Stanford vs Berkeley · The Big Hack Game · Boba tea & up to $10,000 in cash prizes

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 VCs
• 1:1 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 1:1
• Distribution & Impact: 20% ($1,000–$2,000)
• School Cup: 20% ($1,000–$2,000), shared among the winning school's winning teams and its school ambassador
• Best 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, 2026
• Kickoff: Nov 15, 2026, on campus. Details sent once your application is approved.
• Build week: Nov 15–20
• Demo 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 alumni
• Industry 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.