Scaling MTC to 30+ university chapters

I started MTC in spring 2023 at UC Berkeley. One club, eight people. Three years later. 30+ university chapters, city hubs in the Bay Area, Seattle, Houston, Atlanta, and New York, and a community Slack with 100+ organic members.

The mission was what made it spread. A clear line about what MTC was for is how I recruited chapter leads across the country, people who signed on without ever meeting me.

You still have to build real things and give people something to do. But the work only counts when a mission sits behind it. That's what makes someone feel part of something bigger than themselves, and what lets them carry it to the next person.

The best event we ran at Berkeley was a career fair at Hearst Mining Building, Berkeley Engineering's largest venue. We filled it with companies and students and it felt like a real conference. Venue matters. Book the flagship building and companies show up, students dress differently, the energy shifts.

We also ran fireside chats: 30 minutes of conversation, 15 of Q&A, food after. No slides. Just a founder talking about what they actually did. We ran technical workshops too, usually someone a few years out teaching something students couldn't ask in a 300-person lecture.

This year we helped organize mtchacks.com at UIUC, a full-production hackathon with embroidered hoodies, sponsor t-shirts, and a full weekend of logistics.

Our Projects division went through a full overhaul when AI coding tools got good. The old model was five or six students, one semester, writing software by hand, lots of meetings, modest output. Now it's 1-3 student devs paired with a technical mentor from industry who acts as an external PM: they check in once a week, set the tech stack, define the product requirements, and translate those into concrete technical requirements for the students to execute. The students build using Cursor, Claude Code, Antigravity, and Codex. A team that used to take a semester to ship something ships in six weeks. The student gets real project experience and a direct reference from someone already in the industry.

MTC Youth started as Python workshops at a community center. Then in April 2025 I ran a vibe coding session with about 20 middle schoolers using Replit. Within 20 minutes they built a 3D Minecraft clone, Flappy Bird with Steve Harvey's face, and a cat-themed Pomodoro timer. I posted about it on X. 18,000 views. Karpathy and Amjad from Replit both saw it. These kids weren't learning syntax. The AI handled the syntax. They handled the ideas.

Running 30+ chapters means building the machinery so a president at NYU can run an event without calling me. Every chapter lead is on a centralized Slack with regional channels and a #chapter-presidents channel. New presidents scroll back and see how the last one handled the same problems.

We loaded every ops doc into a NotebookLM notebook. A chapter lead types "how do I book a room on campus" at 11pm and gets an answer from our actual docs. We also keep a Notion database of every speaker any chapter has hosted, with contact info and notes on how the event went. It works because the data is real.

Every quarter I run a regional sync. Each president shares what's working and what's broken.

A format that worked at UC Davis showed up at UCSC the following week.

I built MTC from one Berkeley club to 30+ chapters. I'm building Cognition Coffee to do the same thing for Devin. The game plan is here. Let's talk.