- The speaker, Zach Sims, is the co-founder and CEO of Codecademy, a platform for learning programming.
- Codecademy has served over 24 million students worldwide, including Antarctica.
- Sims dropped out of Columbia University and started Codecademy.
- He shares his startup story and the challenges faced leading up to Demo Day.
- Sims talks about his early experiences with the internet and building a waterproof iPod case at the age of 13.
- He emphasizes the importance of trying and learning from experiences.
- Sims also discusses his involvement with Dropio and GroupMe, and the lessons learned from working with startups.

- The speaker started a group chat that became popular and grew rapidly.
- They sold their company to Skype and went back to college but realized the skills they learned were not relevant to the job market.
- They decided to bridge the gap between education and employment and started a company with a friend.
- They initially built a platform to help students find jobs through Facebook but received negative feedback.
- They then focused on helping programmers find jobs and applied to Y Combinator.
- Despite doubting their programming abilities, they were accepted into Y Combinator.
- They struggled to find success with their initial ideas and went back to the drawing board multiple times.
- They received funding from Y Combinator and were determined not to fail.
- They faced challenges and frustrations while trying to build different startup ideas.
- The speaker had limited programming experience but was determined to succeed.

- The founders of Codecademy initially faced frustration and skepticism while trying to build their ideas.
- They decided to focus on teaching programming as they believed it was an important skill for the 21st century.
- They faced criticism and were told there was no market for teaching programming, but they were determined to prove them wrong.
- They launched Codecademy and were surprised by the overwhelming response, with thousands of people using the platform.
- They realized that building something they were passionate about made all the difference.
- Codecademy has now been used by over 24 million people, and the founders are motivated by the impact they are making.
- They share stories of individuals who have learned programming through Codecademy and achieved success in their careers.
- The founders emphasize the importance of getting started, optimizing for learning, and never giving up in the roller coaster journey of startups.
- They also highlight the fact that no one really knows what they're doing in the startup world, but taking action and trying is key.

- Zach Sims, co-founder and CEO of Codecademy, shares his startup story and the challenges faced leading up to Demo Day.
- He emphasizes the importance of trying and learning from experiences, and discusses his involvement with Dropio and GroupMe.
- Sims talks about the initial struggles and multiple iterations of their startup ideas.
- They decided to focus on teaching programming and launched Codecademy, which has now been used by over 24 million people worldwide.
- The founders highlight the importance of getting started, optimizing for learning, and never giving up in the roller coaster journey of startups.

Zach Sims speaks at Startup School NY 2014

I have a distinct privilege right now to introduce another 1 of those New York Y Combinator companies.

CEO, this is co-founder and CEO Zach Sims who started Codecademy.

You guys hopefully all know about Codecademy.

If programming is the fluency of this generation, They are the place.

Since they launched about 3 years ago, they have now served, I think, over 24 million students all over the world in every single country.

1 of the things that's really exciting about this is not only was he a dropout from Columbia, but yes, was that for dropouts or for Columbia?

But like so many startup stories, you know, from the outside it seems really simple, really clear, right?

Figure something out, make something people want, grow, grow, grow, and before you know it you're on the Colbert Report, which Zach was, it was a great episode.

But in fact, every startup is its own cluster.

And I hope Zach shares with you the story of the few weeks running up to demo day, because Code Academy was anything but a sure thing.

I didn't realize I'd have to compete with the soccer game today.

I should have interwoven the score in my presentation.

And as Alexis just mentioned, I started a company called Codecademy with my co-founder Ryan.

And we teach people the skills they need to find jobs in the 21st century online.

But as Alexis mentioned, it wasn't always that way.

So when I go to a talk like this and I sit in the audience, I always ask, why is that person on stage?

What experiences have they been through that let them stand up and preach to people?

And so today I looked at the slate of speakers that's here today and saw a lot of pretty awesome names.

You have people who are changing the world with nonprofits and people with super fast-growing companies.

And then I think they needed someone to fill the cliche spot.

So my story is somewhat similar to what you'd see on the social network, the movie that hopefully a lot of you are familiar with, but with a lot less Trent Reznor music and a lot less cocaine.

So what I hope you guys leave with at the end of today is kind of our story and hopefully a few key lessons you can learn that will tell you some things you can do to eventually 1 day prepare yourself to start your own company.

