Summary

Xiaohongshu’s underlying logic for Black Summit (the Hackathon Summit) is a shift from chasing hot trends to finding people. 伞兵 admitted that demand and technology iterate too quickly: “By the time the event is ready, the trend has already passed,” and the preparation cycle could no longer keep up, so the focus returned to “the people more fundamentally connected to us”—young people who are building. The ambition has also moved from last year’s “a social circle for the best people in tech” to building the world’s best tech community, with the goal that Xiaohongshu’s Black Summit becomes the first thing people think of when they hear “the best tech competition in China.”
Serial entrepreneur 景初, who has attended nearly 20 hackathons since 2020, delivered the sharpest verdict of the event: “Your idea is actually the least valuable thing.” In the AI era, building in public is “the best leverage” for building products: AI product costs are extremely low, so rapid building plus social-media exposure can validate PMF immediately; “keep going if there’s traction, and change direction immediately if there isn’t.” He equates Xiaohongshu and other social platforms with the App Store, calling them “the best distribution channel,” and says holding back a good product is “the worst decision in this era.”
Web Coding is rewriting the rules of collaboration. Edward’s team had no plan on site; after more than 10 hours of deadlock, each member spent 20-30 minutes with AI producing a demo for an internal shootout, leading to the conclusion that “ideas have become more important with Web Coding”—after which Koji summarized that the eventual winner was the designer with the best eye. Koji also noted that even OpenAI and Anthropic hire professional brand-design teams: “A product with good visual design will definitely attract more attention,” which is good news for designers.
The Grand Prize winner Party Guitar’s product soul lies in “understanding chords.” Traditional instruments “make notes the goal,” forcing beginners to learn chords first; 叶博文 preconfigures the chords so users “can’t produce a particularly painful sound no matter how they play.” He does not want to build just a single product but a Chinese brand in the mold of TE (possibly referring to Teenage Engineering), relying on “the premium of design and aesthetics”; his answer to copying: “Later entrants can only copy your surface, and they can’t copy your soul.”
明威 is targeting what he believes is an unsolved direction: creating one-of-a-kind faces for future embodied AI and robots. An accidental on-site moment in which “a head sprouted legs” drew everyone’s attention and validated that the demand is real; “a face is the most important interface for emotional interaction between people,” prompting robot makers to engage on-site, while one investor’s agent has tried it online but has not actually placed an order.
In response to the venture capital world’s “pedophile” jabs at its fixation on youth, 伞兵 adopts 曹曦’s framework of “era age rather than physical age.” People born in the 90s, 2000s, and 10s have had almost the same amount of time to encounter AI, so “in the AI era, we are all the same age.” He closes with his favorite line: “When you’re young, go to Paris”—the hackathon is Paris in the AI era, a place where you meet the highest density of equally ambitious creators.

Deep dive

1. Why Black Summit: Trend-chasing no longer works—back to “people who are building”

伞兵’s pivot began with last year’s Independent Developer Competition, whose premise was that “the community has massive demand” and that builders should engage with those needs. This year, demand and technology were iterating so quickly that “the project-preparation cycle could no longer keep up”; the trend would be over before an event could even launch. Rather than chase trends, the focus returned to “the people more fundamentally connected to us”—young people and the builders already creating, because “young people, students, and founders who have just started companies” showed the strongest enthusiasm and participation in the community.
His happiest moment over the 48 hours: “Seeing more than 200 people arrive on site—seeing real, living people is a very important experience.” Everyone’s personality and emotional state became much more tangible.
The event was built around ritual: gongs at midnight on April 8 to start, drums at midnight on April 10 to close. “Before you even joined the hackathon, IPU had already rung the opening bell.” The joke is “very offensive,” 伞兵 said, but “that sense of offense is very similar to the feeling we wanted from the hackathon.”

2. Party Guitar: “Understanding chords” is the soul

叶博文, a student and indie developer, built a pocket guitar: a portable guitar device that lets users select chord groups, switch with a joystick, and trigger sound by touching the strings. “Within a single chord, no matter how you play, you can’t produce a sound that is especially painful to hear.” The product’s soul is its understanding of chords. Conventional instruments “make notes the goal,” so beginners have to learn chords before they can produce harmonious music. By preloading the chords, “the moment you pick it up, you think, wow, I can actually create this kind of atmosphere.”
His stage story was one of the most moving arcs of the episode. After being mocked for a childhood mistake on stage, he began shaking uncontrollably every time he performed. This time, “my hands and legs were still shaking, but I really enjoyed being on stage.” The night before the competition, he watched Steve Jobs’ iPod Nano presentation and recreated the classic moment of pulling the device from his pocket: “Why do we have 2 pockets?” He did not sleep after 12 on the first day and got only about 2 hours of sleep before the final presentation.
His team came together after most people in the group showed little interest in his ideas. It eventually consisted of a woman studying at a university in Finland, her friend studying music tech in the US (“I don’t understand synthesizers and only know a little music theory, but he is extremely professional”), and a developer he already knew. “Maybe this sounds a little boastful, but I think I’m a complete all-rounder”: he is fluent across the tech stack, while almost all of the design was led by him.

