My Mudd Life
Like many entrepreneurs, Alspencer Omondi ’26 uses hackathons to build and validate startup ideas and develop products. It’s turned out to be a winning strategy for gaining visibility, earning kudos and building a pipeline of new ventures.
Omondi, a computer science major, sees hackathons as a condensed version of the startup process. “I’ve always wanted to get into startups,” he says. “Hackathons felt like the fastest way to build, test ideas and meet people who want to create things.”
Since his first year at Harvey Mudd, he’s competed in eight hackathons, winning top awards at six, for work that focuses on “agentic” artificial intelligence: tools that can take a user’s intent and execute complex tasks independently. He says the biggest, yet most rewarding, challenge of a hackathon is narrowing ideas into a focused, workable solution quickly.
Omondi placed sixth out of 80 teams at a Jan. 24 Full Stack Hackathon hosted by Y Combinator, where he helped develop an automated web-testing agent that navigates websites like a user to identify bugs before launch. At a Jan. 31 systems hackathon, he won first place for building a tool that allows AI coding agents to pull accurate, real-time data from websites, addressing common issues with outdated responses. He and Ethan Sandoval ’26 earned the Founder’s Award at the Feb. 7 Better Hack event for an AI agent, PreMan, that automates backend testing by integrating with platforms such as GitHub and Jira to identify and fix coding issues with minimal human input.
Omondi and Sandoval secured paying customers for PreMan, and it is generating revenue. They are pursuing funding and plan to move to San Francisco to pursue the startup full-time.
“It’s clear that AI will continue to play an increasingly central role in shaping industries, and I want to be part of building that future.”
Alspencer Omondi ’26
Omondi’s approach to startups has been shaped by repetition and observation. “Watching how experienced builders approach problems and present ideas has been incredibly valuable,” he says. Also influential has been his coursework: entrepreneurship courses with Josh Jones ’98 and Benson Tsai ’06 as well as a human-centered engineering design course with Fletcher Jones Professor of Engineering Design Gordon Krauss. Omondi also participated twice in HMC’s Summer Entrepreneurship Studio program, where he developed early stage startup concepts. “I learned how to identify the customer, get feedback and iterate quickly,” he says.
Omondi and Sandoval expanded hackathon opportunities on campus by organizing OpenTest Hackathon, an event that strengthened participation and created opportunities for students to apply technical skills in a collaborative setting.
Omondi plans to continue competing in hackathons and learning from experts like Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan and founder/CEO of Google DeepMind Demis Hassabis, whom he heard speak at a recent fireside chat.
“It’s clear that AI will continue to play an increasingly central role in shaping industries, and I want to be part of building that future,” Omondi says. “I want to contribute to and help accelerate the adoption of intelligent agents.”