Sent on Wednesday, May 6, 2020, at 2:35 PM Eastern Time.
Hi everyone,
More than 90,000 people watched Hack Club’s sit-down with Elon Musk 11 days ago. Last month, over 600 new high school students joined Hack Club, our weekly Slack activity went up 50%, and Hack Club’s Twitter gained nearly 7,500 followers.
Elon said Hack Club students “asked better questions than all the mainstream media” and closed with “I’m not one for false praise…I’m much more optimistic about the future after having this conversation.” Watch the interview here or this short clip.
Here’s your 2-minute read on how we’re building Hack Club—sent to 83 major donors and friends. Thanks for this time together.
How you can help:
- Introduce us to one of these 10 people for a future AMA: Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, Edward Snowden, Serena Williams, Patrick Collison, Anne Wojcicki, Jack Dorsey, Melinda Gates
- Take a 15-minute phone call with me next week to share how you hired during the early stages of your company. I want to get our 5th full-time hire right. (Thanks Tom Preston-Werner for our call yesterday.)
- Be part of our movement to build a generation of hackers in every high school. It’ll take $10 million and 5 years. Ask to read our 1-page vision & share feedback.
Our updates:
Two corporations reached out to Hack Club in the last 2 weeks: Ernst and Young inquired about being on our board; then last week, Adobe Education offered to have Hack Club become their high school partner. Currently, Hack Club’s only corporate partner is GitHub, but we’re considering both these companies.
Alumni & staffer Lachlan Campbell made a new homepage for Hack Club in 13 hours, showcasing our massive program changes post-COVID. Our new goal: make Hack Club the best place to be a teenager into technology on the internet.
Last week, we ran an AMA with Patreon CEO Jack Conte, which you can watch here. Tomorrow, students will join Simone Giertz, a kickass 29-year-old female inventor famous for converting her Tesla into an electric truck and for making dozens of viral silly robot GIFs. 30% of our RSVPs are women, our highest yet. If you’d like to watch, it’s at 2 PM PT / 5 PM ET tomorrow—we’ll tweet the livestream link @hackclub shortly beforehand (or feel free to email me).
To onboard the hundreds of incoming teenagers to our Slack, last week 18-year-old Hack Club alumni Matthew Stanciu built @Clippy, a humorous bot that introduces new students to Hack Club’s Slack and kickstarts them in making new friends.
The emotional toll of quarantine on Hack Clubbers is evident reading some of the 8,000 daily Slack messages. Many students are asking each other for coding help, but our anonymous #confessions channel shows the strain of not seeing friends for nearly 2 months. We hope to make Hack Club the best place to be a teenager on the internet and we’re seeing so many students supporting each other, having thoughtful conversations, and building & shipping amazing projects such as these:
- Justina C. (Vernon Hills, IL) launched reflect, a Chrome extension for more mindful browsing
- Dalton C. (alum from Mason, OH now at USC) made a website with mental health resources for his classmates
- Kat H. (alum from Lowell, MA now at MIT) is starting an online book club during COVID, Anytime Book Club
- Neel R. (San Ramon, CA) used Next.js & the Prismic CMS to rebuild his blog Notebook as a static site
- James K. (Denver, CO) made Pixtools, a Discord bot for Minecraft players, as part of MLH’s Hack at Homehackathon, and many more.
We’re planning to build a webpage showing off student projects in real-time sometime soon.
As always, thank you for all your support and I always appreciate replies to these emails. If you have an extra moment, check out this article on Elon’s Hack Club AMA.
- Zach
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Zach Latta
Founder, Hack Club | zach@hackclub.com | Donate
@zachlatta / fb / web / github
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