37signals invests in The Starter League | Hacker News Reader

37signals invests in The Starter League

37signals.com

200 pointswlll87 comments

Working with 37S will easily be the best thing that ever happened to Starter League. Perfect fit, the creators of Rails, Chicago locals... etc. I'd love to see Chicago become the anti-silicon valley. A place for more practical, "get rich slowly" types of tech businesses. 37S is the perfect cornerstone. It just feels right with Chicago's blue collar roots (I am biased -- a Chicago native).

Separately, I love the fact that the name has been changed (CodeCademy conflict was awful), but The Starter League doesn't have the same instant semantic meaning as Code Academy did. Sounds almost like a startup incubator at first.

> A place for more practical, "get rich slowly" types of tech businesses.

We definitely need more places like this. I'm really loving that Austin tech scene is holding to this mantra :)

I love hearing that as someone heavily considering moving to Austin.

Come take a tour of Capital Factory when you come over to checkout the scene. There'll be plenty of people to answer any questions you have about the area (and hopefully persuade you to move here!).

We definitely have an affinity towards our original Code Academy brand, but unfortunately we had some confusing overlap with another awesome company - Codecademy. Zach Sims and his team are great and he and I have been good friends since we've discussed how to resolve our name confusion. I'm happy that we'll be able to support each other going forward. We encourage our students to use resources like theirs and Treehouse in order to prepare for some of our in-person courses.

As far as the name change not having the same semantic meaning, I completely agree, however "teaching people to code" was never our only purpose. We wanted to provide a path for people who wanted to start change -- in their industries, in their communities, in their lives. To us, being a Starter means so much more than just being able to write code; it's about being driven to do something meaningful with it. A Starter is an innovator, a disruptor; someone who is burning to solve problems and is willing to bust their ass to learn what they need in order to do so.

We are also not a place that you visit for three months to acquire a skill and then leave. You don't just attend, graduate, and then disconnect. To be a member of The Starter League means to have earned a permanent place in a team of people dedicated to supporting one another in ongoing efforts to learn and build, to solve meaningful problems for ourselves and others.

We are not simply an academy for coders. We are a League of Starters.

Love the mission. Best of luck.

"Zach Sims and his team are great and he and I have been good friends since we've discussed how to resolve our name confusion."

So I'm assuming by the above you mean you've become "good friends" after this:

http://www.udrpsearch.com/wipo/d2012-0857

Tl;dr

http://domainnamewire.com/2012/06/21/codecademy-beats-code-a...

Was there an attempt to avoid the UDRP process before and if so why didn't it work?

I'm up north a bit in Madison, Wisconsin, and my co-founder and I have definitely been interested in what's going on in Chicago. I'd love to connect with more Chicago founders and learn more about the scene.

Next time you're down here, gimme a shout. Would love to meet up for coffee and help you get the lay of the land.

Also, if you happen to be in town during any of our Entrepreneurs Unpluggd (http://entrepreneursunpluggd.com) events, that's one place (of many great places) to get started.

Cool, will do. Whats your email?

tim at (the entrepreneurs domain in my profile)

entrepreneurs unplugged is a great event (As tim mentioned), and Technori Pitch (http://technori.com/thepitch) is another one to check out. I"m the CTO for Technori.

And all of the Chicago people start to come out!

> I'd love to see Chicago become the anti-silicon valley. A place for more practical, "get rich slowly" types of tech businesses.

I'd love to see Chicago be what Silicon Valley used to be, a tech scene run by engineers rather than banks.

> I'd love to see Chicago become the anti-silicon valley

Me too, but Groupon.

Touche -- quite the antithesis of 37S

I'm here to if anyone has any questions about the partnership, the reasons behind the investment, the vision, or anything else.

Jason looking long term do you see an expansion of the school with satellite campuses. Clearly one of the benefits of the current location is access to the talented resource pool in Chicago. Chicago, Denver and Kansas City are some of the few places in the Midwest that have an ecosystem, though small in comparison to the west coast,to support and encourage budding builders.

No plans to expand outside of Chicago right now. We’re focused on quality and nailing the learning and teaching experience. One location makes that possible. We're interested in quality over growth. Expansion is dilution, not concentration.

