At some point in the early planning stages, I had taken charge of sponsorship. One of the first steps in raising money is, well, to decide just how much money to shoot for. Trying to be ambitious, we shot to raise more money than had ever been spent on an MIT hackathon before. I remember sitting in yet another meeting with just the five of us trying to decide how much to charge. “There’s no way that companies would ever pay to attend a random hackathon,” someone warned.

I silently worried that sponsorship would, given no precedent, be a challenge.

I began making my spreadsheet of sponsors—i.e. which companies to contact for money. The team pitched in. At the end of the brainstorming session, I had realized two things: (1) I was looking at contacting around 200 companies and (2) Damn that’s a lot of emails to hunt down.

I got to work on possibly the most unpleasant task in hackathon organizing: stalking recruiter email addresses.

Cold-emailing recruiters is about 40% successful; most are nice enough to respond with either an apologetic no or a cautious yes. I worked steadily through my list, accumulating mostly maybes, a few nos, and (yay!) a few yesses.

Carolyn (our designer) joined the team and created our beautiful website. Emily double-checked space arrangements in Stata. Ishaan began to prepare the publicity push, to go out in late August. We were working steadily towards our 500-person hackathon.