Last Sunday, on 18th Nov, we got together for our 4th HackCon at Kolektif House Maslak. A warm "Welcome Home" speech was made by Kaan Akın, explaining what we’ve accomplished before, our aim for the future and what we expect from our new batch of Pioneers. While telling you more about what we did at HackCon4, I’ll also explain our community processes and some info for our new Pioneers who couldn’t attend HackCon4.As Pioneers, we love talking on Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Digital Transformation, and IoT/Smart Machines. We will try to provide more resources and feed our new Pioneers with great information on those topics.Then I took the stage for our second session, which was about events and activities we are planning at Hackquarters Pioneers for this new term. You can also find more info about this topic in our previous blog.

Last year, we received more than 2500 applications for our events and Pioneers program, and we accepted 120 new Pioneers into our family. We organized more than 40 meetups at 15 universities and 8 different cities. For this year we received more than 3000 applications for our events and Pioneers program. We have handpicked 105 new Pioneers into our family from 32 universities, 5 high schools and from 20 different cities all across Turkey. We are so proud to be growing rapidly.

Pizza for everyone!

After sharing our future plans with our beloved Pioneers, we had a networking session. We would love to thank StartupHR team for helping us to create such a fun environment for our attendees and Pizza Locale for providing delicious pizzas for everyone.Next session was given by Kaan Akın about "Growing Tech in a Developing World". We’ve got inspired by knowing more about the stories of leading tech companies and important facts about well-known startups.

Omegas took over the stage after Kaan’s presentation. Berke Uygun from Doktorderki, Emrah Yiğit from Pepapp, Elif Aleyna Duman from Hangi Üniversite Hangi Bölüm, Emirhan Erdoğan from Appyist and TurkishKit, Sezer Ulutaş from Appcent, Mehmet Taş from Blockpays, Berkay Şamiloğlu from Tion and Nizamettin Sami Harputlu from StartupHR were the panelists of our session, which was moderated by Kaan Akın. We would like to thank all our friends for being with us for the day and sharing their unique experiences.The last presentation was from our education partner; TurkishKit. Emirhan Erdoğan talked about what TurkishKit is doing recently, how their community works and how we’ll be working together in our new term at Pioneers. They’ve already helped us on organizing our upcoming Hacker Meetups and our partnership with Bahçeşehir University. We would like to thank them for their participation at HackCon and their wonderful contribution to Pioneers.

What is next for Hackquarters Pioneers?

HackCon4 was our first step into the new term of Hackquarters Pioneers. In Hackquarters Pioneers, we have different groups called Alpha, Beta and Omega. If you know about a product’s creating cycle, you may be heard these words before. Alpha members are fresh newbies, who are in the beginning of all process, and trying to gain more knowledge to become “beta”. Beta members are the ones who had internships in startups or volunteered in organizing our events, so they’ve gained experience. Aleyna, Göktuğ, Sena, Metin and Emre are Betas of Pioneers 2019. Omegas are the last ring of the chain, the ones finally turned an idea into a startup. They help Alphas and Betas to complete the same process successfully. To be clear, the reason behind dividing our community is not creating a hierarchical community, it is actually creating a cycle which everyone could learn from the other.Hackquarters Pioneers will be meeting every month as physical and online both. Physical meetings are for mostly hanging outs, knowing each other better. Online meetings are for catching up the Pioneers learning process well and knowing people from other cities as well without a necessity to have them in İstanbul.We’re planning to add new online courses to Teachable which is our education platform for teaching entrepreneurship. We suggested to new Pioneers also watch, learn and take some notes. Then, they should give us feedbacks if there is any missing points or if they want to add new topics with the others. So we’ll manage to create new online courses and select 15 lucky Pioneers from whom gives us feedbacks, to attend courses as offline.

Through online channels we’ll be creating online meet ups, using Youtube more efficiently and promote our offline events to be reached from any other cities. Slack and WhatsApp groups have been made, our Slack channel has reached 250+ people from entrepreneurs, Pioneers and investors. Pioneers will be benefiting from networking, education and other needs for their entrepreneurship path. I strongly suggest every Pioneer to keep eyes out on every mailings and follow Hackquarters' social media accounts carefully.You’ll see Pioneers are raising on LinkedIn and Angel.co since they already started adding themselves into that platforms. Because we are trying to take them more into the ecosystem and they’ll learn how to use efficiently these two platforms, when they have to find true customers for their startups.You can look at HackCon's posts from #hackcon on Instagram. I can’t wait to create crazier stuff with Pioneers!