People from all over the world are coming to Chicago to attend The Starter League. So far people from 25 states and 12 countries have made the investment in themselves to learn what it is The Starter League teaches.

This focus on quality and keeping it small is the right thing to do. What does the acceptance rate look like though? I think after this affiliation there's going to be a lot more applicants and therefore the acceptance rate is going to go down. Maybe its a question for Neal and Mike, but what's the process for selecting applicants?

The application at http://starterleague.com/apply is the first step. As we review applications we choose people to interview either in person, via skype, or by phone. We are looking for passionate and persistent people that are willing to spend three intense, immersive months in Chicago.

I have worked with several startups in Chicago in non-technical roles. This is a great way for me to learn some of the basics.

Will be there be any sort of scholarships for The Starter League?

We've discussed this, but we don't have a definitive answer right now.

One thing we believe is that it's important for people to make some sacrifices to be here. We want totally committed students. Figuring out how to pay is a great test to see how committed someone is.

You are correct, sacrifices should be made to achieve something meaningful. Could I trade any sort of work for a class? (ie: administrative, janitorial, chef)

That's the wrong way to do this: you're basically asking him to go through your skills, then go through his business and find where they intersect so you can help him. It's take away one of his most important resources, time.

Instead, research everything about 37Signals and Starter League (example: http://charliehoehn.com/2009/01/08/how-to-hack-someones-mind...), come up 3 ideas that benefit them, and pitch them as someone who will get it done and they won't have to manage. When contacting busy people, you'll get far better returns with this approach.

I'd go into more detail, but Charlie already wrote the roadmap for doing this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5qUR3tpEdA

Thanks for your feedback. I was doing it all wrong. I tweeted at Mr.Fried to view a proposal for work.

vpena.sqsp.com/perfectforstarterleague/

Would love to hear if Jason responds to this...

So my uncle has this philosophy that if a school provides scholarship to a student, irrespective of the amount of money, the school is putting some faith in the student and that is very valuable. Some schools provide a no-cosigner loans that are also in the same light. Just a perspective.

How is The Starter League different from DevBootcamp?

DevBootcamp: http://devbootcamp.com/ http://m.techcrunch.com/2012/05/10/dev-boot-camp-is-a-ruby-s...

I believe Code Academy was around before DevBootcamp, since they've been around for a couple of years now. They teach more than just Ruby, they have a co-working space and are based in Chicago.

DevBootcamp teaches you the full stack for being a Rails developer too, not just Ruby. I'd say they differentiate by getting 80-90% of their students entry level development jobs after and that's a core part of their bootcamps.

"DevBootcamp teaches you the full stack for being a Rails developer too, not just Ruby."

We teach way more than just Ruby. Our Web App Development course covers the same material as the Dev Bootcamp offering. We also have a User Experience course and two HTML/CSS classes. Over the past year our students have wanted us to teach MORE Ruby which is in part why we have finally added an Advanced Ruby offering to our lineup.

Another differentiating factor is that we are not focused on just helping our students get jobs. Students who apply to The Starter League have a lot of different goals in mind. Some want jobs, some have startups that they are looking to grow or get off the ground, and some just want the ability to take what's in their head and make it real through software. Our priority at The Starter League is to create the environment where all these goals can thrive.

For students who want jobs, we have an environment that can helps network with the local community to find those opportunities. For those who want to build companies, we are located in 1871 (http://1871.com) which is the new mecca of Chicago digital entrepreneurship.

We have a lot of respect for what Shereef has been able to do with DevBootcamp, and we wish him continued success! It's great that the software education landscape has grown this much in just a year's time.

I think the main difference lies in the end goal of the student. We train people that are looking to become software engineers. People that are looking to dedicate the rest of their life to creating software. The Starter League is more suited for founders looking to build a prototype, or people of other professions looking to gain basic competency in tech.

Their classes are 96 hours, we total over 500. We also have around a minimum of an 1:8 ratio of instructor to student.

I think the last major difference is that we set up an employer day at the end and recruit companies looking to hire junior developers. Two weeks on from the graduation of the current class we've had over 13 students with offers at an average of above $83,000.

