About PhilaCon Valley
Making Philly the tech hub it's meant to be: by us, for us.
Why this exists
I finished a coding bootcamp in December 2024. Resilient Coders. On Demo Day I showed an app I'd built from nothing, in a room full of people who had been in it with me every day for months.
Then it ended, and I went home, and the room was gone. Where are the friends I made?
That's the whole reason this exists. Philly has no shortage of tech events — I went to them. You hand out a card, you listen to a talk, you go home with nobody. I didn't need another audience. I needed the cohort back.
So I built one that doesn't graduate. We meet, we build real things, and the people around the table are still there next month.
The name is on purpose. Silicon Valley decided who counted as a tech person. We're deciding that here.
I got here late and sideways. Most of us did.
Waskar Paulino
Founder & Executive Director
What we hold to
- Centering the margins
- Black, Brown, LGBTQIA+, and underrepresented folks lead here. Not just attend.
- Hands-on learning
- Build sessions, not lectures. You leave with something that runs.
- Community over competition
- Nobody here is your competition. Your success is the point.
- Philly pride
- Built in Philadelphia, on purpose, by people from it.
- Open knowledge
- Every project open source. Every resource free.
- Radical welcome
- First line of code yesterday, or ten years in. Same table.
What we run
- Lab
- Our flagship. Bring a project or join someone else's. No presentations, just building.
- Workshops
- Git basics through shipping an API. You do the work in the room.
- Career support
- Resume reviews, interview prep, and introductions to companies worth working for.
- Community projects
- Tools our own community uses — which makes them real portfolio work.