How do you do, fellow Hack Clubbers?
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Changelog
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Weâre here with Zach Latta. Zach, you reached out late last year sometime; I want to say you actually called us. Did you call us?
Yeah. Yeah, I called your number on your website.
Gosh⌠Thatâs right, man. Youâre one of the few, and one of the proud that actually take the phone number, put it into a phone, and make it ring, and then somebody answers. And that somebody is almost always me, because Jerod doesnât have this connection.
I donât. Iâm not going to answer.
I can forward a call to you, Jerod, but it goes to me usually, because I set it up forever ago. Itâs Grasshopper turned something else, I donât know what it is⌠But yeah, we have a phone number, and Zach called us, which was the coolest.
So maybe this is related⌠I actually noticed today, Zach, because I was on your website, hackclub.com, that in the footer there youâve got a phone number in your footer. And I thought either Zach likes to get phone calls, or maybe he was inspired by Adam actually answering, or maybe that preexisted. I donât know, was your 800 number, was that a new thing? Or did that preexist this phone call you made?
No, weâve had it for few years, but it rings my phone number, among others on the team.
And yeah, I mean, I think that itâs important that you can get in touch with a human. And I think that the beauty of technology is that allows us to take away all the things that robots can do to, let us focus on the things that humans can do. And I think that human-to-human connection is kind of important.
Yeah, for sure. How did you feel whenever I answered your call? âŚa human, given your position.
Well, I think you were driving, and you were âWho is this? Why are you calling?â [laughter] And then we got it going, and I was âOh, my God, I am so excited to be talking to you one-on-one.â So I was excited when you when you picked up. And the reason I called was every few months a bunch of teenagers at Hack Club come together to build some sort of open source project. And we had just shipped one of our most recent projects, which was an open source game console called Sprig. Itâs super-cool. Itâs like a combination of a piece of hardware. Itâs like a custom PCB board that you can hold, and itâs an online game engine thatâs like perfect for people who are just starting to get involved in programming, with game development. And we were reaching out to a few different folks. Hackaday did a profile, front page Hacker News, it was getting popular in different parts of the open source community⌠So I was reached out because I wanted to share it with you.
I recall that. I like those phone calls. And Iâm sorry, because sometimes I get those calls, and I always answer, because I canât not answer. I have to answer. And then sometimes I forget that itâs potentially this number, our business number calling, and Iâm âWhy are you calling? Whoâs this again?â But either way, we talked for like 30 or 40 minutes and I was just âMan, you all have something cool happening at Hack Club.â I found out about you I think by way of Quinn Slack. He was on Founders Talk a while back, and I know that, if I understand correctly, Tom Preston-Werner, one of the co-founders of GitHub, is an investor, I believe⌠You can correct me if Iâm wrong, but I knew of Hack Club, to some degree, and I was like â I was happy that you called, basically. After I was on the call with you, I was like âMan, this is exciting.â
I mean, weâve always been a fan of the younger hacker generation. Jerod and I both have children, so we aspire to have children who respect technology, and understand it, and can use it the same way we do it, if not better; hopefully better. But we love the past, present and future hacker generation just as well as anybody, soâŚ
Awesome. Yeah, and Quinn and Tom have both been incredible supporters of the mission. As a nonprofit, we rely on the generosity of the technology community to make Hack Club free and available to teenagers today. And both Tom and Quinn have been founding board members of Hack Club; theyâve been involved since the very beginning. And really, so much of the amazing work happening in the community would not be possible without either of them. So a big thank you to both of them.
[00:08:13.27] Anybody else you can name? Since weâre naming Quinn and Tom, anybody else you can name thatâs founding board members or integral folks there, helping the mission of Hack Club?
Yeah, I mean, the beauty of Hack Club is Hack Club isnât me, itâs not the staff at the headquarters, itâs not our board members. Itâs the community of teenagers all over the country or the world that make this open source movement possible. And there are hundreds and now over a thousand teenagers who develop and spend their time every week building the communities and projects that they themselves want to have, and want to participate in. And theyâre the ones who really make Hack Club possible.
We were very lucky to have a great donor community. We operate with 100% transparent finances, so anyone - the public, a teenager, anyone curious can go to bank.hackclub.com/hq and you can literally see our bank account balance, every transaction, every donor. Our supporters range from people who have built prominent open source projects in their free time, like the guy who created Cydia from the jailbroken iPhone. Jay Freeman, heâs a monthly supporter of Hack Club. Thereâs a number of technology founders that are supporters of Hack Club. Elon Musk is a big supporter of Hack Club. And really, all these different people are coming together, because they have had their lives touched in a way where it transformed them in some way, shape and form through technology, and they want to make that something thatâs free and available, and something thatâs more supported for the next generation of hackers and makers and doers.
And really, thank you both for having me on, and a chance to kind of share more of the Hack Club mission with the broader audience. It takes a big tent to reach lots and lots and lots of young people, and our partners are so much more than open source contributors or donors. Itâs like, we rely on people like you to get the word out as well, so thank you.
Yeah. Happy to have you on. I know that - Jerod, I was looking through our transcripts, and I was looking for Hack Club, like how have we talked â thank the good Lord weâve got these beautiful, open source, black and white, anybody can contribute transcripts of our podcast, because theyâre even a treasure trove for us even. I was on episode 369 of the Changelog here, this show, with Quincy Larson, âFive years of Free Code Campâ, and on that show, Quincy was talking about the financial viability of freeCodeCamp, and what they had done before they kind of got their situation in order, so to speak, to take better donations, and have a more financially sound funnel, I suppose, to support the cause. And Zach, youâd be happy to know that - I donât know if you know Quincy personally, but heâs a fan of you, and before they were taking donations themselves directly, they were suggesting, Women Who Code, or Hack Club, and Hacker Dojo⌠This is directly from the transcript. So he was suggesting donations to you all as well as a by proxy supporter.
Thatâs cool.
Yeah. And a huge thank you to Quincy and the broader freeCodeCamp community. I donât know if they know how big the impact of that at the time was⌠When they added us to their Donate page, I was 17, on my own. I think I had one team member. So desperately trying to make Hack Club something that existed in the world. And that single Donate page on their site drove more donations than any other source that year.
And it literally meant that we could pay rent. So really, thank you so much to him. And I know we have a lot of crossover and cooperation in our communities. freeCodeCamp is amazing.
Thatâs beautiful. Most beautiful.
Well, letâs dive into your story a little bit. Silicon Valley, and tech people⌠The lore of the founder has a lot of like college dropout vibes, and I was happy to see that you have one-upped the founders of many Silicon Valley companies. Who drops out of college? Anybody can drop out of college. Zach actually drops out of high school, his freshman year, to get this thing going. Do you wanna tell that story?
[00:12:03.20] Yeah, sure. So by way of background, Iâm Zach, Iâm the founder of Hack Club. And I grew up in Southern California, where both my parents were social workers. My mom worked in foster care, and my dad in homelessness, and I went to public schools, that like most schools in America still today didnât offer any coding classes. And I was really lucky enough to be part of, I think, one of the first generations that really didnât know a world without the Internet. And when I would get home from school, starting in like third grade, I would just â like, I could not pull myself away from the computer. It felt like âOh, my God. This is where the secrets of the Universe lie.â And when I realized that you could learn how to code and not just consume stuff from the computer, but be one of the creators, that was the most exciting, interesting idea, and Iâm like âSomehow I have to figure out how to be one of these wizards that knows how to do this.â
And I, got involved, I taught myself after school on the internet, and when I made it to high school, I felt so incredibly lonely, because it felt like the one thing I wanted to do with all my time, which was make things with code, was also the one thing I couldnât do at the one place where I had to spend all my time, which was school. And I think generally â I kind of had felt like thereâs this whole path thatâs set up for young, ambitious people. First you do x, then you do y, then you do z. And I always felt like a bit of a misfit within that. And I ended up dropping out of high school after my freshman year. I had moved to San Francisco when I was 16 to become a programmer. I helped make one game that became the most popular game at the App Store at the time. Itâs called Football Heroes, you can still download it. I was like a junior programmer on the team, and probably held us back more than I contributed⌠And that was like an incredibly meaningful chance to work on a real piece of software for the first time.
And then I helped build an app called Yo!, which was like Facebook Messenger but the only word you could send to people was the word yo. And the idea was like âWhat if we build an app thatâs like so silly, so ridiculous that it can become viral just from that premise?â
[00:14:07.03] âGuys, something interesting just happened⌠So I downloaded Wajeedâs Bro app out of curiosity, and found it very sticky. Iâve never felt like I was anyoneâs bro before. The only people who have used that term with me were assailants⌠But I started bro-ing people, and getting bro back. And all of a sudden, Iâm bros with all kinds of people, including a guy from Branscomb Ventures.
Branscomb? Thatâs a solid shop.
So we bro-ed about this and that, and then when he heard I worked at Pied Piper, he got excited, he tripled-liked my bro, and he asked about meeting us.