We also cost $12,000 versus their $8,000 (for the most comparable course).

I've met Neal, and some of the guys from Starter League and they're amazing. They're going to keep crushing it, now with the power of 37signals! Good job guys.

We're very supportive of Shereef and his team at DevBootcamp. Thankfully we've got the Ruby Dojo http://starterleague.com/dojo (which also sports an 8:1 student/instructor ratio) this quarter which serves a similar audience to DevBootcamp's cohort with training for people aspiring to become software engineers. And class/hours/ratio comparison is a bit different, since it's a full time commitment for our students as they often work in our space at http://1871.com 24/7 and practice around the clock with mentors, fellow students, and the many startups that are looking for development support. While we aren't explicitly jobs/placement focused, our outcomes have been similar to that of DevBootcamp for our students that have aspirations to become software engineers.

jasonfried: You write, "this isn’t a traditional investment. We’re not looking to get out, we’re looking to stay in."

I have to disagree with your choice of words: the investment you guys just made is the truly traditional, old-fashioned kind. Consider what John Maynard Keynes wrote about the difference between the way in which professional investors invest in a business, versus the way in which entrepreneurs since time immemorial have committed capital to business endeavors. Most professional investors, Keynes wrote:

  are, in fact, largely concerned, not with making superior long-term forecasts
  of the probable yield of an investment over its whole life, but with foreseeing
  changes in the conventional basis of valuation a short time ahead of the
  general public. They are concerned, not with what an investment is really worth
  to a man who buys it "for keeps," but with what the market will value it at,
  under the influence of mass psychology, three months or a year hence.[1]

Before the advent of financial markets, all investments were made "for keeps" by people looking to "stay in."

Congratulations on making a traditional investment.

PS. FWIW, Keynes accumulated a fortune by investing his own capital during his lifetime.

[1] http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300071h/printall.html

Edits: added more context and clarified my key point.

I don't see how Keynes' description contradicts Jason's notion of traditional investing.

pilsetnieks: before financial markets made it possible for people to exit their investments with relative ease, all investments throughout history were made "for keeps" by people looking to "stay in" essentially forever. The idea of "investing temporarily" (which almost qualifies as an oxymoron in my view) is a more recent development, but has become dominant to the point that it is now considered "traditional."

Oh, ok. Before the clarification it just seemed that you used the Keynes' quote as a description of traditional professional investing.

Fair point. I'm glad you knew what I actually meant ;)

I've updated the post to reflect more of what I meant. This isn't the type of tech investment you normally read about.

Thanks for doing that, and thanks for writing the post. We need more people thinking this way, sincerely trying to build businesses and organizations of lasting value :-)

> PS. FWIW, Keynes accumulated a fortune by investing his own capital during his lifetime.

And FWIW: He also lost a fortune by investing in his own lifetime. (He was nearly wiped out in the 1929 crash, which he failed to foresee.)

The Super Myth of Keynes as a Great Stock Market Investor: http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2012/03/super-myth-of-k...

He was 83% long going into the downturn that resulted in the 1929 crash (p. 21)So how could Keynes be a great investor with such a bad performance? Because Keynes, the evil bastard, along with Bernard Baruch, talked FDR into confiscating the gold owned by all Americans. He then loaded up his portfolio with gold mining stocks and then urged FDR to prop up the price of gold.

...

Bottom line, as far as I'm concerned, Keynes was a terrible investor, as shown by his pre-gold mining stock losses. The only time he made real money in the markets was when he traded on inside information about FDR's plan to drive the gold price up, and loaded up on gold mining stocks. Got that? The man who called gold a "barbarous relic" in his 1924 book, Monetary Reform, had 66% of his portfolio in gold mining stocks in the 1930s.

jpdoctor: what are your sources?

I ask only because according to the reputable sources I've read, Keynes made a fortune from his investments, and he also made a lot of money for Cambridge University, whose portfolio he managed for a few decades. Here's some reliable information on his track record as an investor:

* The Economist: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/06/keynesia...

* The Financial Times: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/31f0e3f8-eaba-11e1-984b-00144...

* University of Cambridge/London School of Economics: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2023011

I'd also recommend Lord Skidelsky's excellent book on Keynes.

