Be confident. It’s one of the most tried and true maxims we are all told at some point in our lives and it’s probably one of the least effective.

Imagine you’re walking up to the microphone to say your first few words despite terrible stage fright or maybe you’re walking through the door to an anxious first date with someone you think is way out of your league -and then I come up to you and whisper in your ear: “Hey, remember to be confident.”

I don’t blame you if you feel the urge to punch me.

When people tell you to “be confident”, they’re actually trying to convince you to emulate characteristics that make you appear more confident. That usually looks something like making more direct eye contact, not fidgeting and projecting your voice. These are great skills to learn in order to get someone started but the problem with this advice is that most people are pretty smart socially. It’s not uncommon for someone who seems confident at the beginning of an interaction to slowly let that confidence fade way by how they act later in on in the interaction.

You shouldn’t have to flip confidence on and off like a light switch in moments of dire need. You should be confident because it’s part of who you are and because having confidence is the first prerequisite for your job. Now, your job could mean a traditional 9–5 but it could also encapsulate your role in your family, your partnership with your significant other, your passion projects, your membership in your community and so much more.

Years ago, when I was interviewing with some of the brightest minds in Silicon Valley, I experienced what many of us naturally face — bouts of insecurity, doubt, anxiety — a lack of confidence. I feared appearing cocky or arrogant in these interviews and as a result, I spent less time on confidence boosting thinking and I overcompensated with rigorous technical preparation. Surely my confidence won’t be misconstrued for cockiness if I study my brains out, right? This strategy failed miserably. I wasn’t myself — the collaborative, assertive go-getter that my peers and friends know me as. I was a nervous interviewee trying to let the facts and knowledge I was spewing speak for themselves. I stunted my ability to think on my feet by letting my nervousness get the best of me. My interviewers, one after another, caught onto the nervous undercurrents and rejection emails filled my inbox.

I see this event play out time and time again now that I’m on the other side interviewing candidates. The candidate could say enough right to be convincing but their nervousness or lack of confidence gets the best of them and they don’t come across well in the interview. A lack of preparation is part of their poor interview performance but it also has to do with the energy they walk into the room with and whether or not they have the confidence to climb out of a tough interview challenge. Oftentimes, the challenge wins.

One night, while telling a mentor of mine about my recent interview experiences, he told me the following advice: “Everyone thinks about confidence all wrong. It’s there all the time but only goes away when we are in danger. Just keep it there and don’t let it go away. Go in there and act as though you’ve been hired for the day to solve a problem for the business. You’re not an interviewee — you’re the talent they need. It’s your job to be confident. It’s not optional. You’re a consultant for the day”.

The advice I got that night changed my life. And after sharing that same advice with many of my friends and colleagues I have seen their lives change too.

Shortly after, if almost by magic, job offers were rolling in. I felt whatever anxiety I had in interviews melt away. I was even finding myself feeling more grounded and alive in my daily life.

The world needs you to be confident. In our complex, rapidly evolving society with a scary and uncertain future, people with confidence are the ones that hold back the chaos of life from tearing us apart. You aren’t doing anyone any favors by not strengthening your confidence muscle and putting your best foot forward.

Now granted, it’s normal to feel moments of anxiety and fear. That’s fine. But just like it’s not ok to let procrastination get the best of you over the long term, neither it is ok to let the confidence boogie man rob you of your confidence points for the day. I want you to shake off the lack of confidence and resume your original mindset of the professional.

Because whatever you may be or want to be: a student, an artist, a programmer, a stay at home parent, an entrepreneur, a doctor, a writer or an astronaut — it’s time to get confident. Not because I told you to but because it’s your job and you’re the fucking professional that can make it happen.

I’ve been thinking a lot about mission statements recently.

A strong mission is often what separates mediocre organizations from the exceptional, generation-defining ones. High-performing teams want projects that support a mission they believe in and global audiences want to engage with brands that are backed by an ambitious mission to change the world.

We live in a time where modern business is complex and abstract. Your customers and supporters may be on the other side of the world, only able to communicate with you via light traveling inside of a fiber optic cable. To make matters even more complicated, many of the largest and most successful companies in the world don’t even produce a physical product, making it challenging to conceptualize what teams are actually working on. All of this fights against our human intuition that relies heavily on a physical and concrete world.

A well thought out mission statement can provide an anchor to help talent relate to their work and retain them over the long term as well as help develop a brand that captivates loyal customers and devote fans around the world.

Mission statements are important to me. A company’s mission is one of the largest motivators behind my career decisions. Getting up every day with a clear idea of what my team and I are striving for is not only a life raft for grinding through the difficult days but the mission serves as a mental model for how I prioritize what I work on and what risks I take.

