HackFS Summit 🚀 Closing Remarks with Juan Benet

foreign [Music] before we wrap up a little bit of an addendum to the schedule but uh but exciting nonetheless so really excited to welcome a to the stage so Juan Benet is the founder of protocol Labs uh so we're really excited to have a surprise guest at the end of the the summit um it just kind of everything kind of lined up so that one could be here so yeah welcome to stage one and excited to have you here hey how's it going uh can you hear me fine yeah yeah everything's great yeah great awesome uh super excited to be here uh I love hack FS uh we've been doing uh this for a few years out and it's one of my favorite Parts uh times of the year uh to be able to uh work with all of you and hang out and have fun uh talking about new ideas do projects uh uh cool things to build um things that might turn into products things that might turn into like really good open source projects and and so on so I'm super stoked for hackath starting uh it's very near dear to my heart and uh one of the cool things to see this year is so many teams um and people from prior hackathesses are now participating again this year in some cases as sponsors which is super cool to see uh I was like looking through the uh the uh grid and and so that's like three or four teams that started as hack Fest teams like where you are right now uh you know turn into projects uh and then companies and um now and like have good products that tons of people are using and now are coming back to to pay it forward and work with you and um build more more cool things so it's really really awesome to see uh just that entire cycle um uh rebuilding so it's awesome to be here amazing um yeah maybe I I know you also have a last-minute slide as well so feel free to uh if you want to share your screen now it'll show up in the back end and I'll promote it when when you're ready but if you go back to the start of your Founders journey and starting your first you know project um you know Envision yourself back in the series with the people who are building for the next three weeks um you know you have three weeks to learn you have three weeks to build you have you know all these resources teams uh projects interesting things ahead of you uh where would you start yeah uh it's a great question so um and you know I kind of also got myself through hackathons uh initially and it's one of the things that I found super fun to do and I learned a ton from uh so I I built a lot of things early on uh that ended up turning into a really useful projects uh through hackathons and where I would sort of start is you kind of want to find something at the intersection of a few few parts one is something that you're really interested in like follow your curiosity follow what you like um follow things that you kind of want to explore um the second is to find something that uh where there's gonna definitely challenge you and push you to learn new ideas new technologies new uh experiment uh it's gonna push out of your comfort zone so that you can kind of use this as a great learning experience it's one of the best things you can have um uh through hackathons use it as a great learning experience and so but you also don't want to pick something that's maybe too far away from from what you know already so kind of pick the challenge that carefully where like if you go too far away then it might be just be super super difficult um now you can also you know you're excited to do that go for it uh it's just kind of you may want to calibrate what you do based based on um how uh easy or hard you're finding it to be you you want it to be kind of challenging and you want it to be motivating and exciting and new and different um but you don't want it to be like so hard that it's hard to make progress um then I would kind of like explore a lot of ideas initially I would kind of there's a bunch of lists that we've generated over the years with lots of ideas many of which you know some people have tried building um but but certainly comes from open space um you would go to the you know brainstorming session and and think about a lot of things I mean just kind of figure out what you find yourself drawn to that you think would be like really cool um and the cool and attractiveness factor for you matters a lot because one of the things about building projects and products is that uh if you're really excited about building the thing and you really like it uh then you're gonna kind of um uh find it much more rewarding to work on that and build with it and learn from it and so on so it's this really great uh self-fulfilling um uh loop where if you are learning a ton and having fun with it and building something useful like that's a great like intersection where you battle you know uh help you power through um lots of challenges as you're building a thing right like you you have to kind of have the vision of like the full thing working and get really excited about that to kind of make it through the challenges of building a product um and so I would kind of like start this kind of like find that intersection between things that are going to push you to learn things that you're gonna like and find a lot of ideas out there that you think are think are interesting and maybe I would like go to a lot of the workshops um even things that you maybe don't know that much about um just to kind of see what ideas pop up there because you might find something super cool there I'll give an example from one hackathon a very long time ago um I went to hackathon it was like a week-long hackathon that um uh uh it sort of got together with a set of other people there that I met at that hackathon and we had the idea of like hey this is right around when like iPhones were first coming out and becoming popular we're like hey would it be great to have like uh you know Pokemon but like on a phone this is like way or like way before Pokemon go and we kind of like made a monster capture initially in that week and that ended up turning into like our first startup and we made a game called Geomon um that came out of like that idea and we just kind of pursued what we thought was really cool and exciting and that you know was a turned out to be a super exciting fun project um and and that wouldn't have happened if we hadn't been brainstorming a bunch of ideas and and if we had sort of like come in with like oh I'll only look at one set of things then we would never have had found that that set of ideas so I just kind of explore a lot use it as a learning point meet use it as a vector to meet a lot of other people uh in the community that's one of the great things about these kinds of hackathons is they let you get to know a lot of other people in the community get to build relationships form teams um I was just thinking back that uh um from huddle met uh I think the new knew about each other before hacking fast but they like really mad and started like getting to to know each other and work together through Hangout Fest and that really became the moment that that team formed and now built uh built a really really awesome product and Company so um these are great uh also be open to the the ideas that your friends or the people that you're getting to know get really excited about and be willing to kind of like go along and try something try something new yeah I love that I love that idea of picking something that's challenging that's hard um but at the cusp where you can make incremental progress and kind of keep feeling that that motion moving and um and I think people will always be very surprised in how much work they can do how many things they could do in 20 days 20 days is a long time so awesome yeah that the length of time here is like really good because it gives you um enough time to build a solid prototype or sometimes a full product um and so it's not it's not so fast that like you can't actually have the thing working uh but it's also short enough that like you can try something new and if you ultimately choose to like not pursue that that's totally fine that you just learn a ton through a few weeks of hacking on this particular project and you and you learn learn through it so um yeah like one one big message is you know good luck and have fun like uh the the half fun part is a huge component of hackathon so uh really let your curiosity and whatever you enjoy drive drive a lot of it amazing um I don't know if you had any slides or any presentations like the the um the uh sponsors Grant and like highlight a bunch of them that are that are uh got started through hackvest but maybe I'll show that later on I can I can what I can do is I can go to the the paging I can just highlight them myself so I'll I'll do that and actually then everybody can see which ones are our past Tech up as the teach basically oh yeah that'd be cool that'd be a really cool thing for Google to do in the future is like kind of like yeah like a little badge if you if your team started oh there you go awesome Juan is another one of those people like I mentioned Gabriel where I talk to and I get immediately a bunch of really cool ideas that I immediately want to go every month so um awesome well uh thank you for popping in uh I'll leave the last word with you of anything else to add but uh it's been a pleasure always always great to see you and I love the beard I love it thank you yeah you inspired me oh thank you there you go this one thank you so much happy hacking everybody awesome so just to wrap up the summit that's been the hack Fest Summit thank you so much to everybody for joining us today um and uh for being a part of this awesome event um applications are actually still open so if you have a friend that you think would be inspired by the conversations that we had today um send them an invite uh and get them hacking with you and building over the next couple of weeks um and of course like Juan said good luck have fun happy hacking this is what it's all about it's about having fun experimenting building something new uh playing around with new ideas and all around this kind of amazing ecosystem that protocolabs has built both in the technical side and on the sports side so uh thank you all for being here and really excited to uh hack with you over the next few weeks see you soon