Deal Flow: NYC's First VC Hackathon @ Betaworks

about this event

Venture capital moves billions of dollars a year on spreadsheets, warm intros and PDFs. On October 24, 150 founders and engineers will spend nine hours fixing that, in front of the VCs who live with these problems every day.

Deal Flow is NYC's first VC hackathon, hosted by localhost:nyc with VCLab at Betaworks. Every track comes straight from problems NYC VCs and LPs told us they would pay to solve. Partners from Everywhere Ventures, Wischoff Ventures, Forum Ventures and other NYC funds judge live, so your judges are also your first customers.

This is not a weekend side-project hackathon. Before build day, every team does the founder work: customer interviews, market research and a business model. On the day, you only build. We're looking for products a fund would pay for every year, not clever demos that end when the event does. Build a company, not a project.

Get started: pick one of the four tracks, read its problem statement and talk to at least five people who have the problem before October 24. The full problem statements, interview questions and data sources are in the Deal Flow Problem Tracks doc.

Track 1, Sourcing: surface exceptional founders before they raise, from public signals, with a clear reason each one deserves a meeting.

Track 2, Diligence: take a deck or data room and return the market signals, the right comps and the red flags in the financials and metrics.

Track 3, Portfolio: turn scattered portfolio updates into early warnings, with agentic check-ins or a firm-wide open-source model on portfolio data.

Track 4, Funds: read K-1s and quarterly fund reports, diligence GP teams and price LP stakes on the secondary market.

Wokelo's award: bring outside data into any track with the Akta API and compete for Best Use of External Data.

Schedule (Saturday, October 24): 10:00 AM doors open, check-in and breakfast; 11:00 AM kickoff with welcome, tracks recap and sponsor intros; 11:15 AM building begins; 12:30 PM lunch; 5:30 PM Devpost submissions close; 5:45 PM live demos to the judges; 6:30 PM judges deliberate and final demos; 7:00 PM awards and close.

Judging criteria. 1. Design (1-5): Is the product easy and fast for the user it's built for? A partner or associate should get value in their first minute without a walkthrough. Judges look for a clear core workflow, sensible defaults and outputs a VC could forward as they are, like a memo, a ranked list or an alert. Polish matters less than clarity.

2. Uniqueness of Idea (1-5): Does this tackle the problem in a way existing tools don't? Judges know the current options, from Harmonic to Carta to spreadsheets. They reward a fresh angle: a new data source, a new insight, or a workflow nobody has automated. "Another dashboard" scores low.

3. Product and Technical Execution (1-5): Does it actually work, end to end, on realistic data? Judges look for a live product that handles the core workflow, not a front end over a mock. Strong projects show sound technical choices, handle messy inputs, and make it clear where every number or claim comes from.

4. Business Feasibility (1-5): Could this become a company a fund pays for every year? Judges look for a specific buyer, a believable price, evidence from customer interviews, and a credible way to reach the first 10 customers. A team that can explain why it can win, and why now, scores high.

tracks

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