AngelHack
AngelHack is a global hackathon organization. It began in San Francisco with its first hackathon in December 2011 at Adobe and has expanded to over 105 cities globally and 53 countries in the past eight years. The company primarily organizes hackathons, but has recently expanded into innovation consulting, virtual hackathons, acceleration and incubation.
Industry | Hackathons |
---|---|
Founded | 2011 |
Founders | Sabeen Ali and Greg Gopman |
Headquarters | San Francisco, California |
Website | angelhack hackathon |
The company boasts the most global and diverse developer community of 250,000 members.[1] The company also claims to have twenty-one percent (21%) female membership, well above the industry average.
Company Mission
The company website states AngelHack's mission as “To be the world’s premier innovation management agency, serving as a catalyst for rapid growth and development of individuals and organizations who are navigating periods of transformative change.”
Annual Global Hackathon Competition
AngelHack hosts an annual global hackathon competition where entrants compete to build and launch new software solutions over the course of 36-hours. Hackathon events are hosted in several cities around the world and winning teams are chosen to receive coveted acceptance into the AngelHack Hackcelerator program.
Every year the competition has a non-technical theme which inspires its developer community to do better and to think outside of the typical developer mindset.
AngelHack HACKcelerator
AngelHack also runs the HACKcelerator,[2] a pre-accelerator program that provides mentorship to entrepreneurs and showcases companies to investors. Notable AngelHack HACKcelerator teams include WeFunder and Microryza,[3] both of which have been inducted to Y-Combinator.[4] Another HACKcelerator project, Waigo Translate, has been inducted into 500 Startups.[5] Two HACKcelerator graduates have been acquired by Google: SlickLogin[6] and Appetas.[7] Another team, Osper, was able to raise over $10 million in seed-funding. In 2015 AtumSoft secured their first $100,000 in funding from Lab360 and facetime with Y-Combinator.[8]
Ownership
Gregory Gopman founded AngelHack in 2011[9] and Sabeen Ali joined as Co-Founder in 2012. The two had a rather public and contemptuous separation. Gopman was reported[10] to have stolen company funds and former employees recall Gopman as never being around and “galavanting abroad”. In February 2014 then Co-Founder and CEO sued Gopman.
Currently, AngelHack is a female-owned, female-majority company.
Lawsuit Sabeen Ali v. Gregory Gopman
In the lawsuit[11] filed in a California State Superior Court, Gopman's co-founder and AngelHack CEO Sabeen Ali accuses Gopman of removing Ali from the company bank accounts without authorization while diverting $70,000 to his credit card debt, and $4,500 a month to pay his rent. Gopman is also accused of allegedly changing AngelHack corporate account information, including the passwords to social media accounts, and emailing all AngelHack employees claiming that he would fire them.
According to the suit, the trouble began right around the time that Gopman and Ali signed an agreement replacing Gopman as AngleHack CEO. The suit claims breach of contract and seeks an injunction against Gopman.
Sabeen Ali
Prior to AngelHack, Sabeen founded and sold her own leadership training and organizational development company; Team Building ROI, which provided leadership and organizational development training to companies such as Google, IBM, Blackberry, NetApp, Cisco, and others. She holds an M.S. in Organization Development from the University of San Francisco and is an expert in change management.
Sabeen also founded Code For A Cause, a nonprofit organization that aims to make technology and coding accessible for all, and to bring the tech community together to make the world a better place. Founded in 2013, CFAC has organized events and initiatives designed to connect developers, support women and girls, minorities, veterans and other disproportionately disadvantaged communities.
She speaks internationally to corporate, nonprofit and student audiences on rapid innovation, entrepreneurship, acceleration, women in tech initiatives, and more. She has received numerous accolades for her work, most recently including the Harari Conscious Leadership and Social Innovation award. Her work with AngelHack and CFAC has been highlighted in Inc., Fast Company[12], Voice of America[13] [14], and featured in the hit documentary: Seed[15].
Acquisitions
AngelHack announced its first acquisition in 2016[16]. Codeity, a developer recruiting platform. Codeity will connect AngelHack's global community of developers with jobs that best fit their skills with companies ranging from Fortune 500s to emerging startups in the tech industry.
Codeity differentiates itself by focusing solely on the job-seeker's skill sets for matching employers with candidates, while masking age, gender, first name and previous employers, it reduces the potential for bias in the hiring process. Employers and companies will not have access to these masked elements until a profile has been identified for matching skill sets, then employers can unlock the candidates information to make an offer. Focusing on skills before demographics will help to ensure that companies get matched with the best qualified applicants, every time. It will also help companies identify promising and valuable candidates who might otherwise be overlooked.
Code for a Cause
Code For A Cause is a nonprofit organization that was founded in 2011 by Sabeen Ali and the AngelHack team, after seeing an opportunity to create a dialogue about the huge equality gap the tech boom created and to leverage our core competencies to give back. We aim to make technology and coding accessible for all, and to bring the tech community (including our ecosystem of 100,000+ developers) together to make the world a better place. So far, it has helped organize 15 hackathons to build technology in support of issues including safety, girls and women's economic empowerment, entrepreneurship, sanitation, veterans’ issues and more.
References
- Mackin, Scott (15 November 2013). "AngelHack Barcelona: Join the Largest Hackathon on the Planet". BarcInno.
- Ha, Anthony (21 March 2013). "AngelHack Launches A Startup Accelerator, Bringing Its Hackathon To 30+ Cities This Spring". TechCrunch.
- "Y Combinator Backed Microryza is a Kickstarter for Science". Crowdfund Insider. 25 February 2013.
- Lawler, Ryan (19 March 2013). "Y Combinator-Backed WeFunder Launches To Bring Crowdfunding Startups To The Masses". TechCrunch.
- Millward, Steve (17 December 2012). "Waigo App is a Pair of Eyes That Helps You Get a Bellyful of Chinese Food". TechInAsia.
- Kumparak, Greg (16 February 2014). "Google Acquires SlickLogin, The Sound-Based Password Alternative". TechCrunch.
- Lunden, Ingrid (7 May 2014). "To Battle Yelp, Google Buys Appetas, A Website Builder For Restaurants". TechCrunch.
- Venturella, Patrick (25 February 2016). "There and Back Again: Atumsoft's Journey from #StartupCincy to Global Demo Day". Cintrifuse.
- https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/angelhack
- D'Onfro, Jillian (27 February 2014). "The Tech Founder Who Ranted Against Homeless 'Trash' Is Accused Of Using Startup Money To Pay Credit Card Debt". BusinessInsider.
- "Lawsuit Sabeen Ali v. Gregory Gopman". 4 February 2014.
- Elias, Jennifer (14 May 2014). "Why Do Big Companies Do Hackathons?". FastCompany.
- Lee, Elizabeth (31 January 2017). "Global Hackathons Turn Ideas Into Entrepreneurial Reality". Voice of America.
- Lee, Elizabeth (8 February 2017). "Silicon Valley Group Turns Ideas Into Businesses". Voice of America.
- . Prime Video https://www.amazon.com/Seed-Sabeen-Ali/dp/B06Y15DP58. Missing or empty
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(help) - "AngelHack Makes its First Acquisition of 2016 as it Expands into Recruiting". 5 April 2016.