By Darla Bautista, MBA2025
If you’re a budding entrepreneur, or curious to see what it’s like to build a product in the startup scene, you have to try HackLBS – the LBS Entrepreneurship Club’s annual hackathon, in partnership with LBS Institute for Entrepreneurship and Private Capital. This year, my team with Chris Haoxin Xu (LBS MBA) and Jamie Ogundiran (KCL Masters in AI) were thrilled to be hailed as one of 3 winning teams. But beyond the recognition, we left the experience with life-changing insights for our future ventures.
Our solution, Gastronaut, came from our own experiences in Food & Beverage, and the challenges our friends in Southeast Asian restaurants and bars face daily. Managing bookings, answering customer questions, and juggling table assignments is still a messy, manual process, especially for restaurants in SEA and developing regions. We pitched a conversational AI assistant that takes phone calls, answers inquiries, and automates table management; this means staff can focus on service, not their phones.
A Hands-on Crash Course on Entrepreneurship in Tech
HackLBS is like a fun pressure cooker for ideas with amazing people; together with teammates you meet during that weekend, you get to see an idea through to live demo pitching in less than 48 hours.
The event brought together students from 8 UK schools to form teams along 4 themes (health, sustainability, deeptech, and general creativity). On Day 1, the whole of Nuffield Hall was buzzing with a speed dating-style co-founder matchmaking event. By 9am, we were doing back-to-back icebreakers; we pitched ourselves and what we brought to the table, while getting to know what other students wanted to work on and take away from the whole experience. Once we found our matches, the real work began.
In my team’s case, our technical co-founder, Jamie, shared a relatable restaurant problem, so Chris and I built upon it on the business side. We narrowed down and clarified the challenge, fleshed out the target customer, and crafted the flow, to showcase why we were the best fit to solve the problem for this market. In parallel, Jamie used various tools to rapidly prototype the conversational AI bot and refine it based on our feedback.
But this wasn’t a solo journey. We were luckily connected to entrepreneur mentors, Vishal Shah and Srivaths Swaminathan, who challenged our thinking and prepped us for VC-style questions. During breaks, we also had the opportunity to talk to the other teams and exchange feedback on each other’s ideas. It was so interesting to see how our different personal experiences and professional careers inspired the solutions we pitched. All of these insights were helpful as we created our 3-minute video pitch of the product, and ultimately, 5-minute live pitch in front of the whole hackathon audience and judges.
The Biggest Tech Entrepreneurship Hacks
Although I’ve previously co-founded a venture in the Southeast Asian consumer health space, I’ve always been curious about what it’s like to build products from scratch in the AI industry with tech teams. In this process, I gained 5 takeaways on important elements for doing so.
- The right team makes all the difference. Chris and I have teamed up for entrepreneurial pitches throughout the LBS MBA, but meeting Jamie, an AI Masters student from KCL, completed our pitch and dynamic. Jamie’s technical expertise and idea from first-hand experience at Koba brought the solution to life in ways we couldn’t have imagined.
- Talk about your idea as much as possible. Every conversation, whether with mentors, other teams, or even people in line for pizza, gave us valuable feedback that strengthened our pitch.
- AI is a game-changer for bringing ideas to life. Tools, such as Lovable and ElevenLabs, helped us build a working demo quickly, making it easier to visualize the solution and get feedback.
- Looking beyond your market. Exploring how other markets solve similar problems gave us fresh inspiration we wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.
- Persistence pays off. Chris and I joined last year’s hackathon but narrowly missed the top 3, pitching a last-minute service/restaurant booking solution that minimizes restaurants’ losses from cancelled reservations. We took our learnings from the experience to refine our approach this year, so it ended up being a much smoother ride.
Looking back, HackLBS was more than just a competition – it was a great playground to match up with the right team, pinpoint pressing problems, and test out version 1 of the right solution. AI is disrupting the future of global industries, and this experience helped me visualise and be part of what’s next for it, in a space that I care deeply about.
Check out Darla’s Medium page and TikTok for her insights into Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and life at LBS.