Jared, what did you tell him?
I was waiting a bit to bro him back, so that I donât seem overeagerâŚ
Bro him back, bro him⌠Weâre not dead yet, guys.â
And that just absolutely blew up, and became the number one app on the App Store.
I remember that. What year was that?
That was 2014.
And there were like â the BBC was doing stories on how people in Israel were using Yo! to let people know of missile strikes that were happening⌠I mean it was really, really crazy.
Love it. Did they develop Morse code style ways of being more complicated, or is it literally they just say âYo!â and that meant there was a missile strike? Do you know?
Youâd get a âYo!â from an account called âIsrael missile strike alertâ or something like that, that just said âYo!â.
Geez⌠[laughs]
Itâs kind of like âI am Groot.â I am Groot, he says like âI am Groot!â
It means everything.
Thatâs what he says, but people take away different things.
Yeah, totally. And that was like the most ridiculous introduction, I think, to the world of technology. I mean, we literally had - Marc Andreessen wrote an article about one-bit communication. And like we ourselves I think were still like trying to figure out if we were serious about this or not. And I used the money from those two opportunities I had - which for me felt like an enormous amount of money, but really, in the grand scheme of things it was like $25,000 - to start Hack Club, to really try and create the sort of community that I so desperately wish I had when I was a teenager.
[00:16:01.24] And Hack Club today is a network of over 25,000 teenage programmers from all over the world. Weâre in all 50 states, weâre in 38 countries around the world. Thereâs after school Hack Clubs in high schools, thereâs amazing open source projects built by our community⌠I mean, if you use an iPhone, or an Android phone, or anything that runs â I mean, you literally run code written by Hack Clubbers every single day. And some of the things that alumni do are just amazing.
And I think the broader mission of the organization is - like, every day, thousands of young people are having some sort of spark with technology, where theyâre like âOh, my God, I can be a creator and not just a consumer.â That is the most exciting idea on the planet. And thereâs just absolutely nothing to help them carry that forward. And I think we want to live in a world where in the same way you can pursue varsity sports, or the same way you can pursue different subjects as a teenager, where you make that like the primary thing you do outside of class, we want to live in a world where thereâs an ecosystem for the coders and for the makers and for the doers, where you can make building things for the joy of it the primary thing to do outside of class as a teenager. And I think that ultimately, when I think about the long term - like, I think young people today need a new cultural institution that really works for them. It needs to be something thatâs positive. Weâre gaining real skills, weâre connected with like-minded people across zip codes. And I want to live in a world where Hack Club can become as ubiquitous and as universal and as culturally foundational for young people today as groups like the Girl and Boy Scouts have been for young people in the past. I think young people need this, and they want it, and theyâre trying to find it. And when you look at what happens in the community - I mean, itâs amazing what teenagers are capable of when we really give them belief and support, and create a community.
Ooh! Take that, put that on a T-shirt⌠[unintelligible 00:17:53.20]
[laughs] [unintelligible 00:17:55.10] put it on a T-shirt.
I wanna put everything on a T-shirt. Thatâs my thing.
Yeah, you do.
I want to put it on a T-shirt. Yeah, for real, though. I mean, thatâs â while we donât quite embody what you do, Zach, we are there in spirit, because we say⌠Thatâs one of the reasons why we have the explicit tag not on our shows. We bleep out curse words, and things like that, because - not just for that younger generation, but just to make sure that everybody who can listen to podcasts, and gain value from this - you know, that thatâs possible. But itâs also for those folks out there that are either young and listening to our show, teenagers, and making sure that theyâre included and welcome, but also those parents or aunts and uncles or whatever it might be listening to our shows with younger generations in the car. Either by osmosis they get interested, but itâs also just that protective layer. But we want to make sure that everyone is welcome to this community, this Changelog community that we have, and whatever it is currently, and wherever it will go in the future.
Weâre not out there doing hackathons, and doing the things youâre doing, but weâre definitely there in spirit. Thatâs why I thought, when that phone call happened that I was talking about in the first part of the show - like, I knew we had to get you on the show. I knew we had to kind of dig into your personal story. I did not know - this is terrible research of me; I did not know about Yo! It kind of reminds me of âBroâ from Silicon Valley, but I did not know about your involvement in âYo!â And thatâs kind of like the cherry on top of this little cake weâve got here called Zach.
Well, Iâm really happy to be here with you guys, and thank you for saying that.
I hate to do it, because Adam will derail this conversation⌠But if I just pull that thread on the Silicon Valley thing⌠Bro, right?
That was âYo!â, wasnât it? Like, theyâre basically riffing on âYo!â, arenât they? Thatâs to you, Zach.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, when I first moved to San Francisco, I was 16, and I was living in a house of college dropouts who were all three or four years older than me, which felt like enormous at the time. And we would have different â and we were all different people trying to make it in Silicon Valley in some way, shape, or form. And when the TV show came out, we started watching the episodes as a stream each week togetherâŚ
And when season two hit, the first episode, we kind of had this âOh, my God!â moment, because it was about - theyâd gotten a bunch of people together at the AT&T Stadium in San Francisco for like a silly VR type event. And one of the people in the house ran that event. She was an associate at the firm that put that together. We were like âThis is getting too close to real life.â And then the following week, in the second episode of season two, they did an episode where one of the plotlines was about this ridiculous app called âBroâ, where the only word you can send is the word âBro.â They get tons of VC money, it totally blows up.
âI think weâre gonna have to crunch your burn rate again. Even with the $50,000 from TechCrunch, weâre not gonna last very long.
Wait, wait, wait. No, no, no. Richard said we were gonna split that money, right? 10,000 each.
I donât think we can afford to do that anymore.
I just donated $5,000 to my cousin Wajeedâs Kickstarter campaign. Heâs trying to get an app called Bro off the groundâŚ
Itâs the messaging app that lets you send the word âBroâ to everyone else who was the app. So itâs exactly like the Yo! app.
Yes. But less original.â
So for me, I was hired as a first engineer on it, and my job was to make it something that could process millions of push notifications quickly. And we were trying to figure out what the real business behind it would be. But it was just this completely ridiculous, larger than life kind of moment and interaction, and I feel like that era of Silicon Valley, of like 2012 to 2018 - I feel so lucky to have played a small part in that⌠Because that was a really magical time. I think everyone felt like anything was possible, and that was before a lot of the cynicism today had kind of set it.
[00:25:43.22] And itâs interesting working with Hack Clubbers, because as teenagers enter technology today, they read the articles about the cynicism, they read the articles about âYou know, maybe all this isnât so good.â And itâs interesting, because I think that younger people want to feel like they can go on an adventure. They want to do the really exciting, interesting things. And in some ways, I think itâs starting to feel like a lot of the paths that are open in technology are feeling a little closed off. And I think thatâs part of where the excitement around things like AI and whatnot are, where itâs like âOh my God, thereâs this new exciting thing that hasnât really been walked yet as a path.â
For sure. Whatâs interesting is how uncanny that was to your life in the moment. I mean, how could you be watching Silicon Valley and season two, episode two comes out, itâs basically â I mean, itâs riffing on what you had done with Yo! I mean, itâs totally â I mean, theyâre trying to mimic what happened in real life Silicon Valley. Whatâs even cooler is how that went on to play â like, Bro was acquired by a different company, and they sold it to somebody else⌠And Majeed I believe is his name - Dineshâs cousin, who this is all like playing out in real life⌠And this may be, to some degree, part of your life - he ends up like $60 million as part of this acquisition. So this silly idea, this Yo!/Bro app was acquired by somebody else, and then they were acquired by somebody else⌠And hereâs Dinesh trying to essentially do well in Silicon Valley and get rich. His cousin gets rich. And that money fueled them buy Hooli later on. And it was part of the entire story, of the whole story arc of Silicon Valley⌠And that was season six. Like, this silly app, Yo!/BroâŚ
I havenât seen that season yet, Adam.
Donât spoil the end.
Well, you say youâre not gonna do it. Watch it already, JerodâŚ
Well, I reserve the right to act like Iâm gonna do it and be disappointed⌠I mean, I definitely donât have to watch it nowâŚ
Okay, well, there â okay⌠Well, spoiler alert delayed. My bad. Rewind. Yeah, it just played a critical role, basically. This silly thing played a critical role. And thatâs just so wild, because I guess one of the pushbacks when I ask people if theyâve seen this TV show is like âI canât watch it. Itâs too close to real life, and itâs kind of like traumatic.â I guess in your case it was probably not traumatic⌠But maybe it was. What do you think?
Well, after those two episodes we all felt like we had to stop watching it, because it felt like a parody. I havenât watched past season two, because after that I was like âThis is crazy.â
So youâve just spoiled it for both of us.
Hereâs me ruining it for both of you then.
I had no idea it played a larger role later in the story.
