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Category Archives: Startups

Posted by heather
On Thursday January 31st at 04:15 PM

Jan 31

What You Get When You Enroll in HackerYou

We launched HackerYou in June 2012 and, admittedly, we’ve been thrilled with the response. There’s been so much demand for this style of learning experience that all of the courses we’ve offered so far have sold out. Applicants include journalists, writers, marketers, doctors, scientists, product managers, editors, recent grads, designers, community managers, account managers, entrepreneurs, wantrepreneurs and more. And although this wasn’t an explicit goal, we’ve enjoyed a really nice balance of men and women at our courses: our Introduction to Web Development course in Fall 2012 was 83% female, and our current course, an Introduction to Ruby on Rails, is 44% female.

But these are just a few of the things that make HackerYou great. To be able to bring together a group of awesome, talented, forward-thinking people twice a week for three months so that they can build and hone an entirely new skill set – one that is going to come in handy for the rest of their professional lives – is a treat. But that’s what’s in it for me. What’s in it for you?

What do you really get when you enroll in HackerYou?

Allow me to elaborate, just in case this post has the potential to help you make the decision to apply to HackerYou before our next early bird deadline. Here’s what you’re in for if you decide to join us for a course:

1. 72 hours of in-class time (almost entirely dedicated to building stuff)

Whether you plan to do something entrepreneurial one day, want to stop paying other people to manage your personal or small business website, wish you could communicate more effectively with technical folks, or are looking to up your value as an employee…you should learn to code. And at HackerYou, that’s exactly what you’ll do. Each course is 72 hours long (price-wise, it’s just under $39 an hour) and you’ll spend almost all of that time actually writing code.

No matter what people say, making a time commitment (and a financial commitment) to learning a new skill can make a world of a difference. On your own, let’s say you can find an hour a week to dedicate to learning to code. At that rate, it will take you a year and five months to accomplish what will take you just three months to do at HackerYou. Plus, of course, at HackerYou, you’re guided by experts…but, more on that below.

2. A 10:1 ratio of students to instructors

Through our work with Ladies Learning Code, we’ve discovered that a small student-to-instructor ratio is the key to a great technical learning experience. At HackerYou, there isa 10:1 student-to-instructor ratio (or better!) at every class. Since classes are dedicated to writing code, it’s important that there are people there to help you when you get stuck. Or, for more advanced students, the mentors are there to challenge you by suggesting ways that you can deepen your learning by adding more complex functionality to your site. But what happens if you have a question outside of class? Well…

3. Seven-days-a-week access to the HackerYou community

Have a question outside of class? Never fear – as a HackerYou student, you’ll have seven-days-a-week access to the HackerYou forum. Using Lore‘s beautiful and elegant course management software, this forum is a place for you to interact with HackerYou instructors and mentors, myself and my team, and the other HackerYou students. As needed, we’ll add other experts to the site so that it can be a truly valuable resource for HackerYou students. And it doesn’t stop there – we’ll be creating a HackerYou Alumnni community as well, which you’ll become part of. It will become more and more valuable over time.

4. Unlimited HackerYou Workshops

When you sign up for a HackerYou course, your learning doesn’t just stop there. For the duration of your course, you have access to all of the workshops offered by HackerYou for free. We launch new workshops every week – for a list of workshops that are currently live, visit http://hackeryou.com/workshops.

5. An Introduction to the Best of Toronto’s Tech & Startup Community

Love the idea of going to more of Toronto’s tech and startup events, but not sure which ones are best? Or does showing up alone make you nervous? HackerYou students won’t have that problem, because we’ll curate the best events in the city, and head out to them as a group (optionally, of course). And if you want to learn something, but can’t find an event that will give you what you need? Let us know, and we’ll organize it, either just for HackerYou students, or for the broader community. It’s all part of our commitment to making HackerYou an amazing in-person learning experience, and something truly unique. But what if you need to meet someone really specific…

6. Trying to build a network? We’ll help with that.

Thanks again to Ladies Learning Code, we have a huge network of Toronto’s brightest entrepreneurs, developers, designers, illustrators, and more. Looking for a designer to join you for a passion project? Or need to pick the brains of successful entrepreneurs as you begin to plan your transition from corporate to startup life? We know people. If you’re looking for an introduction to someone really specific, we might be able to help with that, too. Try us.

