Building a $100MM solopreneur business with MSR and GitHub Copilot

​GitHub & Microsoft Research Present: Builders Hack Day Seattle 

​Are you using tools like AI Agents for marketing? outreach? coding? design?  Are you building a technology company? Do you want to build your own tech startup?

​​We'll be hosting a full day Builders Hack Day at GitHub in Seattle. Our goal is to empower builders with the community.

​​This event is designed to connect builders and founders like you with the Microsoft Research Team and the Investor network in Seattle.  

​Ready to build something amazing while shaping the future of AI for startups? 

​Register now to secure your place because there are limited spots available. 

​🛠  What You Will Build 

​You will build commercially viable, innovative products using Microsoft’s open-source projects: GraphRAG and NLWeb. 

​They’re foundational technologies designed to supercharge your product development. With GraphRAG, you’ll harness graph-based retrieval-augmented generation for multi-hop reasoning, explainable outputs, and enterprise-grade knowledge synthesis. With NLWeb, you’ll explore natural language interfaces that unlock web-scale intelligence and semantic search capabilities. 

​The top 6-10 projects will be invited to pitch to a panel of investors on Tuesday evening including Kevin Crosby, GitHub Fund, Jon Turow – Madrona, and others.

​🚀 Not JUST another hackathon - What You Get 

​This isn't just another hackathon - you'll receive free access to GitHub's latest Copilot  development tools, plus priority technical support from GitHub Developer Advocate team. You'll also have direct pitch and demo opportunities with PNW VCs and technical leaders from GitHub and Microsoft.  

​As part of Microsoft Research's study on AI-accelerated startup development, teams are randomly assigned to one of two advanced Copilot feature configurations to help us understand how different AI approaches impact development speed, creativity, and outcomes.  See below more details.

​📅 Event Schedule  

​Monday, August 18 - Hack Day 

• ​9:00 AM - Check Ins 

• ​​9:30 AM - Event Kick Off & Talks 

• ​​10:00 AM - Team Creations 

• ​​12:00 PM - Lunch 

• ​​5:00 PM - Dinner 

• ​​8:00 PM - Day 1 is Done 

​Tuesday, August 19 - Demo Night 

• ​5:00 PM - Doors Open 

• ​​6:00 PM - Demos Begin 

• ​​7:00 PM - Networking 

• ​​8:00 PM - Day 2 - Demo Night is Done 

​ 🔬 Research Partnership 

​By participating in the hackathon, you're agreeing to join our research study that will help define how AI empowers the next generation of founders. 

​During this hackathon, participants will be randomly assigned to one of two advanced Copilot feature configurations, Free or Enterprise. To ensure fairness, teams will only be evaluated within the same cohort of feature configurations. This means you have the same edge advantage regardless of which tool you're assigned.  

​All contributions remain completely anonymous, and your insights will directly contribute to research findings that have real-world impact on how AI tools are built for founders like you.