Yeah, it did. Well, I mean, the actual application itself. But I suppose the ramifications of the app being created; the silliness that it was, it became so critical to the long-term story of Silicon Valley, the show. SoâŚ
Actually, I hear in season eight thereâs gonna be a Hack Club. Have you heard this?
Yeah. Well, theyâre coming back for season seven, and theyâre beginning with Hack Club, yeah.
Thatâs why I picked eight. I figured Iâd go way out there on a limb⌠[laughs] Itâs gonna be for elementary school.
When you two talk to people, how are you hearing people talk about the future of tech for young people? And how are you hearing people talk about the cynicism as well?
Good question. I guess I donât hear many people talking about the future of tech for young people.
So they arenât, I guess. To us, at least. And maybe that some of it is selection bias.
The closest Iâve gotten so far is my son is in GT, and heâs - heâs in first grade. And heâs getting to play with 3D printers, and heâs got special classes he goes to that are like - gifted and talented is a program you have to get selected into. You test for it, and things like that. And you just learn at a different pace, you learn differently. And I havenât seen the cynicism, but I guess what I have seen, or I guess what Iâve interpreted from this is in this world of Hack Club, or in this world where you want to live in a world where this kind of thing is available, whether itâs GT, or a Hack Club type thing - theyâre very similar in nature; not the exact same, because GT is more focused on all things, rather than just coding⌠Iâve gotta imagine that at some point you have a lack of educators, right? Like, thatâs got to be â one, youâve got political oversight, and financial funding for schooling, and just different stuff like that that sort of gets limited⌠But itâs great to get the program out there, but you have to have the right kind of people involved to lead the classes, and smart enough to lead the classes⌠Because this stuff moves so fast. So I guess my personal [unintelligible 00:30:10.03] might be âOkay, great, Zach, youâve got people buying into this idea of a Hack Club, or a GT type thing for schools⌠But how do you then get the educators in place to ensure that it actually functions?â
[00:30:26.12] Totally. I mean, this is what everyone on the education side is trying to figure out⌠And itâs a huge challenge, because on one hand, if you spent a lot of time training someone as a teacher to learn how to code, so they can teach it, their job opportunities and the potential salaries are just so much larger outside of that. So thereâs a real â you know, one of the biggest problems of the computer science education space right now is hiring teachers. And one thing thatâs very unique about Hack Club is that there are no teachers. Everything within our community is led by teenagers, for teenagers. And that really came out of my own experience being a 16-year-old being like âWait a second⌠I can run hackathons. I can create these spaces that I want to be a part of.â And I think with that vibe inside the community, you get this kind of interesting dynamic where in the same way you see this kind of like competitive, or semi-competitive dynamic at open source, where everyoneâs trying to build the best JavaScript web framework, and you see these new things popping out, people forming opinions, you see some things that lots of people get behind⌠We see a lot of those same dynamics in Hack Club, where everyone wants to run the best hackathon, or everyone wants to run the best Hack Club. And people are sharing their learnings, but thereâs this almost competitive vibe to make your thing the best⌠And I think that what that means is that when you are a teenager and youâre a part of Hack Club, youâre always seeing new stuff at each event. And youâre always seeing new stuff in each meeting. Like, you donât have to wait for the state standards to be updated, so you can learn JavaScript instead of Java. If itâs cooler to teach JavaScript, people are just going to do JavaScript in all their meetings, and stuff like that.
One thing Iâve been thinking about and weâre trying to figure out right now is around the role of AI. And when I think about the operations of Hack Club today, we are only possible because of the open source community. And I think a lot of developers today take open source as a concept for granted. Itâs like âOh yeah, obviously all the technology that we use in the software world is open source by default.â But in my view, that was something that was only really possible because 20 to 40 years ago a handful of individuals had some radical ideas, worked really, really hard to build foundational technology, and a foundational ethos around open source. And weâre really benefiting from it today.
And I think something Iâm seeing from a lot of Hack Clubbers is theyâre excited about stuff like AI, but itâs so much less approachable than things like web development, because you need expensive GPU clusters; a lot of the stuff is quite impenetrable. Not all of the interesting stuff happening is being open source. And Iâm curious for both of you, how do we create a world where the future of AI and some of this new tech is going to be fully open, and something thatâs by the people, for the people, rather than owned by the few?
Thatâs a big question. We just talked about that a couple weeks back with Simon Willison, and we are seeing open source moves into this space. I think one of the most hopeful messages that Iâve learned of late with regard to large language models is that it doesnât have to get continually larger in order for them to be really, really good, especially once you are able to plug and play different info sources into them; they get to a point where they can be good enough to go find the answers, and not have them all baked in by training. And thatâs going to hopefully democratize access to running your own language models on your own hardware. Weâre already seeing the software get out there for running these things on commodity devices.
And so there are also open source efforts in this space, that are like, you know, six months, eight months, a year behind the bleeding edge, which in a competitive landscape is not good enough, but over the arc, the S curve of technology quality increase - I canât put that phrase together, but you know, that curve of innovation, eventually you get to the tail end of it, and the open source stuff can be right there alongside the proprietary stuff⌠Lacking certain data sources, of course.
[00:34:16.06] So I donât have an answer like âWe need to take steps one, two, and three in order to do thisâ, but I am hopeful now more than I was three months ago, four months ago, because weâre actually starting to see pretty good open source alternatives pop up.
Stuff like Alpaca, and whatnot?
Alpaca, and - let me just grab my notes⌠Thereâs a new one. Nope, itâs just an open tab. I donât have it.
[laughs] Just an open tab. Well, there is lots of effort in this front. You know, itâs the critical mass right now. Like, itâs the hype curve/rapid innovation curve, and thereâs a lot happening in this moment⌠And I think itâs been compared to the invention of the iPhone, the invention of the internet, in terms of its criticalness of the long-term future of - I would even say not just computing, but humanity. This is going to change everything.
We just did this show with Simon, that Jerod was referencing, Simon Willison⌠And on there I said itâs already changed so much for me. Itâs kind of given me, I guess, confidence in a way, because you can search on the internet for a solution to X, but you have to rely upon somebody else ever having that problem. And then you also have to have the time and the willingness to sort of search until the answer is found. And that might live in docs, that might live in a forum post, or wherever it might be, and these language models are really good at matching, pattern matching, and things like that. And so within an instant, ChatGPT, or Copilot X, or Cody, or what have you, can pretty much get you to - at least when it comes to programming, answers, to keep giving you direction. It may not be the final production version of it⌠Simon mentioned how he had scaffolded like the majority of a Python-based application or website or something like that, and he said, âWell, sure, this isnât my final production code, but itâs almost there.â It needs that final human touch to kind of get past everything else. And Iâm just hopeful that even though weâre in that moment where thereâs innovation, and thereâs the hype train, so to speak, that somewhere in there thereâs enough that has said open source has won, that it makes sense to make this free and available to humanity. Because we talked about that before again with Simon - like, if itâs locked behind one organizationâs hands; or will there be a great consolidationâŚ? Yeah, thatâs quite possible. Thatâs still quite possible. But Iâm hopeful that this last decade or more - like, even of this show. We began this show in 2009, right alongside of GitHub being founded. GitHub was founded in 2008, and we saw open source moving fast, we said ââWeâve got to keep upâ, and we started the blog, we started the show, and here we are almost 14 years later, still writing this open source train, so to speak⌠And I think itâs won. Like you had said, itâs kind of - you take it for granted almost that itâs gonna be open source. Iâm hoping that that truth and the power that that truth brings carries forward into this AI world. That thereâs some open models that we can all adopt. And will I do it? Of course not. But am I hopeful? I think I am.
Yeah. And the really hard math and statistics side of things are hard also for practitioners who are like working in the industry. And so of course itâs going to be overwhelming to youngsters coming to these things. But itâs also overwhelming to us âmature adultsâ, who are working in software development. Weâre very intimidated by those things. But I think what weâre finding is that a lot of the really difficult concepts are being lowered down to a place where you donât have to know exactly how this works, but you do have to know how to leverage it. And thatâs, I think, the power of abstraction.
[00:37:57.15] And I think ultimately, what you have is a person who learns how to leverage things, and then as theyâre going about leveraging - I know some people hate the term âleverageâ, but Iâm using it in its literal sense here⌠As youâre doing that, you run into problems, and you get to a point where youâve crossed the bounds of what you understand and what you donât understand⌠And thatâs where just like natural, autodidacts take over and you learn what you need to learn in order to get to that next phase. And eventually, over time, you become the expert. But I think that very much in the spirit of Hack Club, Zach, is that - thereâs no teachers there, right? So thereâs a lot of people who are at least willing to learn on their own, or to be with other people who learn. Was that part of the mix from the start? Youâre like âWeâre not going to have teachers. Weâre just going to hang out.â I guess maybe backing up a step⌠Whatâs the exact structure, like what is Hack Club operationally today? I know itâs hackathons, but what else is there for people to actually interact with?
