How a Miami nonprofit is building a tech talent pipeline in underserved communities

Q&A with Codepath

Michael Ellison co-founded and runs CodePath, a nonprofit on a mission to transform computer science education for underserved communities. CodePath brings high-level technology courses, mentorship and support for free to students at educational institutions across the U.S., with the aim of increasing the number of underrepresented minorities in high-level, high-paying tech jobs.

Ellison, a new Miami-area resident, grew up in a low-income, single-mother household in rural Maine. In college, he was interested in majoring in computer science, but was completely unprepared to succeed in the courses, dropped out of that program, and went on to study economics.

The experience stuck with him as he set out to do good in the world. After starting three nonprofits, Ellison entered the world of tech startups to figure out how to scale impact, and sold one of his startups to Twilio in 2020 for over $3 billion. “I got incredibly, incredibly lucky. Multiple times people invested in me, took chances on me, and chose to work with me. But that’s not the story that most people from similar backgrounds have. Usually the story is dropping out of high school, or dropping out of college,” he says. “That’s why CodePath’s work and mission is so important, because you have this incredible outsized economic opportunity for generational wealth, for life-changing opportunity.”

The organization’s grown significantly since its start as a for-profit company in 2017. With over 70 university partners, CodePath has served over 10,000 students nationwide, placing them on pathways to become tomorrow’s tech leaders, builders, and founders. Last year, Knight Foundation awarded CodePath $2.25 million to bring or expand programming to Florida International University, Miami Dade College and Florida Memorial University. Each school will get a personalized CodePath program.

We sat down with Ellison to discuss his views on computer science education, preparing our tech talent for internships and jobs, and the massive opportunity for Miami to be inclusive in its tech transformation. Here is that conversation, lightly edited for brevity.

Opportunity Miami: How does CodePath approach computer science education?

Michael Ellison: I have two co-founders who are the engineers’ engineers. One of my co-founders’ first tech startup was partnering with Apple when he was 14 years old. At the other co-founder’s last tech company, he was the CTO and co-founder of Google Ventures’s first ever seed investment. Their vision for CodePath is how can we make the computer science experience one that every engineer wishes they were going through? And that’s one piece of how we think about this, but also we’re just very practical — our goal is to diversify the most competitive technical roles — and then what do we need to do to actually make that happen.

In contrast to a lot of other programs, we wanted to be a layer on top of the existing system. It’s really smart to do that — you can leverage a lot of really good work happening across two-year and four-year colleges and universities by working with their faculty, by supporting their students. We want every person to be able to walk into some local site and then have CodePath there for them and supporting them.

I think a lot about the future of education, what it should ideally be, and so often we put the burden of excellence and success on the learner. We say, “Oh, you didn’t get a good grade? Well, I guess you’ve got to go back to classes. It’s your fault. Maybe you’re not smart enough,” when really it’s the whole system that’s failed them multiple times for them to even get to that point.

At CodePath, we approach the courses and the relationship with schools as personalized. Where are [the students] emotionally and psychologically? And how do we need to work with them and support them so that they are able to internalize that they’re capable for success and high achievement? At the highest level, we’re working toward this ideal technical education experience, and then practically, what needs to happen when so that we can diversify the nation’s most competitive technical roles.

OM: I’d love to hear how a student uses CodePath.

ME: It might be helpful to talk about Antonella, who is a Florida International University student. She just accepted a Microsoft internship offer. She has an interesting story because she was an immigrant, and was initially a fashion major. When she came over here, she leveraged multiple CodePath courses to put her on a track to [learn] technical interviewing skills. We have a series of courses that correlate to passing hard technical interviewing bars — it’s one of the biggest reasons why a lot of high potential students can’t get into these tech companies. She also has participated in multiple CodePath courses that strengthen the on-the-job skills that you need. She’s incredible, she’s so charismatic. And she likes to talk about her coding journey — “you can do it.”

OM: What is your long-term vision for CodePath?

ME: We want to diversify the nation’s most competitive tech roles, period. We want the most lucrative, highest paying tech jobs, to reflect the diversity of the population, but also there should be high representation of people from low-income backgrounds. So that’s what our focus is intentionally, and by around 2030, hopefully, CodePath will diversify the entry level of those most competitive technical roles. We’d like to be teaching the majority of computer science students by 2030. I would hope that we’re between 100,000 and 130,000 students at that time.

OM: There’s been a number of programs that help girls get interested in tech at a young age, yet the number of girls in computer science education is still shrinking as they age. What accounts for this and how can that be fixed?

ME: There’s a big difference between being inspired to spend a couple weeks doing something and getting over the technical difficulty level to start to really see yourself as an engineer. I don’t want to say anything negative about any programs as there’s a place for inspiration — it’s critical, you need confidence — but we’ve also identified that unless you’ve put in a certain number of hours consistently over a certain number of months, it all goes away, and people can become professional beginners. Their confidence never increases.