7. Job Shadowing, If You Want It

As I’ve been chatting with the people who have applied to HackerYou (I meet everyone who applies for coffee), I’ve been asking them what would make their HackerYou course over-the-top awesome for them. A few people have mentioned job shadowing as something they’d be really interested in. So, we’re adding it to the program. If you want to job shadow someone (or someone in a certain job or company), let us know and we’ll set it up.

And, if you have other ideas for what would make HackerYou an even better learning experience, let us know! We’re up for the challenge.

8. HackerYou Demo Day

HackerYou participants have the opportunity to participate in a Demo Day at the end of the course (optionally, of course). This is our chance to show the people who say that you can’t learn to code in three months that they’re wrong. It’s a celebration, but it’s also about inspiring people who think that learning to code isn’t for them. Learning to code is for everyone, whether you want to become a professional or not.

9. A Guaranteed Internship

Most people who come to HackerYou aren’t looking for a job – they already have one, and they want to learn to code in order to enhance their chosen career. There are always a few people in each course, though, that are looking to use the skills they learn at HackerYou to land a new job. We’ll help them find one, but if they’re not quite ready, we’re happy to offer a guaranteed internship with HackerYou to students who graduate from the program. We tailor the internship to the role they’re seeking, but for example, here are two projects created by HackerYou interns: http://hackeryou.com/students and http://ladieslearningcode.com/map.

It’s all of that, and more.

If you’re ready to lean to code, and looking for the most comprehensive in-person learning experience around, you’re exactly who we’re looking for. Apply now.

Posted by heather
On Saturday January 19th at 06:21 PM

Jan 19

Learn to code Startups Why?

Here’s why you’re having trouble recruiting a technical co-founder

This post was originally published by Daniel Tenner on his blog, http://swombat.com, in June 2011. To us, it sounds like yet another great reason to learn to code…

Peter Robinett makes a pretty solid case for why even (or especially) when reaching out to cool, startup-friendly developers, “ideas people” won’t necessarily encounter that much success in recruiting them to work on their startup:

Ideas are easy, execution is hard.
People approaching developers often dramatically underestimate the amount of development work, or the complexity of it.
Proposing a revenue share means the developer has to take as much risk as the idea guy (for very low pay, given the point above), and trust that the business will receive the right amount of marketing/sales follow-through.
There’s an opportunity cost to working on someone else’s idea instead of for paying clients.
The idea being proposed is often very unrealistic (and the developer, having worked on a number of such ideas, can tell).
Developers have their own ideas to work in anyway.

These points will seem blindingly obvious if you’re a developer yourself, or if you have some experience in the field, but to new startup founders, this is not so obvious.

Learn more about HackerYou’s upcoming courses here.

Posted by heather
On Tuesday September 11th at 10:03 AM

Sep 11

Learn to code Programming Startups Why?

If You Want To Be The Donald Trump Of Startups, Learn To Code

This post was originally published on September 11th by Fast Company. Written by Rob Spectre.

The Donald built an empire because he knew what every piece and process cost him. If you can’t say the same for your software, you won’t.

Programming is a practical application of abstract math combining esoteric theory with experiential practice. And learning it can be every bit as brain-scramblingly incomprehensible and front-row-seat-for-Celine-Dion tedious as the previous sentence suggests.

But, if you want to start a technology company, you should learn to code. And the reason is Donald Trump.

