This Week in Startups - AMA 1: freeCodeCamp’s Quincy Larson answers founder and developer questions

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today on This Week in Startups, we have our first ever Ask Me Anything with Free Code Camp founder Quincy Larson, featured in episode 1049. This AMA was recorded live in our Twist Slack channel. To participate in weekly AMAs and discuss all aspects of startup life with Jason and our community of 20,000 founders, join us at this weekend startups.com slash slack. This episode is brought to you ad-free thanks to our partners, Clavio, and MintMobile. Amin asks, what is the best tactic

Starting point is 00:00:36 to build an award-winning dev team? Hire junior developers and incubate them or hire more senior people. So if you are trying to build a project that is going to, like, or is already at scale,

Starting point is 00:00:49 like you have a bunch of VC money and you just have to get something out the door that is very polished and works really reliably, it would probably make sense to mostly have a team of senior people that can just do it quickly. Now, if you have a new product and you're not as worried about getting things out as quickly as possible,

Starting point is 00:01:08 I think a better approach long term that can save you a whole lot of money and can also build a lot more loyal people within your organization over time would be to get a single developer who has worked at some big multinationals, places where they've been exposed to a lot of engineering best practices, is somebody who has a good, has a wide range of experience working on different types of applications, working with different types of teams, bring that person on and have them be the main person who the junior developers learn from and follow. And again, it depends on the size of your team. But I think engineering teams are best when they're relatively small.

Starting point is 00:01:55 And it, I know. traditionally in big enterprise companies like in China and India and to some extent in the US there would be teams of like 50 developers 100 developers 200 developers at some point it just becomes very difficult to successfully administer those and you have to break them out of the like different subteams and things like that but if you have just a small team building a product like base camp's pretty good right sized product for example where initially it was really just a few developers who were building and maintaining that product, and they've since expanded. Another good example would be like, WhatsApp.

Starting point is 00:02:32 I mean, WhatsApp was able to build a system that worked at great scale without having to have a whole lot of engineers on board. So if you can just have a relatively small team, just a few senior people, a whole lot of junior people, you'll be able to attract the juniors and they will be very grateful to be given an opportunity, whereas a mid-career person would just potentially be flitting from one project to the next and may only stay for like a year or two. If you bring in a junior developer and they learn a whole lot, they're going to feel gratitude and they're going to absorb a lot of that tacit organizational knowledge and they can

Starting point is 00:03:13 potentially stick with you for a long time and then they can train the incoming people. It is good to have some outside expertise, though, to kind of shake things up so your organization doesn't get too stagnant and doesn't start drinking too much of their own Kool-Aid, so to speak. Sorry, I hate that, I hate that idiom or that expression. But so it would be one or two senior developers, plus a lot of junior developers would be the ideal setup if you're, if you have time and don't have to have everything perfect from the get-go. And just to give you some context, free co-camps engineering team, we're only eight people. almost everybody on our team codes and has worked as a developer and we were able to recruit them from people who had already been contributing to our open source code base.

Starting point is 00:04:00 And the main person who's in charge of like our infrastructure and makes a lot of the big engineering decisions, he has worked at a few different multinationals prior to joining Free Code Camp. So we're able to kind of rely on his wisdom and then everybody else is able to follow his direction. So it is good to have somebody who has some, big organization experience to lead the team. It would be wrong to just have a team of junior developers, in my humble opinion.

Starting point is 00:04:30 Rob Hamilton asks, it was mentioned on the pod that you're moving to a project-based curriculum. What does that look like for someone like me with some programming background? And where should I start when I approach the preco camp curriculum? Well, my answer to pretty much everybody would be just work from the beginning to the end. If it's clear that you don't need to relearn something that you've already learned as part of a boot camp or part of another program, like an undergraduate degree in CS or whatever, then what you can do is you can just jump forward and try building those projects.

