Fifty builders. One day. Most of them strangers when they walked through the door.
That was the scene at Ramen Space last week, where Mahshid Atabaki brought together designers, engineers and influencers for a hackathon unlike the usual pitch-and-network format. Teams shipped real onboarding experiences in real time, using tools like Lovable, Mobbin, Build for Mars, ElevenLabs and Dori.
The builders were impressive. But the moment worth sitting with was watching Samuel Faroun-Amin of Dori sponsor the very hackathon he’d once pitched at, and come second.
Plenty of founders would take a strong second place as validation and move on. Samuel looked at what the community needed instead, and built it. Rather than turning up to pitch for investment, he stood in front of the room, judged, solved problems, and helped other people build better. He went from asking a room to back his idea, to giving a room the tools to back each other.
That shift, from “please pick my idea” to “here’s the problem, let’s solve it together”, is the kind of move that changes a whole day.
There was no ego in the room. There was competition, but the friendly kind, where a stranger becomes a teammate by 2pm because they asked the right question or had the exact skill you were missing. By 5pm, a room full of individuals had become groups who’d shipped something together.
That is what happens when you put builders in a room with a genuine problem, the right tools, and enough time to actually get stuck in.
Friendships rarely start with networking. They start when people get their teeth into something that matters, standing next to someone who cares just as much.
Watching a founder move from pitching to community building is a good reminder of what any of us in this space should be building for. Not validation for ourselves, but the next person’s launchpad.
With thanks to Mahshid Atabaki for bringing the room together, Charlie Ward for hosting at Ramen Space, and the builders, including Dori CTO Harmandeep Singh and the teams working with Lovable, ElevenLabs, Mobbin and Dominic Norton, who shipped something real by the end of the day.
