January 29th, 2024

MindsDB FinTech AI Hackathon

One week after moving to SF, I bagged my first W at the FinTech AI Hackathon hosted by MindsDB and OpenBB. It was a 3-day weekend hackathon, and here’s how it went down:

Day 1: Team Formation & Ideation

Day 1 was all about networking, meeting new people, and forming teams. Once we got our squad together, it was time to brainstorm and figure out what we were going to build. My team was stacked with cracked engineers and designers, so I knew our chances were pretty solid. After brainstorming, we decided to build Learn 2 Finance—a tool designed to democratize finance. The idea was simple but powerful: give everyone the ability to understand their portfolio movements by providing real-time news insights. Users could navigate an easy-to-use interface that displayed the overall value of their portfolio, while also getting quick summaries of news articles explaining why their stocks were moving, based on real-time market events. Since we had our idea locked-in, it was time to go build. We pulled an all-nighter at my friend’s apartment, hacking away to get an early demo of L2F up and running.

Day 2: Grind Mode

Day 2 was pretty much a co-working day at MindsDB HQ. We spent the day grinding—fixing model hallucinations, putting together APIs, and building out the UI. We got a lot done, and by the end of Day 2, our MVP was practically already built.

Day 3: Demo Day

Day 3 was demo day, and we had 5 minutes to pitch what we’d built. Our pitch was solid—I'd say it was our ability to sell what we built that helped us land in the top 3 of the hackathon. Hackathons teach you how to ship and build products fast. They’re also a great opportunity to connect with other cracked builders and expand your network.