Starting point is 00:05:05 Each section on Free Code Camp has five certification projects. And if you build those five projects, get all the test pass. Then you can claim the certification. If you're having trouble with those projects, you can go back and you can review the lessons, which again are totally optional. but I would recommend just taking the time and being deliberate and just working from the top to the bottom. That way there won't be any gaps in your knowledge where you aren't sure exactly where you would go pick up this particular thing. And, you know, it's just like jumping into like a difficult video game halfway or like on the highest difficulty setting or something like that. It would be better to just ramp up to it.

Starting point is 00:05:41 What are your thoughts on remote work for developers post COVID-19? What are some of the biggest challenges companies are facing and how can, candidates stand out during the remote job interview. A lot of companies were already remote, like a lot of software focused companies. WordPress was famously just interviewing people in Skype and would hire people without ever even meeting them in the same room. I could say Freeco Camp did the same thing. Like we hadn't met any of the people whom we hired until we met them at like a team event in like Hong Kong or, you know, some other city. I think we, mainly have our team events in Hong Kong because it's one of the freest countries in the world.

Starting point is 00:06:24 And you can basically, anybody can go there without much visa trouble. I think there are some other places that you could also potentially do that. But I lived in China for a long time. So I was like, well, Hong Kong, let's just meet there. I would say as far as interviewing, you're going to want to master the same foundational data structures, algorithms, basic design system, system design knowledge that is going to come up in most interviews. I'm sure you've heard of the cracking the coding interview book.

Starting point is 00:06:58 It's a very good resource. There are tons of different tools, both free and paid, that you can use to learn a lot of specific questions that get asked at different companies like Amazon specific questions, Microsoft specific questions. I would say that this is not going to dramatically impact hiring the fact that it's remote, what is going to dramatically impact hiring is the fact that organizations are tightening their belt and they're trying to, there's the rush to liquidity so that people can, that these companies can make sure they have enough money on hand to

Starting point is 00:07:32 write out this pandemic, which could last for years. You know, it could be years, 20, 23, 24, before, you know, our GDP returns to what it was right before this. We're not sure. There's too much that we don't know. So I don't mean to be like a chicken little or anything, but this is pretty large and it's pretty unprecedented. What are your thoughts on building an SEO media empire out of Freecode Camp?

Starting point is 00:08:01 And as far as keeping FreecodeCamp.org nonprofit, what do you think about making FreeCodeCamp's YouTube channel and some of the content presence for profit? So there are lots of examples of hybrid nonprofit for-profit endeavors. One of the most famous ones is Mozilla, which is kind of a nonprofit that swallowed a large for-profit project. Firefox was up until recently, I think Yahoo was paying him like $300 million or something like that to make Yahoo the default search engine on Firefox so that they wouldn't have Google be the default.

Starting point is 00:08:43 And I think Google may have been paying them a bunch of money. Everybody's been handing Mozilla a bunch of money at some point, but I think it was all to the Firefox division. And now that that revenue stream has largely evaporated, Mozilla has found that

Starting point is 00:08:58 they're not the greatest place because they grew their team and they depended on this for-profit organization inside them. And when that evaporated, suddenly they had to lay people off. So, I think the more cautious approach is just to keep everything nonprofit and just to assume that we're going to continue to be fully donor supported, which we are.

Starting point is 00:09:20 We have more than 5,000 people who donate each month to free co-camp. And I think one thing people misinterpret about running a sustainable donor-supported nonprofit is they think like doing this big pleasure drive at the end of the year when most nonprofits do raise money. That's when most of the charitable giving happens. What's better is if you go back and listen to This Week in Startups, there was an interview with the founder of Charity Water, Scott Harrison, and he also advocates for this, just what Free Coakamp does, which is trying to get convinced people to start supporting monthly. And if you can get monthly recurring revenue in the form of, you know, small $5 donations, where you get 5,000 people donating. and suddenly that becomes a pretty large, reliable budget.

Starting point is 00:10:11 Even during the downturn, yes, we've had increasing churn as people lose their jobs, unfortunately. At least 25 million Americans, I think, at this point have filed for unemployment just in the past month and a half. The churn is not so substantial that we're losing, you know, our baseline of income. So it's a really robust model. And having a for-profit entity, the only real differences between a four-profit entity, the only real differences between a for-profit and a nonprofit or a for-profit can't have, or, you know, a nonprofit can't have stakeholders. Like, it can't have direct financial consideration in the organization.

