Ooyala Hackathon 2010

This is a copy of my blog post on the Ooyala blog.

Ooyala’s engineering team never ceases to amaze me. Strike that: the entire Ooyala team. Let me tell you why.

A month ago we announced internally the first Ooyala hackathon event. The hackathon was a two-day event starting on Friday morning and ending on Saturday evening. The idea: let engineers and other team members come together and build something cool and useful in 36 hours. We gave everyone complete freedom in choosing their projects, forming their teams, and, in fact, over whether they wanted to participate at all. The entire event was fueled by volunteers and enthusiasm.

Over the next four weeks teams started to self-organize. Some of them formed around ideas that had been floated in the past. Some were formed by non-coding Ooyalans who jumped at the opportunity to work closely with engineers. Some were stealth projects as their members gathered in closed meeting rooms and made plans in hushed voices.

To my great delight, 8 teams stepped up. The teams had members from all over the company and across four continents, representing every Ooyala group and a wide range of skills: product design, marketing, business planning, usability, and, of course, coding. This coming-together was brilliant to watch and led to some of the most innovative product ideas we’ve seen in a while.

The starter’s horn went off Friday morning at 10:30 am. Each team huddled and worked frantically through the process of designing, building, testing, and polishing their products. As the hours went by you could feel excitement building and adrenaline pumping as people worked through the night (while some of us tried to distract them playing Rock Band 3 and Dominion). By Saturday afternoon the products were starting to really come together. We saw many team members shifting to work on presentation and marketing materials while others coded frantically to beat the looming deadline.

Saturday at 5:00 pm the horn sounded again. We gathered the teams and had many other Ooyalans join us (on their day off, mind you) to see the products demonstrated. I can’t go into details of the eight brand-new products we saw, but in the words of Jay Fulcher, our CEO, they all hit it out of the ballpark. We saw a huge range of products: from direct improvements to our consumer offering, through amazing improvements to our analytics and business applications, all the way to operational tools that will help us scale our system and our business.

At the end of the day we awarded top accolades to three of our teams. Team N.E.R.D. won the “Best in Show” award. Team Siren picked the “Most Innovative Product” award. And Team Data is Power won the “People’s Choice” award based on the votes of everyone who participated in the hackathon.  Then everyone went out for a well-deserved cold one, and Jay got stuck with the check.

Immediately following the hackathon it was clear that several of the projects were bound to see the light of day as Ooyala products. The extreme level of innovation, execution, and entrepreneurial spirit the teams exhibited left us no other choice. Looking back now, I would simply say that the level of engagement, creativity, and talent exhibited by the Ooyala team is remarkable and quite rare.

And if you’d like to experience it firsthand and join our next hackathon, you should check out our careers page. Cheers!