What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.
One of the best ways to build a successful business as an IndieHacker is to teach people
a valuable skill that you know.
In fact, I just looked at the last 50 episodes I've recorded, and about half of them, 25,
were educators, which is actually way more than I expected.
So in this episode, I sat down to talk to you two of the best educators that I know.
Darryl Silver is the founder of Thinkful, an online learning service that's helped thousands
of students get high paying jobs in tech.
He sold his company for $100 million in 2019, and Quincy Larson is the founder of FreeCodeCamp,
one of the most impressive projects on the internet that I personally really look up
to.
This is his second time on the show, so if you haven't heard his story, go check out
episode number 56, I believe.
FreeCodeCamp has helped over 40,000 people learn to code and get jobs at tech companies,
and Quincy has done this all as a nonprofit, so it's quite different than Darryl's approach.
In this episode, we talk about the future of education, changing rapidly with so many
people coming online and so much new technology being invented.
So we get into some of the best ways for any hackers to get started as educators.
We talked about the money side of things and the economics behind an education business,
how much money is too much, you know, how much money should you be charging students,
and how do you run a nonprofit as successfully as Quincy has, and why would you even do that
in the first place?
And we also talked about the difference between educating kids, who quite frankly, we just
want to basically sequester away somewhere and take up as much time as possible so parents
can get work done, and educating adults who are really trying to spend as little time
as possible in the education phase so they can go out and get jobs.
Enjoy the episode.
I'm curious, Darryl, what makes you so bullish on FreeCodeCamp?
I mean, there's so many different ways to learn to code.
I've taught people how to code like in person one on one, and that was kind of cool, but
there's obviously some drawbacks.
There's this whole new like ISAs model where people are doing that.
There's the traditional coding boot camps and computer science educations.
FreeCodeCamp is one of my favorite websites on the internet.
I think it's super cool.
It's inspiring in a lot of ways, but I'm curious like why, you know, with the world changing
so much and there being like so many different ways to learn, like why FreeCodeCamp?
There are a lot of different ways to learn how to code, and there's a lot of different
ways to learn how to get a job and think full represented or represents one path for people
that want a lot of support in an online classroom kind of environment.
FreeCodeCamp, I think of as a nonprofit unicorn, and it's run by 12 people full-time with a
massive number of volunteers.
So 12 people is smaller than Instagram was in terms of full-time staff when it was acquired
by Facebook for a billion dollars.
So FreeCodeCamp is a true unicorn.
It delivers an incredible product, incredible community, incredible leader, tiny team, tiny
budget and nonprofit in this context really only means not going to create any new oligarchs
when it continues to grow.
Quincy, why don't you want to become a new oligarch?
Why be a nonprofit?
So I think becoming like an oligarch, which is very like pejorative term for like a really
wealthy, powerful person, I don't want to imply that like I'm against people being wealthy.
You know, I think there's probably natural limits to how wealthy people can practically
get before, you know, that wealth could be better distributed some other ways.
But I personally, I'm a simple man, I like to go for runs, I like to play with my kids
as long as I've got like health insurance, which I have through Obamacare, I think, thankfully,
as long as I have a house, which we've got a mortgage on this house here in Dallas, that's
in a really good school district, we have good schools, good public schools that we can
see the kids do.
My needs are met.
And yeah, if I had like, dramatically more money than I have right now, I probably just
give it away.
So why bother getting all that money if I can instead of having the distraction of trying
to accumulate wealth, just focus on kind of giving now.
Yeah, it's interesting, because like, I mean, obviously, a lot of people who come on the
show are starting companies.
And like, there's usually like some amount of financial motivation, but like as a means
to an end.
And typically, what that is, for like, most founders that I've talked to, especially
indie hackers, you're like bootstrapping is like, personal freedom.
And so a lot of the stuff that you're talking about, like, you know, you've got your kids,
you've got like your hobbies and things you want to do, go for runs, people are just
like, yeah, I want to be able to do that, but I want to be able to do that forever without
working for the man and doing my own thing.
And in a way, I guess you've got yourself in a situation where you can do that forever,
by working for yourself, like you are the man in your own life.
And so like, why go further, Daryl, I'm kind of curious about your take on this whole thing.
I mean, you like, have obviously like had some big acquisitions.
And like, I checked your website, you know, you're doing things like building a workshop
with your father, and you're like working with like political campaigns and donating
to free code camp.
So I guess I'm just curious, like your take on personal finances and like goals in life
and how that changes with money.
Money is a perfectly fine motivation.