Yeah. So Hack Club today is a few key programs. The first is thereâs a massive online community. Itâs all ran through Slack. There are 25,000 teenagers that are a part of it. Weâre about to cross 10 million messages sent, and itâs one of the most active online discussion spaces for teenage coders anywhere. And the discussions range from what itâs like being a teenager, to like people do really highly technical software in there.
One of the projects that was built now a few years ago by a Hack Clubber was called Nearly.js. Itâs a parsing library for JavaScript. It is now downloaded 2 million times a week on NPM. And jQuery is downloaded 6 million times a week on NPM, just to give that some perspective. And this is something where itâs like â that was built by an 18-year-old at the time, in their Hack Club meetings, and talking about some of that work on the Hack Clubâs Slack as they were doing it.
The second part of that club is just hackathons. So these are 24-hour-long coding marathons that happen on weekends, and theyâre all teenager-organized. Thereâs roughly 50 to 100 that happen a year regionally, and those are all led by teenagers.
The third is thereâs hundreds of after school Hack Club chapters where teenagers get together weekly to code together. These tend to be more beginner-oriented, because again, over 50% of high schools in the US donât offer a single coding class, and then in a lot of the schools this is the coding thing that exists. And whatâs cool is when you come to a meeting, itâs not like youâre signing up for a semester-long commitment as a young person; youâre just seeing âIs coding something Iâm into for an hour?â And as a result, youâre also writing code thatâs meaningful and relevant to you. Youâre shipping a project every week. So itâs real contextual, everything youâre doing.
And then finally - you know, the areas where I think Hack Club is really interesting and is really unique is weâre really the first major educational organization, structured and formed after the internet already existed. And what that means is that the internet is part of Hack Clubâs DNA in a way where you look at other organizations, theyâre still kind of trying to figure out how the Internet affects their organizing. And one thing that happens at Hack Club is anytime teenagers run into problems, internal tools that are open source get built by the community, that everyone starts using.
And that brings us to our final program, which we call Hack Club Bank. This is a financial tool. Itâs almost like Stripe Atlas, but for nonprofits, where if you want to start a nonprofit, or if you need a way to receive donations - and we originally formed it because our teenagers kept trying to run these events that had no way to receive money. Because if youâre under the age of 18, you canât open a bank account in most of the country. Itâs a financial tool. If you go to hackclub.com/bank, with one click you can proceed â you get 501(C)3 nonprofit status, you can receive donations, you get physical cards for spending funds, you can manage it with your team⌠And now thereâs 1010 organizations, many of them led by teenagers, that run through Hack Club Bank, and there are millions of dollars that we process on behalf of these groups all over the country each year.
[00:41:54.25] So those are kind of our key programs today. So thereâs the online community, thereâs clubs, thereâs hackathons, thereâs Hack Club Bank⌠And then we also do seasonal events and activities. Like, one thing we did a few months ago was we we did a project called Winter Hardware Wonderland. If you go to HackClub.com/winter, where we did an open call and we said âHey, if youâre a teenager and you want to build a hardware project, and youâve never done that before, buying components is expensive. So weâll buy all the components you need up to $250 per project if you submit a pull request to this GitHub repo with your stuff, if you meet the requirements and whatnot.â And in total, we have hundreds of projects built from like dozens of countries all over the world.
The projects ranged from like - there was this one student I think in Greece who built a plant soil monitoring system for their parentsâ garden, that helps you understand if the soil has a right components and the right setup to grow the plants that youâre trying to grow. Thereâs this one student in New York City who built a foldable kayak from scratch; they wanted to get into woodworking, so they wanted â itâs kind of crazy. Their final video submission was them in the kayak, in the Hudson.
Yeah. And thereâs like everything in between. Yeah, it works.
Thatâs awesome.
So thatâs kind of a high-level overview. And thereâs always new stuff happening. One of the things weâre about to launch is a math game called SineRider. If you go to sinerider.com - thatâs going to go live this Friday, and thatâs this beautiful math game that a handful of teenagers and an engineer on our team have built together. Itâs kind of like if youâve ever played with a TI-84, or if youâve ever played with graphing calculators, or now for young people today if you like Desmos, this is like the ultimate game for you. And thereâs always stuff like this happening in the community if you get involved.
Super-cool. Let me close a loop on that open tab⌠Free DALL-E, DALL-E 2.0 was just released today from Databricks. The worldâs first truly open instruction-tuned LLM. So this is an LLM open-sourced and available to anybody, with the opportunity of giving it instructions. So just another example. Alpaca, a big oneâŚ
What was the name again?
This is called Dolly 2.0 from the Databricks team. They just released it today.
Oh, man⌠They missed the opportunity to call it Open Dolly. Like, âHello, Dolly.â
They said âFree Dolly.â Maybe theyâre just compensating â or you know, theyâre wanting to have that word free in there⌠Like Free Willy maybe. AnywaysâŚ
Thatâs true. Free Willy. Sure.
I just wanted to close that loop, since I left it hanging open, and Iâve found my open tab. Letâs focus in â thatâs a lot of different programs, man; like, different wings of Hack Club at this point. Letâs talk about the afterschool programs, because I think thereâs so much potential power in that. Youâve got kids that donât fit in with the sports, maybe they donât fit in with the drama team, maybe they donât want to do this, that or the other thing⌠A lot of times, if you donât have anything after school, you end up merely either like bored at home, watching TV, or worse, out getting in trouble. And so an after school program around technology I think is just spectacular. How does that work? You mentioned itâs teenager-run⌠How do people find out about it? How do kids get involved? And then how do you start one?
Yeah. Well, so Hack Clubs are groups of teenagers that get together weekly, after school. Usually, thereâs like 5 to 15 teenagers in each club. And the purpose of these is theyâre like mini-hackathons that happen every week at your school. If youâre a teenager and you want to start a club, you just go to hackclub.com, thereâs a whole registration process; we really work with everyone who wants to. And we have what we kind of call internally like a âclub in a boxâ setup, where thereâs a whole set of open source materials that range from workshops that you could do inside of your club meetings, to marketing materials, we print millions of stickers that we ship to clubs all over the world⌠And if you do this, youâd be joining this global community of other clubs all over the country, all over the world, who are all on the same mission as you.
I think that for a lot of teenagers, you donât really know other people that share your love and interest for technology, or maybe if you have that first spark, you donât really know what that best way to get started is. And we really believe in the hacker way, which is that if you want to learn how to code, the best way to do it is just to start writing code. And I think that a lot of kind of education programs around technology can try to be very elite, where Hack Clubâs not elite at all.
[00:46:15.25] We donât believe anyone is born with some special abilities that make you better at coding than others. We think your ability as a coder is just a function of how many hours you spent coding. And if you start a club or you join a club at your school, or come together weekly, every week youâre writing code for at least an hour - thatâs a great entrypoint into the broader Hack Club ecosystem.
And the reason why we have all these other things that are happening in Hack Club too is that if youâre a club member itâs not super-exciting just to come together weekly, and you write code with the same group of people. You want to feel part of something a lot larger than yourself. So if youâre part of a club, youâre going to hackathons happening near you, thereâs online stuff youâre participating in⌠Kind of a whole gamut of stuff. But the best way to start is just go to HackClub.com and check it out.
I love that. So how do you reach schools and teenagers who would have no idea that Hack Club exists? It seems like there are probably a lot of those. And itâs probably like that perfect prototype teenager whoâs at their school, wishing for something like this, but theyâre just not aware. Are there ambassador programs? Is there ways for adults to help this mission without necessarily start â because you canât start a Hack Club. But could you help with awareness? Because a lot of our listeners, and myself, for instance - we canât start Hack Clubs. But we would love to help spread the word somehow. Are there official or better ways of doing that?
Yeah. The reason why everything at Hack Club is student-led is because that is â weâve found the model that works best through that. Probably the best way if youâre an adult and wanting to help support Hack Club in your community, or if you have kids that are interested in technology, is to go to HackClub.com and thereâs an email list at the bottom that you can sign up for. What weâve found is the best way to help new people get into the ecosystem is every roughly two to three months weâll launch some sort of new product that teenagers can engage with directly.
One I mentioned earlier was Sprig, which was that open source game console. Another one is SineRider, which weâre doing now. Another one thatâs coming up is weâre building this open source almost like CNC machine, where itâs fully 3D printed, itâs really cheap to build⌠And with all these projects, thereâs some element of - like, if youâre a teenager, and youâre an individual, and you do some action thatâs educational in nature⌠Or for example with Sprig, if you build a game and you ship it, weâll ship you a free console. So the parts to build your own.
With the new drawing machine, if you â weâre doing like a generative art thing where if you make some general piece of art using code and ship it, weâll then ship you all the components you need to build your own machine that can actually produce that art.
