Eric Wu joins hackNY as Executive Director

hackNY is thrilled to announce that Eric Wu is joining hackNY as its first Executive Director!Eric led Yahoo’s Hack program for years before moving to New York in 2011. Since then he’s split his time between his own hackathon consulting outfit and serving as the GM of the #1 ice cream shop in NYC.Eric actually had a helping hand in hackNY’s origin hackathon in April of 2010, as well as nearly all of our 10 hackathons since then . The Yahoo! Open Hack Day in Times Square, which Eric helped to organize and emcee in 2009, was an inspiration for first hackNY hackathon. “Many future members and friends of the hackNY community were there, myself included,” said co-founder Chris Wiggins. “Eric put together a massive event that made coding feel creative, challenging, and collaborative. It made a big impression on all of us.”In the spring of 2010 Eric flew out to NYC to help hackNY put on their first hackathon. Since then, Eric has served on the judging panel for almost all of our 10 student hackathons.In his own words:I’m excited and gratified to be joining HackNY!When I first met the hackNY crew in the spring of 2010 to help with their first hackathon, I was immediately impressed by their vision for connecting students and the New York City startup community, and it was clear that the students shared that that enthusiasm.Even coming from tech-heavy Silicon Valley, I could see back then that the NYC tech scene was already vibrant and rapidly gaining steam. Since then, the scene has only grown in strength, with startups blossoming all over the city, attracting world-class talent. So when co-organizers Chris Wiggins and Evan Korth asked me to lead hackNY and take it to its next phase, the choice was easy. New York City is an amazing community filled with diversity and tenacity - and hackNY will do its part to make that community even stronger and better.When talking about hacking, I always think back to what I learned running hacks at Yahoo! Hackathons were brought into the mainstream back in 2005 by Chad Dickerson (now CEO of Etsy). Chad was my boss at Yahoo! for a time and he always extolled the virtues of the hack - empowering people, getting out of the way, and letting them build awesome things. I’ve tried to imbue this spirit of hack in my endeavors ever since --- in my experience, it always, always leads to good things.I’m proud to be part of this organization that is empowering students and the NYC tech ecosystem. hackNY has done a great job thus far with its mission, with over 130 fellows (our alumNY) from 40 different schools around the world having interned at over 50 different NYC startups.There’s an incredible opportunity for hackNY to continue contributing to the community, including cultivating gender and minority diversity, expanding the program to start early with high school students, and keep going with long-term mentorship on the other end, and extending into areas beyond engineering, like design and product. These are all things that have been discussed that we can now start making a reality and I can’t wait to get started. If you'd like to help, to discuss, or to be a part of realizing this vision, please email me!When I think about it, hackNY has a many similarities to an ice cream shop - they’re small/medium business oriented, very community based, high quality ingredients are a must, lots of creativity and fun are involved, and everybody loves ice cream and hackNY fellows. So next time you see me, tell me what you’d like to see hackNY do, and what your favorite flavor of ice cream is! (Really, I want to know!)