kickoff - #01

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kickoff - #01
we're hosting a meetup for all the super ambitious and motivated, teen builders across the gta. if you're building something right now, interning or just curious about solving big problems pull up to meet other likeminded people over a cup of coffee attendees include: 17y/o's launching rockets w/ nasa, ieee and mit published author, olympiad medalists, prev intern at a unicorn.
Date: July 6, 2025Location: NEO Coffee Bar, Toronto

Hosted by

Shayaan Azeem
“building integrated ai tools for the browser and ai drones for fire prevention + agriculture. also building teen builders club!”
Rohanth Marem
“ai drones for forest fire preventation and agriculture use. oh and building teen builders club!”

Special Thanks to

Rootly - End-to-end incident management platform

Rootly - End-to-end incident management platform

Coffee and matcha for the meetup brought to you by Rootly. Rootly helps teams respond to incidents faster, learn from them, and improve their incident response processes. Rootly is currently hiring, check out their careers page for more details!

NEO Coffee Bar

NEO Coffee Bar

Venue + coffee. Modern Japanese cafe in the heart of Toronto

kickoff #01 - thoughts & reflections

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What happens when you gather some of the brightest teen builders from across the GTA? Crashing out over hackathon amenities, good times, spilled matcha, and the start of something special.

Our first meetup at NEO Coffee Bar was crazy. We truly expected to have 10 signups but ended up having more than 30. The energy was great and the conversations flowed between everyone. We had some people some incredible shit: space tech with NASA to self-driving cars, AI tools and hardware projects.

Highlights

  • Hackathon connection - a lot of the people at this event were at SpurHacks, Hack404 or were heading to the Undercity hackathon together and they didn't even know it. This was a great conversation starter and many of y'all connected over this.
  • Being performative - there was a lot of debate about the nature of being performative. In the end we decided that our love for matcha was not performative, but rather a neccesity.

Learnings

The diversity of projects was mind-blowing. We had hardware hackers, AI researchers, app developers, and startup founders all sharing their journeys. The common thread? Everyone was building something meaningful, not just talking about it.

What struck me most was how generous everyone was with their time and knowledge. Teens who had never met each other started bonding over their own passions and openly shared resources for each other.

What's Next

This is just the start. We didn't expect this to be such a hit but we're definitely going to be riding this wave. Let us know if you have any ideas for future events or any feedback on how we can improve.

Stay tuned for our next event (perhaps a co-working session?!)

Heres the photos from the event, thanks to Sunny Mei for taking these!

Attendees

Casper Dong
“incoming at convictional + building space tech w/ nasa”
Shane Barakat
“Polarity, see link below”
Fiona Cai
“my internship at rbc”
McCauley Armishaw
“Winnipeg’s Socratica node, 1nsp1re! And I’ll probably also look into building more features for our SpurHacks winning project, QuantDog. ”
Chi McIsaac
“ai growth agents”
Tony Pan
“Contractual, automating government contracts for agencies”
Zane Beeai
“self driving cars and physics research w/ IEEE”
Arjun Gupta
“building integrated ai tools for the browser.”
Aneek Mukherjee
“A whitenoise panner”
Aaron Ye
“hack404 - Fiona's team”
Aayan Rahman
“A app that uses AI to give you food/style recommendations based on your taste/quizes”
Aayan Karmali
“Hack404 Project "Gotcha!" (fiona's teammate btw)”
Aleesha Abdullah
“exploring content creation & applications in ai/ml”
Aneesh Sharma
“Freelancing Website”
Arav Narula
“Events for young adults in Toronto to build community around maker culture ”
Austin Jian
“developing apps and full stack sites at my internship!”
Daniel Pu
“hack404 project - Fiona's teammate”
Edward Drobnis
“Making hackathons more accessible ”
Mutammim
“shenanigans”
Kenny Guo
“deep learning ICs”
Nabira Rashid
“too much”
Nick Pirruccio
“working on some dev tools, and accounting software for businesses”
Om Nathwani
“interning at covalense”
Prabhdeep Singh
“An app to scroll interesting concepts.”
Prisca Meredith Chien
“A few hardware projects for Undercity hackathon”
Shiva Prakash
“HackCharm! See the link below :D basically its a no maintenance decorative tamagotchi that I am building ”
Selena Nguyen
“My digital skills 🙃”
Subodh Thallada
“AI agents to verify university and job applicants profiles by scrapping and searching through the web for accurate information”
Sunny Mei
“Some digital product”
Arjun Virk
“iOS Apps”
Alex Wang
“PinPals - proximity based matchmating app”
Yohance Pawania
“recently hosted eurekahacks!”