Hacker Challenge: The Apprentice meets Startup Weekend meets Y Combinator

A fledgling idea that I’m throwing out there for feedback, comments and refinement.

Take sixteen entrepreneurial hackers.

Follow the standard formula: give them somewhere awesome to live (but force them to live together), a dream workspace, and something to strive towards.

The ultimate reward: $100,000 of seed funding, $50,000 technology funding donated by a sponsor, office space, living space, free hosting, $50,000 of marketing donated, etc etc.

The catch? They have to survive the weekly challenges before they get to the final creation stage.

The challenges are technical and business focused. Similar to the Apprentice, each week tests a different aspect of these hackers’ coding skills and business thinking. From developing an iPhone app prototype and business case pitch in a week, to working with the newly released Twitter API, to finding an innovative green solution to a specific problem… An expert in the relevant area joins the teams each week to help with the tech disconnect, but part of the test is how fast these guys can learn and adapt. Some challenges could be solo but the main idea is getting to know the teams.

The aim is to test the hackers on their ability to hack under pressure as well as their ability to assimilate other business skills, to communicate and pitch, and to work in teams with other type-A personalities. Each week a project manager gets chosen, and the two semi-finalists pick their own full teams from the candidates to create a much more detailed app and business idea, to report back in a month (or week?) – the winning team then gets to create that product with mentoring, cash and invaluable connections.

From marketing to pitch training as well as a ton of challenges around assimilating new technology and developing under pressure, this show should be entertaining and useful to hackers and non-hackers at home. The training sessions, guest speakers, tech guides and even the code developed by the teams should be available online for people to follow along. Hell, even If I Can Dream-style 24/7 ability to follow along, interact via Twitter etc.

Aside: This could also be used as a fairly ‘interesting’ way to select candidates for a job within a large tech company, no? Or to select Y Combinator companies ;)

I’m not sure if non-programmers (or people like me who can program but have moved away from it and prefer to do other things) should be included in the teams. The aim is to train hackers to create awesome startups, both those participating and those watching along. This means covering a lot of business topics as well as development best practices, concepts like ‘ship and iterate’, lean startup, customer development, customer management etc.

I think there’s a lot of value to creating a mixed set of participants, front-end guys and girls, back-end, Rails, PHP, Python, C, etc. It just gets interesting when people get voted off if the skillsets don’t end up complementary…

Anyway, there’s the idea. It could even be started fairly low budget – it doesn’t have to be a NBC show. We’d need a team to get together to run it, design challenges, raise funding for the live-in hack-fest and think about some of the technology problems that we’d have to overcome. But I think it’d be pretty cool, even if a little derivative.