So signing up to that email list and sharing those things with the young people in your life - that tends to be a great entrypoint into Hack Club. Because starting a club out the gate - thatâs like a big commitment. And clubs only really succeed or fail at schools based on the student leadership. And sometimes a parent or like a teacher will be like âI really want to start a Hack Club at my schoolâ, and theyâll start meetings, or something like that, but they donât really have that teenager that falls in love with it and really wants to make it their own. And what happens is it always fizzles out after a few months. You have to have a charismatic leader on the ground. So thatâs where we have these kind of other entrypoints for people into the Hack Club ecosystem.
Yeah. What you see on that homepage, or at least the landing page for it - it says âDonât run your coding club alone. Make it a Hack Club.â So I guess the secret model really is donât be alone in doing this.
Something that â and Jerod, I donât know if you were in a fraternity when you were in college or not, but I know my wife, she was in a sorority, and she had a sorority mom. And sheâs like our surrogate grandmother to this day; like, sheâs super-close in our life. I wonder if you can have â if youâve thought about models where you can involve⌠A sorority mom to a sorority isnât there to sort of guide the sorority; they donât run it, but theyâre there to sort of help with adulty things, I suppose, and to be a guide, and to be a mentor, and to be you an inspiration to some degree with those younger folks in that club, basically. Sorority, fraternity⌠Similar in nature. Have you guys considered how â is that the extent that you let adults sort of play roles? Like, I get it, theyâre gonna fizzle out if you donât have a teenager whoâs really charismatic, as you said, and involved⌠Is there a model where thereâs like a sorority mom type person, that can play a role?
[00:50:26.26] Right now, that happens unofficially, but I love the idea. We donât have anything kind of formal to facilitate that, but I love the idea of Hack Club figuring out how to do that. I mean, when I think about my own story, I feel so lucky to have met [unintelligible 00:50:39.03] as a teenager⌠Because I think if you donât know any adults that do the thing you want to do, itâs really hard to picture yourself doing it. And we see this particularly among the young women in our community. And we do have some specific programs. For example, we have a new partnership with the Girl Scouts, where weâre partnering with different Girl Scoutsâ regional councils - we just did our first one in New York City - to run events that are like 12-hour coding days for local Girl Scouts in that area, ran my Hack Clubbers. And then weâll put together a dinner afterwards to pair Hack Clubbers with female mentors. And that has been a really effective model so far, and I love the idea of growing that into something a little more formal.
Right now, the way most teenagers hear about Hack Club is we partner with a few different organizations in the space. Namely, GitHub is probably our number one referral partner, where they will send out blast to every student on GitHub about Hack Club, usually every other month or so. And we partner with them on a lot of our programs. And then secondly, we work with FIRST Robotics. Theyâre the largest engineering education program in the country. They have 600,000 students across America and in the world that do like robotics, and stuff like that. If youâve ever seen a teenager in robotics, theyâre probably part of FIRST. And theyâre starting to roll out Hack Club materials to a lot of their teams, because they have teenagers that want to do more coding. But I love that idea of having some more formal mentorship models.
I mean, to give a role, really. I totally get that it needs to be teenager-ran. I totally get that. It even teaches them responsibility. Like âThis thing isnât a Hack Club unless you show up, and the folks that youâve connected with show up and make it a thing. Hereâs some folks that will be assistive with the process of running itâ, or maybe thereâs an adult require for x⌠I donât know, whatever. But something where youâve got that osmosis from older to younger generation seems to be a thing.
Now, Jerod, Iâm thinking too with our audience - sure, we donât have a teenager audience by any means, but I bet you weâve got a lot of parents in this audience, right? Somebodyâs listening right now thinking, âGosh, Iâve got kids, and I care about Hack Club.â
Probably both, yeah.
Iâd love to find a way where we can help you, Zach, to be similar to GitHub, or FIRST Robotics, to just â I donât know how we can do that necessarily without just being like âHey, letâs just put you on blastâ, but somehow incorporate something to share with the audience, because Iâm sure weâve got⌠If not parents, their godmothers, or uncles, or aunts, or whatever, to younger generation folks in their lives, that matter, and theyâre going to share the idea and the model of Hack Club with them.
Thank you. Yeah, that would be amazing. And kind of like I mentioned at the beginning, for everyone listening, and for both of you as well - Hack Club was a volunteer-led community and a nonprofit that is here because all of us involved have had some experience where technology has touched us in a personal way, or itâs made us a different person today than we would have been without it. And that is something that is so important for us as a society to give as a gift to the next generation. And Hack Club is such a gift when someone is looking for it. So spreading the word, helping young people become aware of it. So often weâll hear stories from a young person where theyâre like âWell, oh my God, my mom told me about this, and Iâve been looking for something like Hack Club for years. I didnât even realize there were other people my age that shared my love for this.â
[00:54:02.08] The beauty, I think, of separating it from an official school thing is the freedom that you have to sort of like partner up. And it only happens if thereâs motivation, right? Like, youâre not going to force Hack Club into a world where it doesnât need to exist; it kind of happens because the idea of Hack Club makes sense, and that itâs ran by the folks who are really interested in it. I just think like maybe the hurdle I thought you may have faced earlier, like I said before, was like the educators, but clearly, thatâs not necessary, because you have sort of individually-ran Hack Clubs. But thatâs kind of probably the beauty of it, is it doesnât have to be like this staple, âThis is a funded program, into xâ, and then it falls by the wayside, and then next thing you know itâs sort of like not what it began as. Like, you had great ambition for the thing, but eventually it just turned into this not-Hack-Club, essentially.
Yeah. I mean, imagine if to start an open source project you had to get a grant first, and an approval from five different people. There would be no open source community; thatâd be crazy. The way I think about it is I think in education there are basically two models of learning. One model is high floor, low ceiling. This is a traditional school, and a traditional school day, where you have guarantees on what everybodyâs gonna learn. You have a textbook, you have a curriculum, you have tests⌠You have ways to make sure everyone leaves with certain competencies. But itâs very challenging for folks to go off that default path.
And then I think there is a second type of learning model where you have a low floor and a high ceiling, where itâs hard to give certain guarantees of what some people will get out of the program, but those who want to go really, really, really far can. And I think open source as a model is a low floor, high ceiling model, and I think that the future of education is blending both of those. And I think that the beauty of Hack Club is that since it is opt-in, so this is something that teenagers really want to be a part of, since we donât really have a captive audience in the same way that a lot [unintelligible 00:55:53.28] do⌠Like, if youâre a hacker, you actually want to be there. And if for some reason you donât want to be there, you just donât show up anymore, and thatâs totally fine. It means that when you as a teenager get involved, youâre connecting with other teenagers that are also opting in and making that choice to be there.
I think the internet kind of â itâs interesting when you think about what the future of learning will look. I think one of the biggest transformations thatâs happened in education and learning in the past 15 years, that still isnât really being talked about, is so much of our institutions of learning are built around solving the access problem. How do we simply get all this information that we want people to learn in front of them and available to them? And worldwide weâve built, in my view, an incredibly effective, really amazing top-down, one-to-many distribution mechanism. Basically, an entire society is literate. Itâs amazing. But with the internet, we have this new thing where the access problem is really solved. Every person who has access to a phone and the internet has access to literally all of human history and knowledge in our pockets. And the new challenge of education and learning is not just simply âHow do we simply get people access?â, itâs how do we get people to spend their time unlocking the secrets of the Universe, rather than do scrolling through Twitter? And I think the answer is you make it fun, you make it community-oriented, you make it something whereâŚ
I think the thing that weâve really realized with Hack Club, and a lot of other people who are pursuing these models have realized, is that learning and making things and manipulating the world around you - that is like a fundamentally human and satisfying thing that weâve been doing since the dawn of our species. And once you help someone realize that âOh my God, I can do this through codingâ, or âI could do this through this other subjectâ, and get really deep into something on the internet - it is so much more exciting, so much more compelling, so much more fun than watching Netflix. And itâs like addictive. You literally canât pull yourself away from it.
And I think the question of learning of the future is âHow do we make learning fun?â I think weâll see a lot more models like Hack Club, and I think Hack Club needs to be a lot better to better provide that experience for the people where weâre touching them, but [unintelligible 00:57:58.27]
Can we break down the flow of getting started, I guess, then? Because youâve got step one is application, you start by telling you all, Hack Club themselves, who you are, whoâs leading etc. Then you have an onboarding call, which Iâve gotta imagine is the funnest time ever for somebody at what you call Hack Club HQ. You hop on a Zoom call with someone⌠And I assume thatâs just to connect the dots, to make sure theyâre a real human being and theyâre not trying to game the â I can only imagine the fraud, waste and abuse you must have in this process⌠But weâll set that aside to focus on whatâs actually mattering here.
And then the next one is the first meeting. So you said before, Hack Club in a box. Walk us through that flow, how that works, and that first meeting to the 10th meeting. How do you ensure, without overly handholding the process, that this is successful, and it has the right tooling, and that thereâs a certain similarity - or is there a similarity to Hack Club to Hack Club? Does it does it even matter to have similarity?
