VIP Newsletter 002

ChristinaAsquith@ChristinaAsquithZachLatta@ZachLatta

Sent Wednesday, April 22, 2020, at 1:50 PM Eastern Time.

Dear all,

Elon Musk is speaking exclusively to Hack Club students this Friday. See details below if you'd like to join the audience.

Now, this is your 2-minute, bimonthly read on how we’re building Hack Club—thanks for this time together.

This week, I'm talking with a California school superintendent about Hack Club working with partners to systemically supporting remote education for some of the 15 million teenagers out of school. We’ve always worked directly with students, but now education leaders are coming to Hack Club and we want to help them understand Hack Club’s philosophy as they are restructuring. Your thoughts are welcomed.

  • Last week, Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist and Craig Newmark Philanthropies, gifted $25k to Hack Club to support young women’s leadership in Hack Club. Thank you Craig!
  • With Ron Conway’s $25k gift, we’ve launched a discretionary fund to aid students’ technical needs, particularly students experiencing COVID-19-related challenges. Through Hack Club Bank, we made our first micro-grants from this fund to support a Hack Club leader in Zambia transitioning their 20 schools to an online format.
  • This Friday at 4 PM ET / 1 PM PT, Elon Musk comes to Hack Club with a 30-min AMA with students. If you’d like the YouTube Live link, just reply here and ask.

Screenshot of model tweet from Jeff Hilnbrand

Upcoming community AMAs (all at 4PM ET / 1PM PT)

  • April 30: Jack Conte, CEO of Patreon, musician
  • May 7: Simone Giertz, YouTuber, self-described “shitty robot queen,” serial maker, inventor
  • May 14: Guillermo Rauch, founder of Vercel (formerly ZEIT, makers of Now & Next.js), creator of socket.io, mongoose, and slackin

How we’re making Hack Club better

During quarantine, our after-school clubs can’t meet, so the question we’ve been asking ourselves is: how do we make Hack Club the best place to be a teenager on the internet? To answer this question, last week we sent student-turned-staffer Matthew Stanciu to join our Slack community under a pseudonym. Based on his journey & interactions, he’s now built an all-new welcome experience now live on Slack as of yesterday morning.

In our last newsletter, we mentioned our partnership with Sam Lessin and Facebook making a website for the COVID-19 Global Hackathon. Our student-turned-staffer Lachlan Campbell made it happen, and we had 23k unique visitors & 61k pageviews in the first week. Check it out: https://covidglobalhackathon.com/

The San Francisco 49ers even tweeted about 16-year-old Hack Clubber Gina Choi’s incredible Notes for Support project built for the hackathon:

Screenshot of tweet from the SF 49ers

Lachlan also made an interactive visualization of all the high school Hack Clubs around the world. Check it out: https://hackclub.com/map/

High school student ships

Hack Clubbers never stop building. A few projects that’ve caught our eye in the last 2 weeks:

To everyone reading this: thank you. Hack Club would not be possible without the generous support of everyone on this small, friends and supporters-only list.

- Zach

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Zach Latta
Founder, Hack Club | zach@hackclub.com | Donate
@zachlatta / fb / web / github

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