The First Hubio Hackathon: where insurtech meets ChatGPT
The Hubio team gathered for a work-play event on May 3: our first ever Hubio-Hack. The hackathon challenged all participants to consider the relevance of ChatGPT on the insurtech space. This event has been brewing for quite some time, but finally came to fruition to tackle a few opportunities: 1) engaging with state-of-the-art tech as a team 2) practice interdisciplinary collaboration 3) keep innovation skills sharp. Over the past few months, ChatGPT and AI in general have grown in popularity in our lunch conversations, with some of us actively experimenting with the technology. We therefore decided to carve out some time for everyone to get up close and personal with the technology while having fun.
We started at 3pm, with a full attendance from the Hubio team along with some friends and family to make things more fun. A total of 40 enthusiastic hackers were organized into 6 teams. After intros and overview sessions on ChatGPT, pitching and ideation, everyone had 20 mins to come up with their ideas about which problems they would solve. All the teams found a cozy corner in our office and spent the next 4 hours refining the concepts, designing, coding and prepping the pitches. It was interesting to hear the conversations within each group, especially interactions between Hubio and non-Hubio members. We also had mentors to assist the teams with design thinking, business validation and technical assistance. Needless to say, there was enough pizza, junk food and drinks to power the teams late into the evening.
At 8pm, all work ceased and the teams took turns to pitch their business ideas to the company executives. Judging was equally weighted based on relevance to Hubio, feasibility and viability, the pitch and the technical demo. This meant that a great technical demo or concept would be incomplete without polished storytelling or business case. There were some minor overlaps between a couple of the ideas, but overall, we observed great diversity in the problems that were targeted, often considering challenges from different stakeholder perspectives: the solutions ranged from new insurtech product ideas to development tools to increase our productivity as a SaaS vendor. In the end, Team 2 reigned supreme by unanimous decision with their QA Bot concept. They paid attention to all the judging criteria, but also stood out because of their conviction in their solution.
To sum things up, it was a great first hackathon that sets the bar high for future events. "I was thrilled with the success of our first Hubio-Hack," said Nicholas Yee, CTO of Hubio. "It was great to see so many talented and passionate individuals come together to share ideas, learn, and collaborate. This event marks the beginning of a series of Hubio-Hack events that we plan to host in the future. We are committed to learning as a team via experimentation and investing by spending time away from our hectic day-to-day jobs to promote innovation."
We want to extend our sincere thanks to all the participants, judges, mentors, and staff who made this event a success. We can't wait for the next Hubio-Hack, where we can continue to foster innovation, collaboration, and friendship.