And then a lot of things that we did that you probably shouldn't do if you do start your own company.

And hopefully a couple of fun stories in between.

Because as Alexis said, you hear all the time about people who kind of just hit it and it just works.

And I think the story that's been told about Codecademy a lot is that we built the actual product a few weeks before Demo Day and launched and had a lot of success, but it wasn't really that easy.

So I want to go back to 2003, when I really started becoming interested in the internet.

And that was the year that the iTunes Music Store got really big.

They ran the first advertisements for the iTunes Music Store.

And somewhat ironically, they were headlined by Dr.

And so now that's all kind of come full circle a few years later.

For the first time, you could carry 1,000 songs in your pocket.

I brought it on runs, and it skipped throughout the runs.

But what I didn't have was a way to protect it when I dropped it on the ground, which happened all the time.

And as all of you know, with hard drives, dropping them on the ground isn't so great.

So I looked online, and I tried to find a case that I could use for my iPod.

And instead of doing what the normal person does and buying the first 1 that I saw, I realized I should just make 1 myself.

So at the age of 13 in 2003, I emailed a bunch of different iPod case manufacturers across the country and told them that I had the greatest idea ever to build a waterproof iPod case.

I didn't tell them that I was 13 and had no idea what I was talking about.

So after around 6 months of emailing with someone who worked at a big case manufacturer across the U.S., finally I had something in my hands that had gone from having an idea when I first got the iPod to having something that now protected it everywhere.

And then a couple weeks later, the guy on the other end who worked at the case manufacturer asked to get on the phone with me so we could talk about how we were going to launch and market what we had built.

And so what I thought was really cool was that no 1 on the internet knew that I was 13 and in my parents' basement.

The great equalizer that is until you get on the phone with someone and your voice cracks 10 seconds into the phone call.

So that relationship was really fruitful until he realized that I was 13.

But what was really empowering about that was that I realized that being young or being somewhere not in New York or in San Francisco, didn't matter on the Internet.

It didn't matter that I'd never built hardware before.

It didn't matter that I didn't know what marketing was.

But the Internet allowed me to learn all these things very quickly and to build something that came out of that.

So I think that was 1 of the first lessons I learned early on is don't know until you try.

So after that first experience, I kind of kept going back to the question of how do I learn more about the internet and what I can do with it?

I'd already seen what an amazing impact it could have on me and people around me.

And so I went to the library, and I picked up a book on PHP and MySQL for dummies.

I went to a shelf, and I saw a list full of yellow and black books, picked up a few of them that had acronyms I didn't quite understand, and I figured, you know, a book for the rest of us.

And I went home and I read a bunch of For Dummies books, but it never really clicked.

I never really built anything with the knowledge that I'd picked up by reading these books, because they didn't actually have me working on real projects.

So when I turned 18, I went to Columbia in New York, as Alexis mentioned.

And instead of studying computer science, for some reason, I decided to study political science.

And I usually try not to mention that but I'll tell you guys that secret.

So I went to college and my first semester I tried to find people that were like me, that were interested in technology, that were interested in startups, but there was no 1.

I asked everyone around me, what are you guys interested in doing with your future and your careers?

And half of them told me, we're definitely not thinking about that, we're just interested in partying.

And the other half looked at me similarly weirdly and said, you know, we're working in banking consulting, obviously, like everyone else in New York.

But second semester of my freshman year, I saw a poster that there was going to be a talk from someone who I thought was kind of famous in the New York startup scene.

His name was Sam Lesson and he started a company called Dropio.

And he was coming and I showed up 2 hours early for his talk.

I was thinking there was going to be like a packed house.

I got there and it was in a really small room, but it was in that really nice building.

So I figured, very important person, a lot of people are going to be here.

Sam showed up on time, and no 1 else showed up.

So that was New York in 2008, was a world where no 1 was interested in startups and you got ridiculed and there was no 1 to talk to about working in technology.

And so Sam was the only thing I had, so I pestered him for the next 6 months until he finally let me work for him for a summer for free, and I tutored the SATs at night back in Connecticut where I'm from, and I sat on the couch and I learned everything I could from what Sam was doing.

I went back to college and I said, what can I do next that will help me learn more, help me become better than the experience I had at Dropium?

I definitely wasn't taking another class on political theory, which at that point was interesting, but not quite relevant to what I wanted to do after I graduated.

