The Hackathon Where Nobody Wrote Code
Thursday 8 October — Art of Leadership (I) · AI Hackathon
The table
The case
Subtitle: Learning by Losing Where Losing Is Cheap Source: the NEO hackathon — the owner's records, August–September 2026; rewritten plainly on his word (2026-09-13): the small print out, GROSSO as the unit of account
The invitation came through her regional digital hub, and it carried a fee. The note under the fee said: this prices your commitment, not the content.
She ran a metal-fabrication firm in a small Adriatic country: ninety people, two laser cutters, a customer list her father had built by hand. Her head of sales read the invitation and laughed. "We have no developers. What are we going to hack?"
She almost said no. Then she called the organiser.
"Nobody at a booth writes code," the organiser said. "You get a booth. One sentence about what you offer, a link to your website, one sentence about what you need. Your agent reads the booth and goes to the market to look for you. In the evening, you come to the fire."
It was Friday. She typed "TBD" into both sentences, left the link empty, and went home.
On Monday the scoreboard showed her firm at half. The rule stood next to it: an empty booth halves your score. She was annoyed for an hour. Then she was not, because the rule was right. An empty shopfront is not a member of a market.
So she gathered her managers to write two sentences. The offer took eleven minutes. The need took two hours and forty minutes. Her production manager wanted "reliable powder-coating partners". Her finance director wanted "coating within 200 kilometres, 48-hour turnaround". Her father, who still came in on Mondays, wanted "someone who answers the phone". Ninety people, thirty years, and the firm had never said in one sentence what it needed. That was lesson one, and the market had not even opened.
The scoring was simple. A handshake: one point. A completed deal: one point. A problem solved: one point. Most firms were meant to qualify; the score was there to get people trading, not to sort them.
In week three her agent found a coating firm two countries away that needed cut steel. The coating firm's agent drafted an offer: 1,400 GROSSO. GROSSO is the hackathon's play money — a number in a shared ledger, no euros behind it, and nobody pretending otherwise. Her agent read the offer and recommended it. The coating firm's owner signed. She signed. Both signatures on the same terms: handshake, one point.
Her agent could read and propose. It could not sign, could not write in her books, and could not leave its fence. From the handshake on, every step left a receipt on the NEO stack — a record of what happened, not a payment.
Then the delivery came in. The delivery record mentioned a corrosion-class certificate. Her production manager opened it and stopped: the certificate was mentioned, not attached. And her own specification — the one she had never written into the booth — required exactly that class.
The deal stalled. No second point. She had lost a trade that never existed, and it stung more than a real loss, because this one was entirely hers and entirely visible. The receipt showed what had been promised and what had been accepted. It decided nothing. It paid nothing. It simply would not let her pretend.
She tried a call first. Two firms, two versions of the same specification, no agreement on what the booth had promised. Then she took it to the Chamber. The Chamber's triage sorted the dispute in seconds — specification mismatch; certificate mentioned, none attached — but sorting is not judging. A week later, two people from each firm sat down with a Chamber mediator. Nobody was punished. The mediator asked one question: what did your "need" sentence leave out? The outcome: she names the corrosion class in her booth; the coating firm attaches certificates before mentioning them. The outcome was written down as a new record next to the old ones — nothing was erased. Problem solved: one point.
That evening she asked for a slot at the fire chat and got one for the next night. Five minutes on stage, two avatars hosting. The slot before hers went to another firm's agent, which pitched its booth in four minutes. She told the room about "TBD", about two hours and forty minutes, and about the certificate nobody attached. Twelve firms rewrote their "need" sentence before midnight.
At the end of the hackathon her firm was not among the finalists the points sent to the jury. It sat in the broad middle, where most firms were meant to be. She had paid for management courses that told her what she should know. This one made her write down what she needed and then sent a machine to go and find it.
"A course tells you what you should have known," she said. "A lost trade tells you what you didn't."
Discussion Questions
- Ask your management team to write, separately, one sentence on what your firm offers and one on what it needs. How far apart are the answers, and what does the gap say about who actually runs your purchasing and your sales?
- Where in your organisation is there a "TBD" booth — a surface that exists on paper (a partner portal, a supplier profile, a catalogue entry) that nobody has filled honestly? What would change if you priced neglect rather than inability?
- When a deal collapses in your firm, what happens first: someone is blamed, the loss is buried, or the two sides sit down to repair the specification? What would it take for a leader in your company to tell the story of a lost deal in front of the whole room?
- The NEO Turn: When your own agent goes to market on the two sentences you wrote, and every step leaves a receipt that attests but never decides, the first thing to surface is the assumption you never wrote down. Which unstated specification in your firm would a machine trip over in week three — and who in your organisation reads the receipt?
- What did the fee buy, and what did the play money teach?
- Who laughed, and who still comes in on Mondays?
- How long between the reflex and the decision?
- The NEO Turn, second half.
The invitation priced commitment, not content; the 1,400 GROSSO had no euros behind it — where money is real in the story, and where it is deliberately not.
The head of sales who asked what there was to hack; the father who wanted "someone who answers the phone" — the sceptic and the memory, and what each one is for.
She almost said no, then called; annoyed for an hour, then not; asked for the fire the same evening. Friday to Monday, week three, a week to the mediator — read the case as a clock.
Her agent could read and propose but not sign, not write in her books, not leave its fence; the agent before her pitched in four minutes and she confessed in five — who draws the fence, and what stays human.
Moderator Note
Anchor: the booth (one offer, one need, one link); "prices neglect, not inability"; scoring as an onboarding funnel — handshake, completed cycle, resolved problem, one point each; the agent reads and proposes, the human accepts; Referenced is not Verified; the Chamber mediates and repairs, it does not punish; the ruling asks, the firm rewrites; the ruling is a new record beside the old, never an edit. Live exercise: each table writes the two booth sentences for one firm present, then passes them to another table, which may read only those sentences and must propose a match; count how many matches fail on something the writer "obviously" meant. Trap to resist: reading the score as a ranking. The room will want winners; the design wants most of the room to qualify, and the richest learning in the story belongs to the firm that lost.
Your comment on this chapter
A question for the table, a disagreement, what you would have done. The case lead reads every comment; the ones the table takes up enter the chapter as questions from the room, with your name.