Zach Latta

He grew up near Los Angeles; in his Roadtrip Nation profile he says that he grew up in Los Angeles, and Seven Days calls him a CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry native. He says that both his parents were social workers and that he comes from “a long line of teachers”; on the Changelog podcast he said that his mother worked in foster care and his father in homelessness services. The Daily Dot writes that his parents are social workers who focus on assisting homeless individuals and that they encouraged his extracurricular activities; he said, “I feel so incredibly fortunate and so privileged to have parents who have been supportive of me.”⁠[1][2][3][4][5]

He says that the public schools he attended taught no computer classes; in Fast Forward’s post he said that on entering high school he was disappointed to find that, like 75% of schools in the U.S.United StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry, his school offered no coding classes. His Roadtrip Nation profile states that he learned to code from online tutorials, starting with a website about the game Club Penguin; Seven Days writes that his interest in computers began when he was a young boy and that he went online to teach himself to build a computer. On the Changelog podcast he said that from about third grade, when he got home from school, he could not pull himself away from the computer; realizing that by learning to code he could be one of the creators and not just consume, he wanted to be “one of these wizards that knows how to do this.”⁠[1][6][4][5][2]

He says that as a teenager he was very lonely and that coding was always a solitary activity for him; on the Changelog podcast he said that in high school he felt incredibly lonely because coding was the one thing he wanted to do with all his time. He recalled that he was the only person at his school that he knew on a laptop, that he installed a VPN on it, and that he was pulled aside by the vice principal, who asked, “Why are you hacking our school?”⁠[1][2]

He says that as a teenager he loved the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and he calls Aaron Swartz “a personal hero of mine”; he says that the people with whom he had many formative conversations online came from all over the world, and that he felt like “a child of the world or a child of the internet.”⁠[1]

The Daily Dot writes that in eighth grade, at a hackathon at the University of Southern CaliforniaUniversity of Southern CaliforniaThe University of Southern California (USC) is a private research university in Los Angeles, California, planned by a group led by Judge Robert Maclay Widney and opened to students in 1880.Open the full entry, he impressed two programmers, which led to a job at the game developer Run Games, where he worked on the mobile game Football Heroes, which had more than 1 million App Store downloads; his mother accompanied him to his first job interview, at a game startup, when he was a high school freshman. THE Journal writes that he was a developer on Football Heroes; on the Changelog podcast he said that he was a junior programmer on the game and that it became the most popular game on the App Store at the time. His Roadtrip Nation profile states that, of two apps he helped create as a teenager, one became the most popular game on the App Store and the other the most popular app.⁠[3][7][2][4]

Accounts of how he left high school differ. On the EFF podcast he said that he dropped out of high school after his freshman year, when he was sixteen, and on the Changelog podcast he also said that he dropped out after his freshman year; Seven Days writes that he dropped out of his suburban Los Angeles high school at 15; his GitHub profile bio reads “Dropped out of high school at 15 to become a programmer”; in his Roadtrip Nation profile he says that he dropped out of high school and left home at 16. The Daily Dot writes that after two years of high school he took college-level classes for credit at local community colleges and then took a California test to receive his high school diploma early; Business InsiderBusiness InsiderBusiness Insider is a digital business-news organization.Open the full entry India writes that he focused on testing out of school early so that he could devote all his time to programming, built his own home-schooling program in his sophomore year and tested out that same year.⁠[1][2][5][8][4][3][9]

The Daily Dot writes that he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in July 2014 and worked as contract engineering lead for the messaging app Yo until mid-September of that year; Yo’s co-founder Or Arbel said, “I’ve never met a 17-year-old with so much knowledge in computer systems, databases, deployments and so on.” THE Journal writes that he led Yo’s engineering team. On the Changelog podcast he described Yo as an app like Facebook Messenger in which the only word you could send was “yo,” and said that he was hired as its first engineer, with the job of making it able to process millions of push notifications quickly.⁠[3][7][2]

Business Insider India writes that he says he was a 16-year-old without a college degree making market rate as an engineer when he started at Yo. Seven Days writes that he moved to San Francisco at 16 to work as a software consultant, earning $80 to $100 an hour. He says that he moved to San Francisco to become a programmer and started Hack Club after working at a couple of startups to put together some savings.⁠[9][5][1]

