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Every year Bainies from across the world get together to ideate, refine, and pitch their startup ideas to panels of experts in Bain’s largest venture event: the Global Hackathon. The winning team has a chance to test, build and launch their idea within Bain’s Founder’s Studio.
“Participating in the hackathon was an absolute blast. It was a wild ride that combined the best of both the professional and the fun sides of life. I loved seeing the energy and the creativity of solutions from the team. I wish we did more of this.” A 2023 Hackathon participant
Over the years, the Hackathon has become an indispensable event where Bainies from across the globe who share a passion for innovation can come together to ignite their entrepreneurial spirit and compete for a spot in the Founder’s Studio. The Hackathon has generated great success stories such as ESG Flo, which has recently closed a $5.25M seed round, and Laine which is showing impressive customer traction.
The 2023 and 4th Annual Hackathon had record breaking participation, with 138 Bainies from 28 offices submitting 34 uniquely innovative venture ideas.
The event took place over the course of one month to allow participants to iteratively hone and refine their venture concepts. The event kicked off on September 18 when teams came together for an action-packed day to refine their idea, build pitch and develop their prototype. One week later, teams pitched to 48 global expert panelists in a ‘Shark Tank’ style model with live-on-the-spot questions and feedback from the judges. Finally, the Hackathon culminated on October 19 with four finalist teams pitching to Bain’s worldwide managing partner Manny Maceda. Founder’s Studio provided guidance, and technical & design resources throughout the whole journey.
Check out last year’s recap video to learn more:
In the ideation phase, participants were asked to focus on one of six themes aligned with Founder’s Studio and Bain’s innovation priorities:
All ideas were evaluated across four criteria by the expert panelists:
Four teams made it to the final round and were supported by the Founder’s Studio design team in bringing their solutions to life through high-fi prototypes:
“There is something appealing about the idea of using AI personas to figure out how they might react to different stimuli. It’s a fast way to do a survey or a focus group, you can imagine an LLM creating verbatim of reactions to potential product iterations." Expert panelists on Seer
Among the fierce competition Kun Lyu, Cheila Villar, John Dryden, Zachary Orr, and Giorgio Saladino from the Los Angeles office stood out to the final panelists, including Bain’s worldwide managing partner Manny Maceda with their venture concept: Seer.
Achieving product success is harder than ever due to increasing consumer expectations and volatile market dynamics, even for the most experienced companies. Most stages of the product journey can significantly benefit from real-time large-scale consumer insights to increase the likelihood of product success. Yet, they are extremely difficult and expensive to obtain. As a result, 80% of new products in the US either don’t make it to the market or fail to meet performance expectations.
Seer will leverage genAI to bring real-time, large-scale consumer insights throughout a company’s product journey. This presents a game-changing opportunity for businesses launching new products and will build upon excellent work across Bain.
We couldn’t be more excited to welcome Kun in the Founder’s Studio as Seer Entrepreneur-in-Residence, and can’t wait to see the amazing company the team will build.
Learn more about Seer and why we decided to build it.
Sourcing the next generation of Founder’s Studio ventures
Associate Product Manager, Milan
