3 year service 24 million student Codecademy founder's Story

The author of this article, Mr Jamie, is the founder of Taiwan's start-up venture, his blog http://mrjamie.cc/. Codecademy founder Zach Sims recently boarded YC's startup parochial New York Arena, sharing his entrepreneurial experience since the age of 13, is a very enlightening story. The whole story is here, and my experience follows. Zach Sims at Startup parochial NY 2014 the Internet without a distance, see how you use it. The 13-Year-old Zach has the first iPod of his life, and he has taken the baby wherever he goes. He found that he often accidentally fell to it, so he wanted to get a waterproof sheath to install, he found that the surrounding shops can not find such things, simply write emails to the protection of the manufacturer, ask them to produce such things. Not long after, he really got a waterproof sheath for his iPod and made him aware of the power of the Internet. Put into action, do not need to wait for anyone to license Zach is a typical action, when he studied in the political department at Columbia University, he found that the students around the school with the problem of alienation (this is not Taiwan's unique phenomenon), and immediately with friends to build a called comerecruitus ( To hire us) website. Although this quite Xiangyuan service did not get too many market response at last, but planted a seed in his heart, later grew out Codecademy. Seizing the opportunity to leapfrog the challenge at the time of Columbia reading, there was a posting on the post of New York's most famous Drop.io founder Sam Lessin to give a speech. Zach arrived at the classroom two hours early in order to be afraid of crowding. Later, the event was not too many people to listen to, but let Zach know Sam, a rather powerful entrepreneur. In order to be able to drop.io to leapfrog challenges, Zach and then stalker Sam six months, finally concave to a unpaid internship opportunity, also saw the Drop.io rapid growth process. Soon after, Zach heard that two friends were doing GroupMe Group newsletter, he decided that the idea had a lot of potential, so he decides to join them. Groupme,zach also experienced the creation of the new company from 2 to 20 people, and soon after a year by Skype acquisition process. I think that Drop.io and GroupMe's two experiences will definitely help Zach the future development Codecademy. Do what you really think is worth it. Under the circumstances, Zach entered the YC incubator. InIn YC's 3-month period, they kept trying on a variety of topics, no matter how crazy they thought they were, as long as they were truly valuable, they tried. But Demo Day will come soon, they have nothing to show, dead to the end they finally returned to the original solution to the problem of production and learning Gap, Zach plus their own learning programming experience, thus spawned a codecademy. Entrepreneurs must go through the valley of Death although Codecademy and the launch of the Codeyear on the line received a great response, but soon after they fell into the valley of death. The loss of fresh media began to bother to report, and other MOOC online learning platform encountered the plight of people began to doubt the future of Codecademy. This forced Zach to go back to the workbench and try to refine the Codecademy interactive learning mechanism so that it is as far away from the MOOC as it is playing audio and video. These iterations finally began to blossom in 2013, and Codecademy also returned to a good growth trajectory. Although it is achieved can be durable Product harsh fit, but go forward, Zach also need to build a scalable Business model for Codecademy. He currently believes that the future of codecademy in helping people and businesses find each other, but this direction is not really right, we have to continue to look at it before we know.