Starting point is 00:10:51 So, yeah, I think that nonprofit has most of the same advantages, but it's also tax exempt. And if people donate to your nonprofit, if it's a 501C3, public charity like Free Coat Camp is set up, they can deduct it from their taxes. So Farad's question is, I wanted to know what is your, you know, what is your, you know, advice on contributing to open source projects like FreeCodeCamp, and when is it appropriate and how to begin? Do I have to become an expert first, or can a beginner contribute? And the answer to that is we just deployed a new website a few days ago. If you go to contribute.freycotechamp.org, there's an entire guide to how to contribute to FreeCodeCamp. That's how to contribute to FreeCodeCamp.

Starting point is 00:11:35 We welcome contributions. We have like tons of different ways you can contribute to the code to the curriculum and to just additional projects that we run that not only FreeCodeCamp, but other nonprofits rely upon. Contributing to other nonprofit projects, there are some great resources that I'm just going to rattle off. One is first-timers-only, which is an awesome website where you can find GitHub issues that are tagged with first-timers-only, that tag. And that will, those are specific.

Starting point is 00:12:10 specifically set up so that anybody can dive in if they've never done a GitHub poll request before. This can be their first poll request. The people who create those labels on their GitHub issues are specifically doing that so they can help somebody take their first step in the opportunity to open source. So I absolutely recommend first timers only. And then another one is if you just search through GitHub using the help wanted label, you can find something and you can find something with your speed. Just read through the issue. If you're like, I think I can do this. Great.

Starting point is 00:12:43 If you're like, I'm not sure if I can do this. Keep looking around. You'll find something. There's so much work that needs to be done in open source. The opportunities are out there. Just keep digging and you'll find something. And don't be daunted. It does help if you've built a few little toy projects yourself.

Starting point is 00:12:59 If you go through the free cocaine curriculum, which it sounds like you're doing, you're going to build dozens of projects along the way anyway. So that'll give you some general familiarity with Git. and GitHub and some of the different tools like, you know, getting your NPM libraries properly installed and, you know, configuring your local developer environment so you can effectively contribute to these projects. Thanks for the question, Farhad. James Wallace asks, hey, Quincy, many online courses and MOOCs have high drop-off rates and struggle to retain users. Have you found this with Free CodeCannon? And if so, what measures have

Starting point is 00:13:38 found work best for keeping people learning. That's a great question. And this comes up all the time whenever we talk about online learning, especially if it's free if there's no barrier to entry. If all you need to do is go to a website and click log in with Google, log in with Facebook, or log in with email, and then you're in and you're a student. You have done very little work to get enrolled. And this is the case with Coursera, with edX, and with free code camp, and with a lot of other open learning tools. So as you could probably guess, a vast majority of people don't make it very far. Their eyes are bigger than their stomach.

Starting point is 00:14:16 They'll just churn. And that's fine. Maybe they'll come back later. It's frequent that we have people strobe in and out of free co-camp's curriculum. They come and they work through a few lessons. They're like, oh, this is cool. I'll come back in a day or two and they leave. Now, they're going to, once you say,

Starting point is 00:14:36 sign up for free co-camp, you're going to start getting my weekly emails. And those are just basically five links that are worth your time. So a lot of times people see those and they'll kind of jump back in through that and they'll remember free co-camp exists. I can do this. It is possible for me to learn to code if I decide to make it a priority and if I set aside the time to sit down and do it. So it's hard to say how many people just completely drop off because a lot of the people

Starting point is 00:15:03 who have started will eventually come back. And in my mind, you can't force people. You could do like a drip campaign. Like remember, you said you were going to do this. You can try to get them to commit to like 100 days of code, which is a hashtag that kind of grew out of the Free Code Camp community. Alexander Callaway created that. And that's really popular.

