Immigration Hackathon in NYC
At the start of the year, I shared our focus for Foreign Founders this year:
Double down and focus on content → more interviews, more audio content, and a lot more videos
Fewer but more ambitious events → create events with partners, not solo. Create memorable events
We co-hosted a hackathon. Thanks for all the participants who put all their effort to collaborate and pitch. Thanks for all the sponsors (General Assembly, Adro, Lawfully) and supporters!
Community Highlights 🌐
2/25 - Gregory Ugwi, founder of WeFranch (and on episode 39 of the podcast), is hosting an event focused on athletes and franchising in NYC on February 25th. Chick-fil-A will be demoing their opportunity. If you’re interested in franchising opportunities, RSVP
2/26 - Rocket Mixer hosts unique startup founder events in NYC. Each event is thoughtfully created by Ji and Andrea, who have been long time supporter of Foreign Founders. They just announced their next event on February 26th. This event is exclusively for startup founders with an active business. RSVP
Imera is looking to hire a software engineer for their team. You’ll work closely with their CEO and key stakeholders to design, build, and scale a user-friendly platform that supports immigrants navigating life in the U.S.
🎧 New Episodes
Ax Ali - war refugee to PhD in human-computer interaction. Building 3rd Brain for couples
Carolina Goncebat - she’s creating AI toys to help children learn second languages
Immigration Hackathon
On January 30th, we co-hosted a weeklong hackathon in NYC. We had three things in mind when we created the event:
Bring talented people together to solve real problems
Show a different side of NYC events focused on building
Create an environment for the FF community to meet each other in a creative way
We had each theme represented by different founders who were domain experts in that space.
Amarildo (Adro) for finance, Matt (Lawfully) for legal, and Svitlana (Mark Wealth) for health. They were absolutely invaluable to the community by offering insights and answering questions as domain experts.
The teams had one week to come up with a plan, a product, and a pitch. On February 6th, six teams came prepared to pitch and they delivered!
Team Avengenance showed us how they would address the challenges of building financial trust and getting the right guidance as an immigrant.
Team Continuity presented how they can narrow global healthcare gaps with AI-driven medical translation. Language and accessibility barriers affect how immigrants interact with their healthcare and the healthcare system.
Team Nara built a reproductive health app for immigrant women. In a given year, only half of immigrant women receive contraceptive services or information compared to two-thirds of U.S.-born women.
It was incredible to see the creativity, the energy, and the execution from all the teams who participated and pitched. We had seven total pitches and over 100 attendees across both events!
Pictures for the February 6th event can be found here. Thanks to Take for the pictures!
Thank you!
Too many to thank and This event would not have been possible without the following supporters:
General Assembly (Ariadne, Maurice, Eric and team) for offering their space for an incredible week! If you don’t know General Assembly they are a long-standing part of the tech and innovation community and the forefront of shaping the future of work and upskilling. The NYC campus serves as a dynamic hub where individuals and the city’s vibrant tech community converge.
Adro (Sara and Amarildo) for being super early supporters of this hackathon. They basically enabled this event to happen! With Adro you can open no-fee US checking and saving accounts and credit cards before you even arrive in the U.S.
Lawfully (Matt and Joon) for our continued partnership into 2025, and being long time supporters of the Foreign Founders community. Lawfully is a powerful platform where you can track, analyze and get consultation on your immigration and visa cases.
Our incredible judges Svitlana, Claudia and Nestor!
Emily Huang from Unshackled VC for offering incredible insights from an investment perspective on what they see in the market. If you’re looking to work with investors who are known to support early stage under-represented and immigrant founders, look no further.
Takeki Yasuda for taking pictures of the event!
My wife, Charlie, for doing the thankless job of checking people in and making sure the event space is clean after.
We will co-host several more hackathons this year!
Please reach out if you’d like to partner :)
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