Codecademy's Zach Sims on how to build a thriving global community online

14 Aug 2014 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

2:28

In this interview Zach Sims, co‑founder and CEO of Codecademy, explains how the platform cultivates a global learning community of roughly 25 million users. He emphasizes embedding a transformative ethos—responsibility, collaboration, and the belief that coding skills can change lives—into every learner. To operationalize this, Codecademy provides discussion forums where users help each other, and it supports hundreds of open‑source projects that originate from forum ideas and grow through collective contribution. The company also fosters physical community centers that enable learners to bring their knowledge into local contexts. A highlighted story is that of Martha, an 18‑year‑old from Nairobi who, after learning on Codecademy, gathered friends to launch the Nairobi Dev School, the first developer school for girls in the city. Sims notes that the true measure of success is the ripple effect: when a Codecademy graduate not only gains skills but also empowers peers, creating a multiplying impact across communities worldwide.

Chapters

Talk for a moment about this community you've built across the 25 million people on the site. I mean, many of us liken you to a young Mark Zuckerberg, right? Build your company, drop out of school, instant overnight success. Movie in the works, as I understand. Know anyone who wants to buy the book I'm working on? Exactly. But I think what's powerful when you get to that kind of scale is really that sense of how do you connect those people back to Codecademy on a regular basis? That seems like a real opportunity. If you look at the scale of a Twitter or a LinkedIn, you're not dramatically far in terms of the size of your community. And you could argue that this is, much like the people you just described in your team, a highly motivated audience. Who's ambitious and looking to, to grow and change, who's curious. So how do you think about that aspect of Codecademy?
Sure. We want to create a global community of people that have kind of the right ethos as they think about using the skills that they've accrued on the site. And so what that means is really imbuing a vibe of community, of responsibility, of these skills really being transformative. And then providing the settings that people need in order to exemplify those. So we have discussion forums where people can help each other. We have hundreds of open source projects that have been started by someone who has an idea in a forum and says, we should work on this together. And then 10 people pile on and work on it together. Companies that have been started in similar ways. We have community centers where people— you know, one of my favorite stories is a woman named Martha who's 18, learned to program on Codecademy. She lives in Nairobi. And then got 2 or 3 of her friends together, put them through Codecademy, and they started the first developer school for girls in Nairobi called the Nairobi Dev School. And we've seen this happen again and again, where someone will take the knowledge that they've built, kind of become obsessed with the same concept of teaching and learning that we try to imbue everything on Codecademy with, and bring it to their own communities. So they'll start teaching. They'll start TAing, or helping their fellow students, and really trying to empower the people around them. And I think that's when we feel most successful, is when not only do we have an impact on the person who takes the course on Codecademy, but also on the people that those people help.