3. From product to brand: Build China’s TE; copycats can’t take the soul

His ambition extends beyond mass production: “It’s not just this product. I really want to build a brand—a company in China like TE” (possibly referring to Teenage Engineering), using “the premium of design and aesthetics” to build a real brand.
His view on copying is worth preserving verbatim: “Copying is unavoidable, but I don’t think it matters much—later entrants can only copy your surface, and they can’t copy your soul.” Once they copy, “their mindset and thinking become distorted, and the soul is no longer in that product.” He immediately added a hedge: “My product hasn’t officially launched yet, so it’s too early to say.”
The line that went viral was not original. It came from a Weibo post by a video creator he follows: “Creation brings joy; the difficulty of creating brings pain.” Creating is inevitably painful, he said, “but you just need to focus on creating—creating with complete concentration.”

4. 明威: Give Agents bespoke faces; “a head with legs” proved the demand

His product concept is to turn QUMI, an anime giant-head concept, into a platform: “AI or Agents will eventually have bodies, and they will need more distinctive faces of their own. No one has solved this yet.” On site, he wrote a skill that let a “lobster” agent imagine its own appearance, extract its facial features, eyes, eyelashes, and contours, and directly generate blueprints, 3D assets, and surface textures. “What actually entered the competition was a product that lets an Agent place an order for itself.” One investor’s agent tried it online but did not place a real order: “The order system is far more complex than the live demo.”
The live validation came by accident. “Someone asked if they could borrow our head. A little while later, the head came running over on its own—with legs.” Everyone gathered around. “A robot dog moving around at a hackathon no longer attracts anyone’s attention, but put an anime giant head on it and it instantly becomes the center of the room.” A face is “one of the most important interfaces for emotional interaction between people.”
His philosophy is rooted in role-play. A mask gives you a new profile, and “the external feedback you receive is completely different from the feedback you get as yourself. You get to enjoy that kind of happiness—it’s unique and can get you hooked.” He did not win a prize, but “we were the Black Summit’s popularity king—in our own minds.”

5. 小鹅: “The scarcest resource in the AI era is not memory, but focus”

王心怡, a graduate student at BNU’s School of Future Design who goes by 小鹅, won silver in the Digua track. Built around “Time is all you need,” her project reworks Doraemon gadgets: a “memory bread maker” “toasts your phone like bread” and locks it away, communicating through printed physical feedback. “Lend a Hand” uses a camera to record continuously and multimodal analysis to generate a short report on the user’s focus.
Team formation was “a real-life game of Werewolf”: one second you formed a team, the next you jumped to another. She was the person everyone wanted, “because every group might be missing a designer.”
One detail stayed with almost every competitor: 东宝老师 went 4 days without sleep. When the jellyfish lamp could not be moved the night before Demo Day because of its structure, “he spent the entire night guarding their product.” “Xiaohongshu created an exceptionally good experience for the competitors.”

6. Edward’s Artune and the demo shootout: In the Web Coding era, taste decides the winner

Artune, named after Attention, won second prize in the software track. It dynamically rebuilds a webpage around the user’s attention: reducing 10 points of focus to 2 or 3, moving the interaction buttons needed at that moment next to the cursor, and turning its guess about user intent into 1 or 2 buttons. He describes himself as “partnering with AI, not developing independently”: he is one person, but “AI and I are no longer in an indie-developer setup—we’re a team working together.”
The most stressful episode became a snapshot of the era. Edward’s team had not come up with any idea on site. After more than 10 hours of stalemate, each member spent 20-30 minutes rapidly building a demo with AI and they judged the entries internally. After picking a winner, they spent just more than 20 hours building the real idea. “With Web Coding, ideas have become more important; execution can get faster.”
Koji’s conclusion was blunt: the winner was the designer with the best eye. “Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic all hire highly professional brand-design teams. A product that looks good will definitely attract more attention.” For designers, “that’s a benefit.”
Asked whether Artune is meant to save time or kill time, Edward’s answer was: “Time is not necessarily the key. What matters most is that your attention is placed where it is most worth spending.” It may not save time, he said, “but it definitely adds value to the final outcome.”

7. 景初: The idea is worth the least; building in public is the biggest leverage

Andrew 陈景初 has been a serial founder since high school in 2018. His best-known product is Insta碰一碰加好友. This time he built a “highly abstract” self-discipline gadget: a head-mounted camera tracks smoking, drinking, and other lapses, while 2 electrodes behind the neck shock you when they detect one. It won an award in the Digua sub-track.
His cross-hackathon view from nearly 20 events: competitors are visibly younger (“there are already people born in the 2010s competing”), non-coders are becoming more common, and the projects “all feel more human than before.” They are no longer hardcore tech.
His building-in-public thesis was the event’s most complete framework: “AI product costs are extremely low. Build quickly, use social media to get early exposure, and validate your PMF immediately. If there’s traction, keep going; if not, change direction immediately.” The top-tier genius friends who sit on good products are making “the worst decision in this era,” because “your idea is actually the least valuable thing.” If someone else ships first, “you never get the chance to ship it.”
His platform call was direct enough to be filed away: “I now see Xiaohongshu and other social platforms as the App Store—the best distribution channel. Distribution is genuinely cheap and incredibly powerful, and it can help build your personal brand. We really are living in a good era.”

