Zach Sims is the co-founder and CEO of t…
Zach Sims is the co-founder and CEO of the Codecademy website. As a 22 year old CEO, much of Zach’s biography involves some of the short term projects he’s worked on to date such as Drop.io (acquired by Facebook), AOL’s venture group, and GroupMe (acquired by Skype).
Codecademy
Codecademy is a website designed to help students learn how to program through a fun, progress tracking and badge obtaining system. In this 6 minute interview, Zach and co-founder Ryan Bubinski describe their ascension to Codecademy :
Ryan Bubinski and Zach Sims, Co-founders of Codecademy from Venture Studio on Vimeo.
As young entrepreneurs, Zach and Ryan amassed over 200,000 followers within 3 days of launching without any advertising which then lead to a few investors offering to fund the venture. In October 2011, they raised $2.5 million in Series A funding and have since added another $10 million in Series B funding this past June. By the end of 2011, the site had garnered over a million users. Although no clear indication on how they are aiming to gain revenue from the venture, there are a multitude of options that will become available in coming years as the user base continues to expand. Among the options:
- Offering prospective companies a look at potential programmer profiles and earning headhunting premiums upon signing students.
- Introducing premium accounts that offer additional languages and lessons
- Incorporating a micro-economy that leverages the availability of students and teachers
As Codecademy is still in its infancy, it is difficult to evaluate their team as it is still expanding and is likely to triple in size within the next year. In its current state, Codecademy employs three engineers, two education specialists, a user experience designer, and a community relations specialist.
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teacherben 4:43 am on October 2, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I signed up for codeacademy when it was in beta and managed to get through the first set of beginning tutorials on javascript. I think it’s great that it has become popular and that so many people have used it to learn coding. I set 2011/12 as my year to learn programming, but I personally found codeacademy to be really dry and ended up turned to other resources. There is no shortage of competing products out there there days. The new Khan Academy computer science section certainly takes better advantage of possibilities for interactivity than these guys, but Khan Academy started off a bit boring too. With the right backers and momentum, I imagine that they will be able to tweak the product to match the wants/needs of their target audience, whoever that turns out to be.
Patrick Pichette 6:04 am on October 2, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
The thing I enjoyed about Codecademy was its ability to encourage younger students to learn to code. Many of my high school students loved the badges and reward system and constantly strived to get more badges and compete amongst themselves. The immediate response and guided approach seemed to work well to help students progress through the content at their own pace. I haven’t looked at Khan Academy’s new computer science course so I’ll need to have another look but I did find Codecademy’s approach to be quite promising. If anything, their core concept could be leveraged to produce content for other courses as well (math, languages, etc..).