By the start of Week 3, every team in Cohort '25 had a validated problem and a rough plan. What they didn't have yet was a product anyone could actually use, and they had four days to fix that.
Monday morning opened with a single rule from the mentors on the floor: ship something a stranger could click through by Thursday, even if it's held together with duct tape. No team spent more than a day on the "perfect" tech stack decision. Most defaulted to whatever let them move fastest, then iterated in public as feedback came in from the rest of the cohort.
What stood out wasn't the tooling, it was the rhythm: stand-ups at 9am, user tests in the afternoon, and a demo, however rough, at the end of every single day. By Thursday night, five teams had working MVPs on stage, three of them with a handful of real signups already.
"You build, you get feedback, you ship, you grow," is how one Cohort '25 builder put it afterward. It's become something of an unofficial motto for the program.