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[Hack Day] Building a $100MM solopreneur business with MSR and GitHub Copilot
GitHub & Microsoft Research Present: Builders Hack Day Seattle
Are you using tools like AI Agents for marketing? outreach? coding? design? Are you building a technology company? Do you want to build your own tech startup?
We'll be hosting a full day Builders Hack Day at GitHub in Seattle. Our goal is to empower builders with the community.
This event is designed to connect builders and founders like you with the Microsoft Research Team and the Investor network in Seattle.
Plus, it’s a special research edition Hackathon: By participating in the hackathon, you’ll also be joining a Microsoft Research study that will help define how AI empowers the next generation of founders. Learn more about this research below.
Ready to build something amazing while shaping the future of AI for startups?
Register now to secure your place because there are limited spots available.
🛠 What You Will Build
You will build commercially viable, innovative products using Microsoft’s open-source projects: GraphRAG and NLWeb.
They’re foundational technologies designed to supercharge your product development. With GraphRAG, you’ll harness graph-based retrieval-augmented generation for multi-hop reasoning, explainable outputs, and enterprise-grade knowledge synthesis. With NLWeb, you’ll explore natural language interfaces that unlock web-scale intelligence and semantic search capabilities.
The top 6-10 projects will be invited to pitch to a panel of investors on Tuesday evening including Kevin Crosby, GitHub Fund, Jon Turow – Madrona, and others.
🚀 Not JUST another hackathon - What You Get
This isn't just another hackathon - you'll receive free access to GitHub's latest Copilot development tools, plus priority technical support from GitHub Developer Advocate team during the hackathon. You'll also have direct pitch and demo opportunities with PNW VCs and technical leaders from GitHub and Microsoft.
As part of Microsoft Research's study on AI-accelerated startup development, teams are randomly assigned to one of two advanced Copilot feature configurations to help us understand how different AI approaches impact development speed, creativity, and outcomes. See below for more details.
📅 Event Schedule
Monday, Sept 8 - Hack Day
9:00 AM - Check Ins
9:30 AM - Event Kick Off & Talks
10:00 AM - Team Creations
12:00 PM - Lunch
5:00 PM - Dinner
8:00 PM - Day 1 is Done
9:00 PM - Community Judging
5:00 PM - Doors Open
6:00 PM - Demos Begin
7:00 PM - Networking
8:00 PM - Day 2 - Demo Night is Done
Judges
Kevin Crosby - GitHub Fund and Accelerator
Kevin Leneway - Pioneer Square Labs
Research Partnership
The full details about the research study are available on the registration page and in the confirmation email. Highlights:
It’s up to you whether or not you take part in this research Hackathon.
During this hackathon, participants will be randomly assigned to one of two advanced Copilot feature configurations, Free or Enterprise. To ensure fairness, teams will only be evaluated within the same cohort of feature configurations. This means you have the same edge advantage regardless of which tool you're assigned.
All contributions remain completely anonymous, and your insights will directly contribute to research findings that have real-world impact on how AI tools are built for founders like you.