Previous personal research, mainly. However, a quick check through the LSE paper you linked: However, performance in the late 1920s was disappointing, as we saw in the previous section. His 83% equity allocation at the end of August 1929 indicates that he failed to foresee the imminent sharp fall in the London market. This sobering experience could well have led Keynes to his beauty contest metaphor and to bemoan the seeming inability of the “serious-minded” investor, frustrated by the “game-players”, “to purchase investments on the best genuine long-term expectations he can frame” (Keynes, 1936: 156).

I'd be surprised if the other sources failed to acknowledge that he busted badly in 1929-31.

jpdoctor: it makes no sense to judge his long-term results based on a short stretch of under-performance. According to that same paper, the portfolio he managed for Cambridge University beat the market by 8%/year on average from the early 1920's until his death in 1946. That period includes the Great Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930's!

PS. That would be like judging Warren Buffett's impressive long-term investment record based on the sharp decline in Berkshire Hathaway's share price during the financial panic of 2008!

PPS. If you think Buffett's record is explained by luck, check out the subsequent long-term record of the seven investors identified in this article he wrote for Columbia Business School's magazine in 1984: http://www4.gsb.columbia.edu/null?&exclusive=filemgr.dow... -- all materially outperformed the major stock indices after being identified by Buffett -- what are the odds of that?

> it makes no sense to judge his long-term results based on a short stretch of under-performance.

It makes enormous sense: He missed the biggest economic event of three generations. If you can't call the big ones, then there's very little proof his returns were something other than luck.

Look, both Keynes and Buffett (since you mentioned him) have long term positive results when there was a long term positive market. Choose a high-beta portfolio in such an environment, and voila! you beat the market. In order to show you have any actual insight and aren't just playing for luck, you need to show that you beat the market significantly in both up and down environments.

BTW, the entire mutual fund market is based on this approach, and when a fund seriously underperforms, it is conveniently removed from the portfolio of Fidelity/Janus/insert hucksters here.

Edit: Relevant http://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-dont-understand-i...

Most people out there don't understand the inverse relationship of bond prices and yields, let alone beta.

Good stuff Jason

If you are getting more personally involved. How are you going to make sure that people act on your general advice instead of thinking that they have to do exactly like you?

I'm not part of this to make sure anyone follows my advice. I'm part of this to offer my advice.

It sounds like they're profitable and I thought 37S was a proponent of slow growth, no hostility intended but I'm confused about the goals of 37S and Starter League with this agreement. Presumably if its an equity investment you expect some kind of liquidation down the road right?

No liquidation, no. Financially we'll participate in the distributions (The Starter League is an LLC) as long as the company is profitable. But this is way more than that - this is an investment in helping other people learn and for us to become better teachers. The returns from that will be far greater than the financial returns.

Major respect for that attitude - short sightedness is toxic. This is investment and education done right.

I live in Chicago and I'm an experienced developer. I want to start a company but I don't want to go the seed funding route because I want to create a profitable small business, not a startup. Is there a Starter League for me?

Not that the non-existence of such a program would stop me...

This may work for you: http://nreduce.com/

I took part this time, it was a good experience overall, especially considering it was their first time.

Congrats to all parties involved! I was part of the Spring Dev Class at Code Academy and couldn't be happier for Neal, Mike, Jason and the rest of the hardworking folks who made this possible.

Particularly, I applaud the emphasis on using the Starter League as a springboard for starting a career and/or lifelong relationship with development. Too many programs sell the idea of launching a startup from 3 months of beginner coding which is ridiculous. Even the rebrand "Starter League" emphasizes the commitment...perfect. If anyone is interested in my perspective on the class, here's a post I wrote soon after: http://entrepreneursunpluggd.com/blog/should-you-do-code-aca...

I was confused at first given that 37 Signals are famed for avoiding growth for growth's sake and a focus on not taking external VC style investment - I thought "damn, these guys just undid years of sound advice" and then I saw the key line

"This isn’t a traditional investment. We’re not looking to get out, we’re looking to stay in."

Awesome, glad to see someone investing for reasons other than flipping a company

37signals themselves have taken $10 million in external non-traditional VC [1].

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2006/07/20/37-signals-takes-jeff-bezos...