Say whatever you want about the man (and, as a New Yorker, I can say plenty), Donald Trump achieved no small level of success in the real estate business. His real estate portfolio stretching from sea to shining sea, including a good-sized chunk of Manhattan, skyline causing Forbes to estimate his worth at $2.9 billion. He sits at #134 of that publication’s list of wealthiest people in the United States, fomenting a serious bit of celebrity and funding a less serious flirtation with the White House. All this without the ability to get through a press conference with a single complete sentence or eat a New York slice correctly. How is a man whose public image is punctuated by obtuseness able to out-earn quite nearly anybody who reads this article by orders of magnitude?

If you were to ask him the secret to his success, he would point to a competitive edge handed down to him by his father: he knew what everything cost. Meaning he could look at a foundation and given its size, the type of concrete used, the techniques involved and a few other factors, Trump’s old man had a rough sense of how much he should pay. His son often says that knowledge–the knowledge of what everything costs–is the linchpin of the Trump empire’s success. When looking at that ability across all that goes into real estate development, it is little wonder.

Demolition, architecture, plumbing, electrical work, heating, air conditioning, permits, labor, interior design, lumber, dry wall, 12 foot tall golden letters spelling your own last name–Trump’s big edge is he knows the going rate for all of it. There are hundreds of details that go into turning a hunk of capital into a building; Donald Trump wins because he knows what all those details cost. And his competitors don’t.

Reconsider, then, why you should learn to program as a non-technical founder. In our current environment, your most precious resource is not money–it is time. With a macroeconomy still allocating capital to angel and venture at a rate disproportionate with the risk those asset classes represent, a wealth of cloud services that bring down the capital expenditure needed to build a software company to near zero, and a market for developer talent hotter than the surface of the Sun, days of developer time have eclipsed American dollars as the most valuable commodity in the startup game.

Why learn how to program? Because you’ll learn how much time everything should take. Will sharing content on Facebook take more time than authenticating with Twitter? Is it more development effort to implement a recommendation engine or add full-text search? If a developer hands you a login page written in an afternoon, is it quality work? Will rewriting the site in Ruby really only take three months?

It is true what they say about learning to code–it is easier or cheaper than ever before. But for the born hustler well removed from college whose recollection of algebra is as fuzzy as the name of the junior high cafeteria lady, programming is still a damn difficult thing to get a handle on. The difficulty curve from understanding programming fundamentals like variables and conditional logic to producing your first web page is steeper than the hockey stick growth you’re expecting with your company. Scaling this mountain is further complicated by the realities of coding for a modern Web where–bare minimum–you’ll need comprehension of four different languages to do anything and five if you want to do anything important. And this is to say nothing of the hundred odd operational obstacles you’ll also need to hurdle to get the code from your laptop to a domain name where anyone on the Internet can pay you with a credit card.

However, if you do learn to program, you–not your technical co-founder, not your first engineering hire, but you–will have a good sense of the answer. You may not be able to do it yourself, but you will have a far better sense of how long it would take for a professional. You will know what software costs. And in the startup business, the people who know what software costs tend to be the biggest winners.

Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Larry Page. Jeff Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg. By the time they were billionaires, they were each likely as useful committing code as they were mopping the floor. But when any of them were presented with a feature, they knew about how much development time it should take. And the knowledge of that cost coupled with their singular intuition for their customers’ needs and vision for the market propelled them to the decisions that would build world-changing companies.

The bald truth is learning to program is still hard, despite recent gains in accessibility. And to pile on to the bad news, programming is a lot harder for a father to pass to his son than a contractor’s proposal. The only way you can ever learn how much time development is going to take–how much the software you wish to build will cost–is by building some yourself.

There are few CEOs who know the cost of building great software. Those who do hold a stark competitive advantage over the legions who don’t. And if there is anything we could possibly learn from a guy like Donald Trump, that edge can be all you need to build a fortune.

Rob Spectre hacks at Twilio, blogs at Brooklyn Hacker, and tweets @dN0t.

Posted by heather
On Thursday July 12th at 11:37 AM

Jul 12

From a Student Learn to code Startups Wantrepreneurship

Confessions of a Wannabe Entrepreneur

This post was originally published on July 10th on Jordan Saxe’s blog. Jordan will be joining the first cohort of HackerYou students this fall – we’re so excited to have him! You can follow him on Twitter at @jordansaxe.