In 2014 he founded hackEDU, a nonprofit that helps high school students start coding clubs and that later became Hack Club; Make: writes that Hack Club was founded by him in 2014, Fast Forward also gives 2014 as the year Hack Club was founded, and The Daily Dot states that Hack Club was formerly hackEDU. Business Insider India calls him Hack Club’s co-founder and executive director.⁠[10][6][3][9]

On the Changelog podcast he said that he started Hack Club with the money from the two opportunities he had had, about $25,000, aiming to create the sort of community that he so desperately wished he had had as a teenager; his Roadtrip Nation profile states that he used the money from the two apps he had helped make to start Hack Club. He recalled that early on freeCodeCamp added Hack Club to its donate page: “I was 17, on my own”; that year the page brought in more donations than any other source, enough to pay rent.⁠[2][4]

Business Insider India writes that about one year after its founding Hack Club had grown to 62 schools in 16 states and six countries, with four full-time employees including him, funded by grants and individual supporters; there were clubs in the United States, Canada, Australia, Estonia, Zimbabwe and India, and one group of students was building a workplace communication app to compete with SlackSlackSlack is a team communication and collaboration platform developed from an internal tool at Tiny Speck. It organizes work through channels, direct messages, searchable history and integrations, with features including Huddles, Clips, Canvas and AI assistance. Its paid service launched in February 2014, and Salesforce completed its acquisition in July 2021.Open the full entry. The article writes that he says he once thought the way the world was put together would always stay that way, and that programming shows “that you have power, and that you can do things,” which is at the core of what drives him.⁠[9]

On the Changelog podcast he said that the Hack Club Slack started in 2015 and that Hack Club was one of the very first users of Slack.⁠[2]

On June 5, 2015, the Thiel Foundation named its new class of 20 Thiel Fellows, and he was among them. The announcement gives him as 17 at application and from El Segundo, California, working in education and nonprofits as executive director of hackEDU, a national nonprofit that brings coding clubs to high schools nationwide. It explains the idea: students who love music can join band and students who love sports can join a team, but students who want to code have to go home and do it alone; his goal was to spread the hacker ethos and programming skills to every student in the nation.⁠[11][12]

Xconomy writes that the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry, awarded by the Thiel Foundation led by Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry, gives fellows $100,000 and a support network of mentors to help them turn creative projects into startup companies; the first class of 20 in 2011 was chosen from 430 applicants, and this class from 2,800; fellows must stop short of a college degree before they become fellows; the age cut-off for applicants, formerly 20, was raised to 22 for future applicants; and the class size was expanded from 20 to 30 a year.⁠[12]

Business Insider India writes that he was 17 when he was selected and had no plans to attend college; the fellowship provides $100,000 and mentorship on condition that recipients forgo or drop out of college for two years. The Daily Dot writes that the program awards young people $100,000 to pursue their startup ideas for two years instead of going straight to college. THE Journal writes that he received a 2015 Thiel Fellowship; Make: writes that his efforts won him a Thiel Fellowship and $100,000.⁠[9][3][7][10]

Business Insider India writes that his parents were at first reluctant about his decision to skip college, but their reluctance gave way to support when they saw the success he was finding in the workforce.⁠[9]

The Daily Dot published a profile of him on January 11, 2016, giving his age as 18 and stating that Hack Club, which brings coding programs to high schools, had about 1,500 students from 47 schools in 11 states and four countries; 32% of members were women, with a goal of 50%, and 37% were Black or Hispanic.⁠[3]

The profile states that he was living in San Francisco with six other people in a house full of other techies and Thiel Fellows, that all but one of his roommates worked in technology, and that he was the youngest, his oldest roommate being a decade older. It states that he had given a talk to 250 people in Estonia, which he called “the most amazing experience ever,” and that he does not regret skipping prom or walking in a high school graduation ceremony, though he said, “I feel like I’m missing out on those things.” He said that his biggest accomplishment that year was reading books instead of blogs or NetflixNetflixNetflix is a U.S. entertainment company that offers streaming series, films, games, and live programming, headquartered in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997, it grew from online DVD rental into an international subscription entertainment service and also runs original content, advertising, and in-person experience businesses.Open the full entry, and that George Orwell’s 1984 influenced him most.⁠[3][9]