Here are a few mission statement examples from some incredibly successful organizations:

These mission statements are incredibly effective branding, marketing and recruiting tools. They highlight an active subject (‘athletes’, ‘children’, ‘world’, ‘you’, ‘teams’) and they identify beneficial effects on those subjects (‘unleash’, ‘discover’, ‘inspire’, organize’). They surface a story on how they want to impact the world. Notice how none of these statements talk about products. If I were to remove the logos and company names from these slides, I would bet it would be hard for the vast majority of people to recognize that they belong to a software company, a search engine, a sportswear company, a visual discovery company or a toy company.

Several years ago, when I was running Hack Arizona we worked hard to develop a captivating message that would represent what we saw as our long-term vision. What we came up with was the result of multiple iterations and failed attempts to package 4+ years worth of work building one of the largest hackathons in the United States.

“To foster world-class hacker culture in the southwest by empowering students to pursue their ideas.” ~ Hack Arizona

I learned a lot developing this mission statement. Despite how crucial mission statements are to an organization, there are so many teams across the world getting it wrong. Here are some of the most common mistakes I see on an almost daily basis:

1. There’s no mission

This is probably the most common of the company mission sins. Maybe your company never invested in defining what the company actually stands for or what it is trying to accomplish. Perhaps they are still thinking at the product execution level or business goal level. Not having any mission is dangerous over the long term because when the businesses inevitably needs to adapt or change directions the context of the organization will have to be reinvented all over again.

2. The mission is actually a business goal

Startups that tout missions like “be #1 in the CRM space” or “capture 50% of the cat sweater market” make me want to throw up in my mouth. Those aren’t missions but are business goals. This is the wrong thinking for so many reasons but the biggest one is that it pigeonholes everyone’s effort into a specific execution phase. Once that phase is over there’s little left to continue to work towards and ultimately the organization falls into the problem described in mistake #1 — where there isn’t a mission tied to the organization.

3. The mission doesn’t include people

“To make cars faster and easier to use”

“To make shipping faster worldwide”
At first glance, these mission statements seem similar to the form in mistake #2 but they are slightly different in that they abstract away a business goal but they mistakenly exclude people. If your business isn’t focused on solving problems for actual human beings than you don’t have a company -you have a hobby. When founders talk about things like “We want this software to make cars more efficient” or “we want this app to help reduce waste” they are taking away from the users that actually will be using the product (you know the ones that actually matter in the business equation).

4. The mission isn’t big enough

The last major fallacy is a subtle one. If we look back to the mission statements from great brands above we see a common thread: they all focus on using language that quantifies their reach and footprint on the world. Taking Google, for example, they craft their mission statement with the phrase “The world’s information”. This has been a guiding light for Google for nearly 20 years. They want to ingest, index, categories and display the world’s information — no matter its history or location. Google now reaches more than 115 countries in over 100 languages. The scale of Google’s mission creates a framework of thinking on a global scale that guides the company through product and business decisions as well as acts a major conduit for attracting some of the brightest minds in the world to join them in their quest on working on the largest systems in the world.

I hope you are now at least thinking about just how important a strong mission is for your organization and how it can be used to propel you and your team. I truly believe that over the next 100 years, as businesses disrupt and carve out niches in every industry across the world, mission-driven leadership will decide who reinvents themselves and survives and who stays clinging to old ways of motivating people and becomes history.

The elevator doors open to the tune of atmospheric drums against the backdrop of light chatter that ricochets off what seems to be a chic office themed as a mechanic shop. Lights flood the lobby, creating shadowy figures that circle above from the upstairs loft. Striped shirts, clear framed-glasses, leather shoes and painters caps speckle the crowd which is clustered around plastered pencil sketching on one wall, motorcycle frames hanging from the back ceiling and the buzzing cocktail bar right up front.

I look up from my drink to find myself in a conversation about the correct pronunciation of typography “leading” (it’s pronounced like “ledding” by the way). We turn down one hallway jumping to a conversation about the design thinking of a nearby Eames chair. I take another sip of my drink which matches the sky blue hue of the paint splattered on the wall leading to the staircase. We walk up a flight of stairs to the shadowy loft upstairs while talking about the feelings conveyed by the font of the Firestone tire sign seen through the window across the street.

This is SF design week. A city-wide celebration of design thinking and a showcase of industry-leading work from tech companies like Pinterest, Airbnb, and Atlassian as well as design firms like Huge and Ueno. I had come along for the evening pretending to a designer in order to learn more about how designers think and what challenges designers face in their daily work. I was undercover for the evening. I just had to say as little as possible, nod at the correct times and carefully follow conversations — like a slightly buzzed human sponge.

The night ended up being an eye-opening experience for me. In the beginning, I felt like an outsider -like the geek who was invited to drink jåger and smoke cigarettes at the popular kids’ prom after-party. I felt similar to how I now think designers and product managers must feel attending engineering events: feeling not totally out of place, but aloof and surprised by some of the differences between you and everyone else.

During the evening, I soaked up as much as I could about design systems, design thinking, what designers prioritize, how they think about products, and what products excite them and why they excite them. It was an invigorating experience that has motivated me to aggressively pursue a design education of my own. I feel as an industry we have really failed in communicating the immense value of a design education to the rest of the world.

