The COVID-19 pandemic has given an unprecedented push to scientists in academia and industry to try their hand at drug discovery. We have seen this during our "Billion molecules against Covid-19 challenge", where even private individuals initially participated (but did not pass our internal peer-review at the report submission stage). Some novice teams were allowed to continue and submitted their compound lists, but not taking into account synthetic feasibility or ADME caused them to not have physical compounds made. We realized during the challenge that mistakes can easily be made when starting from questionable quality 3D protein structures from the Protein Databank (PDB). Fortunately, we had help from Insidecorona.net to point the teams to the best quality PDB entries for the protein targets the teams were working on. Since the challenge was organized as a winner-takes-all competition, the initial communication and sharing of results among teams was limited. The organizing team (coordinated by the last author) arranged the synthesis of compounds and all experimental studies. In hindsight, it would have been better to have a fully open communication with the teams immediately after the compound list submissions (July 2020). This would have further strengthened collaboration between protein crystallographers, computational scientists, and experimentalists. Overall, the challenge enhanced bridging of research fields, and accelerated communication (versus communication via peer-reviewed publications more traditionally).