Zach Latta
Hack Club
Shelburne, VT USA
"You don’t have to ask anyone for permission to make something that’s meaningful to you."
Career Roadmap
Zach's work combines: Technology, Entrepreneurship, and Helping People
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Day In The Life
Skills &
Education
Advice for getting started
If you're just starting out as a young person in any field, one of the best things you can do is find people who are respected in that field, get close with them, and meet with them regularly. Those mentors can help you through sticky situations and also be a vouch of confidence for you to others in the field. I recommend cold emailing people. One benefit of being a young person interested in a field is that people want to help you.
Here's the path I took:
Did Not Complete
Life & Career Milestones
My path in life has been direct
1.
I grew up in Los Angeles, California.
2.
I had always loved computers but the public schools I went to didn’t really offer any computer or coding classes.
3.
My favorite game as a kid was Club Penguin and I wanted to build a website about it—my coding journey started with Googling how to build a website and following along with tutorials.
4.
As I got older, I wanted more of an opportunity to explore my passion for computers, so I dropped out of high school, left home at 16, and moved to San Francisco, California, to become a programmer.
5.
As a teenager, I helped create two apps that got very popular—one became the most popular game on the App Store and the other became the most popular app on the App Store.
6.
I used the savings from those opportunities to start Hack Club to create the type of space to explore computers and coding that I wished I had when I was younger.
7.
Eight years later, Hack Club is now an international network of teenagers who love computers and are doing anything from just starting to going very deep on their coding journeys.
Defining Moments
How I responded to discouragement
THE NOISE
Messages from Society in general:
You have to follow a specific educational and career path in order to be successful.
How I responded:
As a society, we have this idea that there are these set paths that you're supposed to go down in order to be successful. I believe that the world is a complex place and there are lot of different ways to live an interesting and meaningful life within it. The only person's standards that you should hold yourself to are your own. I do think you should have high standards for yourself but you should live a life that's meaningful to you—not others.