8. 昆尼: Turn the hackathon itself into a product

昆尼, an early-stage investor in Singapore, won the Black Summit Most Popular award, selected by the competitors. Her product, Web Song, is “an online Web Coding competition that anyone can start and join.” Users set the topic, number of participants, duration, and even the prize pool; the entire event is livestreamed, while viewers enter the arena, post live comments, try the products, and vote. “I got so much enjoyment from Web Coding and hackathons that I wanted to introduce both to everyone—as a mini-game that dramatically lowers the barrier to entry.”
The launch plan is already moving: “After the hackathon ended, we worked day and night to improve the product,” hoping to launch “within 2 weeks.” In May, they might hold an offline event in Singapore or Shanghai. The platform is designed to run 24 hours a day and support multiple languages; each competition will have no more than 6 participants, with the host currently expected either to decide the format or put it to a viewer vote.
She believes the meme that best captures the competition is “build a big toy for the world in 48 hours.” “It perfectly matched my state of mind as a competitor. I came to build a toy, too.” Her favorite product was a noise-canceling mask with a built-in microphone: “I talk to AI all day and don’t want to bother anyone. I also want to buy one for my Japanese friends—they care even more about disturbing people in public.”

9. 彭程’s Conan voice changer: Built for himself, a failure that everyone remembered

A team made up entirely of people with hearing impairments, working with a sign-language interpreter, built a Conan voice changer that uses AI to repair unclear pronunciation. The hardware burned out during the demo, and the team won no prizes, but multiple competitors brought it up unprompted.
The inspiration came from a direct need: “The speech-rehabilitation doctor said I might need 10 years, or even my entire life, to learn how to speak. But I don’t want to spend my whole life on rehabilitation.” His company has already developed AI speech-training KAPP to lower rehabilitation costs, but while learning to speak, “people always fail to understand what I’m saying, and it always gets me down.” The Conan voice changer is meant to let people in rehabilitation communicate normally with others.
When the 3D print failed, competitors on site stepped in to help make the model. His favorite project was the mind-controlled wheelchair. “If we can actually develop this product later, I’ll be able to use it to go on stage and give a speech myself.”

10. On-site design philosophy: The chemistry of creation and self-torture

伞兵 identified 2 keywords. The first was stimulating creation through stress-relief tools and memes—“don’t treat this place as something rigid and formal.” The second was self-torture: “The core purpose of a hackathon is self-torture”—using limited time, limited tools, and limited people to solve an extremely difficult problem. The countdown, tents, and opening and closing ceremonies were all designed to make participants feel, “I came here to put myself through it.” “When you put the impulse to create together with the desire to suffer, the chemistry is pretty interesting.”
Every day, organizers sent a mass text encouraging people to quit: “Withdraw now and take 100 fries.” The point was to activate their competitive drive and their “I refuse to lose” instinct. No one withdrew. 伞兵 joked: “The 100-fries incentive was still too small. Next time we’ll raise the bar to 1 million—and then the next day, everyone will withdraw.”

11. Xiaohongshu’s ambition and the “youth” debate: In the AI era, we are all the same age

Building in public took off on Xiaohongshu on a clear timeline: after last year’s Independent Developer Competition, “many people tried posting their products on Xiaohongshu.” Why has it taken off in China and overseas at the same time? “We’re now living in an ‘ideas cheap’ world”—productivity is so abundant that almost any idea can become a complete demo in 1-2 days, just as it did during these 48 hours. That makes going to market earlier and finding users earlier critical. The operations team’s core job behind the scenes is to identify intent: find “people who are really creating and really want to create.”
The people at this event made the point vividly: 13-year-old “老杨” teaches programming on Xiaohongshu; the young prodigy 张振尧 was called “姚哥”—“姚哥 can solve everything”; and a 14-year-old finalist said on stage, “I’m the oldest person on our team.”
Facing the venture capital world’s “pedophile” jabs at its fixation on young developers, 伞兵 did not dodge the issue. Drawing on 曹曦’s framework, he said, “In the AI era, we care more about era age than physical age.” He is from the 90s, 景初 from the 2000s, and 老杨 from the 10s, but “the amount of time we’ve spent encountering and using AI is roughly the same. So in the AI era, we are all the same age. I might even be the more naive one.”
The closing metaphor captured the event’s central idea: “When you’re young, go to Paris.” In Paris’s golden age of art, you could meet “the highest density of people who were as ambitious as you and wanted to create.” This hackathon is Paris in the AI era: a place to meet your kindred and walk alongside them through the rest of your life. That may be the biggest payoff of competing.

Markets Hit A New All Time High, Whats Next?Marc Andreessen on how the internet changed news, politics, and outrage | The a16z Show