On the train on the way back from YCNYC, (Y Combinator Event), I pitched my friend (Abe Stanway) on an idea I had. Every hackathon we’d been to was using forms and spreadsheets to collect responses, and we could never rely on the organizer to send a list of demos. There was no record of what anyone made!

So we built a platform to host hackathons. We started in PHP, and I grabbed my house-mate (Mike Swift, now founder of Major League Hacking) to help.

We launched the platform at HackNY in 2010. Mike then convinced us to throw everything away and start over in Rails.

We continued to run the site together for years, hosting hundreds of events and thousands of hackers. In 2013 we sold the company to Intel as a part of Mashery.
https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/03/hacker-league-mashery-intel/