​Build It. Test It. Prove It.

​Smells like a hackathon. Runs like a road test.

​Proving Ground runs a three-day Sprint where judges push past the pitch. No script survives real questions about what you tried, what broke, and what you changed. That's harder to fake than a deck.

​Past teams have gone on to raise from 500 Global and Blitzscaling Ventures, and been accepted into Berkeley SkyDeck and Confluent's accelerator, independently, without Proving Ground's involvement in those decisions.

​What this is

​Smells like a hackathon. Runs like a road test. A hackathon judges what you built by the end. A road test watches how you handle the car.

​The team is almost everything. How you make decisions under pressure, how you handle a setback, how you treat each other when something breaks. You'll document that as you go. What we ask you to show and how we question it are built around behavior, not performance.

​How it works

​Over three days, founders build under real constraint. No script, no rehearsed demo. Judges probe what you tried, what broke, and what you changed, and compare where you started to where you ended.

​Two Tracks

​Discovery Track. Pre-market, no active customer contact yet. For the startup curious, including enterprise folks seriously exploring a leap.

​Pre-seed Track. In-market, already talking to customers. Ship something real, show what's changed, pressure-test your next move.

​After the Sprint

​Select teams get invited into the Street Test: 30 days back in the real world, no artificial deadline, no audience. This is where we see if momentum was real or borrowed from the room. It's the part a hackathon can't offer, because a hackathon ends when the weekend does.

​Schedule

​Sept 23 to 25, SAP, Palo Alto. Times below are proposed and subject to change.

​Wednesday, Sept 23: 9am to 9pm. Doors open, kickoff, team formation, building begins.

​Thursday, Sept 24: 9am to 9pm. Full day of building.

​Friday, Sept 25: 9am to 3pm. Finals, live defense, judge deliberation, closing.

​Who should apply

​Developers and builders, enterprise or startup background Pre-seed founders with a live customer conversation Product leaders, designers, operators seriously considering the leap Anyone ready to build under real constraint and be observed doing it

​Venue

​Hosted at SAP, Palo Alto.