Spend one day building at the frontier of AI, then pitch it to VCs and Founders.

Flight Zero - Hack Your Way Into the Hacker House is a one-day, in-person hackathon at Fordham University, co-hosted by OnlyExit Hacker House and localhost:nyc, where NYC's sharpest young AI builders ship something real and defend it live in front of a panel of seed-stage investors.

This is the NYC scouting funnel for OnlyExit Hacker House Cohort One - build well here and you skip straight to the front of the line for a hacker house backed by top Silicon Valley investors. We're looking for genuine technical depth and founder signal, not polished slideware or thin GPT wrappers.

Build at the edge of applied AI. Some starting points (inspiration, not requirements):

• AI agents and multi-agent systems that do real work end-to-end

• Applied / vertical AI for real industries and workflows

• On-device and AI infrastructure - inference, orchestration, tooling

• AI for hard, regulated, or high-complexity domains (defense, health, energy, robotics, science)

• A tool that makes other AI systems faster, cheaper, or more reliable

• Something you'd actually keep building after today

• Idea & market
  Big, real, frontier problem. Why now, and a path to a venture-scale company, not a feature - score out of 5 points.
• Technical depth & originality
  How hard and how novel the build is. Real engineering and insight over wrappers - score out of 5 points.
• Problem & customer insight
  Do they deeply understand the user and the pain — a non-obvious "secret" others miss - score out of 5 points.
• Defensibility / moat
  Why this is hard to copy — proprietary tech, data, distribution, or domain lock-in - score out of 5 points.
• Path to first customer / GTM
  Do they know who pays and how they'd get the first ten users - score out of 5 points.