And I think when you start to earn a salary for the first time in your first job, you
think, wow, this is amazing.
I can afford so much.
I'm doing so well now.
And then you fast forward like a year or two later, and it turns out, you say, well, I
really just need that one more promotion, and I'll be able to get that next thing.
Right?
And like you start to you level set whatever number you're at.
And what I discovered with Thinkful is the power of helping people achieve that next
level of wealth for themselves is actually just really, really fulfilling.
And I didn't know this until we exited Thinkful.
But the impact of exiting Thinkful, it had no impact on my happiness.
You know, I was doing fine.
I had a married and been in the same relationship for 14 years.
And I live in New York, and we live in a place we want to stay living in and, you know, all
these things.
And when you experience eight years of seeing people advance their career, and thanking
you or even better, thanking the people that you hired or put in place in different roles,
and you get to experience that day to day, and then it stops because you end that job,
but you have a bigger bank balance, you think, well, gee, that that bank balance didn't really
make me happier.
But it did, it did actually deliver all these experiences for people.
So that was a pretty big impact.
And I think it was a big impact for me, personally, what was really interesting, I think, is that
I didn't realize that was happening until I saw the look of shock on people's faces
when I told them that I would have like, and you don't meet anybody in person this year,
but a video call with someone and I would say, yeah, like, it's kind of the same.
Everything's the same.
We're still living in the same place.
We're still going to do the same thing.
And like, whatever, our expenses will tick up like a little bit.
But they were like shocked.
You're like, really?
It's not happier.
And then you look up the research.
And it turns out the research agrees with you to reach a certain level of income relative
to your cost of living in whatever city or personal circumstances, which can vary dramatically.
Your happiness doesn't improve with wealth.
And so there's nothing wrong with being motivated by money, but it is never the goal.
And when I would, and then I kept pulling the thread on this, and I could talk for an
hour about just this topic, but I kept pulling the thread on this particular thing, asking
other entrepreneur friends I had known who had had like really big exits.
And I kept getting pointed back to the same Maslow's hierarchy of needs research, which
was basically like, you are now free to have self actualization, you're now free to achieve
the things that you were put on this earth to do in your own opinion and without other
people's encumbrances.
And it turns out, when you meet people like Quincy, who basically did that without the
decade of working, they can skip all those steps and reach a lot of the same fulfillment
and build something that outlasts them and is bigger than them.
Quincy Larson, skipper of steps.
But I like your take a lot.
I was, I moved to Boston like 10 years ago for college.
I guess 15 years ago, I'm old.
And I got like a new Boston phone number.
And I don't know whose phone number I inherited, but like, she apparently had a lot of debt
because I would get a lot of debt collectors calling.
And I get all these like text messages from people in Nigeria.
And like one day I just started like responding to a guy and he was like, what's apping me?
He was a Nigerian like phone number.
And I was talking to this guy and like all he wanted to do was come to America.
Like that was it.
He was like, what can I do?
I was like, Oh, well, like maybe you can learn how to code do this.
He's like, I don't want to do that.
Like maybe I can join your military, etc, etc.
And like we talked for like, I don't know, maybe half an hour and I was kind of learning
about him.
But like, I think I came away from that conversation with like, dang, like the thing I take for
granted every single day is like the thing that is this guy's number one goal in life.
Like he cares about nothing else.
And I think in a way when people are shocked to hear that like, Oh, so-and-so got super
rich and nothing has changed in their life with kind of the same phenomenon where it's
like, actually, you can really easily acclimate to this thing that someone who doesn't have
it really puts on a pedestal.
It resonates with me.
So let's talk about this Quincy guy that everybody loves.
I'm super impressed by free code camp for all sorts of reasons.
I think the mission is super cool.
I know a lot of people who've learned to code from free code camp.
And I think like just as like a founder trying to achieve goals, in a way, even though our
websites are very, very different, a lot of what you've already accomplished, like I'm
trying on like pushing hard to try to accomplish, for example, I'm trying to grow the indie
hackers mailing list.
And I'm looking at companies like Morning Brew and The Hustle, which are like pure newsletter
companies.
They exist to do nothing but grow their newsletters and they're like one and a half million subscribers,
two million subscribers.
It's a big deal.
And then you're like, oh yeah, we've got four million subscribers for free code camp.
That's like an afterthought for you.
You're trying to focus on teaching, your newsletter is very good, but it's like, that's crazy
to me.
You're publishing like super high quality articles a week.
You're amazing in SEO.
And then your stats on just how you're teaching people and the amount that $1 can get in terms
of how many minutes somebody actually spends learning is mind blowing and almost seems
like unrealistically great.