Yeah, totally. I mean, I think the first thing to understand is clubs are a part of Hack Club, but theyâre not like the primary thing. I would say maybe only 25% of students in Hack Club are actually in a club, or engaged in a club.
And that was a transformation that the pandemic really had. We were almost entirely clubs before that. And once the pandemic hit, I think we were very early to realize that things were going to be totally different. And we also saw that the space was arranged in such a way where we thought every other organization, every school was going to try and do exactly what they were doing in person, but in Zoom calls instead⌠And thatâs a terrible idea; whatâs gonna be best for the Internet is totally different than whatâs best for the person. And we really doubled down on âHow do we build an amazing community? How do we build an amazing opportunity for people to contribute to Hack Club beyond clubs? How do we build different flows for people?â
And in the first few months of the pandemic, our community grew 700%, because so many people from other spaces were finding Hack Club as like a space where there was stuff happening that made sense on the internet. For clubs specifically, a lot of it is actually student-led. So if youâre a teenager and youâre like âI want to start a Hack Clubâ, or âI want to start a clubâ, you applied, you filled that out⌠A lot of that is just basically just [unintelligible 01:03:00.01] on our end, to make sure that when we send you all the material physically - because we actually send physical materials in a lot of cases - youâre gonna be able to benefit from them. We accept everyone we can.
The real flow and the real magic happens when you join the Slack and when you join the community. And what happens is after you apply, you get an invite, you join the community, and youâre talking with other teenagers your age, from other schools, that are doing the exact same thing as you. And whatâs so cool about that is - you know, to kind of get like on a more of a society level - there is this piece in New York Times recently that talked about how cross -ZIP code friendships are one of the number one predictors of whether or not someone will rise in social class. Like, do they have friends in other social classes? And I think itâs such a shame that our education system today is so highly dependent on what ZIP code you happen to be born in, and you really donât interact much at all with teenagers from other locations, even though they might share your same interests.
[01:03:56.17] So the coolest thing with Hack Cub is like when you join, when you get involved, and when youâre getting started with starting your club, youâre talking to other teenagers that are already doing that activity successfully. You see what it can look like. Youâre having one-on-one conversation with them. Youâre asking them questions in the public chat, youâre getting on Zoom calls with people where theyâre really walking you through things. Youâre getting invites to hackathons, where suddenly youâre not like this one weird teenager at your school that has this interest where youâre struggling to find support. Youâre like part of a whole community of people that share your love, share your passion, share your interests.
More tangibly, most Hack Clubs are pretty focused on âHow do we simply get people in the room? How do we make coding a really fun one-hour activity?â Because our thesis is like - look, if you come in and have a great time, youâre gonna come in again next week. Itâs like a party. How do you make it fun? And what we focus on at Hack Club meetings is shipping something, because thereâs nothing more satisfying than having the idea and making something that you didnât think you were capable of doing, possible.
So that first meeting that every Hack Club leader has - their goal is âHow do I get 25+ people in the room, and how do I make sure every single person leaves the room having actually made a real project, with a real URL, by making real code?â Even if they donât understand all the code that they wrote.
We have a lot of training materials and stuff like that, but I would say the beauty of it is really where youâre connecting with teenagers from other schools, where youâre seeing them do it successfully, and youâre realizing that youâre not this weird person on your own. Youâre part of this broader community, this broader movement of people your age, that share that love, share that passion, share that interest.
Can we get into the community weeds for a moment? Because Iâd love to have your take on Slack as a platform for this community. I noticed on the webpage you say Slack is kind of like Discord. So youâre explaining to your potential members that itâs like Discord, which is something that they must be more familiar with. We have a Slack that weâve been on for years now, and itâs thousands - less than 10,000, but enough people where itâs like âOkay, moving, this would be difficult.â But thereâs things about Slack that we donât love, and Iâm just curious if youâre loving Slack, if that was a choice that you made that you now regret, or if thereâs a partnership there⌠Whatâs your take on Slack for communities of this size?
Yeah. Well, first Iâll say âThank you, Slackâ for donating to Hack Club, because thereâs no way we could afford it.
There you go.
So thatâs certainly a part of it. But itâs been really interesting, because â so for me, when I was a teenager, I was on IRC, and I was kind of on the later days of IRC. Most of the people I talked to were like âOh, you should have seen it in the early 2000sâ, or âYou should have seed it in the â90s. It was so awesome.â And with Slack, we started our Slack in 2015. So we really were there right at the beginning. I remember when Slack launched beta; we were one of the very first users on it. And Discord didnât exist yet; later, we saw Discord emerge. And we early on had a lot of conversations as to whether it made sense to move the Hack Club community to Discord. And whatâs interesting today is like, teenagers do not know what Slack is. Theyâve literally never heard of it. For almost every teenager who comes into Hack Club, itâs the first time theyâve heard of Slack. Theyâre familiar with Discord, all their friends use Discord. They all have group chats on Discord, and stuff like that. Because if you have friends who have Android phones and iPhones, the best way to do group chat is through Discord. So with that, I think Slack is better for communities than Discord is, depending on your community.
The reason why we havenât switched to Discord is for a few reasons. The first is that if we were to have the Hack Club community be on Discord, the network that youâre part of is Discord, and the server youâre on is Hack Club. So like when you have interactions, Discord is set up in such a way to pull you outside of your individual server as much as possible. Like, when you DM someone, you donât DM someone within the context of that server, you DM them in the context of Discord. Now, what that means is that as soon as people make friends, or have some sort of connection, rather than contribute back to your community - because you actually canât make your own channels in Discord, and stuff like that; you have to have the admins make the channel. Or you can have some really clever bot thing, which is extremely confusing for people who arenât really deep in the weeds with Discord⌠You go off and make your own server.
[01:08:02.25] And Hack Club only works because teenagers are building the spaces they want within the Hack Club sphere, to make it better for everyone. Itâs like a positive sum game. Where Discord - we thought that the dynamic would be such that thereâd be a lot of value pulled out of Hack Club and put into the Discord network, rather than kept within the Hack Club community.
The other thing that we like more about Slack and Discord is that - and this is maybe a little specific to our community, but since teenagers donât know what Slack is, for most of them weâre the only Slack workspace that theyâre in, and that means that as a result, thereâs basically the Hack Club app on every Hack Clubberâs phone, and the Hack Club app on every Hack Clubberâs computer, without us â like, thereâs no way we could afford to build a Hack Club app, or get people to use it, being a small nonprofit without lots of engineers.
The last thing Iâll say on this is that Slack, given that itâs meant for companies, has extensive APIs, and you can heavily customize the Slack experience, in a way that you just canât with Discord. And as a result, thereâs all this magic that happens in Hack Club that I think wouldnât be happening if it was through Discord.
One good example of this is, you know, a couple years ago some Hack Clubbers decided to make a channel for the count to a million, where they said, âYou know what, letâs count to a million together, one message at a time. Youâre not allowed to put two numbers in a row.â And like this whole ecosystem of bots emerged around like enforcing the rules, having leaderboards, [unintelligible 01:09:24.28] And thatâs the sort of thing that canât happen on Discord, because people canât make their own channels. So I would say the reason why we sticked with Slack instead of Discord is just we think of Hack Club as its own ecosystem, not as one part of the broader Discord ecosystem.
I didnât quite consider that the pandemic would have hit you guys like that. It totally makes sense now in retrospect, because I just wasnât thinking about [unintelligible 01:09:45.27] post-pandemic to some degree in a lot of ways, and so Iâm like âOkay, that never happened. Just forget that two years, or whatever it wasâ, right?
[laughs] âIt never happenedâŚâ
Itâs just gone⌠So Iâd forgotten that getting together with people face-to-face was a challenge, and now itâs less so now; itâs still a challenge, because you still have concerns and issues⌠But it says down here âEvents on Zoom that donât suck.â Youâve got AMAâs, youâve got Hack Night, youâve got Minecraft, youâve got Community Funds⌠So youâre doing what you would have normally done in the hour after school in remote ways, or distributed ways. Iâve gotta imagine thatâs helped with growth, but also just with inventiveness. With the whole ZIP code idea - I agree with that; the social possibility for a human being that knows somebody beyond their own zip code has gotta be greater. Iâd love to dig into the stats behind that, but this lets you join a cohort.
My wife right now is in a book club for like the last year or so; she started to lead it, and it has been one of the most positive things Iâve ever seen happen in her life. This book club has become like sisters to her. And Iâm seeing this idea of clubs, and â you need to belong somewhere. And as a kid, where do you belong initially, right? Or as a teenager. Well, youâve got your home base, youâve got your family, and thatâs obviously where you fit⌠Unless you donât fit in, and you have home issues, and thatâs just an absolute shame⌠But the next place you fit obviously is school, because thatâs by nature sort of forced on you as a child; you have no other choice but to go to school. You want to learn, but is that the place you want to go? Maybe not. But youâre forced to go to school, so you have that following, and that group. Where else do you get it at? Youâve got sports, or other things, like Jared was saying, like chess club, drama club, sports etc. But if you donât fit in those things, you need somewhere to belong. And this I think is such an interesting way. Like, if youâre in this world where coding or technology matters to you, you donât have to have an after school program; you could just go online and join the Slack, no matter where youâre at, and join one of these AMAâs, or the Minecraft thing, or whatever thing, to be across ZIP codes and meet some people. Thatâs so cool. But âEvents on Zoom that donât suckâ is the premise there, but thatâs so cool that you can like do Hack Club, but not have to be in-person.
