Five years ago, my co-founder Ryan and I started Codecademy to help people around the world learn the skills they need to find jobs. We were the first two users; I was the student, and Ryan was the teacher. I learned JavaScript to write the first lesson on the site and the front end, while Ryan handled all of the backend architecture. At the time, our earliest advisors and friends told us the programming market was small, with less than 200,000 programmers in the US. We pushed forward anyways and discovered more than 200,000 new programmers in the weekend that we launched.

Looking at where we are today, I’m overjoyed that we’ve been able to create change of an entirely different magnitude. Tens of millions of learners around the world have taken Codecademy courses. What matters to us, however, isn’t just the number of learners but their stories. We wake up every morning with the hopes of helping learners around the world gain skills not just for the sake of knowledge, but to improve their quality of life.

Joel Duran is one of those students. He started coding his junior year in high school, and turned to Codecademy to learn Python. Since then, Joel has continued to study coding and is currently in an internship program with IBM. He’s headed to college in the fall to get his bachelors in computer science.

Kristina Pilapil is another student who used Codecademy to change her life. Kristina is from the Phillippines and started learning on Codecademy with a friend when she was in college. She fell in love with coding and building websites, and now works at one of the top custom web design companies in the Philippines. She has been able to pay off her student debt and help support her family because of the career she has built for herself.

These stories inspire us to continue pushing forward to achieve our mission. Less than a year ago we introduced Codecademy Pro, as a way to help our more serious learners with on-demand help, extra content, and clear pathways to jobs. Codecademy Pro is only the beginning of the learning solutions we want to provide to our learners.

To help build our offerings even further, we’re excited to share that we’ve raised an additional $30 million in funding. This means, above all, that Codecademy will continue to offer new and better ways for our learners to develop the skills they need to find jobs. Thanks, as ever, for joining us.