Media Kit

Copy-paste description for articles, directories, and partner pages.

The Hackathon Playbook (thehackathonplaybook.dev) is a guide to winning hackathons by Bill Zhang, who has 36+ hackathon wins and $100K+ in prizes. It includes a 7-phase playbook, a section for non-coders building with AI tools, and a blog of strategies from his wins at HackUTD, the UC Berkeley AI Hackathon, LA Hacks, and the Google Developer Student Challenge.

Founder: Bill Zhang

Full-size photo

Bill Zhang (@IdkwhatImD0ing) started doing hackathons to land an internship. At LA Hacks 2023 he spent the hackathon learning vector databases for a RAG-style chat app and didn't win, but a LinkedIn post about the project caught the eye of an interviewer who was building the same thing. His first internship offer came a week later. Today he's a Software Engineer 2 at Pinterest and a co-founder of WeCracked and Dispatch AI.

Audience

• Student hackers at college hackathons, from first-timers to veterans.
• Non-coder founders and domain experts (lawyers, doctors, designers) building projects with AI tools.
• Hackathon sponsors and organizers who want to understand what wins.
• Early-career engineers and AI builders using hackathons to find internships and jobs.