Over Thai food and strong cocktails, I observed a group of designer friends and colleagues dissect the text editors in a few popular notetaking apps. They showed me how just a tiny pixel change can make a massive difference to the fluidity of the experience as well as how small inconsistencies in symbols, icons and layouts can completely ruin how a user understands the product. I learned about balancing a design between new users that need to get productive quickly but also for power users who need enough features so they can accomplish more. I was transfixed by their focus on deep user empathy and thinking in terms of goals that users want. I found it fascinating just how often systems without a UI are the best way to solve problems. This wasn’t the stereotypical designer conversation which is imagined as a critique of the color scheme of a new mobile app or a discussion on how to make something “pop” or an exploration of a new fancy animation sequence to grab user’s attention. These were detailed conversations about large, challenging, people-centric design systems. These were conversations on making sure we all put our effort towards things that actually solve problems and makes people’s lives better rather than making stuff for the sake of making stuff.

Silicon Valley told the world and their unborn kids to learn to code. With every coding boot camp and high school, computer science class is a rat race that leaves designs skills in a distant second place. We now are catching up to the sea of software that people hate because it’s bloated or because it’s intrusive and leaves us exhausted at the end of the day or because it’s sterile and makes our digital interactions feel less human.

I’m now a firm believer that not only should every engineer prioritize a rigorous design education but the rest of the world should as well. Better design skills don’t just make us better at our jobs — they make us better human beings by improving our perception of our relationship with the world and other people. Design thinking tells us how we can better help someone else and it tells guides us in answering some of the questions on why and how we interact with something inside and outside of our homes.

We need more design thinking in every part of the process. Rather than thinking about design and development stages, let’s start thinking about design and development harmony. Designers are some of the best sources of innovation as anyone else and we need to leverage them by providing a tighter integration loop between engineering, product, and design. Design thinking shouldn’t stop at the design — in fact, it shouldn’t stop at all. We all share a common daily exercise in trying to better understand people. I can’t think of a better tool to accompany you in your quest to understand human beings than design.

I Lied to San Francisco about being a Designer and You Should Too was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There’s an immense amount of suffering in the world. Real suffering plagues people across the planet with debilitating pain that pins them against the wall of life and evacuates the oxygen around them.

We are not going to talk to about that kind of suffering. We are going to talk about the bullshit suffering that we invent and dramatize and that stands in the way of us accomplishing amazing things and being happy. We are going to talk about why we make excuses that prevent us from reaching our full potential because we believe we don’t deserve it.

Growing up I was faced with a confusing character trait that I would only much later in life properly identify and diagnose as impostor syndrome. For those of you not familiar with impostor syndrome it’s a psychological pattern where the subject doesn’t recognize any past accomplishments or periods of growth and, as a result, is continuously anxious about being exposed as a “fraud”. Australian billionaire and founder of Atlassian, Mike Cannon-Brookes, sums it up well in his recent TED talk about impostor syndrome with:

“Have you ever felt out of your depth? Like a fraud? And just kind of guessed-slash-bullshitted your way through the situation — petrified that at any time someone was going to call you out?”

As a kid I was bad at a lot of things. A sampling of which were: sports and physical activities, playing instruments, being cool or memorizing facts and figures before the big exam. This was all fine and dandy because the things I really enjoyed and found myself decent at — writing, programming, business, and filmmaking — I put my focus and time into. But ultimately even the things I thought I was good at didn’t seem to sit quite well at the bottom of my stomach.

When high school came, I became deeply unconfident in my abilities. I saw my dreams and goals as objects looming far in the distance and felt like there was a slim chance I would ever get close to them because I was progressing so slowly. I felt like I was severely behind the curve. Naively, I employed the thinking that to get to where I wanted to go I had to work as hard as physically possible -sacrificing fun and happiness in order to come at out at the other end of the side of the suffering tunnel saying “Hey I worked hard — I deserve this, right?”

So there I was, working tirelessly on filmmaking, coding, reading, investing — really anything I could put lots and lots of work into while at the same time sacrificing hobbies I probably didn’t have to, retracting from relationships I probably could have afforded to spend more time on and giving up incredible happiness and joyful experiences that I could have taken the night off for with little consequence. All because I thought “I had to”. All because I thought that I didn’t really deserve to be happy yet.

In college, I co-founded Hack Arizona -a student-run organization that after only 3 years would end up being one of the largest hackathons in the United States. I oversaw Hack Arizona as it’s Lead Organizer as it grew from a crazy late night pipe dream to an organization serving over 1200+ attending students from all over the world and featuring 30+ sponsoring organizations that represented some of the biggest and best technology firms in the world — all meeting together at my university for a weekend of building incredible, imaginative tech projects.

