King of Sand Hill

Inspiration

Over 50 million people play fantasy sports to have fun with their friends and follow their favourite team(s). They get to play "General Manager" and take ownership over players and compete to use their knowledge of the game to pick the best ones and win the season.

We thought, why can't the tech-world get in on the fun too, so we built King of Sand Hill.

What it does

"KOSH" for short is a web-application that allows users to join a league and take the role of a venture capitalist, competing against other players to become the most savvy investor in tech. Each player in the league starts with $1.5 billion (virtual KOSH dollars) and takes part in a silent-auction where they get to allocate their funds into bids to buy startups. The highest bidder for each startup will add that startup to their portfolio. Throughout the quarter, players can sell, buy, and trade startups to keep up with the fast-changing startup software landscape. Based on how well each player's startups perform over the course of a quarter, a winner will be crowned.

How I built it

The App as a Whole: The web-application was built with the MEAN stack framework. There is a fully functioning database to store company information. All the data on the webpages are binded with Angular.

Company Information: Initially, data for about 50 companies were scraped from Crunchbase and used to determine the values for the companies. Then, to determine the growth of each company, a javascript file using the 'cheerio' api scrapes news from various sources and sends it to the lexalytics api to extract sentiment from relevant news sources. Based on the feedback from the api, the values of the startups are adjusted.