Awards and hackathons.

Two-week startup competition. With Kobe AI as Founding Engineer I kept shipping the product throughout (about 470 commits) and built the investor pitch deck. The team won after the final investor pitch on Demo Day, among about 30 international startups. USD 100,000 prize, no equity.

As announced to the teams; written confirmation pending.

How the programme ran

• Every morning a 9 a.m. session with the two hosts, then building in a shared hall with fibre internet and no mobile signal.
• Challenges with a live leaderboard: content and building in public, user interviews, revenue, a launch video and a pitch.
• Office hours with designers, content coaches and a video team; mentors and speakers included Gary Vaynerchuk, Daymond John and Sophia Amoruso.
• Two eliminations at the campfire: on 10 October half the teams went home, on 14 October ten teams were left.

What I did

• René brought me into the team at short notice. I cancelled a week away with friends and two university courses to go.
• Kept shipping the product during the two weeks: Kobe V3 and the desktop app, about 470 commits in October.
• Built the pitch deck for Demo Day, two days before the final pitch.
• Worked through the revenue, content and user-interview challenges with the team.

Result

• Through both eliminations to Demo Day, then the final pitch to investors.
• The team won the USD 100,000 prize.

What I took away

• Building from zero to one in days instead of weeks, and cutting scope to what matters on the day.
• Selling and talking to users, not only coding.
• Pitching to investors, with cameras running and the next elimination ahead.

When

4–19 October 2026, Demo Day on 18 October

Where

Private camp in the Pocono Mountains, Pennsylvania, USA

Field

30 teams, selected from about 700 applications

Hosts

Stan co-founders John Hu and Vitalii Dodonov

Prize

USD 100,000 in cash, no equity

My role

Founding Engineer in the Kobe AI team of three

Stan, Pennsylvania, USA

• launchpad.stan.com

Team of three to four; 130 of the 142 commits are mine.

WHU

• Voya

Global student hackathon, challenge “Connected Arena”: concept and prototype for real-time fan engagement. Team of three; we pitched in the final at the DFB Campus in Frankfurt on 16 June 2026.

As announced to the teams; written confirmation pending.

AWS with adidas, DFL and Slalom

Part of a group of twelve HPI students that Ignite brought to the hackathon.

START Global

• Thesinator

YOLOv8 instance segmentation, a threaded inference pipeline tuned to run smoothly on a CPU (FP16, 320 px), and Flask MJPEG streaming into a browser dashboard.

As announced to the teams; written confirmation pending.

Siemens Professional Education, Werner-von-Siemens Centre and AWS

The first Bundesliga Hackathon: 42 teams, 15 in the final at Deutsche Bank Park, Frankfurt. Our team “Hasso's Kickers” (three HPI students) is listed by the DFL as one of the winning teams.

DFL, AWS and EintrachtTech

• DFL review of the hackathon
• The app

Ratard flags fake news, manipulation and bias right on the page. I built a first prototype the week after the pitch.

HPI Engine, course “Economic Foundations”

Business model canvas, cost model and market within the week. Taking part was itself a special prize from the Jugend forscht regional round.

JugendUnternimmt

Regional winner in Weimar, first prize at the Thuringian state round in Jena plus two special awards, and the special prize of the German Social Accident Insurance (DGUV) at the 59th national final in Heilbronn, for a CNN system that detects pneumonia on chest X-rays. Team of three.

Three rounds

• Regional round in Weimar: regional win for the best interdisciplinary project, plus a place at the JugendUnternimmt summer school.
• State round in Jena, 80 young researchers and 39 projects: state winner in Working World (first prize) and two special prizes.
• 59th national final in Heilbronn, 175 participants and 107 projects: special prize of the German Social Accident Insurance (DGUV) for work on prevention and rehabilitation, EUR 1,000.

What we built

• A convolutional neural network written from scratch in NumPy, to understand every layer.
• Then a comparison of established architectures in PyTorch, among them ResNet, DenseNet, EfficientNet, ConvNeXt and VGG19.
• Lung segmentation and class activation maps that show where the network looks, inside a DICOM viewer.
• All commits in the two public repositories are mine.

What I took away

• Defending a research project in front of expert juries, three times.
• Carrying one project for about a year and a half, from school research paper to national final.

Category

Working World (Arbeitswelt)

Team

Three students from a specialized STEM school in Erfurt

Origin

Grew out of my Abitur research project

Rounds

Weimar (Feb), Jena (9 Apr), Heilbronn (30 May – 2 Jun 2024)

Germany's national youth science competition, category Working World

• The project

Shotokan karate since 2012 at Chikara-Club Erfurt. Further German Championship results: 5th place junior kumite −68 kg (2022), 7th place U21 (2023 and 2024). The 2024 championship was six days before my Abitur certificate.

Deutscher Karate Verband

335 points for extracurricular STEM activities, against a threshold of 80.

MINT-EC, national network of STEM-focused schools

Completed round 2 in 2022/23. Attended HPI's “Fit for BWInf” camp in January 2024, my first contact with the institute.

Germany's Federal Computer Science Competition

Competition of Thuringia's specialized STEM schools, hosted by the Carl-Zeiss-Gymnasium Jena.

Carl-Zeiss-Gymnasium Jena