During the opening night of the hackathon, I remember taking to the stage to deliver the welcome address to some 1200+ attendees who had traveled from near and far to attend Hack Arizona for the weekend. At that moment, it would seem obvious that I would feel proud of myself and recognize the incredible amount of work and time that went into pulling something like that off. But you know what? The moment I grabbed the mic and faced the sea of staring faces on the other side of the stage — I felt more like an impostor than I ever had before. As my eyes scanned across the rows of endearing faces gleaming from the stage spotlight I felt as though the second I opened my mouth the audience would “figure me out” — my cover blown, exposed as a fraud. I felt like a walking neon billboard advertising a Ponzi scheme or a contestant of a game show that inadvertently saw the answers when the host dropped his question cards before going live on air. I felt like someone that somehow found a shortcut, stole the golden egg and cheated his way to be standing where he is today.

I realized that night that you never quite get over feeling like an impostor and fighting it with guilt that fuels you to work only makes you feel more like an impostor. No matter how much work you subscribe to, suffering you self-impose or sacrifice you obsess over — none of it really makes a difference to feeling comfortable in your own skin.

Hard work is still an incredibly important part of in my life — but I don’t use it as a crutch anymore to feel better about some of my character flaws. I recognize that I can live a joyful and interesting life and get what I want. In fact, happiness and accomplishing goals are complements of each other.

I truly believe that one of the scariest facts young adults can face is the fact that you, and you alone, can have everything you want in life — whatever that may mean to you. As a result, we put up these artificial barriers, we make excuses and we let things like impostor syndrome dictate our lives because we are scared of our lives really being in our control. Tomorrow you could quit your job and backpack across whatever continent you’re living on. You could buy that plane ticket to see that friend you have been meaning to see or start that business you have talked about for years. You can accomplish things without having to make up this story of suffering and overcoming adversity — you can just do it and be happy about it. Because no one really gives a shit about your sacrifice other than you. You will suffer on deaf ears and other people will succeed in conjunction with being healthy and happy. You can tell yourself that the world owes you something just because you suffered but the world doesn’t owe you anything.

At the end of the day, embracing joy and feeling capable will only get you closer to where you want to go. You deserve to be happy and you deserve to be happy today. I promise you it will work out better for your long-term longevity.

Every high-performing team I have been on all share one thing in common: deep empathy.

In tech we oftentimes fall victim to the ever-changing trends of technology fashion. We learn new tools in the hope that it will make us more desirable to employers,. We practice architecture design in the hope that we will make more robust systems. We read programming books and follow tech blogs in the hope that we will stay up to date with yet even more trends. But what we don’t tend to focus on is how we can improve our understanding of the people that we work with.

The world thinks of Silicon Valley as a mystical place filled with visionaries and programming rockstars. The assumption is that if you lock enough coding geniuses in a room together, a mountain of money will spill from the room the next time you open the door. The reality is that Silicon Valley, like anywhere else, is comprised of people who are still figuring things out. People who have family troubles, career worries, financial issues, health concerns or deep insecurities. When developing software it’s usually the wetware, the people behind the screens and the people sitting and breathing next to you, that are the hard part not the code running a machine somewhere in the world.

Empathy is not something we focus on enough in our industry because its nuisanced. Engineers usually have no trouble diving into hard technical problems because technical problems are seen as measurable roadblocks to a feature or a product release. Our job descriptions tell us that we are supposed to focus on solving technical problems. Solving technical problems is allegedly what some of us went to school for. But at the end of the day the technical problem you have been solving is a small piece of the larger puzzle of building amazing things together and solving customer problems.

When we focus on applying more empathy to our daily work, magical things happen. With empathy, your engineering team can perform better because they know they can asking clarifying questions without looking stupid or have insightful debates because everyone understands that each teammate is trying to do their best for the sake of the team. With empathy you supercharge your team to move faster, have less bureaucracy and to be more in sync with priorities. Your team is more focused on customer needs as they have a deep understanding of customer pain points are better at anticipating new ones in future.

The collapse of projects are almost never caused by the wrong framework choice, performance issues or incorrect data structure usage. Projects fail because of people. The people on the project either didn’t understand the people they were working with or they didn’t understand their customers. The project failed because of a lack of empathy.

Slow down and think more on how you can introduce more empathy into our workflow. Your peers and customers will thank you for it.

This is a phrase I have heard often by peers during my (brief) tenure in the software world thus far. Heck, I am guilty of saying those very words on more than one occasion.

As a software engineer, I pride myself on building products that enrich the lives of others but as the tech industry seems to move faster each and every day, I find that it becomes easier to focus on keeping up with the latest trends rather than to pay attention to the reason that software matters at all: to serve the humans behind the screens.

In the tech industry, we often subject ourselves to disrupt-o-mania where, similar to rewriting an outdated legacy codebase, we design systems in the aim of disrupting the status quo, destroying old industries and obliterating the old ways of doing things. Despite some of these disruptions being good and beneficial to a huge number of people — there are times where disruption is the irresponsible way to approach a problem.

