Speaker 1: quotation marks out of this one fragment that we have.
Speaker 1: Let me see the fragment of code. Yeah, family, you
Speaker 1: want to walk all right through it, it's just right
Speaker 1: where is it? So basically over here you can see
Speaker 1: we need these quotation marks and we had this link
Speaker 1: like this, and that's why they work. As simple as that,
Speaker 1: As simple as that. But Jeff still had a few
Speaker 1: hours left until deadline. Yeah, but in that time he
Speaker 1: wanted to keep working. I mean, that's the whole point
Speaker 1: of a hackathon is to push your limits and keep
Speaker 1: building something until you run out of time. Yeah, Jeff,
Speaker 1: so we are is there audio? Hello? Hello? I don't
Speaker 1: hear anything, do you? So what are we just here?
Speaker 1: With that success, that was him working through continued issues
Speaker 1: again in the nature of the hack he had gotten
Speaker 1: the microphone hooked up but hadn't quite figured out how
Speaker 1: to encode the audio, so it streamed through as well.
Speaker 1: So what happens to all these projects after they get
Speaker 1: them working in the hackathon wraps up? You know, That's
Speaker 1: something that surprised me probably the most when I was
Speaker 1: reporting this out, was that most of these projects, however
Speaker 1: cool they are, don't go anywhere. Alex Ayatala, who helped
Speaker 1: organize Stanford's first hackathon and is now working on his
Speaker 1: startup What's Goodly, calls Hackathon's the graveyard of ideas of
Speaker 1: the project takes of the time, and the last which
Speaker 1: is about making the marketing and getting it on the
Speaker 1: app store and fix seeing bugs, making it so users
Speaker 1: can actually log in and sign up, which a lot
Speaker 1: of hackathon projects don't like just skip over completely. Um,
Speaker 1: that stuff can take eight of the time, so it's
Speaker 1: just it's not no one's incentivice to do it. So
Speaker 1: you've got a bunch of projects that aren't totally built
Speaker 1: out and can't be used by the general population. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And a lot of people told me because they're working
Speaker 1: quickly and they just want stuff to work. The code
Speaker 1: that they write is usually really really bad. Oh I see,
Speaker 1: So they'll use like ten steps instead of one to
Speaker 1: perform the same function, which usually means it's clunky and
Speaker 1: breaks more easily. Yeah, not ideal. And the other weird
Speaker 1: thing about hackathons is that the better the project does
Speaker 1: with the judges, the less likely the makers are to
Speaker 1: continue it after the hackathon. When you win that something,
Speaker 1: it's it's like as if you you completed it, even
Speaker 1: though you really didn't. That was Ebenezer Mamo. He won
Speaker 1: a recent cal Hacks hackathon with a project a team
Speaker 1: called test Lapathic. It basically allows you to control a
Speaker 1: Tesla car with your mind. My god, that sounds very
Speaker 1: cool and vaguely dangerous. So how exactly did you do that? Well,
Speaker 1: he and his team used an e G headset, you
Speaker 1: know those mesh looking devices that you put over your head,
Speaker 1: and it has maybe a couple dozen little metal disks
Speaker 1: that attached, right, and they detect electrical activity in the brain. Yeah, exactly, Well,
Speaker 1: they used that to map the brain activity to certain actions.
Speaker 1: Then they used an analog signal to broadcast it to
Speaker 1: an RC radio which controlled the motors in the Tesla
Speaker 1: to make it stop or go, No wonder they won.
Speaker 1: That sounds ingenious, but the creators didn't want to take
Speaker 1: it to the next level. For us, it was for fun.
Speaker 1: Um it's always for fun, and the secondary um purposes
Speaker 1: to really showcase what the next generation of human computer
Speaker 1: interfaces will look like. And for us, it's really all
Speaker 1: about showing people that it's possible and that limits and exists.
Speaker 1: It's this funny thing that while the students are pushing
Speaker 1: the limits just for fun, they're being watched by all
Speaker 1: those recruiters and mentors who are waiting for them to
Speaker 1: grow up so they can hire them. So, Lazette, do
Speaker 1: you think you saw the next Mark Zuckerberg or Evan
Speaker 1: Spiegel at the Stanford hackath I don't know, Brad. I
Speaker 1: met some pretty bright people who were really motivated, and
Speaker 1: I also saw a couple of cool projects. It was
Speaker 1: there anything there that you could see out in the
Speaker 1: real world. Well, I really liked this one robotic drink
Speaker 1: mixer because I've got a penchant from Margarita to say
Speaker 1: no more, I'll where can I buy one? It was
Speaker 1: a fun experience, though, and I can see some of
Speaker 1: these maybe going on or maybe it just stays in
Speaker 1: the graveyard. Who knows, maybe they'll be resurrected from the grave.
Speaker 1: I also loved Jeff's idea of taking something that was
Speaker 1: very proprietary and Menford Snapchat and repurposing it for Facebook.
Speaker 1: That seems like a future that we should have where
Speaker 1: any device out there works on the different social networks
Speaker 1: that we all use. So as the hackathon at Stanford
Speaker 1: kicked down to the final minutes for people stressing out, well,
Speaker 1: there were still that fun vibe and people still had
Speaker 1: smiles on their faces, but you could definitely feel that
Speaker 1: people were starting to get stressed. I mean, these are
Speaker 1: very competitive people who had just spent the last thirty
Speaker 1: five hours crunching on a project and they wanted to
Speaker 1: be as good as possible. Hey guys, good morning. I
Speaker 1: just want to let you know that you can want
Speaker 1: your have to be judged. Please submit it on death
Speaker 1: post by ted am for all the prizes and sponsor
Speaker 1: prizes you want to be judged for. So what was
Speaker 1: the actual finish, Like, you know, it was kind of anticlimactic.
Speaker 1: I expected people to be high fiving and cheering, but
Speaker 1: nobody did that. It was just kind of quiet and
Speaker 1: even the winners of this hackathon, like Cliff, you know,
Speaker 1: the guy that felt like a god when he coded,
Speaker 1: he didn't even seem really fixated on it, And like
Speaker 1: Jeff said, it's really about the process of creation. And
Speaker 1: that's it for this week's Decrypted. Thanks for listening. We'd
Speaker 1: love to hear what you thought of this episode. Record
Speaker 1: a voice message and send it to us at Decrypted
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at Lazette,
Speaker 1: Underscore Chapman and I'm at brad Stone. If you haven't already,
Speaker 1: please subscribe to our show on iTunes or wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts. While you're there, please leave us a
Speaker 1: rating in the review. It really helps more listeners find
Speaker 1: our show. This episode was produced by Pia Gtcari, Liz Smith,
Speaker 1: and Magnus Hendrickson. A big thank you to Emily Busso,
Speaker 1: who edited the Prince story I wrote about professional hackath honors.
Speaker 1: It's different than academic ones. You can find it at
Speaker 1: Bloomberg dot com, Forward slash Tech. Alec McCabe is head
Speaker 1: of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.