And so I got to know a lot of other people in New York who were working in startups.

And I went to TechCrunch Disrupt that year, and I saw 2 friends of mine demo something called GroupMe that, at the time, allowed you to text 1 phone number, and it created a group chatting application.

You could send 1 text to 1 number, it'd go to like 5 or 6 people, and they could all text back to that number.

The 2 founders who are friends of mine had been at a music festival the week beforehand and experienced this themselves when they were trying to text and there was no data and for their emails to get through.

And they could text each other and they got lost.

And then a week later, they built something that solved their problem.

And so GroupMe went on to be super popular at TechCrunch Disrupt.

And I eventually joined them to work on GroupMe when it was just the 2 of them and me in an apartment with a couple other people.

And I realized that solving their problem was the key to their early success.

They had built something that they needed to use.

They figured there's a lot of people that go to music festivals, and there's a lot of people that need to communicate.

And so what I had at GroupMe was something that finally my friends believed in.

I went from My friends looking at me as if I had the worst ideas ever, to adding them all to a group chat.

And for the first time, they thought that something I was involved in was pretty cool.

And then a lot of other people thought it was pretty cool, too.

And So we went from nothing in, I think it was July of 2010, to sending hundreds of thousands of messages a day really, really quickly.

And I realized that the most important thing I could do was get a front row seat on the rocket ship and watch as Groupmate grew from 2 people to 15 people to 20 people.

And then less than a year after it was started, it sold to Skype.

And I had such a good experience, kind of figured what most people would do is double down and go back and work in startups.

But I fell prey to the peer pressure and I interviewed at banks and consulting firms like everyone else.

And I realized sitting across the table from all these managing directors, there was absolutely nothing I wanted to learn from these people.

I sat there and I regurgitated a discounted cash flow function.

And even doing it in an interview was just massively painful.

I figured if that was going to be my life, 18 hours a day for 2 years, I should choose something else to do.

But what I also saw was that the skills that I had learned over the past 2 and a half years while I was at Columbia weren't relevant to what mattered in the job market.

And I saw that all of my friends struggled to find jobs too.

And a friend of mine, Ryan, at the time was a senior, and all of his friends were trying to find jobs.

And even though they were seniors graduating from Columbia, a lot of them still struggled because the skills that they were learning weren't immediately practical.

So I talked to Ryan, who at the time probably thought I was crazy, and said, we should fix this.

You know, this gap between education and employment, it shouldn't be too hard to solve.

The first email that I think really started the company was headlined, 1 Other Thing.

That 1 other thing turned out to be our company.

But we started talking about ways to connect people with skills that would eventually help them find jobs.

And we realized we should just get started.

We had a lot of free time and nights and weekends.

And so we started building a bunch of different ideas.

The first 1, we've always been really great at naming.

So the first 1 is called Come Recruit Us.

I believe, I think we had the .us domain name, so we were very inventive.

And at the time, we figured the best way to connect students with jobs was to have them log in with their Facebook account and just say where they wanted to work.

So we built the first version of this in 2011.

And we talked to a lot of friends and mentors, people who worked at startups before.

And all the people that worked at startups looked at us and just said, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

We're like, it's okay, you're not the market for this.

So we spoke to our friends at Columbia and we're like, we're going to help you get jobs.

And they all looked at us and they said, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

So Ryan and I took that feedback and we said, yeah, you know, we'll roll with this and we'll apply to Y Combinator because if no 1 else thinks our idea is good, maybe at least someone will think it's crazy.

So we filled out our Y Combinator application and we asked for some feedback and got some of the best advice I think I've gotten since we started the company, which is we had too many words and not enough information.

And that was probably because we didn't really know what we were building ourself.

And so we just kind of put a lot of words around a thing.

And we applied to YC and figured we'd never, ever get in.

Turned out we got an email a couple weeks later, and we were invited to interview.

So we flew out to California, And we met with all the partners.

And before doing that, though, we landed, went to a coffee shop.

We figured I'm going to put the finishing touches on the thing that we had built that helped people find jobs through Facebook.

And we realized on the plane, we somehow had an epiphany that this is just a horrible idea.

Everyone who had been talking to us was absolutely right.

So at the time, we figured, well, we can help programmers find jobs.

Because I was learning to program myself.

So we spent the next 48 hours in a cafe in San Francisco building a way for people to take programming challenges and then find jobs from there.