One time, when discussing the tech industry’s role in people’s lives, I had a non-technical friend tell me: “I feel like tech has left some of us behind. I feel like it’s a secret club that I am not invited to.”

Software may be eating the world but software doesn’t rule the world. In our increasingly complex political and economic climate, it’s people who call the shots and those people need engineers who can make decisions and build systems with an understanding of how what they are building will affect the world around them.

Earlier this year, a story made headlines that highlighted how software company Palantir’s latest software suite is being used for deportationsunder the Trump Administration. Just a few months ago, news broke that Uber built a feature into their app to deceive local government officials who opposed use of the app and throughout the past year Facebook has been continuously fighting fake news as the Facebook platform becomes a bigger mouthpiece for diverse and polarizing political agendas.

These examples are just a small sampling of technology’s convergence with difficult political and social issues. The latest Javascript framework or NoSQL database isn’t going to get us out of these problems. Engineers are up against the inertia of the most expansive and complex legacy system on earth –the human race; a vastly distributed, inconsistent, bug-ridden, unstable, interface-free, unmodularized spaghetti codebase.

A few months ago Greg Wilson at Third Bit announced his latest book, Stuff that Actually Matters, that aims to break down current issues on politics, law, history and economics into easily digestible essays specifically written for software engineers. I hope that, similar to the enthusiasm mustered when picking up the latest O’Reilly book on ReactJS, this book will be devoured by engineers who can take what they learn and apply it to their current projects. I feel that this is a great initiative (I have already signed up to be one of Greg’s first draft editors) and hope to see more things like it.

People deserve software that works for them and a tech industry that is intertwined with people in a deeper way than just smartphones in every pocket or Amazon echoes in every home. The world deserves software that helps build communities, provides accurate insights and empowers the minority rather than just the majority. The tech industry is no longer the underdog darling that it once was 20 years ago and it cannot afford to continue to take a detour around difficult challenges that involve human beings.

Future software will be written by engineers who understand the state of the world, how their actions affect communities and how to make ethical decisions when faced with hard social challenges. Learning more about the world around us doesnt just make us better engineers but it makes us better people prepared for the rapid change and uncertainty of the future.

I, for sure, want to be a part of that future.

Everything was completely black. My arm violently shook as metallic voices chattered beside my head. I opened my eyes to find a security guard towering over me talking into his radio. Shaking off my fatigue, I looked around to find myself sprawled out on the ground. I bolted up from the cold carpet discovering my three friends passed out on the ground next to me, fast asleep. The guard let out an exacerbated sigh and said “This area is closing now, y’all really need to leave”. I helped wake up the collective group and as we all climbed to our feet; shaking off sore bodies, dry mouths and bloodshot eyes.

It was January 15th, 2015, a cold winter morning in the center of the University of Pennsylvania campus — about 2300 miles from home. My friends and I had traveled from across the country (Arizona) to spend 36 hours coding non-stop fueled by nothing but stale coffee, Philly cheesesteaks and the occasional granola bar. “How the hell did I get here?”

I had gotten there by signing up for PennApps — a 1000+ student hackathon at the University of Pennsylvania where students assemble into 4-person teams to see what software or hardware projects they can build within 36 hours. Think of a hackathon as a recreational cross country meet except subtract the running shoes and add computers, power strips, Redbull and complaints about the wifi signal. My friends and I had just overslept and missed our wake up call to meet for the closing ceremony of PennApps in the UPenn’s student union. The security guards were here to kick us out because the venue was closing.

My group of 4 friends and I had gone to PennApps to meet a few of its organizers and learn how a hackathon at a scale of 1000+ students operates because we were somehow crazy enough to be throwing our own hackathon is less than 3 months from then.

I didn’t wake up one day and think “Man, you know what? I am going to spend the next three years going to hackathons, throwing hackathons, analyzing hacker culture, fundraising, managing an organizing team, working on registration systems, worrying about budgets and attendance numbers and, most importantly, sometimes failing at all of the above”. It just sort of happened.

At the University of Arizona, I saw a problem: students were not engaging with technology and working on projects in a meaningful way outside of the classroom. I was fortunate enough in college to have an incredible support network of friends, colleagues and mentors that I could discuss ideas with, prototype solutions, hack together side projects, and conduct experiments. I didn’t see a platform on campus or anywhere near campus that offered a similar experience to what I had been fortunate to experience, so I somehow convinced 4 other equally-insane people that we should try and start something on campus to do something about it.

After studying various solutions to the problem, we landed on the hackathon as a model that would work for our audience (college students in the southwest). And just like that, in October of 2014, the founding Hack Arizona team was assembled and the Hack Arizona organization was born.

