Dr. Mustafa Ansari’s Post

Teaching financial literacy to the next generation is crucial!

Another weekend, another hackathon, and another prize win! 🎉 🚢 Had a blast at the 2-day Bits & Bills Hackathon at The Commons, hosted by the incredible Jerry Wu and Wyatt Marshall! 🙌 💡 Project: Subflow – AI Assistant for Managing Subscriptions and Analyzing Bills. ✅ Motivation: Ever been double charged by your internet provider? Yep, happened to me. Spent an hour with support to figure it out... there has to be a better way, right? ✅ Problem: Going over transactions across multiple bank accounts to verify charges can be incredibly time-consuming. ✅ Solution: Subflow connects to your financial accounts and automatically pulls PDF bills (like Comcast!) to simplify the process: - Download transaction statements from bank accounts. - Use Toolhouse and Groq to search for product/service pricing. - Leverage Halluminate for clarity, accuracy, and fairness in evaluating bills. - Generate voice summaries with slashML that you can listen to on your Meta glasses while grabbing a coffee ☕ (whether it's daily, weekly, or monthly—your choice!). 🎤 I even had the chance to do a little interview with the amazing hosts, sponsors, and judges to share the vibes! Shoutout to: - Jerry Wu - Jeremy Nixon - Wyatt Marshall - Jneid Jneid - Daniele Bernardi Should I do more interviews at upcoming hackathons? Let me know!

💭 Curious about the word beside our name? Techstars. Applications are now open for its spring programs! Here's what you'll get: ✅ Access to Capital: Techstars' companies raise $1M+ on average in their first raise post-program. ✅ Niche Education: Our bespoke accelerator programs range from HealthTech to Space, Los Angeles to London. ✅ Small Class Sizes: Tailored 1:1 mentorship and low managing director-to-founder ratios. ✅ Techstars Global Network for Life: 3,900+ active mentors, 9,700+ founders, 300+ corporate partners, and thousands of top investors. ⌛️ Applications close: 20th Nov, 2024 Learn more about Techstars at their upcoming events by giving them (and us) a follow. 🏆 #RealEstate #Tokenisation #Blockchain #Kenya #Investing #Mentorship #VentureCapital

Attention NWA female entrepreneurs, product managers, marketers, and engineers: Join an All-Female Weekend Hackathon at The Collaborative, produced by Fierce Foundry! Join forces with incredible female talent in NWA to build a world-changing company idea October 5-6th. Two ways we stand out from other hackathons: - All participants are female - We will be judging overall company idea (including business plan and market size potential), not just the prototype created during the hackathon About FemHack [ARKANSAS]: In 48 hours, our teams of female engineers, designers, marketers and business leads will: - Build a working product prototype that a founder may continue building post-hackathon - Create a Go-to-Market Strategy for their product - Create an investor deck and business plan (including market research) for their product Register specifically based on your skills (dev, design, GTM, business) and you will be added to teams accordingly. The top three teams will be awarded cash prizes based on: - functionality and overall user experience of the prototype - viability of business plan and Go-to-Market Strategy We will be celebrating all hackers at our Female Founders & Funders Happy Hour, Monday, October 7th. Learn more and sign up here: https://lu.ma/sazezp5v

Attention NWA female entrepreneurs, product managers, marketers, and engineers: Join an All-Female Weekend Hackathon at The Collaborative, produced by Fierce Foundry! Join forces with incredible female talent in NWA to build a world-changing company idea October 5-6th. Two ways we stand out from other hackathons: - All participants are female - We will be judging overall company idea (including business plan and market size potential), not just the prototype created during the hackathon About FemHack [ARKANSAS]: In 48 hours, our teams of female engineers, designers, marketers and business leads will: - Build a working product prototype that a founder may continue building post-hackathon - Create a Go-to-Market Strategy for their product - Create an investor deck and business plan (including market research) for their product Register specifically based on your skills (dev, design, GTM, business) and you will be added to teams accordingly. The top three teams will be awarded cash prizes based on: - functionality and overall user experience of the prototype - viability of business plan and Go-to-Market Strategy We will be celebrating all hackers at our Female Founders & Funders Happy Hour, Monday, October 7th. Learn more and sign up here: https://lu.ma/sazezp5v