THE Journal’s feature on Hack Club of February 18, 2016 gives his age as 18, describes him as executive director of the San Francisco-based Hack Club, and states that he was named to ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry’s 2016 “30 Under 30” list in the Education category. It states that Hack Club had been operating for about a year and had expanded to 52 schools, with an editor’s note adding that the count had reached 69 by February 22, 2016; he said that “Hack Club is built almost entirely by students, for students.” Students apply through the website; Hack Club interviews applicants and looks for leadership and initiative, and an accepted student must find a teacher sponsor at their school and plan the first two meetings with Hack Club.⁠[7]

The feature states that he also ran a Facebook group for high school students with about 6,000 members from every U.S. state, more than 100 countries and over 1,000 high schools; he said that within the community, whether it is called hacking, programming or coding, “all it means is creating.”⁠[7]

THE Journal’s article “Hack Club!” of the same day states that the clubs had spread to 16 states and seven countries; he said that about 40 people generally come to the first meeting, and that by the end of the third meeting members have built their first game and put it online. The article states that most schools require a teacher sponsor to provide a classroom after school, generally twice a week for 90 minutes.⁠[13]

Fast Forward’s post of August 3, 2016 states that Hack Club then had more than 1,500 students in 82 schools across seven countries and 16 states, and that it gave clubs a “club in a box” of curriculum, leadership training, an online community and events, with each chapter operating independently like a franchise; every meeting has a workshop in which members build something: a website at the first meeting, a first game at the third and an online collaborative sketchpad at the fifth. The post states that he wanted a “pipeline of makers” in high school and access to Hack Club for every student regardless of location, race or socioeconomic status; he called coding “the most life changing skill anyone can have.”⁠[6]

The post states that he said that at the previous year’s University of MichiganUniversity of MichiganThe University of Michigan is a university founded in Detroit in 1817 that moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1837; it is governed by a statewide-elected Board of Regents and also has campuses in Dearborn and Flint.Open the full entry and University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry hackathons half the winners were high school students, all of them in high school Hack Clubs.⁠[6]

ProPublicaProPublicaProPublica is an independent, nonprofit investigative newsroom based in New York, announced in October 2007 and operating from 2008, whose stated mission is to expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust; it had won nine Pulitzer Prizes by 2026.Open the full entry’s Nonprofit Explorer shows that The Hack Foundation, the nonprofit corporation under which Hack Club operates, received its tax exemption in December 2016, with an address in West Hollywood, California; the Hack Club website states that it is registered under The Hack Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.⁠[14][15]

Seven Days writes that he moved to VermontVermontVermont is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital is Montpelier and its largest city is Burlington. It joined the Union on March 4, 1791, as the 14th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 643,077.Open the full entry at the start of the pandemic. Hack Club’s announcement of October 2021 states that Hack Club HQ has run on HCB since February 2020; Make: writes that Hack Club Bank gives members a bank account and a transparent ledger so that funders can see where every dollar is spent.⁠[5][16][10]

In an announcement dated May 15, 2020 he announced that Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry was donating $500,000 to Hack Club; the announcement states that Elon Musk had spent an hour in an ask-me-anything call with Hack Club’s high school community the previous month, said that the members asked better questions than mainstream media, and called the community “very wholesome.” In the announcement he wrote, “Elon is very selective about the nonprofits he supports.”⁠[17]

The announcement lists the uses of the money: helping 1,000 more students start and join Hack Clubs in their towns, improving the experience of current members, keeping spending minimal and growing slowly while adding diverse staff such as video game designers, software engineers and media producers, making the Hack Club Slack the best online space for teenagers, and expanding HCB; the public can track how every dollar of the gift is spent. The announcement states that Hack Club’s Slack chatroom, open around the clock, has more than 27,000 teenagers.⁠[17]

Accounts of the timing differ: Teslarati, in its report of May 21, 2020, writes that Hack Club announced the donation on May 20 and that Elon Musk had appeared in a Hack Club question-and-answer session in April; Hack Club’s announcement of October 2021 states that in March 2020 Elon Musk spent an hour with Hack Club members and that he donated $500,000 to build its team.⁠[18][16]