This past January, over 800 students and 250+ mentors and sponsors from across the country joined us in Tucson, AZ for our 3rd annual Hack Arizona. As a graduating senior, this was my last hackathon where I served as Hack Arizona’s Director of Sponsorship and Chief Organizer and I feel that some reflection is in order. I have learned a lot over 3 years of hackathons. I have been humbled and inspired by the community and I feel that Hack Arizona has been the most rewarding thing I have ever done. It has truly been a privilege to serve the hacker community and to have the opportunity to watch something as seemingly simplistic as a hackathon change the lives and trajectories of so many people. My aim in writing this piece is to both inspire those that haven’t been to a hackathon to go to one and to open a dialogue with other hackathon organizers (experienced or novice) about strategies for starting hackathons and fostering hacker culture in your own community. I have also realized that a majority of what I have learned can be applied to other entrepreneurial endeavors, so even if hackathons aren’t really your style, I am hoping you can still get a lot out of this too.

It’s never about you, it’s about the mission

I have seen too many founders of non-profits and startups let the newfound attention after starting something go their heads. Yes, starting a major collegiate hackathon is exciting. For the first time in your life lots of people will want to talk to you: reporters, higher-ups at major tech companies, your professors and your colleagues. It can be easy to become absorbed with how the thing you started changes the way people perceive you but it’s incredibly important to remember that the maelstrom of activity and attention is not about you; it’s about your mission.

Throughout my time at Hack Arizona I was a servant to the mission and to the community I served. Speaking candidly, it wasn’t always easy to remain focused on the mission. I recall a distinct moment during the 2nd Hack Arizona where an attendee chastised me passionately about how my team and I had ‘cheaped out’ on the condiments for our gourmet sandwich bar after the organizing team and I toiled over the past 6 months to raise enough money to provide free food for the weekend for all of our hackers. Yes, at that point in time, I felt a little disconnected from the community as it was hard to swallow the lecturing hacker’s fervent rhetoric, but this instance sticks out because it is a rare occasion and in most circumstances the community I have worked with over the past 3 years have been inspiring, humble, helpful and grateful. The good times outweigh the bad 10 to 1.

I learned that if you can detach yourself from your mission and orient yourself both hierarchically and mentally as an actor in the pursuit of that mission — you will be better off. When you become an actor in a mission rather than linked to the mission itself you create a larger stage for others to join and allow new members to become actors both internally and through partnership. It’s hard to convince others to join you in tackling an ambitious goal, with a low chance of success and to do it all for free. Just as you would expect your team to own the portions of your organization that they are responsible for in order to make the organization successful, it’s important to let them own their portions of the spotlight too and to give them the space to grow into the leaders you know that they can become.

Seriously, focus on your community

We knew from the beginning that our community (based in Tucson, AZ) and the surrounding southwest region didn’t need a competitive hackathon. Competitive hackathons with high-stake prizes, wicked talented developers and a mountain of hype work well for some schools but our hackers don’t get enough value from those sort of events. Our hacker community is nascent and we knew from the start that, even if we could somehow make a hackathon work here in Tucson, we would have to move a big amount of local organizational and bureaucratical inertia to make it happen.

Every member of the Hack Arizona organizing team is a direct end-user of what we are building. Shortly after deciding that we were going to actually try and pull this hackathon thing off, the founding team and I sat down and synthesized our own needs and wants as Tucson hackers as well as feedback we got from from probing the greater Tucson and southwest hacker community. As we constructed the framework for how the hackathon would operate, we knew that it would need to support 4 key features for our hackers:

1. A platform to showcase hacker talent to a large audience for perhaps the first time in their lives.
2. First-class opportunities for internships and full-time technical positions at renown tech organizations.
3. Event structure that promotes collaboration and introduces students to applying classroom knowledge to building stuff quickly by experimenting and iterating on an idea.
4. A cohesive brand and mission that the community can rally around, feel a part of and contribute to (during or after the hackathon weekend).

To accomplish these 4 primary objectives we had to engineer our event to ensure that we satisfied those base level requirements before expanding into features of the event that would distinguish us. To build the best platform to showcase the work of hackers, we de-emphasized competition by giving prizes and awards to more teams in more diverse categories, we hired full-fledged media teams to showcase a majority of the projects and we used project submission software that allowed for projects to be public, shareable and accessible by anyone online. We provided more first-class opportunities for students by going after high-quality sponsors (many of which had never recruited at our school before) and giving them with a great sponsorship experience. We promoted collaboration by giving students lots of space in our 5-floor venue to spread out (no fold-out-tables-in-a-gym setup here) as well time before the event to team up and meet new people during our matchmaking activities. Lastly, we built a cohesive brand through lots of time and energy refining our mission, communicating it to as many people as we could before and during the event and making sure that hackers felt as though they were a part of it by providing them with the best experience we possibly could.

