adFreeq founder creates Hackton, a home for Columbia programmers

Hackton (pronounced Hack-tin) sounds like it could be the name of a town in your county, which is exactly what Peter Meng, founder and CEO of adFreeq, was going for when he launched the Columbia-based community space for programmers Sept. 20 …

Hackton (pronounced Hack-tin) sounds like it could be the name of a town in your county, which is exactly what Peter Meng, founder and CEO of adFreeq, was going for when he launched the Columbia-based community space for programmers Sept. 20.

“We just really wanted to make it a community,” Meng said. “That’s why we call it ‘The Community of Hackton.’ It’s kind of a play on a little town.”

From the start, Meng wanted to build a community he felt was missing in Columbia. Meng said REDI, the local business incubator, and Museao, a community workspace, have created communities for startups of traditional businesses and marketers, but there hasn’t been anything for programmers. He also mentioned Ben Barreth‘s Home for Hackers in Kansas City as an inspiration, and that he reached out to Barreth for advice on building Hackton.

“We’re trying to find ways to encourage people to come together and program together as part of a programming and technical community,” Meng (left) said. “That’s why we’ve created this place. So people can come together and work together, share ideas, maybe have a cold beverage or maybe a good cup of coffee, and kind of just hang out and share stuff.”

The Community of Hackton, located in an unobtrusive space at 1727 Paris Road, functions as a hangout space. A kitchen in the back always has a stock of snacks and beer. Half the space is filled with desks—all donated—while the other half has an open floor space and whiteboards lining the walls. 

One of those whiteboards lists the “rules” for the Community of Hackton: Create, share, be honest, be secure, be clean, pay up, be respectful, be friendly, have fun, start a biz and create more.

Meng hopes to create community and practicality with the space, and upcoming events are designed around these goals. Hackton will hold monthly gatherings featuring barbecue and brews every third Tuesday of each month, its website features a job board and it will host a hackathon designed to solve a local social problem in November. 

Hackton will also offer a free eight-week course called, “Entrémanure—Powerful Fertilizer for Your Startup” on Monday nights taught by local business professionals, including Meng; Greg Wolff, Marathon Building Environments founder and president; and Michael Nichols, former vice president of UM System Economic and Research Development.

Meng hopes all of these resources can help the space’s users solve problems together.

“There were several people who said, ‘I’ll be working on a problem at work during the day, and I’ll just need to talk to somebody to figure out how to do this,’” Meng said. “They just want to spend 30 minutes going trough it, looking through different ideas, and then just hang out a little bit.”

The Community of Hackton is hosting its BrewBQ event Tuesday, Oct. 15 at 6 p.m (tomorrow). Membership prices start at $5 per day, $150 a quarter and $500 a year, but the space is currently offering a special of $50 for the first quarter.  

Although Meng wants membership to grow, he said he’s most concerned about expanding a community.

“Our goal is to have the greatest amount of diversity we can create because our whole philosophy is that great ideas come when peanut butter runs into the chocolate,” Meng said. “When you bring together two people you normally wouldn’t think go together and they start talking to each other and all of the sudden here comes this amazing idea. Invariably, that’s how most good companies start.”

 

Credits: Photo by Sarah Darby.

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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