We won Love at Scale.
Here's what happened.
Love at Scale was a one-day hackathon hosted by Lovable and SwenodeAI, with support from Crusoe and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. 100 founders were invited to build, ship, and present in a single day, timed to the week before GTC 2026 in San Jose.
The Grand Jury
The final presentations were judged by a panel that included:
- Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks
- David Hogan, investor and advisor
- Martin Korman, investor and advisor
- Joff Redfern, former VP at LinkedIn and Atlassian
- Minna Sandberg, SwenodeAI
Teams were evaluated on architecture quality, technical depth, real traction generated during the build, and whether the product could be a fundable company.
The Life Before Me is an AI platform that turns spoken conversations into printed hardcover memoirs. You talk. Our AI guides the conversation, writes the book, narrates it, and delivers a hardcover to your door.
What we built in 10 hours
We walked in with a production app and 10 known bottlenecks in our AI pipeline. We walked out with 7 shipped to production and 3 more fully architected.
AI Critic Agent Latency (measured in production)
34.5s
before
2.3s
after
93% reduction
The 10 fixes spanned silence detection, streaming TTS, decoupled prose generation, batch entity upserts, edge function cold start elimination, and full performance telemetry. The judges noted the depth of the production infrastructure: 49 edge functions, 29 database tables, 118 row-level security policies, and a 10-stage memoir pipeline running 6 AI models.
The results
93%
Critic latency reduction
55%
Synthesis faster
97%
Cold start reduction
+177%
Test pass rate
First place. Second and third went to Synapi and Lovify, both strong teams building in very different spaces.
Thank you
To Amalia Berglof, Minna Sandberg, and the entire Lovable and SwenodeAI teams for curating an event that felt less like a competition and more like the best room we have been in all year. And to Crusoe and Wilson Sonsini for the support that made it happen.
The Life Before Me is built by Jonathan Saunders (Concentric Lab, San Francisco) and Tamas Kalman (Squidcode LLC). We are raising a pre-seed round. If what we are building resonates, we would love to hear from you.