Code Academy vs. The President of the United States
The Story of Code Academy and the Start of the Coding Bootcamp Industry
This is the second post in a week-long series recounting the origin story of Code Academy. This series will cover how our school set the foundation for an explosion of bootcamps across the country and the current work I’m doing with CodeNow, a national nonprofit transforming underserved teenagers into developers, designers, and entrepreneurs.
In Chapter One, I discussed why Neal and I started learning how to code and our difficult journey trying to learn from books and online tutorials.
Chapter Two focuses on developing the original concept for the three-month software bootcamp, getting the Chicago community behind our school, and making a difficult decision about our future.
The meeting where the “3-month beginner-focused coding bootcamp” was formed.
The Original Idea: Nine months (coding, design, entrepreneurship) taught at Northwestern.
The first three months would focus on problem identification, ideation, and team building. The next third would teach software development, and the final third would be an accelerator program with the goal of launching a product at the end.
We quickly realized that this would require a lot of time & money, two things we did not have.
So we thought…
What if we cut this program from nine months to three months and focus on teaching Ruby on Rails first? We could then add design, product development, & entrepreneurship classes once the school was established.
Three months also happened to be the same length of a Northwestern University academic quarter, so this had to work, right?
Note: This isn’t the smartest reason to choose a three month time period for a bootcamp but, once again, we didn’t see anybody else doing this so why not?!
We framed it like this:
Is it possible for a complete beginner to learn more in three months than we did in a year?
Crazy Times at Chicago Startup High
If you were in the Chicago tech industry during this time, you know how much energy was in the community.
So meetups. Much ideas. Wow awkward pitches.
There was even this secret project called Project Mercury to build a 50,000 sq. ft Chicago tech center (which is now the 350,000 sq. ft behemoth known as 1871). After a few months of startups events, I swear I saw this quote tattooed on everyone’s forehead.
“I have an idea, but I don’t know how to code.”
Neal and I were like, “that’s why we’ve been learning for the past year!” If you knew how to code, you could spend your time building an idea instead of searching for someone to create it for you.
Choosing a Name
After weeks of deep research to pick a name for our school, we had completely failed on finding an epic name. Our operative name at the time was “TrainingRails” but… we were still searching for a better answer.
A team member emailed a list of domain names on April 20, 2011, but most of them were pretty bad.
- Codingskool.com
- codeconvent.com
- codecloister.com
- codeacademy.org
- coderabbey.com
- hackacad.com
- hackestary.com
But, as Neal so often does, he found the one and casually replied:
Startup Name ✅ Everything else? ❌😩❌😩❌😩
Alright! So we have a name. Now we just need money, an instructor, a physical location, computers, students… No big deal.
Ok, Mike, give yourself a break. Y’all were just getting started here.
No, we didn’t have any of those things, but we were good at making presentations, so we created one for our school.
🔑🔑 MAJOR KEY ALERT 🔑🔑
Now, this presentation didn’t just focus on our school (no, of course not), but a vision for what Chicago could be during this entrepreneurial renaissance. We called it the Chicago Identity Deck.
During the month of April 2011, Neal spent an obscene amount on gas & coffee meeting with every developer, VC, and influential Chicago tech person we could find.
Getting connected with the Chicago Ruby on Rails (RoR) Community
Fred Ballard — Neal was friends with Fred Ballard, a software developer at Orbitz. They had been doing Ruby on Rails development every Friday aka “Rails Fridays” for a few months when Neal brought up our new idea.
Desi McAdam — Fred then connected Neal to Desi McAdam, a developer/principle consultant/agile coach at Hashrocket, one of the preeminent Ruby on Rails development shops in the world.
Neal met with Desi on Wednesday, April 6, 2011 at 7:45 AM. The meeting was supposed to last an hour max.
However, I kept getting texts like this:
“Desi introduced me to this Rails developer…”
“Desi is taking me to this company…”
“I’m now going with Desi to happy hour…”
Neal didn’t make it back to our apartment until 3 AM.
By the next day, Neal had either met or was being introduced to all the major players in the Chicago RoR community.
One of the people Neal met during this marathon Wednesday, was Sarah Gray, who (with Corey Haines) had co-founded Technical Advocates, an organization that helped startup founders get the best value from their software development processes.
Corey then introduced Neal to the senior brass at Obtiva, another top-dog Ruby on Rails development firm in Chicago.
This intro email led to a connection with Dave Hoover, who soon became our Lead Mentor for Code Academy.
We also discovered local meetup groups, workshops, and people like the late Ginny Hendry at the Chicago Ruby Meetup & Railsbridge Chicago
By the end of April, everything was going really smooth. Actually, it was going too smooth.
But then…
“I just talked to Harper [Reed], and he wants me to work on President Obama’s re-election campaign.” — Neal
For context: Harper Reed is a friend of ours, and had just been hired as the CTO of President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. What was supposed to be a meeting to chat about Code Academy, turned into a hiring session.
Thankfully, Neal turned the job offer down. He didn’t want to leave me behind (awwww shucks).
However, Harper, and President Obama’s 2008 CTO, Michael Slaby, upped the ante and offered me a job too!
Work for the President of the United States and make money than we ever have before.
Or…
Work on a one-month-old idea?
For three weeks, we wrestled with this choice.
Neal had a meeting with a friend who ran a Chicago VC firm and told him about our situation. Neal explained that if we could get $250,000 we would turn down the offer to join President Obama’s re-election campaign.
“We will get you the money.”
With these six special words, we had enough confidence to turn down the Obama campaign.
May 18, 2011
Neal and I sent in our decline offer letters to Obama for America. Due to a Microsoft formatting error, my signature looked like this:
This led to a fun response from the Obama campaign HR Director:
When I saw this my brain was like, “Ahhhhhh yes I am declining this position please don’t make me say it twice MIKE ARE YOU REALLY DOING THIS?”
I replied with this:
The next chapter in this series will cover the aftermath of turning down POTUS, attempting to raise money (failing), and deciding to bootstrap Code Academy into existence.
To learn more about my current work at CodeNow, you can visit http://codenow.org. We are in the middle of a year-end fundraising campaign for student scholarships, so if you’d like to help us teach more students how to solve problems with technology, donate today.
