📍 Two kickoff hubs on Nov 15. Pick the one on your campus, no travel needed!
🌲 Stanford students → Stanford Campus
🐻 Berkeley students → Cal Alumni House, UC Berkeley
Stanford vs. Berkeley. One week. Ship an AI agent people pay for.
The Big Hack Game is the campus showdown before the Big Game: build, launch, and grow an AI product with real users, solve real problems from enterprise teams, and win it for your school.
🎁 WHAT YOU GET
💼 Job referrals🧑🏫 Mentorship from YC-backed teams🧋 Free boba at Campus kickoff!!
Extras for winners:
1:1 office hours with top VCs1:1 YC application mentorship from founders in recent YC batches
💰 PRIZE POOL: $5,000 GUARANTEED, UP TO $10,000
For every 100 attendees, we add $1,000 to the pool, up to $10,000. Invite your friends to apply and grow the pot!
🏆 AWARDS (share of the final prize pool)
Grand Champion: 30% ($1,500–$3,000)Real Customer Award: 20% ($1,000–$2,000), VC 1:1Distribution & Impact: 20% ($1,000–$2,000)School Cup: 20% ($1,000–$2,000), shared among the winning school's winning teams and its school ambassadorBest Build Log: 10% ($500–$1,000), shared among the top five
⚖️ JUDGES Judges include YC founders and builders from Microsoft, OpenAI, and Perplexity.
Full judge lineup coming soon.
🗓 TIMELINE
Team formation: now through Nov 15, 2026Kickoff: Nov 15, 2026, on campus. Details sent once your application is approved.Build week: Nov 15–20Demo Day: Nov 20, 2026.
Berkeley Kickoff Hub: Sun, Nov 15, 10:00 AM–1:00 PM PT at UC Berkeley (Cal Alumni House)
Stanford Kickoff: Campus boba meetup + live kickoff stream
Final dates, venue, eligibility, judging criteria, and prize payment rules will be published before registration closes.
🎓 WHO CAN JOIN
Stanford and Berkeley students and alumniIndustry experts from enterprise AI teams who can bring real-world problems. We'll match experts with student and alumni teams.
Please apply with your school or work email if you have one; a personal email is fine otherwise.
⚙️ ABOUT HARNESSROUTER
HarnessRouter is a unified interface for agent harnesses that turns them into building blocks for your AI product. Ship production-ready AI features in hours, with no harness engineering, no deployment hassle, and no complex integration across models, harnesses, and sandboxes. By picking the best harness × model combination for each task, it can cut token costs by over 90%. Past hackathon builders shipped in hours and got their first paying customer within a week.
Organized by HarnessRouter Labs (YC-backed). Additional sponsors may be announced, and the prize pool may grow.
Listed from Luma