Do I Still Got It?

A few weeks ago, I wanted to answer a simple question.

Do I still got it like that?

Over the course of twelve days, I entered the first three hackathons of my life.

One organized by Y Combinator.

One at Google.

One with Anthropic.

Three dubs.

The trophies were satisfying, but they were never the objective.

The objective was the test.

Entrepreneurship is an unusual profession because there is almost no objective feedback.

There are no annual reviews.

No promotion cycles.

No rankings.

No one tells you whether you're improving or slowly becoming less relevant.

You spend months—sometimes years—working on a single company, solving the same problems, speaking to the same people and living inside the same world.

Eventually, it becomes difficult to measure yourself honestly.

Your friends encourage you.

Your team believes in you.

Customers give you mixed signals.

Investors have their own incentives.

Everyone has an opinion.

Very little of it is objective.

I wanted something different.

I wanted to walk into a room where nobody knew me.

Nobody cared what I had built before.

Nobody owed me anything.

Just a clock.

A problem.

A team.

And qualified judges who would evaluate only what happened over the following twenty-four or forty-eight hours.

There is something refreshing about that level of honesty.

A hackathon strips away almost every excuse.

There is no time for endless planning.

No opportunity to polish a presentation for months.

No carefully constructed narrative explaining why success is just around the corner.

You either identify the right problem or you don't.

You either build something meaningful or you don't.

You either communicate your vision effectively or you don't.

Everything happens under pressure.

That pressure reveals interesting things.

Can you make decisions with incomplete information?

Can you bring strangers together into an effective team?

Can you recognize which ideas deserve attention and which should be abandoned?

Can you remain calm while the deadline approaches? (low cortisol gang)

Those questions matter far more than whether you remember the syntax of a particular programming language.

Winning those three competitions didn't convince me that I'm somehow extraordinary.

Three hackathons prove very little in the grand scheme of a career.

What they gave me was something much smaller—and much more valuable.

Confidence.

Not confidence that I will always succeed.

Confidence that I can still walk into uncertainty and create something meaningful.

Entrepreneurship slowly erodes that certainty.

When projects take years, it's easy to confuse slow progress with personal decline.

You begin asking uncomfortable questions.

Have I lost my instincts?

Am I becoming slower?

Was previous success simply good timing?

Am I still capable of building something people genuinely value?

Those questions probably never disappear.

Nor should they.

But every now and then, it's healthy to expose yourself to an environment that provides immediate feedback.

Hackathons do exactly that.

They force you to think clearly.

To prioritize.

To execute.

To communicate.

They remind you that entrepreneurship isn't about knowing every answer before you begin.

It's about becoming comfortable solving problems you didn't expect to encounter.

Looking back, I realized that wasn't really what I was testing.

I wasn't testing whether I could still build software.

I wasn't testing whether I could still pitch.

I wasn't even testing whether I could win.

I was testing whether I could still figure things out.

Because that's the real job of an entrepreneur.

Not predicting the future.

Not having perfect plans.

Not always being the smartest person in the room.

The real job is entering situations filled with uncertainty and finding a path forward anyway.

Sometimes that takes years.

Sometimes it takes forty-eight hours.

Either way, the skill is the same.

That's what those three weekends reminded me.

Sometimes, the best way to measure yourself isn't by looking backward at what you've already built.

It's by putting yourself somewhere completely unfamiliar, giving yourself an impossible deadline, and seeing what happens next.