Name: The Founder Sprint
Start: 2026-07-11T11:00:00.000-07:00
End: 2026-07-12T19:30:00.000-07:00
Location: Eastside Seattle — venue revealed to approved applicants

Personal

Mohamed F. Ahmed

A 48-hour anti-hackathon for AI-native builders.

Most hackathons celebrate who can ship the most features in 48 hours. We celebrate who can find the strongest evidence that their idea actually matters to real people.

The Founder Sprint isn't a hackathon. It's a 2-day startup building experience.

100 builders. Hand-picked. Application-only.

A full day of workshops on the methodology real founders use to validate ideas: problem severity, rapid validation, AI-native building with the Boundless Stack. Plus team formation and experiment design.

A 10-hour build sprint. You'll prototype, talk to real users, validate one assumption, and present to a panel of judges (including a working VC) for $5K in cash, $10K+ in credits, and 3 months of mentorship with the top team.

All fields. Healthcare, education, finance, arts, anything. You don't need a CS degree — you need to know how to use AI as a force multiplier. Vibe coding, AI research, no-code prototyping. If you can use AI to build, you belong here.

— Full 2-day experience (workshop + hackathon)

— Food, snacks, coffee, and credits for whichever AI tools you use

— Mentors, judges, and operators who've actually shipped

— A network of builders that doesn't end on Sunday

Submit your interest — no charge, no commitment. About you, your team size, what you want to build, why now. 5–7 minutes.

Every application is read by a human. Rolling decisions right up to the June 30 deadline.

You’ll get an acceptance email with everything you need to prep, plus an invite to our Discord/Slack to meet fellow builders before the event.

100 spots. Eastside Seattle. July 11–12, 2026. Venue revealed to approved applicants.

11:00 AM  ·  Doors open. Check-in, AI tool setup help, mingling.

12:30 PM  ·  Welcome & Vision (Mo + Partner)

12:45 PM  ·  Session 1: The Velocity Trap — why AI lets you build the wrong thing fast

1:15 PM  ·  Session 2: Finding Problems Worth Solving (interactive)

2:00 PM  ·  Session 3: Rapid Validation Framework

2:30 PM  ·  Session 4: Building with AI — the Boundless Stack (live demo + setup)

3:30 PM  ·  Session 5: Team Formation & Idea Sprint

4:15 PM  ·  Session 6: Experiment Design Workshop (mentors floating)

8:30 AM  ·  Doors open. Breakfast, fuel up.

9:00 AM  ·  Day 2 Kickoff. Rules, judging criteria.

10:30 AM  ·  Mentor Round 1 (5-min check-ins per team)

12:30 PM  ·  Lunch (mandatory step-away)

1:15 PM  ·  Lightning Talk (VIP guest, optional)

2:30 PM  ·  Mentor Round 2 (focus shifts to demo prep)

4:30 PM  ·  Science Fair Round (judges rotate through every team)

5:45 PM  ·  Final Demos — top 5 (3-min pitch + 2-min Q&A each)

No. Some of the best teams will pair a domain expert with someone AI-fluent. If you can describe what you want to build to an AI and iterate, you belong here.

Apply solo. We match solo applicants with teams on Day 1, and run a pre-event Co-Founder Matching channel for anyone who wants to arrive paired up.

Your laptop. Your chargers. A headset if you do your best thinking with music. We cover food, coffee, snacks, and credits for whichever AI tools you use.

No. Space manufacturing, autonomous swarms, physical AI, fusion, neural interfaces, synthetic biology, climate at planetary scale — any domain, any ambition. You're judged on the strength of your evidence, not the category.