So I guess, how do you do it, Quincy?
What's the deal here?
How does free code camp work?
And lightness is to how this is so amazing because it is.
That's like one of the big things about free code camp is we're very privileged in that
we have a lot of different angles we could go in a lot of different directions, but we
try to be very disciplined about what we can realistically do over a longer period of time.
And I think patience would be like the key word and it may sound like I'm kind of a brat,
like talking about patients when we're only like a six year old organization.
But if you look at like the YMCA, if you look at like the Red Cross, if you look at Doctors
Without Borders, like all these great NGOs, all these great nonprofits that have cropped
up over the past 200 years or so, but the organization is bigger and more ambitious
than ever.
And it's because they've just been slowly compounding momentum over a long period of
time.
If you think about literacy, we still have a long way to go.
We've been here in the developed destination of many aspiring Americans, right?
And I feel like it's going to take probably hundreds of years to get everybody up to where
they can do basic programming and all that stuff.
Just like it's taken hundreds of years to get even close to like 99% literacy in the
United States.
Yeah.
So it's a long mission.
And in technology, everything's like now, now, now things are changing so quick and
everything, but the more things change, the kind of the more they stay the same, fundamentally,
it's just people trying to acquire skills and trying to apply those skills.
So yeah.
There's a good Jeff Bezos quote about change or something and somebody asked him like,
you know, what are you betting on that's going to change?
And he's like, no, we bet on like, what's going to stay the same.
You know, we're not trying to be super complex.
We look at like, what's kind of true about human nature and then like, we want to improve
in that area.
But like, we're not making these super risky bets of like, this is, everything's going
to change the next day.
And I think with free code camp, like, it's quite obvious that like, people are always
going to want to like improve their skills and be able to level up so they can get better
jobs and improve like the quality of their life.
Like that's why would that ever change?
You know, and as long as like software engineering is a thing that's like lucrative and fulfilling
people are going to need something like free code camp.
And why do you think free code camp works so well?
What are you doing that other people didn't do?
I think there's something to be said for being completely free.
People do like free stuff.
And the fact to remember is about half the people on earth live off less than $5.50
a day.
Those people who are living off $5.50 a day, they probably shouldn't be spending money
on like, you know, coding courses, in my humble opinion, they should probably be spending
money on, you know, essential day-to-day items and food and shelter and things like that.
So the fact that it's free does open it up to a huge number of people and only about
30% of people who use free code camp are here in the US, most of it's abroad and a lot of
it's in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe.
I bet you if you were to look at the average per capita income of people in the free code
camp community, not the developers that are just upgrading their skills, which is about
two, about one third of the people are just working developers continuing their education,
but the two thirds who are entering the field, it might be like $10,000 a year or something
like that.
It would not be like even close to the median US household income of like $50,000.
So free is a huge aspect of it and I'm not going to deny, there are tons of great, great
learning resources, some of which are also free.
But I think in terms of resources for learning the code, free code camp is a very good one
and the fact that it's free immediately makes it accessible to many people who would not
otherwise be able to do it.
Another thing is just that it's completely interactive for the most part, like the curriculum,
you've got a type feedback loop, we run the tests client side generally, so there's not
even like a back and forth to a server somewhere.
So you can fire up the browser, you can go in and you could be learning JavaScript or
learning Python within a few seconds really and you don't have to configure a development
environment, you don't have to go and clone a bunch of GitHub repos, just the number of
steps is so much smaller and that feedback loop is so key.
If you think about going to like a university class, you might get a little bit of feedback
on the midterm as to how you're doing, right?
Maybe you're lucky you go to office hours and the teacher like has you do something
on the board and it's like, no, that's not right, try this.
But the feedback is very coarse.
You're certainly not getting feedback on your work within a few milliseconds, but that's
how it works on free code camp, like you're constantly getting feedback from the interpreter.
So basically, the reason this podcast is happening is because occasionally you'll ping me on
Twitter and you're like, hey, Cortland just started the episode with the guy from Famous
Birthdays.
I thought it was great.
Or hey, Cortland, I heard whatever episode, cool episode, I'm like, hey, Quincy, how's
it going?
And we'll catch up.
But this last time, it was a little bit more involved.
You're like, hey, by the way, we've got this cool new thing, this whole new curriculum,
what do you think?
And I kind of told you what I thought and we kind of went back and forth.
I'm just curious, what was going through your head when you messaged me, like, what's
new at free code camp?
What did you want to talk about?
