Inside Organising Hackathons For 5M+ People & 10k+ Institute: Dinis Guarda Interviews Samkit Sharma, Founder Of Hack2Skill

In the latest episode of the Dinis Guarda Podcast, Samkit Sharma, founder of Hack2Skill, India’s largest and fastest-growing community with 5 M+ innovators and developers & over 10k institutes, discusses the evolution of Hack2Skill, its impact on innovation through hackathons, and the role of AI in shaping the future workforce. The podcast is powered by Businessabc.net, Citiesabc.com, Wisdomia.ai, and Sportsabc.org.

Samkit Sharma is an entrepreneur, tech innovator, and community leader, specialising in innovation management, product evangelism, and technology-driven community building. He is the founder of Hack2Skill, India’s largest and fastest-growing community that connects over 5 million technology innovators, including startups, professionals, freelancers, and student innovators.

During the interview with Dinis Guarda, Samkit Sharma discusses the evolution of Hack2Skill:

"Hack2Skill is more of an AI platform where the action happens, It's working in North America, South America, Asia-Pacific, and the MENA region. Hack2Skill is more prompt in solving the largest challenges which brands are facing, focused on how brands can solve their challenges.

With the touch of AI, the innovation acceleration has doubled or twice the kind of capacity it can be. The whole focus of mine is right now on Hack2Skill and making this the world’s largest innovation management platform."

Hack2Skill: Empowering innovators through hackathons

Samkit introduces Hack2Skill, India’s largest and fastest-growing community, has partnered with over 10,000 institutes, including IITs and NITs, and engaged with more than 10,000 startups. The platform has hosted over 1,000 hackathons, generated 25,000+ ideas, trained more than 75,000 innovators and organised 5,000+ boot camps,  working with brands like Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Unilever, and Snap.

"Hack2Skill is an innovation management platform and product evangelism platform. We are catering to two types of organisations and companies. One is the tech companies like Google, Intel, Microsoft, who are ready with their SDK, ready with their product and all with the platform.

We are engaging developers for that, more than 5 million innovators and developers. We are also working very closely with Google on how the AI adoption in India can take place.

It's a gamified version of experiential learning where a lot of offline or in-person, or I will say online, boot camps we are doing, they can compete, and then they can see how they level up.

They can take part in various hackathons and judge themselves, a complete gamified version of learning where they can not only learn but also evaluate where they are standing in the ecosystem of AI development.

Second is a pure innovation management where we outsource, we like to crowdsource all the good ideas. For a company, if they want to innovate, what they will do is create a team of 10-12 people, give them 6 months, and provide all the resources. We are closing in just a day or two.

Imagine the 10 best solutions can help them in whatever way they can. There are good examples out there, these are the frugal innovations. These are the tested innovations that will work in the ecosystem.

90% of the cases we have agreement with the client. We can't share publicly, but a few things which are in the public domain, we are happy to share and talk about more."

Driving innovation through collaborative competitions

Samkit elaborates on the implementation and success of Hack2Skill's innovation management platform:

“Our main focus is the right set of ROI and the experience of all the stakeholders. When we initiate a project, there are, I will say, stakeholders related, mentors, jury on the client side, there are thought leaders, subject matter experts, and all, and then there are innovators who come up with their solutions.

Everything is a competition environment because you are catering to more than two million developers out there.

There are a lot of things you have to do when it comes to engagement, innovation management, and so all.

We don’t want to do it just for the sake of executing it. We want to take what came out of those projects. Any initiative we do with our client it’s like a festival in Hack2Skill. We do celebrate all the successes.

The festival feeling of doing a project with our clients makes our retention rate 98%, which no one has in the market. All those clients bring us more business."

Revolutionising innovation: AI-driven Hackathons 

Samkit discusses the transformative impact of AI and its potential to reshape the future:

"We are more focused on how they can communicate with these AI models. The new generation will not code, even if you ask any IT companies, 60 to 70% of their code is done by an AI model. Our focus is shifting to the communication-first approach, giving us all the capabilities of exploring new things and all.

We worked with SEBI to track the influencers who are misleading stock prices and inflating the value of stock. We were able to track those influencers on social media.

Similarly, we worked with ICC. The ICC's challenge was how they could engage the young generation. We launched the challenge, and one of the ideas was the stump camera.

The stump camera is a system built for a few lakhs, versus it would take millions to get a Hawkeye system, a frugal innovation that helped the young generation trace their activity. 

This system helped in local cricket tournaments to trace the ball's movement and whether it hits the stump or not, empowering local tournaments with technology. This helped ICC engage with the young generation in technology and developers, creating solutions that make cricket more interesting."

Concluding the interview, Samkit discusses his vision for shaping the future workforce, reflecting on the challenges faced by young individuals:

"There are a lot of jobs available in the market, the only problem is we are not interacting with the right set of skilled people for the job.

When I started, I never thought that I would create a 10 cr company or a 100 cr company like that. I always start, let's solve this.

In entrepreneurship, if you are making sense of whatever you are doing and you are doing for at least two to three years, I think things will fall in place. People will know what is happening in the media, but no one wants to go to these new technologies and domains, which is a lack. 

Our platform will focus on those opportunities which are domain agnostic, people will learn first, they will have an experience, that experience will give them confidence whether they want to pursue excellence in that particular domain."