Starting point is 00:15:22 If you just search on Twitter and sort by most recent, you'll probably see lots of tweets just within the past hour from people that are going through the 100 days of code challenge. So getting people to commit to that sort of using commitment devices, things like that, those are great. But I think that, you know, if it's meant to be, if somebody really wants to do it, they're going to figure out how to do it and they're going to make it a priority. If they have sufficient extrinsic pressure to go out and get a new job and change careers,

Starting point is 00:15:48 or if they are just genuinely passionate about learning the code and they go through it and it lights a fire inside them to keep pushing, then they'll keep doing it. But I don't do a lot of kind of growth hacky type things to try to convince people who, don't intrinsically want to learn to code well enough to put in the time to try to do it. Because it's not really helping anybody. It can backfire and people can feel even more demoralize as a result. So yeah, I just, I basically, we just tell them like very upfront. This is hard.

Starting point is 00:16:23 The curriculum is going to take a whole lot of work. Are you in or are you out? And if you're out, now it's not a big deal. Just come back later and try it later. So there's an open door. Everything's self-paced. Everything's free. Everything can be done from any computer.

Starting point is 00:16:38 You can even do it from your phone if you want. Question from Brady. What are plans for future courses? Will there be other languages or frameworks included? This is a great question. And a lot of people don't realize that Free Code Camp does have a YouTube channel. We don't heavily publicize it on Free Code Camp because we want people to just go through our linear curriculum.

Starting point is 00:16:58 This is designed to be as unambiguous as possible. And this is modeled after the original university system that the hundreds of years preceding the arrival of electives and majors and all these innovations that I think helped universities make a lot more money but didn't necessarily help students become more job-ready. I think that majors are overrated. I think electives probably shouldn't exist because it's basically saying, hey, you don't know what you're doing. Why don't you choose some courses that seem interesting to you? It's kind of offloading the actual expertise that like a provost or a university chair should have in a subject. Before 1900,

Starting point is 00:17:41 virtually every university had the exact same curriculum. It was just a basic liberal arts curriculum. You learned Greek. You learned Latin. You learned math. You learned rhetoric. You learned all these topics that are still just as relevant today. I mean, you could argue Greek and Latin aren't as relevant. I mean, they do improve your vocabulary. And learning the classics does increase the amount of historical knowledge you can draw from. But there's no reason why you couldn't also include programming as a core skill. I mean, I think pretty much everybody should know when they graduated from college. They should know how SQL queries work.

Starting point is 00:18:16 They should know how relational databases work. They should know how basic scripting languages work. They should know how basic computer hardware works. These are not revolutionary earth-shattering new things. These things have been around for decades. at this point and people should know them. And there's not really a good reason why we have people graduating with, you know, a major in Spanish, for example, and all they've done is learn a specific foreign language. By the way, I call out Spanish specifically because it's one of the lowest

Starting point is 00:18:46 paid university majors you can get. And I think that it's unfortunate that universities don't force people to pair Spanish, which would be a great thing to learn. I mean, it's super useful. But that shouldn't be the core of your study. You should learn that in addition to learning marketable skills like engineering skills. And a lot of people may come in and say like, well, you know, schools about making people, you know, good citizens. It's not about helping people get a job. They could go to technical institute if they wanted to get like a specific job. And I would say that that's kind of an abjugation of universities, day-factor role in society. I don't buy that at all.

Starting point is 00:19:30 So, yeah, we have a ton of courses on YouTube. If you search for a topic, if you search for Python, if you search for SQL, if you search for TensorFlow, there's a good chance that the top result will be a free Co-camp course. And these are full-length, multi-hour, in some cases, like 8, 10. We have a course is 24 hours long on C-sharp. We actually had to speed it up 1% because YouTube didn't allow. videos that were longer than 24 hours. So it's like 23 hours and

Starting point is 00:19:58 59 minutes or something like that. It's a really in-depth C-sharp course. So you can learn any language pretty much you want. We don't have COBOL yet. A lot of people are asking about that. We're working with this Mainframe Institute to try to create a COBOL

Starting point is 00:20:14 course in the next couple months. We're not just going to dash it out, though. It takes a lot of work. But you can learn pretty much anything on our YouTube channel and that will supplement what you're learning through the free code camp curriculum, or you can just use some other book, you know, coding boot camp,

Starting point is 00:20:30 or you can use technical books. You can do all kinds of things, but that will give you a wide array of different topics you can learn. So C. Pulido asks, I am new to coding. I have a vision of what I want to build, but I am wondering if I am being too ambitious.

