DV Hacks: Humans
This weekend, we’re hosting over 65 engineers, product managers, designers, and business builders to create new businesses around the topic of Human 2.0.
So what is Human 2.0?
Human 2.0 is the next generation of technologies that will influence the way we live, work, and learn. What originated with the concept of human computation over a decade ago has accelerated, and will hit the mainstream in the coming years.
Some examples
While these products are already in-market, we expect to see this space explode with tech that doesn’t even exist yet. This hackathon aims to explore that space.
Our participants have joined us at our 10 Hudson Yards location on the 46th floor, where they are enjoying sprawling views of Manhattan and beautiful fall sunrises and sunsets.
We have over 20 coaches here at all hours of the night guiding them on desirability, feasibility, and viability of their concepts. All of this will culminate in a pitch event on Sunday where the judges will give away $20k in prizes.
On Sunday, an esteemed panel joined us to determine our winners:
Angie Lee is the head of brand and marketing at Industrious, the country’s largest workplace services platform. Formerly, she served as Chief Product Officer and employee #9 at Celmatix, which aims to bring personalized medicine to fertility. She has also held executive roles at at General Assembly, Ideo, Teach for America, and HarperCollins.
John Mattison is the Assistant Medical Director and Chief Health Information Officer for Kaiser Permanente, where he led the largest integration of Electronic Health Records in the United States. He has been leading innovative practices at Kaiser for over 27 years, including founding their Innovation Fund. He serves as co-chair of the eHealth workgroup for the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, and is a frequent speaker at both industry events and universities.
Elana Jacobs is the Chief Product Officer at Crisis Text Line, a 24/7 text line for individuals in crisis that leverages both humans and AI. In addition to her product work, she also serves as a volunteer crisis counselor on the platform. She formerly ran all operations at Flatiron School, an accelerated programming school for aspiring software engineers, and managed the health sector program for the Millennium Villages Project, an initiative of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
Dharmesh Syal is our own CTO and Partner at BCG Digital Ventures. Dharmesh is our in-house Human 2.0 expert, having overseen business and technology builds on digital products from a computer vision workplace safety product to a virtual AI avatar that assists dementia patients. Prior to BCGDV, Dharmesh was an early executive on IBM’s Watson and led technology teams at AT&T.
Ultimately, 3 winners were selected:
- Best Overall: Tunesquad, who built an early stroke detection tool that uses computer vision and speech detection to flag early warning signs
- Best Build: Team GRO, who built an application to support Alzheimer’s patients’ memory as their condition evolves
- Best Business Pitch: AlphaGo, who built a patient advocacy platform to provide consult to patients before, during, and after medical treatment and billing
So what next?
The winners will be offered ongoing support from DVers should they want to pursue their new startup. We hope that many of these teams will take their ideas to the next level, not just the winners, given the massive opportunity areas they tackled and potential to change millions of lives.
Thank you to everyone who made this inspiring weekend possible!