The southwest isn’t New York City, Boston, San Francisco or Los Angeles. While many of the organizing team and myself have been to many hackathons in those cities we knew early on that copying them directly wouldn’t have the same effect on our community as those events had on theirs. We implemented some of the things we learned from other organizing teams at other hackathons but the vast majority we created from scratch. By focusing on our community we made our organization and our hackathon unique because our community is unique. As someone who has been to dozens of hackathons across the country, I still feel that what our community has helped us build is one of the best hackathons in the United States. (Disclosure: I am obviously bias).

Your sponsors are your customers and your partners

The moment you forget this — you lose sponsors.

I have seen other organizers treat sponsorship as a donation. It’s not uncommon to hear: “We’re a non-profit organization based out of the university, so a sponsor is really just giving us a tax-deductible donation, right?” That may be true, but sponsorship is so much more than that.

Sponsors spend lots of time preparing their staff, determining category prizes, attending their own meetings about the hackathon, having phone calls with the organizing team and usually mentors and reps from a sponsoring organization aren’t getting compensated to be there. These other activities which incorporate sponsorship outside of the monetary sponsorship payment are what I refer to as the “invisible costs” of sponsorship and a sponsor is usually incurring a lot more invisible cost than hard sponsorship costs. This means that it’s much more convenient for a sponsor to not waste the time and money going to our event than going to it.

From the beginning of Hack Arizona, I focused the sponsorship team on providing as much value to our sponsors as possible. This meant listening to what they wanted and thinking of ways to provide them with metrics to measure their ROI (number of social media impressions, resume data, number of signups to their platform or API, ext) so that they felt like a valued member of the partnership and had reasons to keep coming back. Sponsors are just like customers. Sponsors want marketing exposure, they want a recruiting platform and they want to pay for a great product; it’s just that the product in this case is a hackathon rather than something you buy off the shelf or from a website.

And it’s not just a one-sided working relationship either. Sponsors want you to succeed. They want to see the event get bigger and better every year because not only does it benefit them but being tied to a mission that is helping a community they have a stake in is rewarding and fun too. It’s important to architect a hackathon in a way that gives sponsors a voice and makes them a part of the community; otherwise sponsors will continue to be on the sidelines of what you are trying to build and eventually will exit the playing field all together.

I am not saying that our sponsorship system is perfect. I could write a whole post just on fundraising alone (and most likely will). I made an uncountable number of mistakes around fundraising but we have always had a strong influx of funds that allowed us to create an unbridled experience for our hackers and our sponsors continue to return which leads me to believe that we are not totally off in our strategy.

Stand on the shoulders of giants

Since our hackathon is housed inside a large state university, there is a suffocating amount of bureaucracy that can kill our event or make it virtually impossible to get anything new started. If you take the inertia of the university and add to it the fact that the organizing team is volunteering their time and sweat into the cause for free and that our member base is in a constant state of flux due to people graduating -it can seem like adaunting amount of obstacles are in the way of a successful hackathon. When things with Hack Arizona really started to pick up before our first event, I knew that we would need a careful strategy in regards to the university system in order to pull off the hackathon and to ensure that it would keep going after the first year.

So I asked myself, “How could we use this organizational inertia to our advantage?”

Let’s assume for a moment that you are starting a new autonomous bus startup. You will probably have to produce the software to make your buses autonomous, but will you have to install new lanes for them to drive on? What about specialized bus stops? Will you have to manufacture the buses too or could you use existing ones? In Tucson, we have a lot of buses all with their own existing infrastructure (stops, lanes, policies, ext.) Why not leverage that as much as possible so that you can focus on making the software for piloting the bus the best it can be?

Similar thinking is what we applied to the hackathon. Rather than maintaining an entire venue and all of the complex logistics around facilities, setup, teardown, equipment, shipping, ext. — we patterned with the University of Arizona’s Library system to handle most of that for us. The venue we used for the event, the Science and Engineering Library, had enough room for 1200 students, robust wifi and power infrastructure, tables, chairs and breakout areas already set up, staff and policies for handling facility maintenance and a shipping port that all of our materials for the event could get shipped to. The Library team drastically reduced the the amount of complexity the Hack Arizona organizing team had to consider when running the event.

Likewise on the fundraising and partnership side, we leveraged department allies in UA’s Department of Computer Science to help us attract some of their closest department supporters and companies looking to hire more UA students, (thanks, Bridget!). This allowed us to get in front of potential sponsors when we had no track record of success. This partnership was also crucial in helping us garner professor and faculty support of the event as well as in helping us engage with CS students both as attendees as well as new members of the organizing team.

Both of these partnerships were crucial to the execution and success of the hackathon. Leveraging the existing system also has allowed Hack Arizona to mitigate risk against future mistakes in student leadership. While I have full confidence in the Hack Arizona organizing team to continue to make the hackathon bigger and better every year, the expert support from both the Library as well as the CS department ensures that they wont have to keep redoing the hard work that is already figured out. All they have to do it focus on making the hackathon experience better. I feel like that is a pretty cool place to be in.

Don’t Stop (hackathons are just the beginnning)

This may seem antithetical to what you have read so far: I believe in the hacking community and our mission, but not necessarily hackathons.