Well I never, you learn something new every day. In my defence I hadn't even heard the words Venture Capitalist in 2006... thanks for the link though

I'd like to hear how Jason or others feel this approach compares to online coursework which is arguably more dynamic and interactive than books (and often free/cheap). For example, Udacity's CS253 Web App Engineering course [1] taught by Steve Huffman which covers building a blog in App Engine.

I'll admit I had trouble staying focused in the coursework (and completed only ~25%) despite ASP.NET experience, and desire to improve my web dev skills.

1: http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs253/CourseRev/apr20...

One of the ways I (and I suspect others) learn best is by asking questions. This is the primary downside of an online only course.

in a perfect world, everyone can learn from books. i know that my learning style is MUCH more interactive and i only really learn in a classroom setting. Having done the spring dev course for Starter League (then codeacademy) I can tell you how amazing it is to have material presented, then challenges with pair programming right in class. TAs walk around and help you when you get stuck, thereby teaching you how to deal with error messages. learning from a book can be such an isolating experience, whereas classes are much more about community.

Different people learn in different ways. There are lots of people - me included - who don't learn well from books or online tutorials. We need to be immersed in the environment. We want to be able to ask questions and get human responses. The Starter League is especially well suited people like this.

This is the other side of for-profit education, something that's been turned into a bit of a dirty phrase (not without reason in a lot of cases). The fact is non-traditional education that costs money and provides great results is alive in a whole lot of industries, and it seems like the tech industry is slowly starting to catch up a bit. That's great news. I think it's also great news because some of the platforms that outfits like Treehouse or Code Academy (the online JS school) are using are really really nice. A welcome breath of fresh air.

While it's great to read about the success, this part gets me:

> They put up a simple web site and announced that they were accepting applications. And soon enough they had more applications than they had spots.

Methinks there is more that was done between step A and B rather than just putting up a webpage and sitting back. Would you be able to give more specifics on what they did between those two steps to get all those applications?

I went to an IdeaMensch talk by Mike McGee (co-founder), and it was actually surprisingly little. They knew what they wanted to build (a physical school, great space, excellent teachers, etc) but one of their funding opportunities fell through right as they were running out of money.

They decided to see if they could bootstrap it by getting 30 students who were crazy enough to enroll when there wasn't any of the stuff promised in place yet.

There were way more than 30, and had to reject a number of applicants. They rented their first space (at Groupon I think) less than a week before classes started, and bought the iMacs just days before it started.

Long story short, they shipped, and it worked.

Pretty close @tg3! Glad I was making a little sense up there...

Since I am one of the crazy fools who started this thing (Mike McGee), I guess I'll chime in...

July 2011

Our main focus was just trying to build the site. Since Neal and I hadn't really built a professional site before, we didn't really know what we were doing and it was pretty damn hard. Luckily we got a lot of help from our instructor and other advisors who were developers and designers to lighten the load a bit. Still the main product was ours and it was definitely an MVP - http://bit.ly/PZpoSt

August 2011

By August I was down to about $200 in my account and we had still not received the funding we thought we would to market Code Academy to the masses. So we just decided to launch the site and see how many people we could get to apply by using Twitter, Facebook, sending emails, and going to meetups in Chicago. We launched Thursday, August 4th 2011 at 9am looking for 12 students to fill our inaugural class.

While we had the benefit of having a lot of support within the Chicago community, the applications we were getting were from complete strangers. We were getting applications from realtors, retail workers, lawyers, accountants, journalists, teachers, etc. They were also coming from across the country. California, Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Wisconsin, New York, the list goes on. Even people from outside the country (Israel and The Philippines) applied to our inaugural class!

By the end of August we had 88 quality applications from people all over the world without spending a single dollar on marketing.

September-October 2011

From there, we decided to accept 35 students instead of 12 and we started our first class in October 2011 with two web development courses instead of one.

I think the biggest reason why we were able to generate so much interest was the fact that we were addressing the right problem at the right time. There were so many people out there looking for a program like ours, but it just wasn't there yet. When our inaugural students heard about Code Academy, they jumped at the opportunity.

