Shady Hackathon, Inside Job: The Winner Knew the Founders

I entered the Multi-App AI Agent Hackathon by Lemma AI and Comma Capital on September 13. One day, $15,000 in prizes, and interviews with Arga Labs or Lemma for the top three teams. I built my project that day, submitted it, and waited. I was just a participant, no connection to anyone running or judging.

Then the winners came out and I went looking for what beat me. I couldn't find it. Not the first-place project, not the second. What I did find is a story where everyone knows everyone. Read it all and ask yourself if this looks like an inside job.

The winner knows the organizers

First place and $10k went to Pranav Lingareddy. Here's how small this world is:

1. Pranav is a founder of Lily, a startup from LavaLab, USC's student incubator. His LinkedIn says he was in the S'25 batch there, building Lily. The LavaLab directory lists him as a Lily founder.

2. Jerry Zhang, one of the two Lemma co-founders, is a LavaLab guy too. He's on the directory page for Lumen, his F'24 startup. His LinkedIn even lists him as a former Director of Internal Community at LavaLab.

3. Cole Gawin, the other Lemma co-founder, is on the page for Aro, his S'24 LavaLab startup. His LinkedIn says he was President of LavaLab.

4. So the winner and both founders of the host company came through the same small incubator.

5. And they're not strangers. In the comments of Jerry's April poker night post: Pranav ("What's the rake Jerry"), 5 months ago.

6. Nowhere on the event site does anyone disclose any of this. In google meet Pranav name was announced like they don't know this guy.

Could it all be coincidence? Maybe but ask yourself what it looks like.

His project is missing

The homepage was clear about what every team had to submit: a README with what you built, the apps, setup, and reliability testing, plus a demo video of two minutes or less, with the repo and demo open to the judges.

Pranav's GitHub has sixteen dummy repos and nothing from the event. I can't find his project anywhere.

He wasn't even in the room

The event ran on a live Google Meet. I went through the attendee list, every name, while it was running. The first-place winner was never on it. And at the end, the results call wrapped in about two minutes before the room was closed. I'm not going to overthink it. I'm just saying the guy who won didn't show up.

The other winners

Second place, "Krish, Ved, and Mithil", left no trace at all.

The judging math

One more thing that doesn't add up. There were over 400 people in the event's Google Meet. I was one of them, and I went through that attendee list. Say half of those people submitted something. That's 200 projects.

Each project came with a repo, a README, and a demo video of up to two minutes. Per the schedule on the site, the judges got exactly one hour for all of it, 4:00 to 5:00 PM Pacific.

Even if every demo was just one minute, that is 200 minutes of video in a sixty minute slot, before anyone opens a repo. It doesn't fit. Nobody watched that field. So the top three were not chosen by watching the field. I don't know what they were chosen by. Neither will you, until someone explains it.

So I emailed Phillip Li, one of the judges, right after the results. Fair questions: where are the winning projects? No reply. Still nothing.

Why I'm posting this

Hackathons are supposed to be the one place where someone without a network can win on a day's work. This one gave its money and its interviews to people from its own circle, never showed the winning work, and went quiet when asked. Maybe nobody broke a law. It's still wrong.

What I want

1. Publish the winning projects. Repos, demos, scores. Every team submitted them.
2. Say out loud how everyone knows everyone. The incubator, the investor, the judging, all of it.
3. Explain how a project I can't see, from a guy who wasn't in the room, wins $10,000.
4. Answer the email.

That's my whole case. If I got anything wrong, tell me and I'll fix it. I'd rather be corrected than right.