YouthHack 2016 — A Year Of Trust & Growth
The day-to-day grind can often narrow our vision, and make us forget to look at the bigger picture and reflect upon everything that has happened. This past year has been a big year for YouthHack, whether its been our strong international expansion and growth into countries like Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia and Korea or the new programs we’ve established in Manila and Philadelphia or the amazing growth of our Calabarzon chapter.
With this rapid international growth, I’ve gotten the chance to experience first-hand the growing pains an organization faces. On one hand, it has been pretty crazy, exciting and amazing to see YouthHack grow both locally and internationally. On the other, it’s been one challenge after the other, having less and less control of each outcome and having to establish structure and process as well.
All these challenges taught me first-hand that growth is hard, and that there is such a thing as growing too fast. As a result, this past year was full of painful decisions and sleepless nights thinking about YouthHack’s future. There were certain chapters that we had to shut down this year, and we’ve had to make several transitions within our different core teams as well. These moments weren’t easy. These were times when I had to really dig deep and ask myself “why”.
On the flip side, this year also taught me the importance of trust and finding the right people to take an organization to the next level. This is so key to the success of any organization — you have to find the right people and give them the ability to grow and make an impact as well. In other words, you have to trust that these people you’ve found will step up to the challenge, and I’m glad I found these people this 2016. You guys know who you are — thank you for stepping up to the challenge!
Where are we headed?
With all this rapid growth, people often asked me, where’s YouthHack headed? Where is this organization going to go next? I think a few key pillars have emerged in this past year and have been solidified across our different chapters: 1. A big part of our mission has turned into investing in the personal and professional growth of our participants and core team members. 2. We can play a big role in shaping our local startup communities and ecosystems. 3. We are in the position to really be able to push the boundaries in terms of both our programs and what the students we work with can do.
So how do we plan to further these key pillars in the upcoming year?
YouthHack Accelerator
Batch 1 of the YouthHack Ventures Accelerator in Manila and Batch 1 of the YouthHack Ventures Accelerator in Philadelphia started out both as experimental programs, with the hypothesis that there were students who could benefit from the traditional accelerator model without having to leave school. And in the two batches we’ve had so far, this hypothesis was validated with better than expected outcomes and a lot of lessons learned for our team as well.
Regional Programs
We’ve always had a goal of creating a global community at YouthHack, and this year, we’re moving one step towards that goal by hosting the first-ever YouthHack Startup Bootcamp, a weeklong regional startup bootcamp focused on opportunities in the Southeast Asia region. It’s exciting to note that we’re not that far away from our goal of holding a global event for our expanding community in 2018.
Academy-Based Skills Building Workshops
We’re always thinking of ways to better tailor to student’s needs. While we’ve seen a lot more students interested in startups, technology and entrepreneurship, a lot of these students lack the skills needed to execute their ideas whether that’s product design, coding, marketing, sales, etc., we hope to fill in the gap through the YouthHack Academy series of programs (Watch-out for the YouthHack Coding Academy in Manila and Sri Lanka!).
Better Content
At its core, YouthHack is a producer of content, whether through our various programs, social media channels or blog. This 2017, we’ll be working twice as hard to deliver you only the best content to help you achieve your goals. We have some exciting content initiatives planned and we’re working hard to make sure our programs have even better content based on all the feedback we’ve received so stay tuned for that!
More Strategic Partnerships
Finally, YouthHack has always relied in the power of partnerships and community. In our first two years, we’ve really pushed for all these partnerships, which is what has fuelled our growth. This year, we hope to step that up a notch and work with even more partners towards the collective goal of helping students learn more about startups, technology and entrepreneurship.
It’s been a great 2016
In hindsight, it’s pretty surreal how much YouthHack has grown this year. We’ve now done events in over 9 countries including Thailand, Italy, Philippines, USA, Singapore, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Korea and Malaysia. We launched the first-ever student-run startup accelerator in Southeast Asia YouthHack Ventures this past summer, and brought the same program to Philadelphia this fall. Over 2000 students from all over the world have participated in our events, and our alumni have gone on to start their own startups or work in startups and VC firms.
And this is only just the start. See you in 2017!
Thank you to everyone who has made this past year for YouthHack a year filled with growth and valuable lessons. I’m eternally grateful to all our core-members, partners and participants around the world for the continuous support and belief that we can make something special happen. If you’re interested in getting involved with YouthHack, feel free to shoot me an email at david@youthhack.net.