Seven Days’ article of July 28, 2021 on Hack Club’s cross-country train hackathon gives his age as 23 and states that he had founded Hack Club about seven years earlier and was its executive director; he said that he started it because “I didn’t think coding and making things should be a solitary activity.” The article states that the headquarters was a Victorian house in the center of Shelburne, Vermont, beside the Shelburne Country Store, that there were a few hundred school clubs, and that about 13,000 young people took part through its Slack group.⁠[5]

The article states that 42 teenagers took part and that Hack Club covered all expenses; the event began on July 16 in Shelburne, the group left the next day by bus for New York City and then took a train west, and the trip lasted eight days and ended in Los Angeles, with the goal of building a network called ZephyrNET and loading it with 500 projects. Make: writes that the train hackathon was a 3,502-mile journey from Hack Club HQ in Vermont, through New York City, Chicago and the Rocky Mountains, to Los Angeles.⁠[5][10]

On October 8, 2021 he and Christina Asquith, then chief operating officer, announced that Elon Musk was giving Hack Club $1 million, to support more in-person hackathons, more one-on-one technical help on the Hack Club Slack, new projects such as The Hacker Zephyr, and 1,000 more teenagers starting or joining Hack Clubs in their towns; the announcement states that “Hack Club will be fully transparent in how we spend this money.” The announcement states that in 2021 Hack Club members met SpaceXSpaceXSpaceX is a company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 whose businesses include space transportation, Starlink satellite communications and artificial intelligence. It went public in 2026 under the ticker SPCX.Open the full entry engineers and demonstrated their projects at SpaceX’s factory in Hawthorne.⁠[16]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation published his episode of How to Fix the Internet, “Hack to the Future,” with a full transcript, on March 22, 2022; the episode page describes him as executive director of Hack Club, a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient and a Thiel Fellow, and says that Hack Club connects more than 14,000 young people to coding clubs, hackathons and workshops.⁠[1]

On the episode he said that almost every month a school district blocks Hack Club, that there are dozens of schools in America where “everything’s blocked,” and that with some Hack Club members he wrote to EFF’s support line about it; he said that school Chromebooks disabled “inspect element” and that Hack Club had to build its own debugger; he also discussed network surveillance in a district in Georgia, and said that Hack Club runs a club locally in Vermont where it tests all its material before putting it online and open-sourcing it. He said that a Hack Club in Kerala, India is dramatically different from one in America.⁠[1]

On the episode he said that locking down digital systems around young people kills curiosity and that surveillance undermines the values of curiosity and tinkering, with Hack Club members feeling that they live in an “Orwellian surveillance state”; he said that for Hack Club members coding is more than a technical skill, “It’s a form of self expression,” and that “digital civic duty” means “You’re not just a consumer, you’re a creator too”; he said that open projects let every person in the world with technical knowledge and internet access take part.⁠[1]

On April 19, 2023 the Changelog podcast published its interview with him, “How do you do, fellow Hack Clubbers?” On the episode he said that Hack Club was a network of more than 25,000 teenage programmers from all over the world, in all 50 U.S. states and 38 countries, that the community was about to cross 10 million messages sent, that roughly 50 to 100 regional hackathons took place a year, that there were hundreds of after-school chapters, and that somewhere between 50 and 100 teenagers held official positions; he said that the community grew 700% during the pandemic.⁠[2]

He described HCB as “almost like Stripe Atlas, but for nonprofits,” started because teenagers had no way to receive money, since in most of the country those under 18 cannot open a bank account; he said that 1,010 organizations, many of them led by teenagers, were using it. He said that Hack Club operates with “100% transparent finances” and relies on the generosity of the technology community, that Elon Musk is a big supporter of Hack Club, and that GitHub is probably Hack Club’s number one referral partner.⁠[2]