Let me explain. Hack Arizona’s mission (to foster world-class hacker culture in the southwest) is an ambitious and long-term vision that will take multiple generations of organizers to even put a dent in. Hackathons as a trend work effectively now but a hackathon alone can’t get us to the end goal. We have no idea what the future holds and how hacking will evolve in the future. If we want to invest for the long term, we need to continuously ask ourselves: “What’s next?”

As a group usually at the edge of technology — hackers face a more rapid evolution that many other social groups. While I feel that Hack Arizona’s hackathon will continue to be effective for quite a while, the team and I have already begun to plan for what the next steps will be for doubling-down and building a more robust community. What does that look like? Hardware labs for more departments on campus, more hacker-focused curriculum integration with the university, startup incubators, technical mentorship programs, startup engineering rotation programs and so much more.

Even after 3 years, it feels like we have just gotten started. There is still so much more work to do.

The End

If any of this stood out to you (or made you want to punch me) — I would love to hear from you. I can always be reached at ian@hackarizona.org

~ Ian.

The sputtering pour of the espresso machine, taking refuge in a hidden Starbucks tucked away from the sidewalk, swirls throughout my sluggish morning. It’s a brisk Saturday morning for southern Arizona in October and I am exhausted. The agenda already looks fierce today sprawled upon the white abyss of my iPhone calendar: 5 phone calls, 2 sponsor meetings and a team recap to wrap up the day. The earbuds go in, the saddle bag goes over my shoulder and I’m off. Here’s to building the future.

Arizona is experiencing one of the greatest fundamental transformations in the state’s history — and it is close to blowing it. On the shoulders of a recovering housing market, the people of the Sonoran desert are seeing technology as a prevalent theme for 2015 and beyond. High-tech Companies are migrating and expanding from California and the east coast to Arizona, and the term ‘Silicon Desert’ is sprouting up at bars and offices quicker than the press can count. The problem is that, despite great progress, the believers and the followers in a future for technology in Arizona are still a minority — and we need to fix that. Incredible developers and entrepreneurs who are chasing some of the greatest challenges in the world are amidst the grind and the trauma of starting disruptive companies throughout the valley and are passing by unnoticed, unrecognized and unsupported. Talented, passionate and motivated college students are graduating and leaving the desert for the more stable pastures of San Francisco, Boston and New York. Arizona has, for the first time, the opportunity to take on the world, beat the odds and create a brighter future of impactful tech companies that shape the world in astonishing ways. It’s time to double-down, hold on tight and play our cards right.

As a group of college students, there are some problems we can’t fix. We can’t force our state representatives to pass more welcoming bills for immigrating companies to the valley and we can’t turn every Arizonian into a coding champion in 36 hours; but what we can do is start the conversation about what the world of tech will look like in the next decade and where we stand amongst it. A hackathon serves as a representation of what the next generation of technologists should look like — an open, collaborative, enthusiastic, fearless and united movement who are behind shrinking the world and enriching every person’s quality of life. In order for the Silicon Desert to work, Arizona needs a similar stake in the future of its developers, programmers, entrepreneurs and evangelists. Arizona needs a hackathon.

Hack Arizona isn’t about the latest mobile app or the newest JS library (seriously, why so many libraries?) — it’s about representing the unquenched thirst and the unshackled spirit of the hacker that is prevalent everywhere in the world, even in the sleepy town of Tucson, AZ. It’s about identifying a new generation of problem solvers, disrupters, thinkers, technologists, evangelists, and the bold that dare venture into undiscovered technical territory. It’s about recognizing the immense pool of unbelievable students that are spilling into the workplace, ready to bring wholehearted craftsmanship and fresh ideas behind the businesses that are on a mission to change the world. It’s about celebrating how far we have come and yet how much farther there is left to go. We want every passionate, motivated and restless soul that is ready to make an impact to attend— and we will drive ourself to clinical sleep deprivation to get you all here.

Ultimately, maybe we fail. Maybe Hack Arizona is nothing more than a cute story I tell my kids someday about how we tried to unite the southwest with a gimmicky event. But I would take the bet on hackathons. I believe that they are here to stay and will only expand alongside the limitless energy that the hacking community uses to propel them into every nook and cranny of every city and town. When it comes to the hacker against the world, most of the time, the hacker wins.

It’s not easy starting your state’s first major collegiate hackathon, but with the overwhelming support and camaraderie we have experienced from the incredible people across the country and the world who has supported us thus far, you make it all feel easy. And we can’t thank you enough for that.

Here’s to being insane enough to start a hackathon.

Here’s to building the future.

Ian Tracey

Founder and Chief Organizer

Hack Arizona

Hack Arizona is a hackathon at the University of Arizona from March 6th-8th featuring 400+ of the most motivated, passionate and talented student technologists from across the country to participate in 36 hours of agile software, hardware, health and sustainability projects.