Running Through Walls How to Hackathon
Feb 11, 2026
Bryan Mistele, co-founder and CEO of INRIX, who built a mobility-data company and an internal Innovation Week. He explains shutting the company for a week to form cross-functional teams. They describe open pitching, junior team members presenting, heavy partner support, and how AI speeds prototypes into deployable projects.
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Innovation Competes With Customer Demands
- Mature companies face a constant tug of war between customer demands and time for innovation.
- Bryan Mistele notes tech debt, evolving employee skills, and persistent customer feature requests squeeze engineering bandwidth.
Companywide Shutdown For Innovation Week
- Innovation Week shuts the company down for a week so everyone from sales to legal can form teams and build ideas.
- Bryan Mistele even codes as a junior developer during the week to participate hands-on and model the experiment.
Let People Vote With Their Feet
- Let teams form organically by allowing employees to vote with their feet rather than assigning people to projects.
- Bryan Mistele explains anyone can pitch ideas and people sign up for the teams they want, which weeds out weak ideas.