San Francisco, October 4, 2025 – This Saturday, downtown San Francisco hosted Burn Your Code Hackathon, a Burning Man-inspired event where builders ship code instead of art cars. Over 100 participants from 46 teams gathered at Entrepreneur First Campus to build, connect, and compete in a six-hour sprint that blended radical creativity with startup urgency.
A Different Kind of Hackathon
No pizza, no Red Bull. Instead, participants experienced tea ceremonies, Slavic comfort food, meditation, and sound healing. The event, hosted by Burning Heroes Founders Association in partnership with Entrepreneur First, reimagined what a hackathon could be – replacing burnout culture with intentional care for builders.
“We wanted to create something different – a space where participants feel cared for and supported,” says Anna Nazarova, co-founder of Burning Heroes.
Backed by Emerging Startups, Not Corporates
Unlike typical hackathons, Burn Your Code was backed by early-stage startups with heavyweight investors: Rork (a16z Speedrun), Omi (Sequoia and a16z), Fluently (Y Combinator), alongside Vapi, 21st.dev, varg.ai, Apify, Higgsfield, and Vercel.
High Stakes, Fast Builds
100 attendies were selected from over 500 applications, and they formed 46 teams to compete. In just six hours of building time, participants developed fully functional prototypes across multiple categories.
“Burn Your Code Hackathon brought together a great crowd of builders! It was amazing to see how products were polished and ready end-to-end in the span of just 6 hours. I’m sure that classic Slavic protein-rich syrniki helped participants to truly lock in,” said Oleksii Bykhun, CTO of yolocode.ai and event judge.
Six Finalists, One Winner, Three Special Nominations
The competition culminated in final demos and judging, with six teams advancing to the finals. The judging process was designed to be thorough and supportive, with each team receiving personalized feedback.
“20 judges met teams 1:1 — every project received two independent reviews; we judged to inspire, not just rank. It was almost a tie between Response Analyzer and Burning Events, but truly, every builder at the hackathon was outstanding,” said Alex Varga, Head of Judging.
The Winner: Response Analyzer built both hardware and software providing real-time tactile feedback to help people who are blind or have low vision sense emotions and interpret visual cues;.
“I was genuinely so surprised how much we got done in just 6 hours. Definitely did not expect that as the youngest team there, we’d have a shot at winning,” said Saras Agrawal, member of the winning team.
Other Finalists: Burning Events created a smart event discovery platform that aggregates events from different sources and tailors recommendations to users’ interests; SwipeGame created a Sora-style platform for Tetris-style games that generates gameplay in real time based on players’ personal experiences and backgrounds; AEO Platform developed a tool to optimize and prepare SEO content specifically for AI scrapers; Pikachu Podcast built an AI-powered podcast generator using ElevenLabs to create multi-speaker podcasts from a single text prompt; and Jobi designed a career assistant that guides users through resume creation and interview preparation using AI insights.
“Every winning team pushed the edge of what’s possible to build with AI. Today, imagination has almost no limits” said Peter Potapov, Head of Analytics in Kick (OpenAI, GC) and hackathon judge
Special nominations were awarded by sponsors 21st.dev, Omi AI, and Apify for best use of their platforms.
“It was inspiring to see every project designed for real-world use cases and built with hackathon sponsors’ technologies,” said Kate Yanchenko, Founder of CoffeeInABit and hackathon judge. “Apify, Vapi, Rork, and Higgsfield were among the most popular integrations.”
About Burning Heroes Founders Association
Burning Heroes Founders Association is a non-profit organization with a mission to democratize access to global opportunities for tech industry talent. Founded in 2022, the Association runs independent contests and awards, covering the USA, UK, EU, APAC, and Africa. Operating with principles of giving and inclusion, the association’s members and partners collaborate voluntarily, independently of commercial firms.
What’s Next
Burn Your Code demonstrated that hackathons don’t have to burn participants out — they can heal while you build.
To join the Burning Heroes community and stay updated on future events, sign up at https://www.linkedin.com/company/burning-heroes-association/.
Photo: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1fyCrDSIE4cvNar7nhs6ZQMd3QI0VrDob?usp=sharing
Source: Downtown SF Turns Into a Coding Retreat With Meditation Sessions
