Hack Week 2025 Recap

What is Hack Week?

Every year, employees at Material Security take a week to work on whatever they want, with whomever they want. That’s right, last week we had five days of controlled chaos at our annual Hack Week. No, we weren’t donning our black hoodies and engaging in cyber-mischief; we came together to work fast and kickstart some of the ideas that aren’t on our roadmap (yet), all with the goal of plugging security gaps across the cloud office. 

Hack Week teams are cross-functional pods of employees who don’t typically work together. If you were to look around the room, you’d see combinations of engineers, data scientists, marketers, designers, and customer support specialists deep in conversation and planning. Let’s just say we go through more than our fair share of whiteboard markers over these five days together.

Why do we do this?

The cost of flying everybody into town, putting them up in hotels, paying for dinners and events adds up quickly. And then there’s the fact that we’re pulling nearly everyone in the company out of their daily routines for at least a big chunk of the day, every day, for a week.

While it’s certainly an investment of time and money, we see it as a critical one for both our culture and our product. As a remote-first company with a strong company culture, getting together a couple of times a year to work in the same space and relax after hours is invaluable. Hack Week also provides a low-pressure environment to incubate ideas that need more time and freedom than a typical sprint allows. By design, Hack Week brings people together from across the company who may not have a chance to collaborate during their usual day-to-day work, and the cross-pollination of ideas that stems from this never fails to amaze us.

Hack Week gives our team opportunities for personal growth, allows us all to step out of our comfort zones and work together in a different environment. But it also produces tangible results–many of the most promising features we’ve built in the last few years have sprung from Hack Week projects!

Hearing from customers

Every Hack Week, we take time to schedule fireside chats with real users of Material. It’s a great way to inspire ideas and build empathy with the people on the front lines of security. 

This year, we had guests from two companies using Material, including Frank Wang of Headway. Frank shared his journey to create a culture of security at Headway, while ensuring that his efforts to keep company data safe didn’t cause friction for VIPs. He talked about how he optimized processes for speed by automating areas of corporate security. 

One of Frank’s insights involved going from an operational organization where activity is rewarded (think: number of tickets closed, number of emails blocked) to something that looks more like an engineering organization, where progress is rewarded (think: strategic initiatives, improvements over industry benchmarks). It was a mind shift that he helped the security team make by automating repetitive tasks to clear the way for bigger business impact.

Hack Week winners

The best Hack Week projects strike a balance between creativity and customer value. Some of the most beloved tech products come from a spark lit during Hack Week (fun fact: ChatGPT started as a Hack Week project at OpenAI), so letting the ideas flow can have real-world impact. 

This year, we focused on both product improvements as well as ways to expand Material’s value for companies who are looking to upgrade security for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. Out of the teams that presented, some projects stood out as especially high-impact:

• Customers Want This Now Award: Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest, something that our data science team proved to be true with their elegant solution for smarter VIP email filtering lists.
• Most Cross-functional Award: Working together, members of our product, design, and marketing teams designed not one, not two, but five lightweight options to trial Material before going into a full-blown Proof of Concept (POC).
• Most Business Impact Award: Collaboration between customer experience, security, and business operations led to new improvements to our support operations.
• Best Overall: Creative thinking among our engineers led to a solution that can streamline Material’s deployment time from fast to very very fast.

…And now for a social break

It’s not all galaxy-brained big thinking during Hack Week, the team makes time for fun as well. The theme for this year’s Hack Week was gaming, with both an in-office game night and a trip to a retro arcade. Some of the highlights included:

• Vying for dad joke supremacy in Punderdome
• Seeing the competitive side emerge during an epic five-on-five confrontation in Killer Queen
• Learning who played intramural sports in a basketball challenge
• Introducing first-timers to Dance Dance Revolution

No company on-site would be complete without some team bonding time. Team dinners saw activities as diverse as mini golf, karaoke, and dinner at an authentic pinseria (that’s an authentic Roman pizzeria to the uninitiated). Whether teammates chose to dine, play, or learn a new skill together, a great time was had by all.

Between the efforts of Hack Week teams, the judges’ panel, and the planning committee, it’s another successful Hack Week in the books. We’re already excited for next August’s efforts!

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