One of the reasons we're really excited is because Darryl is supporting free code camp,
and he has agreed to do donation matching for a large amount of money, $150,000, to
put things in perspective, free code camp's budget in 2020 was $498,000.
So essentially, with this fundraiser that Darryl is helping us do, where we're trying
to raise $300,000 and Darryl is essentially going to match all donations up to 150,100%.
So if we can get half of it from Darryl and half of it from the developer community, then
we're going to be able to fund the development of this math and machine learning curriculum,
a data science curriculum that teaches all this stuff that you would learn if you were
to go get a graduate degree at Stanford and focus on machine learning, things like that.
It's not necessarily like a one-to-one matching of what you would learn, but what we perceive
to be kind of like the low-hanging fruit and the fundamentals that you would need to be
able to go out and work as a data scientist or a machine learning engineer.
So that's one of the big things that is going on right now, and one of the reasons, like,
in the most recent exchange, I was like, hey, are you interested in this?
Like, would this be of interest to the community?
Yeah, it was pretty inspiring to hear you talk about basically the donations.
So maybe share some of the numbers around how much basically learning is accomplished
on Free Code Camp for people donating money, because it's kind of blew my mind to hear
this.
Yeah, at that previous budget, $498,000 for 2020, we delivered, I think, 1.3 billion minutes
of learning, which translates to about 2,500 years of learning.
Right now, if you're listening to this, there's probably about 2,500 people currently using
Free Code Camp, like, logged on.
It's like what, like thousands of minutes of learning per dollar or something?
Yeah, so it's the equivalent of 50 hours of learning per dollar spent.
So we have about 7,000 people who donate $5 a month.
Every person who's giving $5 a month, that means they're providing essentially 2,000
or 250 hours of learning to people around the world.
And it's a very abstract way of thinking of it, because that goes to servers, that goes
to staff, that goes to like all the different things that we need to be able to design instructional
resources.
You know, free learning resources that people can then use to advance their skills.
So, Darryl, you've written about your thoughts on education before running Thinkful.
I found something where you sort of yourself professed beliefs were that adult education
has to be accountable for student outcomes and needs to be low risk and incredibly affordable,
which is not too different than Free Code Camp.
I mean, you don't get much more affordable than free.
What's the story behind sort of like your convictions on how people should learn and
how you sort of injected that into Thinkful?
That's a great question.
The biggest revelation I think we had at Thinkful around the pedagogy was the idea of classroom
hours, which in most education that you've been in, or I've been in, and then Americans
have been in, it's you start in kindergarten or thereabouts, and you go in a classroom
a certain number of hours, you take a few tests to make sure you're not falling too
far behind, and then at the end of it, you get some sort of diploma or degree.
And that goes all the way through young adulthood.
And for some people, far beyond young adulthood.
Now what we noticed at Thinkful was people, adults are not looking for a degree, they're
looking for a job.
And just side note, it's sort of obvious that college students, about 86% of college students
are also, they don't really care about the degree, they're just going to college to increase
their income.
So it turns out as an adult, you may have spent your entire life in measuring education
through classroom hours and test scores, but actually you want to spend your education
time as efficiently as possible, you're looking for the fastest route from deciding that you
want a job to getting that job.
And so the more hours you spend in a classroom learning, the worse.
And that's the opposite of all education you'll have received up until that point.
And so we knew when we started that we had this long cultural change that has to be happening
in order for Thinkful to be successful, which is people have to, employers mostly, recognize
that you have to hire someone based on the skill they gain, they have, and they can do
on the job, instead of the number of classroom hours or diplomas they gained.
And so programming and software engineering was the earliest of those kinds of skills
and that spreads to a lot of other skills.
But fundamentally, adults are looking for the fastest, cheapest way to go from the job
they have to the career they want.
And every time we thought about classroom hours, we found ourselves failing.
And every time we thought about, well, what does this person really need to pass this
interview to get this job, we succeeded.
We would have these incredibly, I found them sort of funny, but they were kind of painful
in a lot of ways, interviews with potential job candidates or with members of our community
who would tell us about the stuff that we must cover in the curriculum for our students.
So if you're teaching Python, you must cover different libraries or different paradigms
or strongly typed versus not strongly typed, you know, all these different differences
that you see in cross languages.
And our head of education will say, well, that stuff isn't being asked in the interview
and it's not something you're going to find useful in the first three months of your job.
Why do we need to teach it?
And the person would say inevitably, if you don't understand the difference between X
and Y, then you can't really be a programmer.
So we're not trying to make you a programmer, we're trying to make you an employed software
engineer.
