The Hackers Behind Greylock’s Hackfest: Alice L.

We continue our series of The Hackers Behind Greylock’s Hackfest with Alice Lee.

Formerly of University of Pennsylvania and currently a Product Designer at Dropbox, Alice was named by Glamour Magazine as one of the top 10 most inspirational college students of 2013 — and we’d have to agree! From graduating in 3 years and securing a summer internship at foursquare, to combining her love of photography, design and tech to get her digital resume viewed more than 80,000 times (and, of course, participating in last year’s inaugural Hackfest) Alice embodies her top tip of “learning more”.

In this post, Alice talks about the important (albeit, sometimes unexpected) role designers can play in hackathons, how Greylock Hackfest helped her to secure a full-time job at Dropbox and why her competitors should be stocking up on Hot Cheetos (lots of Hot Cheetos)

Read more of Alice’s story below and apply here to be considered for this year’s Greylock Hackfest!

 

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The Hackers Behind Greylock’s Hackfest: Feross A.

Next up in our Hacker Series is Feross Aboukhadijeh, currently a student at Stanford University where he is pursuing his Masters Degree.

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Already named one of Stanford’s top 5 CS students by PandoDaily & featured by New York Magazine & dozens of other outlets for his 3-hour project, YouTube Instant, Feross has been building & hacking from a young age. To qualify for this year’s Greylock Hackfest, Feross & his team created a platform that will let you monitor visitors via your website called CCTV.js.

When he isn’t indulging a closeted love for emus, he’s building lots & lots of websites. You can read more about his many projects here — or meet him in-person at Greylock Hackfest by applying to compete! Though, a word of warning: just don’t get on his bad side & leave him around your appliances…

 

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Stanford Graduate School of Business: 4 Characteristics of Winning Entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley Founding Father Franklin “Pitch” Johnson

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stanfordbusiness:

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“I have never met a successful entrepreneur who didn’t have zeal,” shared Lecturer Franklin “Pitch” Johnson. Johnson started Asset Management Company and has invested in more than 200 tech start-ups including Amgen and Biogen. Below, he shares four fundamental traits of winning…

Best quote “If entrepreneurs don’t have integrity, they will have a short run at success but won’t make it in the long term”

The Hackers Behind Greylock’s Hackfest: Richie Z.

Last summer, Greylock hosted its inaugural Greylock Hackfest — an event for the top college students aspiring to be computer scientists, designers, engineers and, well, hackers. We received hundreds of applications from students from around the globe and after careful review, welcomed 160 participants that comprised 44 teams for 24 hours of hacking, mentorship and sugar rushes at Dropbox’s San Francisco HQ.

While last year’s judges included Greylock’s own Reid Hoffman, Instagram’s Kevin Systrom, Facebook’s Mike Schroepfer and Cloudera’s Mike Olson, the ones to watch were the hackfest competitors.

To qualify, we’ve already offered automatic entry to the winning teams of on-campus hackathons from schools such as Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, UPenn, among many others and starting today, we’re accepting applications for the few, remaining spots. As we start reviewing applications for this July’s greylock hackfest 2, we thought we’d highlight a few of last year’s most noteworthy participants as well as some of the students that have already qualified for this year’s hackfest.

First up, meet Richie Zeng, from UC Berkeley.

 

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Richie’s team took 2nd place last year for their mobile platform for the real-life game, Assassins. Popular with many universities and now many Valley tech companies, Assassins is a game that demands creativity — and a high level of paranoia. Richie and his team built a platform that used your mobile phone to manage the game and provide cool elimination features using the phone’s sensors. For example, you can swing your phone if a player is next to you to simulate a sword. Interestingly enough, Richie and his team also believed that many real life games like scavenger hunts would be awesome with mobile features like that, so they worked on a more general platform for real life gaming called GIRL (Games In Real Life)

When Richie isn’t working on technology that can help us be more efficient in the offline world, he’s developing and executing on ideas before tech luminaries like Sean Parker and keeping us guessing on what his real name really is.

 

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Announcing Greylock Hackfest 2.0

Last summer, Greylock hosted its inaugural Greylock Hackfest — an event for the top college students aspiring to be computer scientists, designers, engineers and, well, hackers. We received hundreds of applications from students from around the globe and after careful review, welcomed 160 participants that comprised 44 teams for 24 hours of hacking, mentorship and sugar rushes at Dropbox’s San Francisco HQ.

Not only did our hackers get to learn and engage with their peers, but we also offered offices hours with Greylock’s DJ Patil and Josh Elman, and product, engineering, and data science stars from Pandora, SumoLogic, Walmart Labs, Dropbox, and TrialPay.

Today, I’m excited to announce this year’s Greylock Hackfest will take place on July 27, 2013 at Airbnb’s SF HQ! Applications open today at http://greylockU.com. The deadline is July 3, 2013

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This year’s competition promises to be even more fiercely contested and inspirational. The winning teams of on-campus hackathons at Princeton, Cal, Stanford, UPenn, CMU, MIT and many more have already been selected to participate.

We’ve also lined up an incredible panel of judges: Google Ventures partner & Digg founder Kevin Rose, Airbnb founder Nathan Blecharcyzk, Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen and Greylock partner and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

The Greylock Hackfest has quickly become a highlight of the year for us. It’s a chance for us to put a spotlight on some of the very best technologists and designers coming out of schools today such as Richie Zeng from UC Berkeley and Feross Aboukhadijeh from Stanford. We’re excited to share more stories from our Hackfest participants on our blog in the coming weeks.

We look forward to seeing you at Airbnb HQ in July.

~John Lilly

John Lilly is a partner at Greylock Partners and former CEO of Mozilla.

Insights from #ProductSF — Greylock’s First Product Event

Last week, Ty Ahmad-Taylor from Samsung and I hosted an event in the Presidio with over 120 Product Managers from around SF, Silicon Valley, and beyond. Our idea was to create an event we wished we had been to earlier in our product management careers. We wanted product managers to learn and talk about career paths, growth strategies, team management and hiring, product processes and tactics, and much more.  And we hoped to make everyone realize that it isn’t just their company where people frequently ask — what does a product manager actually do?

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