I’ve Got 99 Problems But a Pitch Ain’t One!

How to Pitch your Idea and other Award-winning Hackathon Advice

Abstract

It’s really important to communicate. At a Hackathon, you need to be able to convince people to join your group, you need to be able to guide your team to a single goal and you need to show the judges that your team has done some excellent work.

At this workshop, we’ll talk about effectively communicating your work, and the significance of what you do. We’ll talk about the different type of pitches, how important clear communication is for teams, and highlighting the importance of what you’ve done.

I’ll also touch on why I think Hackathons are important, how they’ve helped me in my career in science and my tips for dealing with potential employers who want to talk about your Hackathon win and not your Nature paper.

Bio

Alan Robertson can give a pretty good talk. He gave a good enough talk to win the Queensland HealthHack in 2015, which he followed up by leading a team to win the event in 2016. After getting banned from competing at HealthHack he won the Australian Hacking Heath Hackathon in 2017. In May of this year, Alan won the BridgeTech PitchTech competition and last week he won the Australian leg of the Global Intellectual Property, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Contest.

Alan is the founder of ClearSKY Genomics, a Brisbane based startup and runs a genomics subject over at QUT.