[01:12:02.29] Well, weâre building on that. Like, when you think â and that was a huge realization we had during the pandemic. We were like âOh, snap! This is way better, and it actually helps people have better in-person experiences, too.â It also means that the perpetual challenge pre-pandemic was âHow do we have a relationship as Hack Club, as a brand and as an HQ, with members?â Because we have this intermediary who are leaders. And both the best part and the worst part with Hack Club is that every year all of our most experienced people become alumni. Because you donât go to high school to stay there forever, you go to high school to graduate. And on one hand, that means thereâs always room for fresh blood, thereâs always new leadership opportunities. Thereâs always new voices in the room. But on the other hand, it means that itâs very hard to build up institutional knowledge. And we had basically thrown the towel in and were like âYou know what - after a leader graduates, that clubâs dead. If someone else wants to, they can restart a club at that school.â And we consider it a new club, not a continuation to the same one, because nobody wants to inherit something. You want to be the founder of your own thing.
And what we realized post-pandemic was like, wow, actually, Hack Club - like with a lot of education groups, or a lot of similarly structured things like the scouts, if you ask the question âWhat is the fundamental unit of this thing?â, itâs the group. The fundamental unit of schools is the classroom; the fundamental unit of scouts is a troop. The fundamental unit of Hack Club was the club. But simply, if you think about it, thatâs a constraint of the physical world, because you can only have relationships with so many people. When youâre going to the internet, the fundamental unit could be the individual. And weâve really shifted the Hack Club approach to be something where you donât need to be part of a club, you donât need to run a club. You can engage with Hack Club directly, as an individual, and if you later start a club or join a club, thatâs great. But we donât really recommend that as a starting point anymore.
One of the best calls to action right now is if youâre a teenager and you want to make a video game, go to hackclub.com/Sprig. Itâs a really awesome, really fun way to get started with game development. And if you ship a game, you get a free console thatâs open source, mailed to you for free. And we have lots and lots and lots of calls to action like that that we do now, and those have been great ways for people to get involved in the community. And I think the future of education is like more things where the fundamental unit of the interaction is the individual, rather than the group.
So a large online community of 25,000+ teens, or post-teens; I assume you can probably continue to hang out. You donât get booted at age 22, do you? You get to hang out stillâŚ
You donât get booted, but the social expectations is you should make room forâŚ
People kind of age out eventually. That makes sense. But what Iâm over here thinking is how much time and effort and distraction I guess perhaps is involved with moderation? Because teenagers can get rambunctious. I remember myself when I was a teen; you wouldnât want me in your Slack necessarily. Has that been a problem, or have there been a lot of incidents? Is it not an issue, or do you have a team that just sits around and makes sure everybodyâs abiding by the code of conduct, and doing what theyâre supposed to do?
Yeah, so at this point, with all the different programs that we have, I would say thereâs probably somewhere between 50 and 100 teenagers that kind of have like official positions in some way, shape or form, helping Hack Club happen. And a handful those positions are on the moderation team in the community.
Most of the stuff is pretty minor. I mean, we have a pretty robust code of conduct, and weâre pretty, I think, proactive in our moderation approach. Like, sorry, but Hack Club is not a democracy. We have certain things that weâre okay with, and certain things weâre not okay with, and itâs not going to be decided by consensus. Itâs like, you put the foot down. So most things get nipped in the bud early.
Iâd say we have some sort of moderation incident like every other month, or something like that⌠And really, I think one thing thatâs totally unique about us is that since we work with teenagers, change is fundamentally part of what it means to be a teenager. So in a lot of communities, you get permanently banned, you get permanently kicked out, where like âNo, weâre never going to give you a chance again.â In Hack Club, our whole moderation approach is built on this idea that people grow, people change, and the thing that we primarily look for is good faith behavior.
[01:16:06.08] So to answer your question, I donât think we have anything thatâs very extensive as issues. Occasionally [unintelligible 01:16:09.24] but the beauty of Hack Club is that people also tend to self-moderate. One thing we see that a lot of teenagers get a lot of value out of Hack Club and one thing they like a lot about Hack Club is in a lot of online spaces - and this really, I think, accelerated towards the end of the pandemic - people began to realize that itâs easier to get attention through being outrageous than through being helpfulâŚ
And particularly in spaces where youâre gathering over some technical interests, you would see very loud people dominating a lot of the conversations. And I think one thing teenagers really like about Hack Club is that our two values in our online spaces are 1) wholesome, and 2) being technical. So if youâre a teenager where you just want a low-drama space to build as a coder, get recognition, work with other people, chat with other like-minded people, Hack Club is a very wholesome place, and people are invested in keeping it a wholesome place. And weâre very deliberate about making sure that the only way to rise in like the social hierarchy of the community is through contributing, being helpful, giving more than you take, rather than being loud, outrageous etc. And I think that those are values that compound over time as you hold them.
I love that emphasis on wholesome, because technology is very powerful, and especially when you start to learn how to wield it - I used the word âleverageâ earlier, and you are operating at high leverage, right? You can do a lot with a little. And I know that itâs tantalizing, and sometimes cool to do things that are perhaps malicious, because you can; like pranky, sinister, like âOoh, we can get away with this, because I know how.â And itâs easy to get riled up around those things, these bad ideas that float; somebody floats a bad idea⌠But if you have wholesome as a core value - and Iâm not sure if this actually weaves its way through your code of conduct or not, because I havenât read it, but certainly your moderation teams and your leadership, which will emphasize these things⌠Like, those bad ideas that sound good, and maybe theyâd be funny, maybe theyâd be interesting, itâd be hard to do there - if theyâre doing damage, theyâre not wholesome. So having a wholesome as this core part of what Hack Club is I think will go a long way to combat what is kind of natural for young people when they have some power that they find, is like doing things along the fringes of damaging. So I think thatâs going to serve you well.
Thank you. Yeah, and when I think about the long-term mission of Hack Club, I think values and being a space where young people can find really positive values â and actually, so often when youâre in programmer spaces, particularly as a young person, the people who are more technical will be kind of cynical, or be a little mean, or be a little short-tempered, or stuff like that⌠Particularly I think though the people who tend to be more technical than you, who hang out and spend time with people younger than them, they kind of want to be put in that [unintelligible 01:18:58.28] Iâm sure both of you have experienced that with others in some way, shape, or form. I think itâs really important that thereâs a path where youâre like âI can be really successful and really ambitious, and really want to be someone who writes myself into the pages of history, and I can be a nice, wholesome, positive person.â And when you look at groups like the girl or boy scouts, I think they do a really great job with that. If you talk to anyone who made it to an Eagle Scout, theyâre pretty consistently good people, and have shared values, and talk about how that experience really helped them become the person they are today. And I think a lot of young, ambitious people right now, particularly because of things like the college application process - I donât know how old your kids are, but are you in that stage with them yet, or no?
My oldest is turning 15 soon. Iâve got 15 down to 4, soâŚ
I go from 18 down to 3.
[01:19:52.17] Okay, so youâve experienced some of this then, or maybe youâre currently experiencing it.
I think for a lot of young people who are very ambitious, the path that they see to being successful, which I think is reinforced through things like the college application process, the way to succeed is to basically lie, cheat, exaggerate and steal. And I think that our ambitious colleges are turning a generation of young ambitious people into sociopaths. And I think one thing â yeah, and itâs crazy. I mean, I donât know how much youâve dug into it, but when we saw the George Santos stuff happen, we were like âYeah, this is literally what Stanford is asking for. Itâs crazy.â And I think Hack Club can help be part of a path where people will kind of feel like they donât need to do that, but can still be successful at those ages. That values component is very important to our community.
Well, where does it go from here? You seem to be off to a good start; youâve got a base, youâve got supporters, you have a lot of programs, thereâs excitement, thereâs infrastructure, thereâs â you know, the core is there. And so what happens next, or what are you trying to accomplish? Is it just get this into the wheelhouses of more people? Is it build and become bigger than the current offerings? Whatâs next?
Yeah. So today, if youâre a young person and you have that spark with technology, thereâs very few things to support you in doing that. And we want to live in a world where â right now thereâs about 15 million high school students in the U.S. I want to live in a world where about a million of them can kind of choose that hacker/maker path to be the primary thing theyâre doing outside of class. And I want Hack Club to meaningfully contribute to building the ecosystem where thereâs a whole bunch of different touch points that theyâre a part of, that are supporting them on that path.
