08: Replicating success twice
You're watching innovation unfold in real-time: developers from Nigeria collaborate with designers from Tokyo, creating solutions no one could predict. Public hackathons thrive on this chaos—thousands of strangers bring fresh perspectives to every challenge. But then Fortune 500 companies approached Devpost with a tough ask: recreate this magic, but only with their employees. How do you spark the same level of creativity in a closed ecosystem?
Devpost’s first attempt completely missed the point. We copied over all our public platform features - collaboration tools, the voting system, everything - but something was missing. Teams stuck to their usual groups and played it safe with ideas. When our customers looked at their first internal hackathon results, it was pretty clear: 90% of what teams built were just small tweaks to projects that already existed.
Then the real challenge became clear: what if we could help employees tap into all the knowledge that was already inside their company? We believed that building a Large Language Model (LLM) could be exactly what we needed - a way to find and connect insights that were just sitting there unused, and turn them into big product bets that help companies stay competitive.
-
Devpost is a community platform that helps large companies run public hackathons to drive innovation and stay competitive in the market.
I led design and research for Devpost’s PaaS product, which helps large companies organize and run successful internal hackathons. I designed and launched AI-powered features that helped employees find teammates, fill skill gaps, and come up with relevant project ideas.