Confidence, a sense of belonging and community are really big. Some things we do intentionally with CodePath is that we get lots of the women to connect with other women. That community is one of the things that our students love the most about CodePath — it’s actually the superior connections. We are trying to make sure that people from underrepresented backgrounds are connecting and building relations with one another across schools.

OM: What are the biggest barriers to building a diverse and inclusive population of computer engineers?

ME: You have this huge gap between computer science education and industry, which isn’t talked about as much as it should be. You can be a straight A student in a great computer science program, and you don’t know how to build mobile apps, you don’t know how to build web applications, you haven’t taken any courses in the technologies that are the highest paid across these different technology companies and that means — going back to the underrepresented populations that are more likely to be at the schools with fewer options to have this exposure and less likely to get internship experience — you’re seeing shockingly low numbers of these CS graduates [from underrepresented populations] actually become software engineers. 8% of black CS graduates become software engineers, only 8%.

Lastly, you can have the skills but you’re still invisible to employers. It’s like if I’m self taught, or I went through a training program, the employer doesn’t know that they should prioritize my resume, and therefore I never get the opportunity to even show them I’m good enough.

OM: What can be done to move the needle?

ME: I am really bullish on education becoming more and more of an employee benefit across major employers. For employers like Walmart to Disney to McDonald’s, it’s already a thing. They are very interested in providing the pathways into the highest paid technical roles. I’d love to see that at scale. I think it’s a huge opportunity.

[Within schools], you need to be personalized and you need the right pathway so that it’s the right thing for the right person. I’m really bullish that the right education, training and internships and partnerships with companies at scale can significantly move the needle.

OM: I know you’ve lived and worked in Miami for a couple months. What do you see as specific challenges here and, on the flip side, what are the opportunities here?

ME: Some challenges: the local tech talent pipeline is very small. Miami has the same challenges that other areas have, where there’s a gap between what’s being taught in different programs and what’s emphasized inside major tech companies. There’s the influx of tech companies that will likely make inequality worse, because they are not going to see the depth of expertise in blockchain or whatever technologies, and then they’re going to try to bring people outside and that’s going to further exacerbate things. And the companies themselves know that they’ve done this before, so they’re like, how are we going to not do this? Because you can start to learn a technology but then the companies who are hiring — all these tech startups coming in raising billions of dollars — they’re like, cool, we’ll interview you, so do you have five to six years experience in this particular esoteric technology, and people are like no, but I’m good over here, and they will be like that’s not good enough. There are significant challenges.

Now opportunity: I am drinking the Kool Aid, I’ve never seen anything like it. In Miami, from K-12 to higher ed, the presidents of colleges and universities, to the mayors, to all the foundations, they are all in lockstep in trying to invest in the local community to make sure that they can be a part of the technology sector.

I think in the short term, there’s going to be a period of challenges because of the mismatch with what Miami has and then what the tech industry will expect — but the investments that the community makes right now will set Miami up well.

OM: Where do we start? What should be a few priorities for us here in the Miami area?

ME: I think number one is in colleges and universities, you want enough time to really cultivate and build the next generation of technology leaders… and the structure is already there. I see that as a huge opportunity to increase the size, but then also to influence the tech skills so they’re more aligned [with employers for tech internships and high-demand jobs]. There’s already tons of high-potential, smart, great people who you can redirect a little bit. That’s a big part of where we’re focusing.

Number two is there are a lot of experienced engineers that are proficient, but not in the technologies highest in demand from the new companies coming in. I would love to see high-scale efforts that are very intentionally focused on that — they’re already tech leaders, but you can make them to be that much more influential for these technology companies, and then they become mentors and teachers and everything else.

And number three for me is K-12. A lot of the focus in K-12 is on teaching to the APCS [AP Computer Science course and exam] and I don’t think that’s the way that you get more people to feel like they belong in tech. You make them feel like they belong in tech by connecting them with something that appeals to them, that appeals to their friends, like project-based applications, technologies like mobile. There are others, but mobile is great because you can have something on your phone really quickly without really being proficient, which makes you get excited.

OM: Let’s look ahead to 2040, what do you hope to see computer education looking like then and what do you hope Miami’s population of engineers looks like?

ME: Back in 1984, Dr. Benjamin Bloom found that the average one-on-one tutored student performed better than 98% in the control group. Our goal is to do that at scale, and our hypothesis is through personalized student support before, during and after the class; personalized difficulty levels; and learning from every classroom and then decentralizing those classroom operations to make a lighter lift for every single teacher. What if you could give every educator their own Ironman suit to do what they love to do, but you’re able to minimize the challenges that they’re facing? The last piece is community: community among teachers and instructors and students peer to peer. All this gets back to Dr. Benjamin Bloom’s findings that you can significantly improve with the right attention and connection with students.

For Miami and the nation, there’s an opportunity to have over-representation from people from disadvantaged low-income backgrounds, because the odds are so stacked against people from those backgrounds that they’re underestimated. And I don’t know about you, but I’m shocked by how many times I meet people who aren’t getting paid very much, they don’t have very glamorous jobs, and they’re brilliant.