What happens when you mix students, start-ups and 54 hours? Brilliance.

Samantha Rhodes | Georgetown University

People came -- and one team conquered.

The event: Startup Weekend at Georgetown University, held Oct. 2-4, a crazy 54-hour pitch competition where budding entrepreneurs entered with ideas and left knowing how to turn them into companies.

Well, that plus hours of invaluable feedback from successful company founders and priceless networking.

Created in 2007 by techie Andrew Hyde and run by Techstars and Up Global -- two companies dedicated to entrepreneurship -- Startup Weekend is held every weekend in one of over 700 cities worldwide. This is the second year in a row it's been held at Georgetown and it drew 50 aspiring marketers, developers and designers from the school and greater Washington, D.C., area -- up from 40 last year.

The way any given weekend works: Friday night participants have an open-mic pitch voted on by attendees. The top 8 are chosen. Teams are then formed -- four to five people each -- from the remaining participants. Saturday morning to Sunday evening is dedicated to developing the idea, including potential customer outreach (literally, teams take to the streets) to see how best to adapt their ideas to potential customers; the creation of a business model; and a mock-up of their products.

Local entrepreneurs work as mentors to guide the teams throughout the process. They advise each group on anything from the best way to pitch their idea to what their market value might be.

USA TODAY College spent the weekend following one student-led team from the time they met as a group to the award ceremony Sunday night.

The team was headed by Eric Wu, a junior at Georgetown, who came up with the idea for an app -- eventually named Phonic Chef -- a couple of days before the weekend. Matt Gallea, a freshman, Alex Hilleary, a senior and Max Sedghi, a graduate student, all from Georgetown, were his teammates.

Wu's idea: An app that provides a hands-free cooking experience that reads recipes for you and can then bounce between steps in response to your voice commands.

It was grueling weekend for all. Well into Saturday night, team members all across the Startup Weekend event room were frantically and deliriously asking each other, “Why did our website just crash?” or “Why isn’t this code working?”

Watch Phonic Chef's process, and see who won the event!

Samantha Rhodes is a student at Georgetown University and a fall 2015 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.