← All Sections

K-Scale Hackathon (2024-2025)

In early 2024 I randomly decided to attend a social event hosted by GitHub at their San Francisco office. There I met Ben Bolte, who casually mentioned he had been working on Tesla’s Optimus project and had just quit to go through YC and build his own humanoid robotics company. That was my introduction to K-Scale Labs.

K-Scale was a startup based in Atherton, California, close to where I live. I stopped by their hacker house (or hacker mansion, more accurately) and got to see, for the first time in my life, a humanoid robot in person. In late 2024, humanoid robots were all over X, but still rare to see in real life. I got nerd-sniped and started spending more time there, experimenting with their repo, and attending hackathons they hosted, including one on December 14, 2025.

The theme of the hackathon was robot olympics, and K-Scale opened up their hardware for events including dancing, boxing, soccer, and an open category. They had full-sized humanoids and a smaller platform they called Zeroth. I teamed up with other attendees: Kyle Kaveny, Michael Antoun, Marcus Veloso, Andy Prevalsky, and Neil Chen.

My main contribution was a simple Python script that used a camera feed to detect human motion, generate a skeleton wireframe, and translate that into motion commands for the Zeroth robot. Demo video: watch on YouTube.

That code was used for the dancing category, shown in the video below.

Other events our team participated in included boxing (where we went undefeated) and soccer, shown in the clips below.

Overall, our team placed 3rd (arguably 1st judging by crowd reactions, but judges really favored Rust and we were a 100% Python team), and we took home our own Zeroth robot as the prize. Weekend recap embedded below.

Unfortunately, K-Scale Labs is no longer around. You can read Ben’s writeup here. Zeroth still lives on and is being continued by ex-team members at zeroth0.com.

If you want to see the vibe and the kind of work being done at the K-Scale house during that time period, watch the video below. It sums it up pretty well.