Most of you know and have seen various tweets of my wide-ranging pursuits of trying to develop a website/application for the last year. Everyone has ideas and everyone has designs that they think are good and could be the next thing sold for a kajillion dollars. I think the thing that separates people out are the ones who pursue the idea, and the ones who sit back and let that idea sit and do nothing while someone else does it.

I don’t speak for everyone and can only relate to my experience, but I have had some difficulties in pursuing those ideas. I’ve invested in books to re-learn HTML and CSS, and deep dive into MAMP, and ultimately start out really invigorated. But things come up, and the interest is lost. I return to sitting back and wondering how awesome my idea could potentially be if I could only find that one missing person who believes in my idea enough to help. I have also invested in Team Treehouse and TutsPlus to learn. I honestly thought that maybe this is a better avenue for me to work in. I can watch the videos online, take the chapter quizzes and apply my knowledge. Again, the initial passion is there, but things come up and the interest is gone.

So my next pursuit is something more. Something bigger (and something I think will be really big in the future). I signed up for HackerYou, a startup run by a couple passionate ladies from Toronto who created the successful Ladies Learning Code workshops. I feel like I have scratched the itch of the Wannabe Entrepreneur. I plopped down the cash and time commitment (3 hours, 2 days a week for 3-4 months), and I can say that I have never been more excited to get my hands dirty and create. The tools included are like something I have never seen (and you can read more up on that here) and should provide a very interesting way to challenge typical learning experiences you get in high school, college and university.

I feel like this could be a very interesting experiment, not only for HackerYou, but also for me. I’m planning to blog about the experience week by week and update everyone on my progress. Why would I subject myself to some potentially stupid and hilarious public gaffes of a semi-new developer? For those reasons…its stupid and hilarious and I know I wont make those mistakes again. As well, it would be a fairly interesting way to showcase a side-project I have been meaning to create since I started trying to develop it.

Should be a wild ride.

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Want to follow Jordan’s lead and start learning to code for realz in 2012? Join us for an Intro to Web Development this fall, and learn how to build websites from scratch. Click here to learn more or to apply.

Posted by heather
On Monday June 25th at 03:25 PM

Jun 25

Learn to code Marketing Programming Startups Why?

Want a Marketing Job at a Startup? Better Learn to Code!

This post was originally published on June 23rd on the Onboardly blog. Written by Renee Warren.

Reginald Braithwaite once wrote about “[...] having trouble with the fact that 199 out of 200 applicants for every programming job can’t write code at all. I repeat: they can’t write any code whatsoever.” Clearly, learning to code is no small feat. Hundreds of students spend years and thousands of dollars to learn how to code. And for good reason! According to HackerYou, “there’s never been more energy around the importance of learning to code.”

It seems like everyone wants to discuss who should be learning to code. It’s the latest trend for non-programmers to learn. In fact, there are even specific resources and workshops for women who want to learn, entrepreneurs who want to learn, children who want to learn – you get the idea. Of course, marketers are among this seemingly endless list of people who must learn to code.

Andrew Chen made it even more apparent in his post Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing, stating that “coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer in Silicon Valley.” Though he refers to this new position as Growth Hacker, it still emphasizes the increasing need for technical experience as a marketer. This doesn’t just mean a basic HTML or some CSS understanding, this is full on Ruby or Python experience. “The fastest way to spread your product is by distributing it on a platform using APIs, not MBAs”, says Chen.

Well, it’s not just another trend. Digital marketers, especially those working at startups, absolutely need to learn to code. Here are just four reasons why:

1. Small Teams

Startups are small and close-knit. As a startup marketer, you’re going to know what everyone else is working on and you’re likely going to be involved. Realistically, you can’t be a marketer for a startup without understanding the basics behind your landing pages, website, blog, etc.

