A few days ago, I made an international team for the Egoist Machines, Inc. (YC S26) International Ideathon.
We ended up winning the AI Passport Ideathon — For Work Winner with our idea, Fair Launch.
And honestly, the win was great.
But the part I found more interesting was everything that happened while building it.
The idea
Fair Launch started with a simple question:
What happens when we stop treating AI products as purely technical problems and start treating them as business problems too?
It is very easy to build something that technically works.
It is much harder to build something that works within the constraints of an actual business, for an actual customer, with an actual reason to exist.
That distinction shaped a lot of our thinking.
Instead of starting with "What cool AI system can we build?", we kept coming back to:
- Who is actually going to use this?
- What problem are we solving for them?
- What constraints does the business have?
- Where does AI genuinely add value?
- What would make someone actually adopt this?
That changed how I approached the technical side of the project.
Technology is only half the problem
One thing I've increasingly realized while working on AI projects is that technical complexity can be misleading.
You can have an impressive architecture, sophisticated models, agents, RAG pipelines, evaluations, and all the terminology that comes with modern AI.
But none of that matters if the end user doesn't get meaningful value from the product.
The hardest part isn't always making the system work.
Sometimes it's figuring out what should be built in the first place.
For this project, we had to continuously balance the technical solution against the business constraints and the experience we wanted to create.
That was probably my favorite part of the ideathon.
Building across countries
Our team was spread across different countries:
Giannis Davarinos, Irini Hartzi, Katie Wan, and me.
Despite that, the collaboration felt surprisingly seamless.
Different backgrounds, different perspectives, different working environments — but very little friction when it came to actually building and making decisions.
That was another takeaway for me.
A strong team doesn't necessarily need everyone to think the same way.
It needs everyone to be able to move toward the same outcome.
And I genuinely enjoyed working with this team.
What I took away
This ideathon reinforced something I want to keep applying to the projects I build:
Don't build technology in isolation from the problem.
The technical solution should exist because there is a real problem, a real user, and a real constraint worth solving.
Especially with AI becoming easier to prototype, I think this distinction is becoming even more important.
When everyone can build a demo, the interesting question becomes:
Can you build something that deserves to exist?
That's the direction I want to keep exploring — right where human intelligence, technology, and real-world constraints meet.
And, of course, winning an international ideathon with this team was a pretty good way to learn that lesson.
Fair Launch — Winner, AI Passport Ideathon: For Work
A huge thank you to the team for making the week what it was.
I would genuinely love to build with all of you again.
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