When Ryan and I started building Codecademy in August of 2011, we were focused on building something for ourselves. I was teaching myself to code and was incredibly frustrated by what I found in books, videos, and elsewhere online. Ryan, meanwhile, had taught hundreds of students while we were at Columbia and wanted to find a way to teach millions more. What started as something built for the two of us has become so much more in the nine months afterwards.
Shortly after we launched, hundreds of thousands of people around the world used Codecademy. Since then, we’ve heard awesome stories from thousands of them. Some of them are below:
Ben Roberts from Memphis, TN told us about how learning just the basics of JavaScript helped him land a position as a Data Management Specialist – and that knowing the core programming concepts has been been very handy in his new job.
Juliet Waters, a writer from Montreal, has been learning programming with Codecademy with her 11 year old son, Ben, and blogging about their experiences. She told us that six months ago, she didn’t know what a programmer really did. Now she’s joined a hacker space, hosted coding meet ups, and made her own website and app!
Users like Adam Travers from Bristol, UK have also shared with us how valuable it can be to combine a little coding with an existing skill. Adam is an illustrator and designer, but has found that learning some programming has greatly complemented his existing skills. He now incorporates his illustrations into dynamic websites that he creates himself!
Learning is a complex process, and we’ve put a lot of thought into designing the best learning experience possible. Many of us taught programming before Codecademy and we took what we learned there from our teaching experiences and put it all into Codecademy. That’s why we’re so passionate about learning by doing, creating, and building real projects with new technologies.
Along the way, we’ve been fortunate enough to work with amazing people as both friends, mentors, and investors. In November 2011, we started working with Andy Weissman and the folks at Union Square Ventures. They and our other awesome first-round investors contributed tremendously to both our vision and our progress.
In January, we launched Code Year as a way to show the world just how important programming is. Months later, hundreds of thousands people are getting programming lessons sent to them each week. A few weeks after we launched Code Year, we met Neil Rimer and Saul Klein of Index Ventures. Saul told us, about the world he wanted for his kids – one where code was a foreign language as important as Chinese and English for people to learn. Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins visited our office around the same time and painted a picture of a few industries that needed to be shaken up – education chief among them (see her 2012 Internet Trends presentation here). We spent a lot of time talking to Saul and Mary, and Mike Abbott at Kleiner about the future of education, programming, and our workforces.
Ryan, the rest of the Codecademy team and I have thought endlessly about the future of education and how we get there. It became clear that we needed partners who both understood the importance of a global company (more than 50% of Codecademy’s users are outside of the US) and the process of scaling a company far beyond the nine people we have grown to now. Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins are joining the Codecademy family with $10 million in our second round of financing. They’re joined as well by Union Square Ventures, Yuri Milner and Richard Branson. It’s inspiring to work with both great firms and terrific entrepreneurs like Richard and Yuri.
With this new funding, we’re going to keep doing what we’ve been doing. We’ve reached millions of students in more than one hundred countries. Tens of thousands of teachers that have created Codecademy courses are now able to spread their knowledge all over the world. We want to make that process better for our students and for our teachers.
Codecademy is a global movement. We’ve hired people from all over the world – Jordan, Finland, Australia, and elsewhere – and we want anyone, anywhere to have access to an education that can change their lives.
Rarely is there an opportunity to have so much of an impact on so many people, and we’re excited to keep working for our students and our teachers. If you think you can help, come join the team.