2025
Pitchfest
July 11-13 | Virtual
Pitchfest 2025 has concluded with participants all across the globe!
What is Pitchfest 2025?
Welcome to Pitchfest 2025 — a dynamic virtual conference for high school students at the crossroads of technology and entrepreneurship. Dive into a fast-paced pitch competition where you’ll craft innovative solutions to real-world challenges and compete for hundreds of dollars in prizes. Gain exclusive insights from distinguished speakers, including a Senior Director at Meta and a Systematic Trading Quant Strategist at PIMCO. Whether you’re passionate about emerging tech, business strategy, or creative problem-solving, Pitchfest 2025 offers the platform to turn your ideas into impact. Your breakthrough starts here!
Timeline
Pacific Standard Time (GMT-8)
Registration opens
June
Opening ceremony + Prompt released
July 11 @ 2:30 PM
Speaker David Yu (PIMCO)
July 11 @ 2:45 PM
Work day + pitch preparation
July 12 all-day
Pitch Presentations
July 13 @ 6:00 AM
Speaker Chunqiang Tang (META)
July 13 @ 8:00 AM
Awards!
July 13 @ 9:00 AM
Pitchfest 2025 has concluded. Stay tuned for future W3B events!
Cash prizes will be split amongst team members and can be replaced by an equal-value donation to a charity of their choice.
$70
$100
$30
About the Speakers
Qihang (David) Yu
Systematic Trading Quant Strategist at PIMCO
Qihang (David) Yu is a systematic trading quant strategist in one of the world's largest asset managers. Also, as a founder of Quantitative Bros, a cutting-edge crypto systematic trading system. It transfers innovative trading ideas into practical, executable strategies. With extensive professional background in systematic trading, encompassing data analysis, research, and portfolio construction, the experience allows him to design a highly extensible trading system that integrates sophisticated insights, setting us apart from those with purely engineering-focused backgrounds. His goal is to leverage these capabilities to develop robust trading solutions that can adapt to the dynamic nature of the crypto market. David holds a dual degree of Mathematics and Quantitative Economics in University of California, Irvine, and he also holds one master’s degree in Quantitative Finance in Fordham and Computer Science in Georgia Institution of Technology.
Chunqiang Tang
Senior Director at META
Chunqiang Tang is a Senior Director of Engineering at Meta/Facebook. He joined Facebook in 2013 and has worked on a wide range of production systems used by billions of users, encompassing AI, ASIC/GPU/Accelerator, LLM/Llama, hardware/software co-design, High Performance Computing (HPC), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and databases. Prior to Facebook, he was a research scientist and manager at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.
Pitchfest 2024 is sponsored by
Better Giving
About the Judges
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Damodhara Reddy Palavali
Damodhara Reddy Palavali is a Senior IT professional with over 15 years of experience in full-stack development, enterprise architecture, and AI/ML integration. He has delivered impactful solutions for leading organizations like JPMorgan Chase, American Honda, and the U.S. Social Security Administration. An AWS-certified developer, DZone author, and current Generative AI postgraduate student at Illinois Tech, he recently served as a judge at the Hidden Leaf Hackathon.
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Jeet Mehta
Jeet Mehta is a seasoned software engineer specializing in high-scale distributed systems and ad tech infrastructure. He currently leads engineering initiatives at Netflix for their Ad stack and previously worked at Amazon.