Great move by both of these companies. I had dinner with Mike McGee (one of the co-founders) a couple of months ago, and could hardly believe my ears when I heard his story of bootstrapping Code Academy. These guys generated serious revenue with nothing more than a static website, then figured it out from there.

Congratulations Neal and Mike. You're helping people make their lives better in a tangible way. I'm really impressed that you found a way to scale up and grow the company within Chicago through a route I doubt many other entrepreneurs there would have considered!

This is great! But it also sounds suspiciously like a 37 Signals incubator. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, that would be awesome. There is room for incubators that are not investing to "get out" but to "stay in" and help build cash-flow profitable businesses.

This isn't an incubator. We're not making investments in the companies that might come out of The Starter League. Also, starting a company isn't required to attend The Starter League. You just have to want to learn how to build and ship software. You could use these skills in your existing job, get a new job, or, if you want, go out on your own. It's entirely up to you.

I am wondering, are there any studies with regard to how successful developers who "couldn’t learn from books" are? Or who need encouragement to "make a definitive commitment to learn"?

This is just so drastically different to what learning programming was for me.

A truly amazing turn of events. How to get into the tech business without being techie. Neal's plight is not too dissimilar from many a tech entrepreneur learning to code, create, work or monetize their endeavours. The eureka moment for Neal is that he inadvertently realised he wasn't a coder, and became an event marketer. People like the glamour of coding, but it's anything but glamorous. There’s a level of intense curiosity that's required to figure it all out, so if you're struggling to learn 'holed up' at home, chances are it's not right for you, and that's fine. Neal found his skill, that said, the skills he's selling might not be yours.

This is awesome. I spent the summer working from Excelerate Labs at 1871 Chicago, where Code Academy (now Starter League) teaches their classes. Neal and Michael are doing things right, and the Chicago tech/startup community has benefited greatly from it. Jason Fried was a mentor at Excelerate this summer and it's great that he's giving back to the Chicago community. Chicago is becoming a new hub for startups, and the Starter League has graduated many talented developers that are now working on their own startup or for others.

This is awesome!

One of my favorite things about programming with other people is when one of us has one of those magical moments where something just "clicks".

Sometimes it's simple like when someone finally understood OR in MySQL (I couldn't believe some of the things he had built without using it!).

I can still remember the time I first got the difference between server and client side code, and the first time the DOM really made sense - that one blew my mind, I felt like I could see the matrix!

You guys are helping people have those moments!

It's interesting that the courses are on-site in contrast to 37S pro-remote working stance.

I definitely agree with the point their are limitations to learning on your own. (books vs. instructor)

But I'm a 100% remote worker and wonder how much better I could be learning from / with my colleagues in person vs. online chat.

I know that being in a real-life tech community is a huge asset over not, but personally I wonder how much better I could be if I were able to live in The Valley, Chicago, Austin...

I'm glad to see these types of schools getting traction. I've never thought that CS was necessary to be a good programmer. In fact, the only parts of CS that legitimately helped me in my career were two courses: Data Structures and Discrete Math (covering amongst other things, big O).

If there's anyone in Portland Oregon interested in starting something similar, I'd be interested in talking with you.

Really happy to see this partnership. It's definitely a perfect match.

My favorite line: "They built something for themselves on the hunch that there were plenty of people out there just like them. And they were right."

In a constant stream of articles about market research, fund raising, and investing, this is refreshing to be reminded what should be at the heart of all startups.

Was looking at The Starter League's class work and I really love their Rails for Designers course outline. Does anyone know a meetup, online course or real course like it?

ref: http://starterleague.com/rfd

This is awesome! This truly is the way forward with technical education. I feel exactly the same way as Neal did.

I'm enrolled at the debut semester of The Flatiron School, a similar program based in New York, and I'm super excited to improve my coding skills.

Does the Starter League plan to expand beyond the Ruby stack at any point? Python...etc?

No plans right now.

I am very happy for Neal and his team and, of course, 37signals. This is a great partnership and will lead to some great work.

Man, I love 37signals. Read all their books.

No offense intended, but this doesn't really add to the conversation (IMO).

I didn't know you could fit so much "passiveness" into one sentence.

I'm waiting for the movies.

I liked them better before they were cool.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com