Startup Sprint: Prove you're fundable
Build It. Test It. Prove It.
Free 3-day Sprint for pre-seed founders. October 21 to 23, SAP Labs, Palo Alto.
Judges from Stanford, Nvidia, Meta, and Microsoft AI spend three days watching how your team actually works, then question you on it. You leave with a clearer next move and a scored record of how you operate, built for investor conversations.
Past teams have gone on to raise from 500 Global and Blitzscaling Ventures and join Berkeley SkyDeck and Confluent's accelerator.
20 team spots. Applications close Oct 14
Judges
Mohammad Rasouli Phd., Researcher, AI for Private Markets, Stanford
Sajal Garg, Principal Soft Eng, Microsoft AI
Abhinav Balasubramanian, AI Lead, Nvidia
Tharun Tej Tammineni, AI Lead, Meta
What this is
Judges who lead AI at Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft AI, and Stanford spend three days watching how your team works, then question you on it. They'll push on your build, your technical claims, and how your team decides. Better here than in a pitch meeting.
You leave with a clearer next move and a scored record of how you operate. Evidence you can bring to investors, not a pitch deck you rehearsed.
Two tracks
Discovery Track. Pre-market, no customer contact yet. For founders seriously exploring a startup, including people inside companies weighing the leap.
Pre-Seed Track. In-market, already talking to customers. Ship something real, show what changed, pressure-test your next move.
What you get
No cash. No trophy. Something more useful.
Teams that clear the Sprint's scoring bar earn the Street Test: 30 days back in the real world, building with no event deadline and no audience, just you and the market. It's a bar, not a ranking. Every team that clears it gets in.
Teams that finish the Street Test receive a Proving Ground report card, a scored record of how you operated across both stages. It covers three things: whether customers are pulling (Pull), whether progress held up after the event (Momentum), and whether this team fits this problem (Founder Fit). It's yours - bring it to investors, accelerators, or a cofounder you're recruiting.
A hackathon ends when the event does. This doesn't.
Schedule
Wednesday, Oct 21: 9am to 8pm. Kickoff, building begins.
Thursday, Oct 22: 9am to 8pm. Full build day.
Friday, Oct 23: 9am to 4pm. Finals, live defense, deliberation, awards.
Who should apply
Pre-seed founders with live customer conversations.
Builders, product leaders, designers, and operators ready to test an idea for real.
University students: the commitment is all three days, Wednesday to Friday, 9am to close. Limited undergrad spots.