Today is a bittersweet day for us...
Today is a bittersweet day for us.
Last week I shared that the Nepal–US Hackathon 2026 had crossed 600 applications.
That number didn’t stay there very long.
Applications officially closed yesterday with 1,300+ applicants from 12+ countries across 250+ cities.
On one hand, it’s incredibly exciting to see this level of interest from Nepalis around the world.
On the other hand, it meant we had to make some very difficult decisions.
The hardest part by far was selecting participants. Every other application seemed to have someone with an impressive background, strong experience, or an interesting idea. Turning people away wasn’t easy.
To be completely honest, we also weren’t fully prepared for that level of volume. Reviewing over a thousand applications quickly became a learning experience for our team.
Originally, we planned to host around 300–350 participants, but after seeing the level of interest, we stretched the capacity to around 450 participants.
Even with that expansion, we still had to make some tough calls.
This process surfaced a lot of learning curves for us as organizers — especially around the importance of over-communicating and being transparent about how decisions are made. That’s something we’ll do better next time.
The hackathon might not be perfect.
But the team is genuinely doing everything we can to make this a meaningful experience for everyone involved.
And if there’s one big takeaway from this process, it’s that we now have a much clearer idea of how to make the next edition even bigger and better.
This week, our focus shifts fully to execution.
We’ll be onboarding selected participants, making sure everyone has access to the right resources, matching teams with mentors, and troubleshooting anything that comes up along the way so the experience runs as smoothly as possible once the event begins.
As NLN continues to grow, we’re also making a few adjustments to where we focus our energy.
For now, we’ve decided to sunset the Leadership Speaker Series.
The reality is simple: we’d rather do a few things extremely well than spread ourselves too thin trying to run everything at once.
That includes upcoming professionals mixers, starting in Boston and expanding to New York City in April. I’ll share more details on that next week.
One quick note about the newsletter as well.
Until now, these updates usually had three sections:
• a leadership conversation we hosted
• what’s coming up next this month
• and a behind-the-scenes look at what we’re building and why
Since we’ve decided to sunset the Leadership Speaker Series, the newsletter will evolve as well.
Going forward, these updates will focus more on events we’re organizing and weekly updates on what we’re building as an organization.
More soon,
Shreyas K. Shrestha
Founder, Nepali Leaders Network
PS. If you made it this far, you’re a real one. These newsletters might be my favorite way to stay connected with everyone.
