Before the Crunchies last night, Zach Sims, a co-founder of Codecademy, stopped by our office in San Francisco. (Codecademy won the runner up for Best New Startup in 2011, losing to Pinterest.)
"Programming is literacy," he told us. "People want to do this. I think for a long time, coding wasn't cool. It was something you did because you worked at a company. Anyone can start learning. If you put the effort in, you can become an awesome programmer and I think more people are realizing that," Sims said.
Dims dropped out of college in August in 2011 to launch Codecademy. The new startup already has more than a million users.
We asked Sims about the new platform that Codecademy launched this week, which lets anyone create a course.
"We had a lot of people asking us to use the platform to create their own courses," Sims said. People were already creating tutorials on the Internet, but it's not as interactive and engaging, so Sims said they wanted to create the opportunity to do that.
Sims thinks that the ideal age to learn to program is 13, but anyone at any age can learn.
"I think this all goes back to the fact that if you know how to program, you are at a distinct advantage to get jobs for instance and discover the world around you. You can understand how your mobile phone works or how your computer works. Programming is the only skill that guarantees you employability and you can learn without going to college," he added.
More From Business Insider
There are no comments yet