Maia awarded Consumer AI Best Buzz Builder Award!
This post was originally shared August 05, 2025. It has since been updated to include photos from the event.
Over the weekend something magical happened, I built an app, Maia.
When I initially reached out to Sara Deshpande at Maven Ventures to ask for her help joining the event, I promised I would ship something.
Walking in the door to the Consumer AI Build Day at AGI House with Inworld AI and Lightspeed, I had never opened a terminal, attempted to code, and had yet to sign up for any of the vibe coding websites. I joined the event so late, I didn’t even have the technical documents for the hackathon until well after things had kicked off. All things I would not recommend as part of your first hackathon experience.
In fairness, I fully intended to link up with a team that had coding experience, learn, and help the team wherever I was needed. But in the end, that isn’t what happened.
During the networking hour, I had a few interesting conversations with fellow hackers. Someone wanted to build a 'brain-rot' ai teacher (I found it funny) and a guest dropping by the house outlined their current work creating AI influencers.
Prior to the kick off, I sat next to someone whose full-time role was helping build a solution for families in need of a surrogate. Something very close to my heart.
Then Kylan Gibbs kicked things off, he made a remark about how well Moritz Baier-Lentz 🎮's kid was performing relative to metrics that matter to him/his family.
All of these signals created an idea. And after the partner presentations ended, I had the opportunity to chat with Kylan and shared my initial thought. The conversation gave me the confidence I needed to chase the spark of an idea, and my curiosity ran wild for the next 8+ hours. A lot of things proceeded to break. But we got to a demo.
Inspired by my relationship with my 2-year old daughter, Maia...
Maia is an application that transforms your child’s stuffed animal into an animated educator. It aligns the values of your family, with the lessons you want to share. While I demo’ed the app on-site, I did not trust myself to release it into the wild. Luckily, that didn’t stop the judges from recognizing the promise of the idea, and crowning Maia the Best Buzz Builder.
While I work through the necessary steps to bring this to life, you can find a link to the presentation and a case study on Efficient Frontier Labs - Our Projects - Maia.
Thank you to the amazing hosts, to OpenAI, Windsurf, Tenstorrent, LG Technology Ventures, the judges, and hackers that helped make Saturday so special.
Stay tuned for more.