Bridging the gap between theory and practice is perhaps the most important problem to solve in design education. A lot of design knowledge is tacit - it's not easily captured in books or presentations. The best way to learn and develop intuition is by working on real-world problems in context, while being supported by feedback and mentorship. This is why industry projects are a main feature of our Product Design Fellowship at ownpath, and it's no wonder Fellows love this aspect about the program. So, what happens at an industry project? Fellows get to 👉🏼 develop domain knowledge, learn about what worked and what didn't 👉🏼 learn to work in quick iterations and tight feedback loops with a design team 👉🏼 understand real constraints & tradeoffs: wildly different from theoretical case-studies Looking forward to collaborating with Last9 Inc, where Fellows at ownpath will gain first-rate exposure to challenges and constraints that a team helping serve millions of users faces on a day-to-day. 🚀 Big thanks to Sahil Khan (and previously Nav Pawera and Saloni Bhandari from Jiva and Sanket Pathak from Postman) for collaborating with us on industry projects. 🙌 #designeducation

Last month on the blog, we celebrated, got philosophical, used some Star Wars analogies, dreamed about the Olympics of hackathons, and shared some SVG tips. Did you catch them all? Check out the latest on the Simple Thread blog ➡️ https://lnkd.in/eD7HKJvE

I ❤️ hackathons so it was a blast to hold our first one at Clarify recently. 24 hours, 11 people, and 5 GA'd projects later, I jotted down some notes about why this one felt different and what worked so well we will absolutely do it again next time. ⭐ Don’t stress the prep — over-organize and risk turning what should be a fun, spontaneous event into just another company initiative ⭐ Involve everyone — we’re saying no to PD hackathons! Our own Sam Larsen-Disney explains in his The Hackathon Survival Guide how all roles at all levels can make a huge difference ⭐ Productize right away — dedicating the following week for shipping strikes a great balance between ambitious hacks and grounded, realistic projects ⭐ Skip the cash prizes — awards w/ meaning can quickly turn into coveted collector’s items with unlimited incentive potential. In our case: simple, elegant crystal trophies ⭐ Sharp start time, loose end time — keep a level playing field and respect the team’s time, then leave room for late night jam sessions that turn into their own special moments At the end of the day, our first Chrome extension, a Zapier integration, a Raycast plugin, dark mode, and universal record popovers have now GA’d, and the remaining ones are all lurking in prod behind a FF. If any of this sounds interesting and you’d like to join me, Patrick Thompson, Austin Hay, Andrew Kramarev, Michael M., Eugeny Voronin, Ashish Pandhi, John Jiang, Sam Larsen-Disney, and Adam T. on our startup’s journey, let me know! https://lnkd.in/gyyVQAzi

Congratulations! We are celebrating our 60th birthday! 🎂 It's okay and even necessary to celebrate small successes. We invest so much, so we deserve to celebrate. 🥂 Just before another event, we're at Vickathon, celebrating 60 hackathons! And there's nothing like a birthday to share 6 tips from our journey so far: 1) It is essential to get out of your comfort zone and try things for the first time—that's how I started with hackathons. Somewhere in 2013, I attended a hackathon event without knowing what it was about. I was hooked, and the rest is history. 2) Be creative 💡 and look for opportunities even in difficulty. Instead of getting confused when COVID-19 entered our lives, we developed a platform for hackathons. That's how we entered the virtual hackathon market and, from there, the international hackathon market. 3) Listen to your customers. The reasons they want your product/service can be various. Each customer is unique, and for each customer, we need to make adjustments👌. These adjustments help us improve the product/service for future customers. 4) When you're just starting out with a new product or service, it's critical to find a very specific audience willing to experiment. It's not easy, and sometimes you have to cast many fishing lines 🎣 to catch one or two customers. But that's all you need at the beginning. And if what you're offering is good, others will join later. 5) Keep learning and developing in your field and also in adjacent fields. This will give you an advantage over others and signal to your customers that you are professional. 6) Most importantly: Enjoy the journey💫. When we do things out of passion and enjoyment, we radiate that outwards, and ultimately, it attracts others. If you too have insights to share from your entrepreneurial journey, please share 🙂

We recently clinched the top spot at the Rocketium Dev Hackathon! 🏆🥳 Taking on the challenge of automating major time-consuming processes involving Google Sheets, our goal was to streamline workflows, reduce manual efforts, and enhance overall productivity. 🤖✨ The result? A cutting-edge solution that not only simplifies tasks but also accelerates data-driven decision-making! 🚀📊 The impact of our work extends far beyond just saving time; it transforms the way we handle data, reducing errors and improving data-driven decision-making, setting up the fundamentals for Automated workflows. 🔄💡 A massive shoutout to the Ravish Chaudhary and Nitin Gupta who brought their unique skills and creativity to the project. This victory is a testament to our collective dedication and collaborative spirit. 🙌 Special thanks to the Somya Bhargava for organizing everything so smoothly and Shivramakrishnan V for helping us to get the user's perspective and more insights. It was an exhilarating experience, and we're grateful for the opportunity to showcase our skills. 🚀 Here's to innovation, teamwork, and the boundless possibilities that lie ahead! 🚀