A lot can happen in 48 hours.
For Selina Kao 27BBA, 48 hours over the course of a beautiful October weekend was the turnaround time afforded her team at the HackATL competition. Their mission? Transform a fledgling business idea into an actionable plan.
“HackATL is one of the largest business hackathons in the Southeast and supported this year in an inaugural collaboration with the City of Atlanta. It provides a unique experience for students to come together from across different universities, connect on shared passions, define a problem, and pitch actionable business solutions to a panel including angel investors and venture capitalists.” says Molly McDonald, Community Engagement Coordinator for The Roberto C. Goizueta Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation.
Hosted by Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, this year’s event—powered by a dynamic collaboration between InnovATL, the City of Atlanta and the center—brought together more than 300 students from across the Southeast. After two days of frenetic brainstorming, building, and pitching transformative start-up initiatives to a panel of judges, the top teams took home over $13K in prizes. The rest left with a broader network, a better sense of what it takes to build a business, and a wealth of resources to help them get started on their own.
HackATL: The Competition
HackATL is just one of over 35 events promoted by InnovATL from among its community partners.
Hosted by the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce annually in October, InnovATL serves as a hub for innovation, where innovators from across industries can come together to celebrate success from the past year and collaborate for continued success and momentum moving forward.
Brian Cayce, managing director of the center, states, “InnovATL provides a unique platform both to highlight the assets of our innovation ecosystem at Emory University as well as to plug our students, faculty, staff and alumni into invaluable opportunities with a range of our Atlanta collaborators. HackATL is a key piece of this for both ecosystems.”
Over the course of nearly two weeks, Emory and the center engaged in several events that spurred innovation forward in Atlanta and afforded students the chance to try their hand in the entrepreneurship scene. Some of those events include:
- – The Emory Entrepreneurship Connect Night: uniting the Emory community to exchange ideas and explore the future of entrepreneurship
- – Venture Atlanta: connecting Southeast tech companies to capital, and has raised $7.5 billion with $17 billion in exits since its founding in 2007
- – Avant South: a two-day event uniting Atlanta’s top leaders across industries to explore the future of innovation, technology, and culture, driven by the Mayor’s Office and local academic partnerships
- – The Atlanta Startup Awards: honoring the city’s top tech startups and pioneers.
HackATL is not just any hackathon. It is an experience centered on real-world business application, providing students with workshops, networking and mentoring opportunities. For Meher Jain 27BBA, the student director of HackATL, the hackathon represents a unique opportunity for students to engage in “a more holistic approach” to business.
“Unlike traditional hackathons that focus primarily on coding, HackATL emphasizes both the business and technical sides of entrepreneurship,” says Jain. “This unique approach is brought to life with a diverse mix of participants, mentors, and judges who converge on campus to turn ambitious ideas into reality.”
While the event is predicated on competition, the reality is that most students experience it as a crash course in collaboration. Kao, who has been on the first-place team two years running, met most of her teammates the day of the competition each year. The gamut of disparate specialties they bring to the table is yet another challenge—and opportunity—for their communication skills.
“Our team was comprised of pre-med, computer science, pre-law, and business students,” says Kao. “Our diverse backgrounds allowed us to come up with a solution that is meaningful and impactful. I really loved seeing how all our individual backgrounds contributed to bringing about the overall product.”
Providing a Launch Pad: From Concept to Reality
HackATL has evolved a bit each year since it began in 2013. This year, the competition aimed to inspire participants to move their ideas from concept to reality.
“It can be overwhelming to know where to start, and HackATL provides that launch pad,” says McDonald.
“This year, we set ambitious goals for HackATL and achieved a lot of firsts,” says Jain. “One of the most exciting changes was the significant increase in participation. We nearly doubled the number of participants compared to last year, drawing students from all across the Southeast.”
In addition to expanding our participant base, we made a deliberate effort to bring in a more diverse panel of judges. We wanted perspectives that represented various industries and areas of expertise, so we invited investors, entrepreneurs, professors, and even members of the City of Atlanta.
Meher Jain 27BBA
“This blend of judges allowed participants to receive well-rounded feedback that didn’t just focus on their technical abilities, but also on their ability to think critically about their ideas’ real-world application.”
The Prompt: “Smart Cities” Sparking Smart Solutions
Another innovation was the introduction of a prompt for the competition. This year, it was “Smart Cities.”
The prompt encouraged students to consider how their ideas could shape the future of urban spaces, making the hackathon not only a test of their creativity but also their ability to address real-world problems with technology and innovation.
The theme resonated for Kao and her teammates.
“One of our teammates, Briella, who comes from a pre-med background, noticed a problem after one of her visits to the doctor just last year: the hasty summary written by overloaded doctors had contradicting information about weight loss and was extremely confusing.”
Selina Kao 27BBA
“HackATL challenges you to think critically, not just about your idea, but about the real-world problems it could solve.”
A Visionary Partnership
The flourishing partnership between InnovATL and the center reflects a shared mission to foster innovation in Atlanta’s growing tech ecosystem.
We realized that millions of people struggle with these issues each year, and so to increase medical adherence, we developed MedRec, an AI software that generates concise, relevant, and easily-digestible takeaways from confusing after-visit doctor summaries.
The Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation launched in 2019 with a gift from The Goizueta Foundation, focuses on three key pillars: entrepreneurship, early-stage investing, and corporate innovation. “The center supports students and entrepreneurs by offering a range of programs and courses that guide them through the entire journey of venture creation, from idea development to securing investment,” shares Cayce.
HackATL represents just one part of a collaborative effort between the center, the City of Atlanta, and other Atlanta-area colleges and universities to empower. “These founders are poised to induce measurable, long-term positive social and economic impact,” says Cayce. “Over a weekend, participants experience an exciting, immersive foray into the world of startups.”
With a strong commitment to fostering diversity and inclusion, center initiatives like the Peachtree Minority Venture Fund empower underrepresented founders. Meanwhile, other programs like the Techstars Emory Founder Catalyst Program (formerly the Startup Launch Accelerator) and Venture Atlanta Angel Edition help startups grow and thrive within their ecosystems. Through these efforts, the center bridges the gap between vision and reality, enhancing entrepreneurial and innovative capacity across various industries.
The center’s impact is powerful—within the University and reaching far beyond into the broader Atlanta community.
In the last academic year alone, the center was able to serve over 1,000 students with 15 unique course offerings, augmented by 10 student-led experiential learning programs with in-depth participation from nearly 25+ center student fellows. Additionally, the center has interacted with more than 350 startups from across the Emory entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem, including our alumni community. Of those, more than 150 startup founders engaged meaningfully with the center’s programs.
Elevating Atlanta’s Entrepreneurship Scene
Within InnovATL’s framework, HackATL became an integral part of a larger series of events aimed at driving excitement and engagement in Atlanta’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, including the Atlanta Startup Awards and Techstars Atlanta Demo Day.
While the Hackathon sponsors vary slightly year to year, this year the center secured a particularly new and exciting supporter: the City of Atlanta.
One of Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens’ initiatives is to elevate Atlanta’s thriving entrepreneurial scene to land among the top five in the nation, placing it on the board with powerhouses like San Francisco and New York. A primary means of moving this goal forward is to foster favorable spaces for business stakeholders, including those affiliated with universities, to mingle and network.
“The City’s Office of Technology & Innovation—an office created by Dickens—launched the Atlanta Collegiate Entrepreneurship Syndicate (ACES), a consortium bringing together Clark Atlanta University, Emory University, Georgia State University, Georgia Tech, Morehouse College, and Spelman College,” says McDonald. “The goal of ACES is to create regular reports around the ecosystem’s growth and connect students across campuses. It is believed by improving collaboration amongst the universities and their entrepreneurial counterparts, the City of Atlanta will be better positioned to become a top five city.”
We believe the center is changing the landscape of business around Atlanta and beyond by providing opportunities and education to get involved no matter your level of experience or interest. There is something for everyone and a community of support.
Molly McDonald, Community Engagement Coordinator
Jain emphasizes how valuable the center is to Goizueta students.
“Emory students, through these initiatives, are gaining the confidence to start their own ventures, and they’re bringing fresh, diverse perspectives to the table,” says Jain. “In this way, HackATL and the center aren’t just changing the lives of individual students; they’re actively contributing to the future of Atlanta’s business community.”
A Legacy of Lasting Memories and Impact
With InnovATL and the center’s support, HackATL continues to be a transformative experience for students who are eager to make their mark in the world of business. Beyond the cash prizes, HackATL creates a lasting impact by fostering connections that last long after the weekend-long event. Many participants form networks that continue to support their entrepreneurial journeys long after the hackathon ends. “HackATL has connected me with peers from different backgrounds that I would never have met otherwise,” Kao remarks. “These connections are one of the most valuable parts of the experience.”
“It’s not just about winning,” Jain emphasizes. “It’s about challenging yourself, learning from others, and building something that could genuinely make a difference.”
I had countless opportunities to learn from others. These conversations weren’t limited to technical discussions; they were about the challenges students faced, their dreams, and how they viewed the world. It’s this kind of human connection that makes HackATL special for me—it’s about much more than just the event itself. It’s about the relationships and the sense of community we build over a shared passion for innovation.
Meher Jain 27BBA
For Jain, some of the most memorable moments from HackATL occurred late into the night.
“During the late-night hours of the hackathon, the energy in the room at 2 a.m. was electric. Despite the exhaustion, everyone was so dedicated to their projects, whether they were furiously typing away at their laptops or bouncing ideas off each other.”
“My team and I spent the large part of the 48 hours completely together, and there’s definitely been a fair share of both work and fun,” says Kao. “One of my teammates, Raghav, fell asleep on the table.”
Experiential learning opportunities such as HackATL form an integral part of Goizueta Business School’s MBA programs. At Goizueta, students solve real-world problems for real-world business clients, take part in immersive global experiential modules, complete hands-on leadership training, and tailor their academic path to match their career interests. Learn more about the only top-20 full-time MBA that delivers an intimate learning environment in a global U.S. city.
To learn more about The Roberto C. Goizueta Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation view our 2023-24 Impact Report. If you are interested in joining our network and getting more involved with the center, sign up for our email newsletter or follow us on our social media channels: LinkedIn | Instagram.