How would you have an intelligent conversation with the programmers? How would you coordinate between a programmer and the CEO if you only really understand one side of the equation (the business side)? Knowing how to interpret and become involved in “geek speak” is a must for startup marketers.

2. Coding Is Digital

When you think about it, coding is what makes digital marketing possible to begin with. Without coding, most startup marketers would be out of a job. Justin Pearse calls coding “the building block” for everything online marketers do. Perhaps that’s why senior staff from brands like Unilever, Bacardi and BBC have attended coding workshops like Decoded. After all, in order to build a sound structure, you need to know a little something about laying bricks.

In order to build a sound structure, you need to know a little something about laying bricks.

3. Generalists Wanted

There’s a lot of debate about whether it’s better for startups to hire specialists or generalists. Early stage startups, for the most part, prefer to work with generalists. That is, they want employees who are good at a lot of things, not experts at just one thing. Why? The team gets more done for less money. Consider the efficiency and expenses associated with managing a design expert, a social media expert, a Google AdWords expert, and a programming expert.

So, not only do you need to be able to “speak geek”, but you need to be able to get your hands dirty too. A working knowledge of multiple areas will allow you to help out here and there, making adjustments and optimizations where you see fit. Coding is the backbone of everything digital, which means you’ll want to be able to include it under your generalist umbrella.

4. Digital Is Life

In 2010, ecommerce sales increased 12.6% to $176.2 billion. By 2015, experts are predicting sales to reach $278.9 billion. Nine years ago, Facebook didn’t exist. Today, if it were a country, it would be the world’s third largest. There’s just no doubt that the digital world is becoming more and more ingrained in day-to-day life. As more online startups sprout up, we’ll see more jobs in the digital space as well. In fact, a recent study showed that 83% of respondents telecommute at least part of the day.

Since we’ve already determined that coding is digital and now that digital is life, it might be a good idea to understand coding before the need completely overwhelms you. Imagine trying to do your job without a working knowledge of email. In a few years, coding will be the new email. Unfortunately, history is full of people who have lost their jobs because they couldn’t adapt to changing technology. Get a head start!

You don’t need to be a coding expert, but you do need a working knowledge. If marketers can’t edit a website, update the behind-the-scenes of a blog or add SEO parameters to a landing page, they’re inefficient. And when it comes to startups, there’s no room for inefficiency. Learning to code, even on the most basic level, empowers marketers. It makes them more valuable now and more prepared for the future.

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Want to be the person startups dream about hiring? Join us for an Intro to Web Development this fall, and learn how to build websites from scratch. Combine that with your marketing savvy, and you’re all set! Apply before June 30th for earlybird pricing.

Posted by heather
On Friday June 15th at 03:10 PM

Jun 15

Learn to code Programming Startups

Grads: Skip the Bank Job, Join a Startup

This post was originally published on June 13th on Bloomberg View. Written by Ezra Klein.

Dartmouth College has four valedictorians this year: Wills Begor, Glynnis Kearney, David Rogg and Jie Zhong. They are impressive kids. All have stratospheric GPAs. Most pulled off two majors and a minor. One developed a new social networking platform for the iPhone.

So what are they doing next? Investment banking, mostly. Begor is headed to Morgan Stanley. Rogg and Zhong are headed to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Kearney is the rebel. She’s going to McKinsey & Co.

That’s no surprise. After all, 39 percent of Harvard’s 2010 graduating class went to work in finance or management consulting. At Columbia, it was 34 percent. Nothing against finance or management consulting, but do they really need such a big chunk of our best and brightest?

Two years ago, Mike Mayer appeared headed in the same direction. A high school valedictorian, he attended the University of Pennsylvania. As a sophomore, he worried he wasn’t learning usable skills, so he switched into an undergraduate program at the Wharton School and, as he puts it, “followed the herd into the finance concentration, and then into New York and Wall Street.” Last summer, he worked at Credit Suisse Group AG as a research analyst. They quickly offered him a job, which he turned down. Instead, Mayer signed on with Venture for America, a young startup with a slightly odd mission.