And we're so focused on building the first prototype of that product, that we didn't realize we had locked the keys to our Airbnb inside our Airbnb.

So we went back that night and didn't have a place to stay.

So next morning we showed up at Y Combinator looking a little raggedy and just a total mess.

And we figured we walked in, we spoke to the partners for 10 minutes, and we got question after question.

But the weird thing was they were answering each other's questions.

So we didn't know whether that meant we had a really good idea or a not so good idea.

And we didn't have a chance to demo what we had spent 48 hours building.

And so on the way out, 1 of the partners tapped us on the shoulders, kind of looked at us and said, can you guys even actually program?

So we left and we said, well, we blew it.

We didn't even get to answer any of them.

And they don't even think we know what we're doing.

So, which wasn't far from the truth at the time.

And so we went from being on a super high before our interview to super low, walking around Palo Alto.

And then a few hours later, Paul Graham called us and said, we'd like to have you for White Combinator this year.

I think my answer to him on the phone was like, is this the wrong number?

And then I did something smart and I said, can I get back to you?

Which I have no idea what we needed to think about, but apparently we did.

So a couple weeks later, we got our first check from Y Combinator.

This is the first feeling of like, wow, we actually made it.

Everyone gets into Y Combinator instantly successful.

And we moved out to Silicon Valley, and we said, awesome, everything's set from here on out.

I'm going to live and work in a suite office.

You see all those pictures of brick in San Francisco.

And then we get out there, and we crashed on the floor of a friend's apartment who worked at Palantir.

And so this was our office and where we slept for the first couple of weeks until we realized it's not productive when your desk is the box for a coffee machine.

So we moved into our own office, felt really warm and cozy.

You'll notice we're really good at naming.

So the company's name is Ryzac, because my co-founder's name is Ryan and my name is Zach.

And we said, we have a way for you to hire more programmers.

The hardest thing we do is hire, and we can't find a way to find people, we can't find a way to evaluate them.

And so we knew we were on the right track there.

And then we talked to the programmers, And we said, we have this really awesome thing.

And to do it, you just have to do these fun challenges.

And they had absolutely no interest in what we were building.

Went to a Y Combinator dinner, and they were all like, we just started a company in YC, and I still get 50 LinkedIn email requests every day.

Like, why am I going to mess around on your garbage platform?

And you'll notice this is not the first time we went back to the drawing board.

But this time, it wasn't just metaphorical.

And we didn't go back to the original concept that we had of helping people learn skills to find jobs.

Instead, we basically became random startup idea generators.

You'll notice some of them are really good, like building a CRM for club promoters.

Literally, if you spun like a jackpot wheel, you would not get anything as crazy as what we were coming up with.

So we kind of sat there and we're like, well, unclear what we're doing, but we're in Y Combinator and we have $170,000, so that's cool.

And there's 2 of us, and we figured we could move in with friends, we could eat ramen, and we would have 5 years of burn.

Just work on CRMs for club promoters all day.

And I remember going to office hours with Sam Altman, and Sam had called us, you know, the worst ratio of intelligence to ideas.

So every night we'd go home and I'd sit there and Ryan and I would write code for 1 of these ideas and we'd get super, super frustrated, both with what we were building, but For me, without a formal programming background, I had taken CS 101 when I was at Columbia, I had read a couple of those for dummies books, and Ryan had actually started an organization on campus at Columbia to teach people how to program.

And so, in the process, I was learning the skills I needed to do my job, basically.

And so we started, kind of came back to where we started.

Just can we teach people the most important skill they need to find a job in the 21st century, which was programming.

And we had sort of patient 0, which is me.

If I could learn how to program well, then probably a couple other people could use it too.

And this was around 3 to 4 weeks before demo day at this point.

And so we started building the first version of Codecademy.

And we spoke to a couple of the partners at YC and some investors.

And again, you'll notice this is a common refrain.

And a lot of them told us that there are only 100,000 employed programmers in the US.

Like, there's just no market for something that teaches people to program.

People are not interested in programming and never will be.

That was something we heard a couple times.

Ryan and I were super interested in what we were doing, mostly because we were building for me, and based on Ryan's experience.

And so we'd go home every night, worked all the time.

We did some research for some of the fundamental pieces of Codecademy.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Zach Sims at Startup School NY 2014