On the episode he said that he wanted Hack Club to become as culturally foundational for young people as Scouting, with the goal of about 1 million of the roughly 15 million U.S. high school students taking up hacking or making as their main out-of-class activity; he said that “Coding is something that changes lives; it shouldn’t be something that’s left to chance,” that “I don’t really want Hack Club to be an incubator,” and that the primary purpose of Hack Club “is and should always be to help young people become the best versions of themselves”; he said that the two values of Hack Club’s online spaces are being wholesome and being technical, and he criticized the college application process, in which, he said, “the way to succeed is to basically lie, cheat, exaggerate and steal,” saying that he wants Hack Club to be part of a path on which people feel they do not need to do that.⁠[2]

Make: published a feature on Hack Club on July 2, 2024, writing that as a teen he struggled at a public high school with no meaningful computer science program and that at 16 he set out to build a community for young makers and leaders, looking for friends who loved computers; he was later joined as co-founder by Christina Asquith, a journalist and war correspondent who founded The Fuller Project, a journalism nonprofit focused on women and girls. The article states that Hack Club is headquartered in Vermont and is open to all teenagers regardless of gender or financial background.⁠[10]

The projects the article lists include the math game SineRider, started by Chris Walker and finished by a team of more than 20 teenagers; Hackathon.zip, an all-in-one platform for hosting hackathons; Hack Club Bank, which gives members a bank account and a transparent ledger so that funders can see where every dollar is spent; OnBoard, a grant program that lets teenagers design their own circuit boards; Sprig, a web-based editor for tile-based games paired with a mailed console kit based on the Raspberry Pi Pico, and Blot, a web editor whose programs drive a CNC drawing-machine kit, both part of the “You Ship, We Ship” series; and Days of Service, one-day hacking events for girls.⁠[10]

The Vermont television station WCAX’s report of July 4, 2025 on the Shelburne-based Hack Club states that when it first covered the group in 2022 Hack Club had 20,000 young people registered in its programs and that by 2025 nearly 70,000 young coders in and out of the state were taking part; the report also mentions the Athena Award initiative, which aims to get 1,000 girls to build their own projects.⁠[19]

In the report he said that “Making circuit boards like this is something that every 14,15, 16 year-old in Vermont can do” and that Hack Club will fund such projects: “The funding is there, we just need teenagers to get excited about this”; he described an opportunity to “really make Vermont a leader.”⁠[19]

As of November 2026, Hack Club’s team page lists him as founder and executive director, stating that he founded Hack Club after dropping out of high school to build software used by millions and that he received the Thiel Fellowship and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30; Christina Asquith is listed as co-founder and president.⁠[15]

His Roadtrip Nation profile gives his location as Shelburne, Vermont. There he says that his job is to make sure Hack Club is working on the right things, has the right mission, has money in the bank and has the right team working on those things; his days include many conversations with the team about the roadmap, planning and future casting, and he spends much time on hiring and building out the team. He advises finding people who are respected in one’s field, getting close with them and meeting them regularly, and says, “I recommend cold emailing people”; he says, “You don’t have to ask anyone for permission to make something that’s meaningful to you.”⁠[4]