Starting point is 00:20:51 how do I effectively learn and build at the same time? That's an excellent question. Everybody should have a big, ambitious project in their mind, something they want to build, that they can use to be a driving force, kind of a central narrative arc through their learning the code journey. And I would recommend that you use that idea that you have in your mind, that you build it.

Starting point is 00:21:18 You can work backward. You can say, okay, well, first of all, I need to design some user stories. How do I do that? And next thing you know, you've read some basic books about, you know, system design. And you've like user interaction, user research, things like that. That can be a really good place to start. And then you can say, well, it looks like we're going to need to have a database here. Like, why don't I learn some SQL?

Starting point is 00:21:47 Or how to use an ORM? object relational mapper. If you learn this, you don't need SQL. That's one of the weird tricks. You should still learn SQL. You should still learn how relational databases use work, but you might want to just start with like the mean stack or the Mern stack, like Mongo React, Express, and Node is the stack.

Starting point is 00:22:08 That's probably the most common stack that people are using for most medium-sized companies with new projects. So you could learn how to use Mongoose, which is an ORM, and you basically don't even need to worry about the database. At that point, you just need to have a database and put it in your API keys so that your application knows where to write your data. So then you can be like, well, I need to build the front end. So you can learn some basic CSS.

Starting point is 00:22:36 You can learn React, be able to build some components. And then you can just use that like your whole, through Freecode camp, you're going to build dozens of projects, but they're not projects that you would let go show your potential employer, you're going to want one big project that demonstrates you have full understanding of all these different skills. And that's the project that you want to lead with because they only want to look at like one thing. Just show me one project. Don't show me a big portfolio filled with lots of things. Show me one exciting project that uses a whole lot of different concepts and potentially, you know, preferably has an existing user base because that shows that you actually know how to

Starting point is 00:23:15 cater to existing users and help them. build that functionality that they request, things like that. So great question. Gene Hoffman asks, great session so far. Thanks for doing this. In an age of no code and low code, what are your thoughts on for total beginners who explore new career paths today, either at the beginning of their career or career switchers, where should they start and what should they learn first in terms of languages and or no code tools?

Starting point is 00:23:44 also would you give different advice for people who are already intermediate and have like an intermediate knowledge of HTML CSS. So HTML CSS, of course, the foundations of web design. If you understand how those work, you can take like a WordPress application, like a template and you can quickly get something live. In some respects, WordPress is almost kind of a no-code tool in itself. It's an entire ecosystem of plugins you can drop in. Wix is another great tool.

Starting point is 00:24:14 Squarespace. Like a lot of these make it very easy to build a quick MVP. And you may not even have to go much deeper than that if you just have like a simple blog or you have a simple e-commerce site. Shopify is very powerful. And you may be able to quickly just get what you need without actually writing much custom code. And that's actually a good thing because that's code that you don't have to maintain and

Starting point is 00:24:36 you don't have to worry about that code breaking. If something breaks, you can call somebody else and say like, hey, your code's breaking. What's going on? You can create a ticket in their system or, you know, potentially you could just get somebody else to use these tools to build out your features and they can help make sure that things don't break. But if you want to consider like a lot of the more advanced no code tools, taking something like Zapier or what I used to use back in the day was IFT, which is kind of a precursor to Zapier. I'm not sure the state of the feature set and how the two compare. But you can pipe together a lot of services very quickly. You don't necessarily need to learn programming to be able to do that.

