Code is the new alphabet
Why I’m launching a coding bootcamp in Brazil.
I clearly remember the epiphany of discovering Napster back in 1999 on my university campus. It was the fastest broadband 50 km around. Our frantic searches for mp3s occupied us for weeks. We would stop to reflect on the fact that the music industry was definitely f***ed... and then search mp3s again. The press and business elite would not stop making fun of label owners as “dinosaurs” who hadn’t anticipated the cool and shiny “digital wave”…
Zoom forward to 2016, working at Deezer gives you a very different picture. First, the music industry has understood how to address the crowd’s need for instant access and synchronicity. It allows streaming services to offer subscriptions to access more than 40 million tracks the global revenue is finally growing again. And if there is one thing I understood at Deezer is the importance of good programming. All the good efforts of PR, advertising and business development don’t come even close to designing a good onboarding and making sure your users understand and use the product. At Deezer, programmers ruled.
Now what’s ironic is the way the rest of the industry moguls (sometimes the same that had mocked music labels) hasn’t been spared by the same kind of digital wave. They actually got shadowed by a “handsome surfer” who is attracting the whole crowd away from them. It is the Napster story all over again: a nice digital app/website connects users or content providers and makes it EASY to do whatever you have in mind. Airbnb is doing it to Hilton, Whatsapp to Mobile Carriers, Transferwise and Lending clubs to banks, Facebook to media, Netflix to Blockbuster and then TV Networks…
Everyday a new fight begins. A slick app, where UX wins over a crowd tired of being abused by the traditional service provider in a crappy experience. If you ever used a traditional bank’s app or being forced to pay a visit to your local bank agency to do something that clicking a button would solve, you probably see my point… The old players thinking that a physical network of stores / antenas / hotels -you name it- would protect them from competition are still scratching their head trying to understand what is happening.
Here are the two things you must keep in mind:
- “Software is eating the world”
- if you intend to be part of the revolution, stop what you’re doing and learn to code. Not necessarily to turn yourself into the next Mark Zuckerberg, but to be able to launch a product or a service without searching desperately for a tech cofounder, or wasting all your money on a dodgy web agency which will build you half a product one year too late…
“Learning to code is the single best thing anyone can do to get the most out of the amazing future in front of us.”
Marc Andreessen — VC and Founder of Netscape
Internet is the biggest invention since Gutenberg’s printing press. Learning how to code will soon become as important as learning how to read. We never needed millions of Hemingway and Shakespeares, but imagine what kind of world we would live in if we had stayed to fifteen century’s literacy rate.
Well, in a few centuries, those who don’t know how to code will be like the illiterate of our times…
That’s why I’m launching LeWagon
The first Coding Bootcamp to happen in Brazil.
Coding bootcamps are intensive, full-time, months-long programs designed to train student how to code in a “learn by doing” philosophy. In the US alone, more than 16k students “graduated” from bootcamps in 2015. That is double the number of 2014 and only a third of Computer Science University yearly grads... The market understood that we need more coders and the smartest, fastest answer it got was “bootcamp”.
Le Wagon is one of the most acclaimed Coding Bootcamps according to both press and reviews.
LeWagon was founded in 2014 by Boris and Romain Paillard, two brothers who ditched boring careers in quantitative finance modeling and the practice of law. Their mission is to “bring technical skills” to “creative people”. And with the number of issues the world is facing, getting the most creative minds to get all the skills they need to build amazing stuff seems like a good thing to do. I wanted to be part of it.
Le Wagon will be born in São Paulo on the 4th of July (pun intended).
Join the revolution and learn how to build a napster of your own.
If you want to know us IRL, and learn a few tricks, we also do meetups all the time.
I’m Mathieu Le Roux. Father of 2 meninas, I lived in Toulon, Paris, Berkeley and São Paulo and always been in love with the future and ways to make it sustainable, fair and fun.
Special thanks to Fernando, Pedro, Renata and Antonin for their feedbacks.