Hack Club’s philanthropy page lists its board of directors as Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub; Quinn Slack, co-founder and CEO of Amp; Ruth Cotter, senior vice president and chief administrative officer of AMDAMDAMD (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.) is a publicly traded U.S. semiconductor company founded in 1969 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California; its stock trades on Nasdaq under the ticker AMD. The company develops CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, adaptive systems-on-chip and related software, mainly for the data center, personal computer, gaming and embedded markets; its product brands include Ryzen, EPYC, Radeon and Instinct.Open the full entry; and him and Christina Asquith, with John AbeleJohn AbeleJohn Abele (John E. Abele) is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist and a co-founder of the medical device company Boston Scientific. He co-founded the company with Peter Nicholas in 1979, helped spread catheter technology used in interventional cardiology, and later founded the Argosy Foundation.Open the full entry, founder of Boston Scientific, and Michael DellMichael DellMichael Dell is the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Dell Technologies. Starting from a direct-sales personal computer business, he led the company’s take-private, its acquisition of EMC, and its return to the public market, and with his wife Susan Dell co-founded a foundation that funds education, health, and children’s investment accounts.Open the full entry as advisors. The page lists donors in tiers by amount: Tom Preston-Werner and the Musk Foundation in the $5 million–$10 million tier; Lisa SuLisa SuLisa Su is a semiconductor engineer and business executive who serves as Chair and CEO of AMD. She earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked at Texas Instruments, IBM, and Freescale. After joining AMD in 2012, she became CEO in 2014, led the company’s growth in high-performance computing, data centers, and artificial intelligence, and also became Chair in 2022.Open the full entry, Michael Dell, Craig Newmark, Tobi LütkeTobias LütkeTobias Lütke, who also goes by Tobi Lütke, is a programmer, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Shopify, and a startup investor. He took part in the Ruby on Rails open-source community, has served as Shopify’s CEO since April 2008, and joined the board of Coinbase in 2022.Open the full entry and AMD among others in the $1 million–$5 million tier; GitHub Education and Joe LiemandtJoe LiemandtJoe Liemandt is a software entrepreneur and investor who founded the enterprise software company Trilogy Software and the software acquirer ESW Capital, and is principal of the AI-driven private school Alpha School.Open the full entry among others in the $500,000–$1 million tier; and Ron Conway, Gwynne Shotwell, Ron BaronRon BaronRon Baron is an American investor and fund manager and the founder, chairman, and CEO of the asset management firm Baron Capital. He founded the firm in 1982 and manages funds including Baron Growth Fund and Baron Partners Fund, the latter of which holds large, long-term positions in Tesla and SpaceX.Open the full entry, Jack Dorsey and Vitalik ButerinVitalik ButerinVitalik Buterin is the originator of Ethereum, the author of its whitepaper, and one of its eight co-founders, as well as a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine. The Ethereum Foundation calls him the inventor of Ethereum; he has long been involved in protocol research and public discussion, but does not control the network as a CEO.Open the full entry among others in the $200,000–$500,000 tier.⁠[20]

The page states that Hack Club is always free for teenagers, has used an external auditing firm since 2021, and has published its IRS Form 990s for 2020–2024 and annual reports for 2022–2025. Hack Club’s README page states that its headquarters moved from a small house in Shelburne to a larger house in Burlington, Vermont, and that there are more than 1,000 clubs worldwide; each summer interns aged 13 to 18 and gap-year participants aged 16 to 19 work at headquarters full time and paid.⁠[20][21]

ProPublica’s data, drawn from The Hack Foundation’s filings with the Internal Revenue Service, show his compensation as president and executive director as $2,000 for fiscal 2017, $45,500 for 2018, $56,500 for 2019, $84,500 for 2020, $78,000 for 2021, $82,446 for 2022, $119,659 for 2023 and $119,146 for 2024 (fiscal years ending in December; the filings for 2018–2024 give his name as Zachary Latta, and the Form 990-EZ for 2017 as Zach Latta).⁠[14]

The same data show The Hack Foundation’s total revenue as $38,167 for fiscal 2017, $285,026 for 2018, $1,648,010 for 2019, $1,600,932 for 2020, $3,041,120 for 2021, $4,974,838 for 2022, $11,357,856 for 2023 and $22,351,707 for 2024; expenses for fiscal 2024 were $14,214,400.⁠[14]

His GitHub profile lists him as founder of Hack Club and gives his location as Charlotte, Vermont, and its bio also reads “Computers changed my life, and they can change yours too!”; its pinned repositories include sshtron, described as “$ ssh sshtron.zachlatta.com”; postman, a command-line tool for batch-sending email through any SMTP server; his NixOS configurations; and freeflow, described as a free and fast alternative to Wispr FlowWispr FlowWispr Flow is an AI voice-input product and brand developed by Wispr. It turns natural speech into text within applications and has expanded into meeting notes. Founded in 2021 by Tanay Kothari and Sahaj Garg and based in San Francisco, Wispr initially explored wearable voice interfaces before focusing on Flow software in 2024.Open the full entry.⁠[8]

On his personal website he writes that he is the founder of Hack Club, whose mission is to help as many teenagers as possible fall in love with computers and electronics; he writes that growing up he was incredibly lucky to discover computers as tools for creation, and that learning to code completely changed his life and made him feel that he had finally found a tool to express himself.⁠[22]

Hack Club: Official website: https://hackclub.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[23]

Personal website: https://zachlatta.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[22][8]

GitHub: Public account: https://github.com/zachlatta (opens in a new window).⁠[8]