Last September, we reported that VC firm Greylock Partners was planning on having a second Hackfest after the first one was a rousing success. The Greylock Hackfest will take place on July 27 at Airbnb’s office in San Francisco. The idea of this particular event is to bring a selected group of university students from around the world for a 24-hour hackathon. During the process, the students will be getting mentorship from some of Greylock’s partners and portfolio companies.
A new site, GreylockU, will be the host for all of the Hackfest information and the application. Additionally, students can submit their resumes for internships and full-time positions at Greylock’s more than 50 portfolio companies. By setting up this portal, Greylock hopes to feed its investments with the best and brightest talent from all over the globe.
The judges for this year’s Hackfest are: Greylock Partner and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Airbnb Founder and CTO Nathan Blecharcyzk, Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen and Google Ventures Partner and Digg Founder Kevin Rose.
The opportunity to apply for the Hackfest coincides with the admission of winning teams from campus hackathons that have already taken place at colleges like Princeton, Cal, Stanford, UPenn, CMU and MIT. The deadline for submissions is July 3, and Greylock would like students to come into the process with teams already created.
Last year’s winners included Toaster.js, a hack involving power strip censors and controllers, linked to a physical device; Assassins, a cloud-based multi-player mobile game; and Dance, a multi-player dance game using optical recognition.cal recognition to spot faces and hands to score players.
Other than being crowned champion, winning teams can grab free Amazon Web Services, Lytro cameras, office hours and a personal dinner with Reid Hoffman and DJ Patil from Greylock.