A (very) brief history of HackCville
I’m Daniel Willson — I’m the COO at HackCville. I graduated UVA in 2016 with a degree in CS, and I joined the HackCville leadership as a student in 2014. I still look back on my time at HackCville as one of the most important, formative, and fun experiences of my college career.
I wanted to share a bit about how HackCville started and how HC’s founding values and culture have led us to where we are today.
HackCville was founded in the summer of 2012 by Spencer Ingram and Brendan Richardson, two UVA grads.
Along with Spencer and Brendan, HackCville was led by a non-profit board of local alumni. It was made to try to answer the question, ‘What are we going to do for students who are interested in entrepreneurship?’ The alumni who helped start HackCville all had the same goal: “let’s create what we wished we had as students.”
So they rented out a few rooms of #9 Elliewood, the beat-up old building we now call home. And they got to work.
Since day one, the house was furnished and painted by and for its students. The first few meetings were “bring your own chair”. HackCville’s first summer was devoted to fixing up the place and making it into the creative, funky place it is today.
From 2012 to mid-2014 HackCville didn’t have any skills courses or summer programs like we have today. HackCville was a startup of its own, trying to find its footing with the support of its board and some local entrepreneurs.
What HC did have from day one was community. Very quickly it became the hang-out spot for a few dozen entrepreneurial students. They all hung out together at the house working on their own passion projects and companies. Spencer and some local alumni worked upstairs and would mentor the students.
Fast forward to 2013. My friend Alyssa Dizon and I were 2nd Years, and we both were having rough academic experiences. She had been denied from Batten and McIntire, the very reasons why she came to UVA. I was finding that the CS major was all theoretical and very little about building real projects. (A lot of that has changed by now, but not all.)
HackCville gave us a home — it was a place we could make and learn whatever we wanted to. It was a place where we had mentors and peers that genuinely wanted to help us figure out what we wanted to do with our lives. We had found our people.
But HackCville had not found its business model. By the end of our second year (2014) HackCville was struggling. (Real estate on Elliewood Ave ain’t cheap.) Spencer also was set to move to Austin to take on a new job. So Alyssa and I asked Spencer a bold (and quite naive) question: what if we, the students, led HackCville?
So that’s what we did. Our non-profit’s board (somehow) said yes to inexperienced 3rd Years taking over a big non-profit. We held the very first Open House in March 2014 to announce our new student-led direction to Charlottesville, and to recruit the first-ever student staff. Alyssa and I would become the first HackCville student directors.
The general idea was simple: get smart, go-getter people together, get them to hang out, and see what happens. Encourage this community to make stuff that mattered to them, and the rest would fall into place. Outside of that big vision, we really had no idea what we were doing. Dozens of events, classes, and community initiatives failed as we tried to figure it out.
The idea and structure of a “HackCville skills course” first began in 2015. They quickly became an attractive way for UVA students to meet people and learn new skills or learn about entrepreneurship. That combination of offerings was unique, and started to bring in go-getter students from all different years, majors, and backgrounds.
People started to take notice as HackCville grew and grew. We were 35 members the first semester, then 70 members, then 120, and then about 150 by the time Alyssa and I graduated in 2016. By that time, we had learned a few key lessons that still hold true for HackCville today:
- When something sucks, step up and make it better. Our trips, mentorship program, and every single program started because one of our students stepped forward and said “I want this to exist.”
- Collaboration beats competition. Our board members, alumni mentors, and UVA supporters let us lead while enabling our success. HackCville may look very different than UVA, but it was and is built with UVA support.
- Entrepreneurship education goes way beyond starting ventures.The mindsets and toolkits that entrepreneurs use are valuable to everyone, especially college students who are trying to figure out what they want to do. Spencer Ingram has written a great article about starting people, not ups.
From 2014–2016, HackCville had grown from 15 members to nearly 200. It had built an alumni network from nothing to nearly 1,200. It had captured and created incredible energy around student makers, creators, and entrepreneurs. But HackCville still didn’t really have a business model. We were still almost entirely supported by donations, and often barely scraping by.
So as the initial HackCville team graduated in 2016, our non-profit’s board of directors recognized the need for more high-level strategy and a plan for consistent revenue for HackCville. So they hired Chip to help make that happen, and they hired me to help Chip and the students keep moving forward. Going forward we would have a unique, hybrid leadership: two full-time staff working alongside two dozen student staff.
Since then we’ve done quite a bit together. We’ve created Launch, which now funds over 80% of HackCville’s costs. We’ve developed new partnerships with UVA, added another building, brought on 20 more student staff, and expanded our programs to serve 1,000+ students a year. All in the last 3 years! Things are still tight sometimes, but we’re making good progress as we head into our 8th year of existence.
Students built HackCville into what it is today. Together we’ve built a beautiful example of what happens when students are enabled to take charge of their own education.
Meet our current team here, check out all of our student offerings, or stop by our clubhouses on Elliewood Avenue and say hello!