Starting point is 00:25:21 The problem with using no code tools is twofold. One, you don't have the nuanced control that you're going to have if you're actually slinging real code. If you're actually building an application that is built on like a boilerplate of some form, You get a lot of the benefits of having a no-code application in that you have tons of, JavaScript libraries. You can just drop in and they just work for the most part. Maybe there's a little bit of wiring code that you need to write. So you get additional flexibility if you're actually writing your own code.

Starting point is 00:25:54 You also save a ton of money. Okay. I'll give you an example of MailChimp, right? If you want to have a newsletter or you want to like integrate some. sort of email tool. You can just use MailChimp, but it's really expensive. And it rapidly ramps up. Like if you have a list that's, I don't know,

Starting point is 00:26:17 uh, 5,000 people, maybe you're only paying 20, 30 bucks a month. Uh, but the, the second year, your list gets to be 10,000, 100,000, wherever, it starts to get untenably expensive. Like free code camp, like I have a mailing list of like three million people on 3.5. That would cost me a fortune. That would cost me hundreds of thousands of, thousands. of dollars probably a year to administer through MailChimp. So if you know how to use tools like AWS SES, which is simple email service, and you

Starting point is 00:26:47 can write code around that, then you can just use that to deliver the emails and you're paying $1 for every 10,000 emails, dramatically, like several orders of magnitude difference in price. So by actually being a developer, you can access all these things. And the moment you're at scale, it's not that big of a deal. but most no code tools I've seen start off pretty reasonably priced and then rapidly increase in price as you get closer and closer to Web Scale where you're having, you know, hundreds of thousands of users in an enterprise app or tens of millions of users potentially in a consumer app. So those are the two considerations, flexibility and also cost. Now, you could always just build a quick prototype using no code and then go back and, uh, update it later. So I think no code is a great tool for developers. As I said on during the Jason

Starting point is 00:27:43 interview, I think that it's even better if you're a developer and you can just grab off the shelf solutions and you have that wisdom to know what you actually are interested in building and maintaining yourself. And you know, it's the builder buy. So in many cases with no code, you're giving yourself a really good buy option. Which other founders and leaders and companies in the Freecode Camp slash online learning space do you think are also doing great work for the community? Well, Ryan Carson with Treehouse

Starting point is 00:28:11 has this really cool program where he's helping, like, do kind of apprenticeships. And he's focused on helping people in a few key cities. I think he's based in Oregon, like the Portland area. So he's helping people get jobs at local employers like Nike.

Starting point is 00:28:29 And this is really high touch. And he's basically taking people and just rapidly ramping them up. And what he does is he gets the company to pay for a certain number of people that they're going to hire. Like they basically pledge, we'll hire end people for end years.

Starting point is 00:28:46 And then that gives them the budget to do all the training. And so the person doesn't pay anything. They just go and they learn to code and then they do half the time, I think crank it through Treehouse and also potentially doing. So Treehouse also has mentorship

Starting point is 00:29:00 and a lot of things that you can do when you have people paying money or you have the budget set aside and you're working with a smaller number of people. Free co-camp, we can't really do that because we have millions of people and it just doesn't scale. And all our efforts to get to like

Starting point is 00:29:15 randomly match people together to do that, there are a lot of potential issues that can come from that. So we just let people organically group up and work on things as they see fit. Chat's a really good tool for helping people organize those things. So is a forum.

Starting point is 00:29:31 So I would say, Treehouse, other online learning spaces, like edX is a really great initiative out of Harvard and MIT, and they are open source. And there's another program called Shui Tong X, which is Shui Tang means like school, essentially in Chinese.

