Conference Presentation
Zach Sims at Startup School NY 2014
- Zach Sims anticipates the programming education market will expand to include over one million open jobs by 2020 if current educational trends continue, challenging prior investor estimates of only 100,000 employed programmers in the US.
- The company plans to leverage a "learning by doing" model with instantaneous feedback to enable individuals without formal programming backgrounds to build companies and products within 18 months.
- Following a Series A raise of $2.5 million and a successful initial launch featuring 1,000 concurrent users that exceeded site capacity, the company expects to serve more than 24 million people while transitioning from the least popular Y Combinator company to the fastest-growing.
- Founders intend to hire individuals committed to being part of a rapid growth trajectory, emphasizing that founder passion is a primary driver of future expansion.
- The narrative highlights a specific growth curve where immediate post-launch popularity via TechCrunch was followed by a predicted "trough of sorrow" after returning to New York and losing initial media-driven traffic.
- Key historical benchmarks include GroupMe growing from zero in July 2010 to sending hundreds of thousands of daily messages and selling to Skype in under one year, and Codecademy developing its first version three to four weeks before Demo Day.
- The presentation aims to educate audiences on startup realities, specifically that ventures are difficult, involve constant new challenges, and require persistence despite the lack of clear roadmaps or formal industry experience.
- A central lesson conveyed is that geographic location is irrelevant for internet-based success and that founders should optimize all efforts for learning to avoid common pitfalls.