Hackathon In 5 days
November
Sunday
to Fri 20 November 2026 · San Francisco time
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📍 Two kickoff hubs on Nov 15. Join the one on your campus, no travel needed.
🌲 Stanford: Virtual Kickoff, 10AM-1PM PT.
🐻 Berkeley: Cal Alumni House, UC Berkeley, 10 AM–1 PM PT.
🗓️ Timeline
▸ Nov 15–19 · Kickoff & build week
▸ Nov 20 · In-person Demo Day & Judging
Ship an AI agent people pay for.
The Big Hack Game is the campus showdown before the Big Game: build, launch, and grow an AI product with real users, solve real problems from enterprise teams, and win it for your school.
🎁 WHAT YOU GET
💼 Job referrals
🧑🏫 Mentorship from YC-backed teams
🧋 Free boba at Campus kickoff!!
Extras for winners:
1:1 office hours with top VCs
1:1 YC application mentorship from founders in recent YC batches
💰 PRIZE POOL: $5,000 GUARANTEED, UP TO $10,000 For every 100 attendees, we add $1,000 to the pool, up to $10,000. Invite your friends to apply and grow the pot!
🏆 AWARDS (share of the final prize pool)
Grand Champion: 30% ($1,500–$3,000)
Real Customer Award: 20% ($1,000–$2,000), VC 1:1
Distribution & Impact: 20% ($1,000–$2,000)
School Cup: 20% ($1,000–$2,000), shared among the winning school's winning teams and its school ambassador
Best Build Log: 10% ($500–$1,000), shared among the top five
⚖️ JUDGES Judges include YC founders and builders from Microsoft, OpenAI, and Perplexity.
Full judge lineup coming soon.
🐻 Berkeley Kickoff HubSun, Nov 15 · 10:00 AM–1:00 PM PTCal Alumni House, UC Berkeley
🌲 Stanford Kickoff HubSun, Nov 15 · Time & location to be announcedCampus boba meetup + live kickoff stream
🎓 WHO CAN JOIN
Stanford and Berkeley students and alumni
Industry experts from enterprise AI teams who can bring real-world problems. We'll match experts with student and alumni teams.
Please apply with your school or work email if you have one; a personal email is fine otherwise.
⚙️ ABOUT HARNESSROUTER HarnessRouter is a unified interface for agent harnesses that turns them into building blocks for your AI product. Ship production-ready AI features in hours, with no harness engineering, no deployment hassle, and no complex integration across models, harnesses, and sandboxes. By picking the best harness × model combination for each task, it can cut token costs by over 90%. Past hackathon builders shipped in hours and got their first paying customer within a week.
Organized by HarnessRouter Labs (YC-backed). Additional sponsors may be announced, and the prize pool may grow.
Full text on Luma .
Investors in the room
One of the year's big ones
Investors in the room
Investors in the room
