Post by Dmitrii Abramov 🏳️‍🌈

TL;DR: - 700 signups, 430 students, 45 universities, 110 projects - 10 weeks to prep, extremely low budget, super-lean team - A ton of curiosity, love to create, quite some ambition - Would I do it again? 100% ♥️ Our vision is to empower people to create. When someone without a technical background realises they can pair technology with their own thinking, they become unstoppable. EurHackNL was built around that moment. "No coding experience." "No background." "I'm a business student." "I've never shipped before." None of those excuses holds up against someone who actually wants to build. 430 people. May 18th and 19th. In the middle of the semester. 110 teams shipped something. We have an answer. The most interesting part doesn't fit in stats: hackathons aren't competitions. They compound. You find future co-founders. You improve your ideas through collaboration and building with other people. The strongest builders at EurHackNL weren't the ones with brand new ideas. They were the ones bringing old ones back. Third, fourth, fifth time. Each iteration sharper. That's the loop: show up, build, gather feedback, come back, refine, repeat. It took me six or seven years to learn that you don't build alone. You build alongside other people, you respond to whatever situation you're in, you keep growing. EurHackNL was 24 hours of that. Positive feedback, negative feedback. Both are the work. Some friction was real and we'll fix it. Next edition will be better because of, not despite, the people who told us what didn't work. We read every line. Thank you to every participant who stayed until the end. To the 110 teams who shipped. To the 18 semi-finalists. To the judges who made impossible calls between strong projects: Aleks Shamis, Omar Elamin, Rajarshi (Raj) Chakraborty, Maurice de Rochemont, Irina Musuc, Sankalp Shukla, Mark Smits, Martin de Bie, Candas Demir, Thomas Hordijk, Ivo van Dongen To the team that pulled this off: Laura Karasova, Daria A., Elena Avramenko, Mohamed Aoun, Yunus Noah Oberst, Nils Zippelius, Rajarshi (Raj) Chakraborty, and the volunteers. We built this from nothing. To our speakers at the Day 1 fireside chat: David Knibbe (NN Group), Daniele Tonella (ING), Holger Hürtgen (McKinsey and QuantumBlack), Hiek Van der Scheer (ABN AMRO), Surajeet Ghosh (HEINEKEN). Thank you for showing up with substance, not slides. Special thanks to Dirceu Da Silva for driving this conversation. And to Luis Santos for pushing the room to aim higher. To our partners: Lovable, Miro, Modaal, Picnic Technologies, BCG Platinion, BDO, Cursor, DEPT®, ElevenLabs, Framer, EventLabs, HelloPrint, and the rest. You backed this before there was anything to back. To Erasmus Tech Community, Erasmus Artificial Intelligence Society, and Erasmus University Rotterdam. And to everyone who showed up, helped out, or cheered from afar. The first event at this scale is the hardest. We did it. The next one hits different.