Darrell Silver @darrellsilver - Tumblr Blog

Giving Tuesday

If you can donate this year please consider The Young Center, a non-profit helping unaccompanied children who seek asylum in the US.

This year I've had the privilege of joining their board, coming to understand how much work goes into creating our freedom, and just how much that relates to my own family's Jewish history.

When you read about unaccompanied minors immigrating to our country it's The Young Center team advocating in US government shelters, in our courts, and across our bureaucracy. It was The Young Center, for example, helping dozens of kids who suddenly arrived in Chicago from Afghanistan this summer, and The Young Center who serve over 1,000 each year from our Southern border.

If we've not spoken in a long while, I hope you're doing well, and if we have I hope the same :)

https://www.theyoungcenter.org/donate-startup-xmas

#givingtuesday #immigration

freeCodeCamp is a nonprofit unicorn: 1.3b minutes of FREE learning in 2020, 60% y/y growth since 2015, and sustainably run.

Thinkful now has the best leadership, brand, team, educators, and in Chegg, steward, that it’s ever had. So, it’s time for me to move on.

Today we’re founding the next era in Thinkful history: an era where our mission to build the world’s next workforce truly begins. For…

Thinkful acquired for $100M by Chegg.

Dan & I took team Thinkful to see Avengers on our anniversary and they surprised us with 100+ thank you cards!

Two weeks after announcing we acquired Bloc I sat down with the founder of a large competitor who asked with equal parts curiosity and…

Since 2012 Thinkful and Bloc have been building high-growth tech careers for thousands of students. Until now we’ve been at it separately…

Darrell Silver is a unlikely critic of coding bootcamps, the 9- to 12-week intensive courses in computer science and programming skills. “Bootcamps as ...

After five years as an education entrepreneur I’ve learned, perhaps to the chagrin of my gold-seeking peers, that success will come only from those who..

TechCrunch was kind enough to publish my latest:

Not everyone will survive. It’s just careful, hard work, by passionate professionals. After five years as an education entrepreneur I’ve learned, perhaps to the chagrin of my gold-seeking peers, that success will come only from those who remain harder working than the competition, more optimistic than the critics, and more dedicated than those who thought it’d be easy.

#coding bootcamp #startup #programming

Dev Bootcamp got acquired too early. Now it’s out of business.

Last night we learned that Kaplan Test Prep is shutting down Dev Bootcamp. Maybe this means bootcamps are dead? I mean, Kaplan has infinite money and DBC was the pioneer of now nearly billion dollar industry that’s only five years old. Why shut it down?

It wasn’t incompetence, though that’d be easy. DBC, Kaplan, Kaplan Test Prep, and Graham Holdings are all run by career educators with a keen understanding of how to build successful education companies.

Dev Bootcamp failed because it was acquired too early.

Kaplan can’t afford (nor would it have made sense) to take the big risks necessary to innovate in this competitive market. In the three years since the acquisition DBC had to keep to only one web dev program (imagine the finances of a college if it only offered one major) despite clear adjacent opportunities in design, ux, etc. DBC had to stay only with rails while many of its peers moved to full stack JavaScript. DBC couldn’t report student outcomes despite pleas from CIRR and others. DBC couldn’t offer any form of money-back promise or guarantee, alternative funding, or test corporate sales.

In the end, two great forces came together for an amazing opportunity and the result was less innovation.

Startups in education have to walk a very thin line: Take risks to innovate (as all startups do) but don’t ever EVER put students on the line for those risks. So where an Instagram can add a feature and cut it a month later, schools adding a new program must commit to every student who enrolls for the year(s) it takes them to succeed, even if that means it’s a major financial loser for the business. If Kaplan had made the acquisition five or ten years later DBC would have had the chances to work this stuff out on its own dime and oversight.

Dev Bootcamp will not be the only school closing this year. Coding schools are pretty mainstream but the space is still crowded and only a few schools have the combination of talent, reputation, and investors necessary to innovate fast enough.

howtowork

The most important investment you can make is in yourself. Very few people get anything like their potential horsepower translated into the actual horsepower of their output in life. Potential exceeds realization for many people…The best asset is your own self. You can become to an enormous degree the person you want to be.

Warren Buffett (via howtowork)

Well, that was fun! A day at The White House talking diversity with people far smarter than me. Part of outreach organized by the excellent @lesbiantech.

Transparency in coding schools

Transparency will help our industry grow: My essays in MarketWatch and Techcrunch.

The figuring out of how to break a big problem into small pieces, and identifying the right steps to solve it.

— Obama, defining Computer Science better than anyone (here).

My father has a PhD in physics, which at the time in the 60s was really just Computer Science before it was called “Computer Science.”

In another 50 years it looks like the same will happen again: “Computer Science” as the thing I learned in college, and spent half my life doing – coding, algorithms, patterns, system design, etc. – will be known as the quaint precursor to what will be much more far-reaching. That thing it seems, specifically, will be exactly what Obama calls it here.

Certainly if you believe (like I do) that 1) not everyone needs to actually write code, 2) coding is just like the “Three R’s” in education, then 1 plus 2 must equal analytical problem solving as he describes it.

Obama continues,

In the new economy computer science isn’t an optional skill, it’s a basic skill.

It’s not every job where The President of The United States tells the world your mission will change the world. At Thinkful, we’re hiring.

#Thinkful #Obama #Coding #Education

Some Thinkful team members on a swim during our summer retreat.

#drone #swimming #loveliness

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Darrell Silver