Codecademy co-founder Zach Sims says coding is now as essential as reading and writing. The company hit 500,000 users by November and partnered with the White House on Code Summer Plus, a program teaching low-income youth to code. Sims dropped out of college without a coding background before building Codecademy with co-founder Ryan.
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A common complaint among employers in Silicon Valley is the lack of coders and engineers. One startup is trying to change that. Codecademy's goal is to teach anyone how to code for free online. Last week it announced a deal with the White House called Code Summer, a 3-month program geared to teaching underprivileged children and teens. Earlier I spoke with Codecademy co-founder Zach Sims.
Sure, I think it's finally becoming time that coding is a skill almost as important as reading and writing. And in the 21st century, you know, these are, these These are skills that can get people jobs that are just as important as knowing math and science also.
Do you think everybody should know how to code?
I think everyone should at least know the basics of coding, yeah.
Alright, now you just announced a partnership with the White House. Tell us about that.
Sure, we're working with the White House on a program called Code Summer Plus that's designed to educate low-income youth in basic coding skills as well. So it's a 3-month condensed version of what we're doing with Code Year, which is a super popular program to get people to learn to code in 2012.
Tell me about the popularity. I mean, you guys just launched last year and it's really taken off.
Why do you think that is? I think it goes back to your first question. So coding is finally entering the mainstream as something that's super important. And I think that New Year's resolutions are, you know, something that people want to get into. And coding is something that they can build real skill from.
We talk to a lot of people, companies here in Silicon Valley, and they always talk about how difficult it is to find good engineers and good developers. Do you see this as something that, you know, over the longer term could combat that problem and even the wider unemployment problem?
Yeah, I mean, I think we are hopefully educating that future generation of developers who can work for these Silicon Valley companies and companies anywhere that need developers.
Now, can you really learn to code online? Is it really that easy?
It's not easy, but you can definitely learn online. I think it's just, you know, if you put the effort in, you can learn the same way online as you can offline.
And you, I understand, dropped out of college to do this, but you don't have a coding background, right?
So I didn't have a coding background, and I learned slowly before we built this. And so my co-founder Ryan and I basically built, you know, this for me after Ryan had been teaching people to code for a while also while we were at Columbia.
Now, one of the things I didn't realize is it's all free. How do you, how do you get away giving this away for free?
Sure, so everything is free for now. We raised money in October, and so that's sort of supporting where we are now, and we'll look into making money soon.
So monetizing, I mean, what kind of monetization efforts are you looking at? How do you plan to make money in the future?
Sure, I think we're looking at a massive network of super engaged users who are all interested in development, so I think there's a lot of things that they'll be interested in buying and opportunities they'll be interested in pursuing also.
And how many courses do you have right now?
So right now it's somewhere around 6 or 7, and we're adding more every day.
So you guys, I know you're you're looking to ramp up over the next year. Tell me about exciting plans you have in 2012. Sure.
We're adding a bunch of different programming languages. We're helping people do more than just learn to program. We launched, uh, question and answer forums the other day. Uh, we launched meetups also. So there are people in, I think, more than 40 cities around the world now, uh, who are meeting up to talk about Code Year and teach each other how to code in addition to learning with us.
And how many people have signed up so far?
So the last number we announced was in November, and that was 500,000 people that had, uh, used Codecademy, and then 350,000 more signed up for Code Year since, uh, January 1st.
What kinds of people are these? You know, tell me sort of your average customer.
It's really everyone. We've seen, you know, it's not just the United States. We have people, the meetups that I mentioned, there are meetups in Kosovo. There are people that are 85 and older and people whose parents are helping them when they're 13 years old also.