Starting point is 00:29:49 And it is just a fork of edX. And I think they may pay edX for support and services, but the biggest Chinese MOOC platform is a fork of the one of the biggest, I think Coursera may be slightly bigger than edX here in the States. But I think that's really cool that they went open source

Starting point is 00:30:10 and not only did they go open source but they have other major programs using their code. Charles asks is there a place for those who are passionate but don't think that they could ever be a great coder? Are these skills learned at Free Code Camp transferable

Starting point is 00:30:26 or useful for gaining employment in other parts of the tech startup industry? Now I would argue that any skills that you learn are going to be relevant down the road. Like people frequently transition to the tech from sales, for example. And I always tell people like, the higher you rise in an organization, the more your job becomes sales. Regardless of what you were originally doing, you know, you think Satya is sitting there

Starting point is 00:30:54 like coding? No, he's mainly in meetings and he's trying to convince people. He's trying to understand problems and he's trying to deliver solutions. that's useful. As I said earlier, liberal arts background, super useful. I got a liberal arts degree.

Starting point is 00:31:06 I didn't learn engineering in a formal capacity. I just learned a whole bunch of philosophy and worked as a journalist and then as a teacher. So like teaching has been incredibly useful. So I think probably the same thing with software development. At the very worst, you're going to walk out of this with kind of an engineer's mindset and you'll be able to relate to people

Starting point is 00:31:25 who are actually doing the frontline work of building the applications. And you'll be better at managing them. successfully. And they'll have more respect for you if you can just pull up a chair next to him and help them debug something real quick. So there's zero downside to learning to code. Like all you're doing is you're investing some time. And I can't think of a field other than basically reading and like English skills and things like that. Like I can't think of any field that would reap more reward over time than learning software development as a skill.

Starting point is 00:31:56 Jackie asks not related to coding, but I'm curious about your experience teaching. in China that you mentioned. I would like to hear more about that and what ages and subjects as you teach and what are some of the differences you've seen between the education system in the U.S. and in China and how do those differences play out in careers? Right. Well, I've always focused on teaching adults for the most part. So most of the people I was teaching in China were engineers from Brazil and some other

Starting point is 00:32:24 countries who were expats in China. And they were using English as their lingua franca between them and the Chinese engineers. So people would come to China, which in the early 2000s, you can imagine how many expats were going there. There's still a lot, but it was really surging then because that was just when China was growing like 11% a year. It was insane. And there were just a ton of engineers from around the world. and I just meet with them and teach these kind of small seminar-style classes. And differences between the Chinese education system and the U.S. education system?

Starting point is 00:33:08 Well, I would say that the Chinese education system focuses a lot more on fundamentals, like just really learning English really thoroughly. They've got a pretty comprehensive English curriculum, learning mathematics really thoroughly. My wife is Chinese. met in grad school while I was over there doing my graduate degree, and she was my classmate. And she used to joke that while American kids are playing hundreds of video games, Chinese are solving hundreds of math problems. So they definitely emphasize just what we would call, I guess, in the U.S.

Starting point is 00:33:46 STEM, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. That's basically everybody learns that. And if you look at the number of people who are going through engineering, schools. It's like the de facto that's the default curriculum and everybody who leads in China like all the leadership there engineers. So occasionally you have somebody from like a non-hard science like economics who rises up the ranks but for the most part it's people who are you know mechanical engineers irrigation engineers all kinds of like city planner civic civil civil engineer type those are the people who run the country

Starting point is 00:34:27 and it really shows in the education. Now there are some areas where I think not necessarily American education because I don't think American education is particularly strong even at the collegiate level and I know people might get angry when I say that because we do have some of the best research universities in the world but I think better

Starting point is 00:34:49 models of education might be like Scandinavian schools are really strong. they tend to be more, I mean, it couldn't be more different from the Chinese system. The Chinese system is you wake up 7 a.m., 6 a.m., you go to school, you finish school at like 6, 7 p.m., you go home, and you do some homework, and you do that six days a week, and on Sunday, you get half day. That's school, right, in China. It's just brutal, and it's like all-encompassing that is your life. you don't have hobbies generally outside of school maybe like the most common stated hobby of Chinese students is sleeping so in like Norway for example they have one of the best education systems

Starting point is 00:35:42 for K through 12 in the world people mostly just play and it's it's very similar to what you get it like if you enrolled your kid in like a Montessori program or like a Waldorf, like one of these fancy kind of like, learn by playing and experimenting, less structured. And then the U.S. in general, like our education system is kind of a hybrid of the really grueling Chinese system

Starting point is 00:36:08 and the more relaxing Scandinavian model. And most education systems are based off of, I believe, what's called the Prussian model, which was something that really took hold in like the 1800s and has just that model of having like these stratified schools, it's just taken over and pretty much every country in the world has adopted that in somewhere or another.