‘Meta Economy’

Venture for America is the brainchild of Andrew Yang, a charismatic former lawyer. “We’ve got the best universities in the world,” Yang says. “We have the talent. But our best and brightest are being absorbed by what I call ‘the meta economy.’ They’re heading into professional services and transactions and optimizing but not into direct value creation. If you can imagine a country where the equivalent wave of talent currently heading to professional services was heading to fast-growing companies, think about what that would do for job creation.”

Yang got the idea for Venture for America while running Manhattan GMAT, a test-preparation company that was acquired by the Washington Post/Kaplan in 2009. (I work for the Washington Post.) “I saw there was a huge pool of investment bankers and management consultants who weren’t very happy in their jobs and didn’t know what they wanted to do next,” he said. “So they would come to us because they were taking the GMAT to go to business school. Then, after business school, they would have a debt load to pay off and would end up being recruited to the same firms. But they were looking for something.”

Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that enticing Ivy League graduates to work at a for-profit business can now be sold as a way to “give back” to the community — on the grounds that the job isn’t in finance or management consulting and isn’t in New York or Boston. Yet that’s Yang’s pitch. “Let’s say you were to place 20 teachers in Detroit,” he says. “That would be a great thing. But if you could place 20 entrepreneurs in Detroit and have each start a business, that would also be incredible for Detroit. These regions need our top people helping to build businesses and create opportunities.”

The conventional wisdom is that the flood of top students to management consulting and finance is basically irreversible. Those industries pay so much, are in such desirable cities, can hire so many graduates, and have such deep alumni networks on campuses that small businesses simply can’t compete with them for top talent.

At least, that was the conventional wisdom. Then Teach for America came along and upended it, attracting 48,000 applicants — including 12 percent of Ivy League seniors — for 5,200 annual spots, none of which pay well and most of which are in cities that are decidedly not New York or Boston. The electric response to Teach for America convinced Yang that graduating seniors wanted more options. They just weren’t sure how to find them.

Young Businesses

Venture for America intends to correct that. You might have heard that small businesses create the majority of jobs. Recent research by John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin and Javier Miranda for the U.S. Census Bureau disproved that. It’s young businesses that create jobs. “Once we control for firm age there is no systematic relationship between firm size and growth,” the authors conclude.

Think about a young business. Usually, it’s small and obscure, with little brand equity. Its founders are probably extremely busy, particularly if their business is succeeding and has the potential to create a lot of jobs in the future. And the company probably has only a couple of positions to be filled at any given time.

That’s pretty much the opposite of big banks and management consulting firms, which have many open positions, many employees who can do recruiting and deep brand equity on every Ivy League campus. “It’s the organizations with the most resources that get the best talent,” Yang says, “while the young businesses that will be creating all the jobs don’t get the talent they need.”

Teach for America solved that problem by providing schools across the country with the recruiting capacity and brand equity they lacked, enabling them to pool resources to attract top students. Venture for America is eager to play a similar role, serving as the middleman between small, growing businesses and students who might want to work for them.

In its first year, Yang estimates that Venture for America received about 500 applications for 40 slots. The jobs are in fast-growing companies that are less than 10 years old, and they pay from $32,000 to $38,000. Right now, Venture for America is working with companies in Cincinnati, Detroit, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Providence, Rhode Island. Next year, the organization expects to have more than a thousand applicants for 100 positions, allowing expansion to Baltimore; Cleveland; New Haven, Connecticut; Pittsburgh; and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.

As for Mike Mayer, he’s finished with Wharton and heading to New Orleans to work at a small software company. “There is a sense of creating something, of creating real tangible value,” he says. “A big bank does create value for our economy, but as a first-year analyst among 80 or 90 peers, you’re not seeing it. At a startup, you’re seeing it every day.”

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Want to join a startup, but feel like you don’t have the right skills? Join us for an Intro to Web Development this fall, and learn how to build websites from scratch. Combine that with your design skills, your vision or your hustle, and you’re all set! Apply before June 30th for earlybird pricing.