Sent Thursday, April 9th, 2020 at 1:25 PM Eastern Time.
The following is a brief update on Hack Club. We send it every other week, only to our supporters and friends. If you'd prefer not to receive it, click here.
Dear friends,
Zach here, founder of Hack Club. I'm writing from my co-quarantine with several members of the Hack Club team in Vermont. We have a beautiful view of the Green Mountains out here.
Entering our third week of nationwide school closures, Hack Club continues to gain momentum, with more students joining, another new donor, an exciting new video series with tech leaders, and some incredible student projects shipped.
I'm excited to announce Elon Musk will be the next guest speaker for Hack Club's ask-me-anything video series (AMAs). This is a private call for students, but you're welcome to listen in; please email me directly.
On March 27th, we had our 2nd AMA with Hack Club students featuring Facebook's former Head of Product, Chris Cox. Chris talked about early Facebook days, managing 2.5 billion users, spaces vs. tabs, and the world he would create in 500 BC. More than 100 Hack Clubbers participated. Thanks for Ron Conway and Sam Lessin for introducing us to Chris. Watch the recording.
Hack Club is doing two things with our students right now: (1) offering a friendly online community with mental health support and (2) helping our students use this time to build projects. To provide support, our Slack channel for girls and femme people in Hack Club had their first meetup (over Zoom) over the weekend and has started hanging out regularly.
Our students are building and launching projects at an incredible rate. Two of our favorites since our last update are a meadow for your computer & a poem set to an original piano song. This past Wednesday and Thursday, we hosted two "Code in the Dark" activity nights, where 30 Hack Club students competed in a series of 5-minute website-building challenges. Meanwhile, GitHub featured the Predict COVID site Hack Club's Lachlan Campbell and I made on their blog. We have much more to share as we continue building out our curriculum.
To help our students build both their networks & technical skills, Hack Club became the official student partner of the COVID-19 Global Hackathon, which attracted 18,000 engineers from 175 countries to build COVID solutions (which we believe makes it the largest hackathon ever). I got my first tech job after working on a hackathon with experienced developers when I was 14, so it was great to see hundreds of our students participate, including making a judge-favorite project Notes for Support (this is a remarkable project, Gina Choi—Hack Club leader and HS junior—has already sent 1,200 notes to hospitals through it). Facebook is leading the organizing, and they'll be announcing featured projects tomorrow with a website built by Lachlan. Read the update they sent during the event.
Finally, we want to thank our generous donors. Gerry Ohrstrom of New York City pledged $20k to Hack Club this week, and is introducing us to two friends of his who might be interested in learning more about Hack Club's mission to improve tech & science for young people across the country. We so appreciate everything our community does to support us.
I hope you and your families are safe and healthy. Expect another update in 2 weeks.
- Zach
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Zach Latta
Founder, Hack Club | zach@hackclub.com | Donate
@zachlatta / fb / web / github