The recap
The Founder Sprint — July 2026
The first Founder Sprint: 48 hours, 100 hand-picked builders, one validation methodology.
The first Founder Sprint brought 100 hand-picked builders to Bellevue for 48 hours. Not to ship the most features in a weekend — to find the strongest evidence that their idea actually matters to real people.
Teams left with a working prototype, real signal from the market, and a business thesis they could actually defend. Here is how it went.
Winners
The judged top three and the popular awards are being confirmed with the teams — check back shortly.
Signal over speed
Anyone can build an app in a weekend now — AI ships code in hours. The hard part was never the code; it was knowing whether anyone wanted what you built. So the Sprint rewarded evidence, not feature count: teams spent the weekend talking to real people, running real experiments, and following the signal.
A room full of people trying to do the same thing
Builders worked alongside operators, founders, and investors who had actually shipped. Mentors pressure-tested assumptions in real time, and the judging panel scored on the strength of the evidence and the clarity of the thesis — not the polish of the demo.
Judges & mentors
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Taimur Rashid
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Alaa Badr
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Riham Mansour
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Jonathan Chang
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Tarek Elabbady
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Usman Shakeel
The next Sprint is in October.
Want in for the October 2026 edition? Drop your name and email and you'll be the first to hear when applications open.