Can you actually build a meaningful business in a weekend and have it still be running years later?

Social entrepreneurship can feel lonely, overwhelming, and undefined, especially when you care deeply about a cause but have no idea how to turn that passion into a functioning business. That's exactly the gap GiveBackHack was designed to fill.

Adam Morris pulls back the curtain on the Columbus, Ohio-based organization that gave him his own entrepreneurial start, sharing how a weekend hackathon format rooted in applied design thinking has launched real businesses tackling real community problems. The secret isn't building a finished product. It's getting the right people in a room, surfacing your assumptions, and then actually going out to test them by talking to real people.

Adam walks through the stories of participants like Karen, whose research on Black caregivers became the foundation of her nonprofit Pair to Care; Leah, an AmeriCorps volunteer who discovered that a crumpled piece of paper with outdated resource phone numbers was failing the people she served; and Wesley, the rapid-prototyping tech wizard who embodies the "scrappy and fast" philosophy that separates learning entrepreneurs from stuck ones.

Along the way, Adam reflects on his own journey launching Wild Tiger Tees, a screen-printing business that employed youth experiencing homelessness at the Star House, and what it taught him about what entrepreneurship actually feels like from the inside.

At its core, this episode is about something bigger than business. It's about building authentic human connections, slowing down in an AI-accelerated world, and creating spaces where people feel genuinely heard. GiveBackHack, it turns out, is less a startup event and more a community transformation engine.

Episode in a glance

00:00 What is GiveBackHack and why Adam cares deeply about it

02:42 How GiveBackHack was founded and why it broke from the traditional startup weekend model

04:28 Design thinking explained: testing assumptions before building solutions

08:30 Karen and Pair to Care: turning research into a social enterprise

10:27 Wild Tiger Tees: Adam's own GiveBackHack origin story

12:31 Wesley's scrappy prototyping approach and what it teaches us

14:03 Leah and Hunger Helper: learning from people experiencing the problem firsthand

16:59 The Impact of Rapid Change in Technology

19:15 What the best social entrepreneurs have in common

Interested in launching a social enterprise? Reach out to Adam or join his social impact mastermind group for entrepreneurs at the early stages of building something meaningful.