Starting point is 00:36:38 So K through 12 education in the U.S. very different from northern Europe, which is in turn very, very different from China. Heidi asks, two-part question. As a nonprofit, what do you find the hardest and most difficult part of soliciting donations? is it easier to get corporations to buy into what you're doing or get the community to give donations? There are two approaches to this. There's an organization that I have a whole lot of respect for called Girls Who Code,

Starting point is 00:37:09 and they have done an amazing job of getting every large, you know, S&P 500 corporation you've ever heard of to donate to them. I think that's amazing. And they have a ton of money as a result. I don't have any expertise in that. I've never done that sort of sales stuff. I have successfully applied for a few grants and things like that, but for the most part, it's just been asking the community to help support things.

Starting point is 00:37:36 I think there are advantages to having a broad range, like in Free Code Camp's case, thousands of people donating every month, as opposed to just having the deep pockets. I'm not trying to single out code.org. They're a great organization. They're doing important work. but if you look at their 990, which is the equivalent of like an annual report that every nonprofit puts out,

Starting point is 00:37:57 including Free CoCamp, we have a platinum transparency rating. Just go to GuideStar.org and you can pull up all our annual reports, our 990s. There are on code.orgs 990, probably like 50, 60, maybe 70% of their income just comes from a few million dollar annual donations.

Starting point is 00:38:19 And when something like COVID-19, and the economy goes through what may be an unprecedented global recession. A lot of that money will evaporate. But it's just a whole lot more points of failure to imagine, you know, millions or tens of, I'm sorry, thousands or tens of thousands of donors all canceling their donation as opposed to just a few key people who are funding your entire organization. And also having thousands of stakeholders. that changes your priorities a little bit.

Starting point is 00:38:54 Like Freeco Camp doesn't need to bow down to like the fang companies or anything like that. Granted, you know, we would love to get more grants from them. We don't have to say, oh, we don't have to walk on eggshells whenever we say something negative about Facebook, for example, which is frankly doing a lot of things. Like, we don't have to, that doesn't have to leak into our editorial. It would if we were getting, you know, most of our payment. are donations from Facebook, for example. So there's a little bit of independence that you get from that. Also, because the donations just come and it just comes through the software,

Starting point is 00:39:32 we don't actually have to have dedicated people going out and getting donations. Now, I realize if we were getting millions of dollars in donations from large corporations, we could have the budget to get like a really high-lying, you know, fundraiser type person. And if you go to, you know, some of these big NGOs, like the Red Cross or if you go to Susan G. Coleman, they're going to have professional fundraisers who are running those operations. So there are benefits and there are drawbacks to both.

Starting point is 00:40:03 But a lot of it is just that free cooking, we've been busy focusing on product. We've been focusing on making sure that this tool is as useful as possible to people, that we get as many people as possible, ready to go out and get jobs. And those are the things that we optimize for, not increasing funding.

Starting point is 00:40:20 sure, I am actively learning how to do fundraising and I'm learning how to do all those things. But you don't have to start with going out and trying to find a big check. If you can figure out people who are gaining value from your organization, you can just ask some of them to donate and that can help sustain the organization. So, yeah, there's not one definitive approach that everybody has to follow. There are lots of different pathways and this is the path we've chosen. Thanks for listening to Quincy Larson's Ask Me Anything. If you'd like to participate in weekly AMAs and discuss all aspects of startup life with Jason and our community of 20,000 founders, join us at this weekend startups.com slash slack. Thanks again to Clavio, Fiverr, and Mint Mobile for making this possible.

This Week in Startups - AMA 1: freeCodeCamp’s Quincy Larson answers founder and developer questions

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