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Hackers building on stage at a hackathon, against a deep blue curtain
Kommon Field NotesHackathon as a service

Run by a hackathon champion

Build like champions.

A hackathon, run end to end for your organization. 72 hours, the newest AI tools, and someone who has won more of these than anyone. Your people leave with a working prototype and the belief they can build.

18 wins and counting

Every organization now says it needs to adopt AI. Far fewer have watched their own people build something real with it. A hackathon closes that gap in a single weekend: a room, a deadline, and the newest tools, run by someone who has done it a hundred times.

In this issue

  • The person who kept winning them
  • A 72-hour programme, run end to end
  • The wall of wins
  • Event photos
  • Why a prototype beats another meeting
Chris Chan, Kommon co-founder
Fig. 1 · Chris Chan, co-founder

The byline

You are hiring the person who kept winning them.

Chris Chan is the all-time hackathon champion at Yahoo, with 13 wins, and kept winning at Splunk and, most recently, the 2025 Gloo AI Hackathon. He has organized, judged, and mentored events drawing more than a thousand developers.

18
hackathon wins, Yahoo to Gloo
1,000+
developers at his events
80+
hacks built
11
patents filed
A whiteboard mapping a hackathon from need to build to hand-off

Fig. 2 · From need, to build, to hand-off. The whole arc, on one wall.

The programme

72 hours
  1. Day 10 to 24h

    Kickoff

    • Keynote

      A talk to open the event and show the room what AI makes possible.

    • Skills workshops

      Hands-on sessions on the newest tools, so people start sharp.

    • Guided practice

      Real reps before the clock starts, not a blank screen.

    • Brainstorm and teams

      Surface ideas, pair up strengths, form the teams that build.

  2. Day 224 to 48h

    Build

    • The main event

      Teams build, our engineers on the floor for live mentorship.

    • Pitch prep

      We coach teams to demo and sell an idea in three minutes.

  3. Day 348 to 72h

    Demo and judging

    • Pitch to executives

      Teams present the working prototype they built.

    • Judging

      Winners picked, plus a ranked shortlist worth funding.

Event photos

A late-night hackathon war room
A whiteboard mapping a hackathon from need to build to hand-off
An eat, hack, sleep, repeat sign at the event
Chris Chan speaking on the TEDxSFState stage
Presenting permissionless, disruptive innovation to a full room
A hacker pitching on stage in a HACKER hoodie

When insiders and outsiders build together

The magic

Your people are the insiders. They know the business, the customers, and where the levers actually are. What they are missing is time, the newest tools, and someone who has done this a hundred times.

That is us, the outsiders. Put the two together for a few days, in a room where the usual rules are suspended, and you get the thing you cannot schedule. That overlap is the magic.

The magic of the mixA hand-sketched Venn diagram. The left circle is your insiders, the right circle is Kommon as outsiders, and the overlap in the middle is labeled Magic.Insidersyour teamOutsidersusMagic

Not just for software companies

Beyond tech

Internal hackathons started in tech. They have moved well past it, and AI is why. The tools are finally fast and cheap enough that a nurse, a plant manager, or an analyst can build something real in a day.

  • 114,094

    people across 167 countries joined NASA's Space Apps Challenge in 2025, the largest hackathon in the world.

  • 470

    people from 11 countries built at a Siemens digital-manufacturing hackathon that surfaced 10 patent-worthy ideas.

  • 21,000+

    employees take part in JPMorgan's Innovation Week and global hackathon across its technology centers.

  • ~$1B

    was what Amazon paid for PillPack, the pharmacy whose founders met through MIT's Hacking Medicine.

HealthcareManufacturingBankingRetailGovernmentNon-Profits

The wall of wins

The receipts

Not a hobby, a track record. Every category, in-house and in the open, more than a decade, and counting.

  • GlooDeveloper Track2025
  • SplunkShip It2020
  • SplunkMost Innovative2020
  • SplunkInternal Tools2019
  • SplunkShip It2019
  • YahooBest Overall HackQ4 2015
  • YahooSearch CategoryQ4 2015
  • YahooMobile CategoryQ4 2015
  • YahooBest Overall HackQ3 2014
  • YahooTech For GoodQ3 2014
  • YahooConsumer CategoryQ3 2014
  • YahooBest Intern HackQ3 2014
  • YahooGreater GoodQ2 2014
  • YahooMobile CategoryQ4 2013
  • YahooHacker's ChoiceQ3 2012
  • YahooHacker's ChoiceQ2 2012
  • YahooHacker's ChoiceQ1 2012
  • YahooDesign CategoryQ1 2012

Yahoo 13 · all-time champion    Splunk 4    Gloo 1 · most recent

Worried your team will just build random things?

Constrained innovation

It is the first thing leadership asks. Give people 72 hours and they will build something fun and useless. Fair. Unbounded innovation wanders, so we do not run it unbounded. Before the event, we set the guardrails with your leadership team, then get out of the way inside them.

  • Curated themes

    We name the areas where you actually want new thinking, so 72 hours of effort points at real problems, not pet projects.

  • A scoring rubric

    Judging rewards what matters to the business, agreed on before anyone writes a line of code.

  • Room for the white space

    Inside those lines, teams have real freedom to explore. That is where the surprising wins come from.

Real constraints plus real freedom. That balance is the winning formula, and it has a name: constrained innovation.

Why a prototype

A working prototype settles the debate.

A proposal asks everyone to imagine it works. A prototype resolves it in days, not quarters. Once the room can see it run, the question changes from “could we?” to “when.”

2412141016182022FIG. 1
Fig. 1 · The working prototype

The case for building, from the TEDx stage

In his words
Chris Chan, TEDx. Why a working prototype beats another meeting.

A few slots each year

Hold a date.

A premium, hands-on engagement led by our founder, so we run a limited number each year. Tell us about your organization and the dates you are weighing.

questions

Questions we get asked

What is hackathon as a service?
Hackathon as a service is when an outside team runs your organization's hackathon end to end: the keynote, skills workshops, team formation, the build, live mentorship, and judging. You supply the people and the problems. Kommon supplies the format, the AI tools, and a hackathon champion to run it.
Who is this for?
Any organization that wants to get its people building with AI, not just talking about it. You do not need to be a software company. Internal hackathons now run in healthcare, manufacturing, banking, retail, and government.
Do our people need to be engineers?
No. Today's AI tools let people who have never shipped code build a working prototype in a day. Our workshops get everyone to that starting line, and our engineers mentor each team through the build.
What do we walk away with?
Working prototypes, not slideware. A ranked shortlist of ideas worth funding. And a team that has seen, first-hand, what it can build in a few days when you give it the room.
On-site or remote?
Either. The energy is best in a room together, and we will travel to run it. We also run hybrid and remote formats when that is what the calendar allows.
How is this different from Build Week?
A hackathon rallies your whole organization to build in a short burst. Build Week is a small, focused team that ships one prototype in five days. Both de-risk AI by showing you what is possible.
How many of these do you run?
A limited number each year. It is a premium, hands-on engagement led by our founder, so we protect the calendar. Inquire early to hold a date.