Today, I would say when you look at all of our different programs, there are probably about 25,000 teenagers around the world who would say that yeah, Hack Clubâs like a meaningful part of whatâs going on for them; they would identify as that. But thatâs a tiny percentage, and a tiny fraction of the number of people who would love to be a part of Hack Club if they simply heard of it.
So the way I see it is like we need to grow Hack Club to be something that every young person who wants to be a part of it knows about it, knows the right things about it, and has the right folks to become a part of the community. And I want to live in a world where every high school has a group of teenagers who are like âThis is our thing.â Theyâre nice, kind people, with really positive values, and where if you are someone who wants to pursue this thing, thereâs a path for you.
I felt like I had to drop out of high school and move hundreds of miles away from home to find my people, and to find that path for myself, and I feel like I mostly got lucky in being able to find that. Coding is something that changes lives; it shouldnât be something thatâs left to chance. And itâs important that those of us who have been lucky enough to kind of be the beneficiaries of the current technology revolution, that we give that gift to the next generation, and make sure that they see that path for themselves, too.
One more Silicon Valley reference. I have to bring it up, Iâm sorry⌠[laughter] Does this act like an incubator in any way, shape, or form? Have you gotten to the point where youâve got folks, or young folks, or teenagers, or whatever label you apply to those - I think you call them Hack Clubbers - that they get to a point where theyâre like âYou know what, Iâm aging out, and Iâm gonna create this thingâ, and they need not so much venture capital necessarily, but maybe angels, or pre-seed, or early seed, or⌠Are you at a point where youâre actually helping to assist in that next trajectory, which is like âHey, I needed a place to belong when I was young, I needed a place to learn, I needed to make friends, and I did all that. And Hack Club served me well. And now Iâm at a point where Iâm in a launch point, and I was in the Hack Club (for a lack of better terms) incubatorâ, like Erlich Bachmanâs incubator, âand Iâm ready to spread my wings and create my Yo! app, or my Bro appâ, or whatever it might be. Whatâs the scenario for you?
Yeah, so today our oldest alumni are probably in their early 20s, and itâs been really interesting seeing what Hack Clubbers do. There is a number of Hack Club alumns who raised millions of dollars for startups, and are doing really serious stuff. And again, thereâs a handful of Hack Club alums who have built open source projects that are now used by like millions and millions and millions of people.
[01:24:17.26] I think that the primary purpose of Hack Club is and should always be to help young people become the best versions of themselves. Once you turn 18, I think thereâs like a really great network of support and stuff like that afterwards. And I think that if weâre going to do â I think the one thing that will kill the org is focus. So like âLetâs pick one thing and try to make it the most amazing, beautiful, incredible gift that youâve ever experienced for people of age 13-18â, and then afterwards maybe weâll have some alumni support, but⌠I donât really want Hack Club to be an incubator, because the problem with being an incubator is that the people who are in power get to choose who gets opportunities and who donât, and Hack Club only works because everyone is building the spaces that they themselves want. If suddenly thereâs a dynamic where you got more by being friends with staff, or like doing certain things, I think it would make Hack Club feel a lot more competitive, a lot less community-driven⌠And thereâs already so many spaces like that. Like, go to Y Combinator. Y Combinator is great. And thereâs a bunch of Hack Clubbers who have gone to Y Combinator. Like, just do that. Thereâs a ton of stuff like that already, and I think that we would just end up doing a lower-quality version of it.
I was thinking more on the naturalness of it; less like the explicit, like, âHey, we are an incubatorâ, and more like just by nature of your mission youâve got to incubate, to some degree. Like a coding school, or a boot camp, there may be â on the other side of that they may partner up with opportunities, for example. I just wondered if that was â because youâve got connections, like Tom Preston-Werner, he is very into funding startups, and other folks are into seed investing. I know Quinn Slack is an angel to several startups, Iâm sure. And youâve got friends in that area, and it would just make sense, I would think, to not so much implicitly say that âOkay, since youâre a Hack Clubber, you get X opportunityâ, but more just by natural operation youâre going to incubate some opportunity for somebody. I just wondered if there was anything that youâre doing around that front, or just connecting those dots for folks.
Yeah, nothing official at this stage. Because again, I want the role of Hack Club to be to help you become the best version of yourself. The thing is, Hack Club is a human network, right? Thereâs thousands of people involved. Inevitably, board members like Tom get connected with some Hack Clubbers, and stuff like that. But Iâm not the one making the connections, [unintelligible 01:26:31.27] Actually, one of the key things you learn at Hack Club is how to send really good cold emails if youâre running a hackathon. And that is a skill that really serves you later on.
Oh yeah, for sure.
And thereâs a really robust alumni network. Thereâs a handful of Hack Clubbers who run a series of group houses in San Francisco, and stuff like that⌠Itâs a broad world, and I want Hack Club to â I donât know, thereâs something that feels a little wrong to me about staff going out of their way to connect certain people and not others. I think it would change the dynamic a little bit, and itâd make it a little more transactional, I think.
Yeah. I appreciate the focus. We have this thing right here, âKeep the main thing the main thing.â And thereâs nothing worse in life than a focus person whoâs distracted. Because theyâre not focused anymore, right?! I love the fact that you have that focus, and thatâs good, because - I mean, that gives you your Northstar, right? And anytime you â like, thatâs even for us⌠One of our North Stars around here is âSlow and steady.â Now, âSlow and steadyâ doesnât necessarily mean that youâre literally going slow, because to go steady, you have to go the pace that makes sense to keep the thing steady. So slow is just a term to say âAs fast as it needs to be to remain steady.â And we find ourselves not being steady anymore, and going too fast, and we say, âSlow down and check yourself.â So thatâs how we keep our focus around here, to some degree⌠And thatâs great that you have that response, because youâre focused.
Iâm glad we had you on to share more of the story. I was curious myself. I wanted to dig into what youâre doing. We didnât talk too much about Sprig and the PCB that was there, but we did enough, I suppose⌠Is there anything else in closing you want to share? Anything else thatâs left unsaid?
[01:28:07.16] Go to github.com/hackclub/Sprig. Go to github.com/hackclub/sinerider. Go to hackclub.com and sign up for the email list, where every three months weâll send you an email about a cool new open source project. What we see is like there are so many young people who are hungry, and sharing one of these things with a young person in their life could be the thing that helps them find their people, helps them find their path, and helps them be part of a community that they might have been looking for for a long time. And it takes a big tent, you know?
And again â I think maybe the last thing is if youâre listening to this and you wish you had something like Hack Club as a teenager, give that gift to a teenager today. A lot of our support will â literally, all of Hack Club is made possible and free for teenagers through donors. So give $5 a month at hackclub.com/donate. Youâll really be helping to make this possible for a new generation of young people, too.
Very cool. Yeah, weâll link that up in the show notes. We definitely want to encourage donations as necessary. Yeah, I canât imagine we have a large teenager audience, but we certainly want to encourage the ones who are here, and those who are parents or loved ones of teenagers, then please, follow Zachâs advice. Weâll link everything up in the show notes, as you would expect, so check that out.
Zach, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. We appreciate it.
Thank you both again. And really, thank you both for everything you do for open source. I follow the Changelog and would check it often as a teenager after you launched. You actually featured one of my projects I built when I was like 15, and that was like the most exciting thing ever.
Which one was it?
It was a Git ignore tool. It was a CLI tool that generated Git ignores for you. I think it was just like one of the Go projects that I got a few stars that day. Another one was SSH Tron, I think you did⌠Itâs a little game. If you type âssh sshtron.ZachLatta.comâ in your terminal, it drops you into like a multiplayer Tron game written in Go. I think those are the two that you had on your site, and that was really â I think that was like one of the first times Iâd ever seen my stuff on someone elseâs site⌠So thank you both for the work you do, and for supporting the ecosystem. I would not be coding today if it wasnât for the open source movement, and I know you two do a lot to help make that possible.
Wow. Thank you for saying that. I know whatâs getting featured in news next week, Jerod⌠SSH Tron! [laughter]
Weâll re-up that sucker.
Weâll bring it back. Weâll bring it back. Itâs a multiplayer Tron in your terminal. Thatâs so cool. It looks cool, too.
Sounds like something I would have covered at some point, definitely. Weâll give it another shout-out next week on News, why not?
Thatâs right. Well, Zach, thanks for being a follower all these years, and - man, I appreciate you saying that, and itâs so cool to⌠We never really quantify our impact; we never slow down enough. Weâre always sort of chomping at the bit for the next thing, or the next urgent thing, or the next right thing, or whatever your next thing might be, and we donât often start to - not smell the roses, but quantify our impact. And I appreciate so much having you on the show so many years later, but also throughout your journey having some shape or form of impact to you. Thatâs just, honestly, such a cool thing. Thank you for that.
Of course. Youâre the people who did the hard works. Thank you. Have a wonderful rest of your days. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Zach.
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