Like, let's figure out what it takes to get you employed.
And if that's on the list, we'll teach it, we'll spend your time and money on it.
And if it's not on the list, let's cut it.
We would have, and this is still true, I think today and thankful, you can see it, it's all
public data.
We celebrated the number of graduate people that would get a job before graduation.
It would mean less money for the business, but it meant they were achieving that goal
faster with fewer classroom hours, and that was the whole point, to go from the job you
had to the career you wanted.
When we were acquired, I adopted very quickly one of the lines of Chegg's leadership, which
was accelerate the path from learning to earning.
And it turns out that's just this incredibly powerful concept, that undercurrent that goes
throughout all of adult education, which is you just want to go a faster route from learning
to earning.
One of the important things about education, from my vantage point as an eddy hacker, is
a lot of people who are trying to start businesses have sort of hit on the fact that teaching
people to do something is one of the easiest and most successful ways to get started.
When you don't have a lot of resources, and all you really have is knowledge, don't have
a lot of connections, you can start a business teaching and helping people do something and
actually earn your freedom as an eddy hacker and do good for the world.
And it's just one of these ideal ways to get started.
David Perrell had a really good tweet about the future of education, it was a huge Twitter
thread.
And I kind of want to go through it and get you guys takes, because you're educators.
I am in sort of a way, but like through you, I'm not teaching anybody, but I have people
like you on the show.
And you can teach people about how you're doing things.
He had like, I think 12 points or something, we're gonna go through like a few of them.
One of them was that he said in the future, teaching will become an extremely lucrative
profession, salaries will follow a power law, the best teachers will make millions of dollars
per year and teach 1000s of students per year.
Quincy, what's your thoughts on that?
You're already seeing that to a good extent, like there are teachers who have like their
own course platforms, like West boss is a great example, if you're familiar with him,
he's this Canadian developer, who's exceptionally good at teaching.
And he, he's built like his entire teaching infrastructure, and he's not really beholden
to anybody.
You know, he, he codes his own platform and his own checkout and everything.
He just releases a lot of free courses, and then he'll release paid courses as well.
And I have no idea how much money he makes.
I don't know if he would share that amount, but I estimate it's, it's a lot.
Another person with David Malan, who teaches CS50 at Harvard, he is about as rockstar as
you can be as a teacher.
There's even like people within the free cocaine community.
Estefania, she's a prolific author within the free cocaine community and has created
lots of courses.
She's based in Venezuela, but she has a Spanish language Python course on YouTube, and she's
made a lot of money on Udemy, for example.
So a lot of people are using the existing platforms and then a lot of people will self
house or they'll create their own tools.
But I think that, like that time has absolutely already arrived where, I mean, you could,
you could look at like Carl Sagan, you could look at Bob Ross.
There are lots of examples of people who have been prolific kind of mass market teachers.
As a matter of fact, jump in there, David Perrell is an honorable man, but I'm a little
underwhelmed by the premise there.
I mean, in 2011 and 2012, when MOOC started taking over education dialogue about the future
of education, it was exactly this model that you can record the best lecture in artificial
intelligence and make it available to millions and then the very, very tiny number of teachers
who do well on video and who do well with high production, they can make a lot of money.
And then in the intervening decade, well before this Twitter thread from a year ago, 2020,
companies like Teachable or Thinkific are creating platform, and Udemy as well as doing
it, creating platforms that allow teachers to gather a huge amount of demand, charging
a low or high dollar amount per set sold course, but create the power law that you're describing
in education.
So it's not a new concept.
It's been around for the better part of a decade.
And the idea that teaching will be lucrative overall is probably very misleading in my
opinion.
Yes, you will have celebrities and you already have celebrities making millions, a very small
number just like celebrities, very small number of actors making millions.
Most teachers will not.
Most teachers will remain employed by the public school system in various ways with
complex mechanics and unions.
Most students need a lot more than a video.
And the reason that I interject so harshly, not that harshly frankly, but the reason that
I want to interject really harshly with this Dave Perrell message is when people describe
making a lot of money from education, it's extraordinarily easy for them to get suckered
into charging a lot of money for education.
And when you charge a lot of money for education, you basically remove one of the reasons that
education exists, which is to allow social mobility because people can't afford to spend
$5,000 or $500 or $50 on a class.
And so video provides a way to give zero marginal cost distribution to content.
But the effort of teaching, the effort of sitting with a student and having them learn
something because they were able to ask a question and get an answer in the language
they understood in that moment in an environment that they were comfortable in, that remains
an enormous challenge.
And it's misleading at best to say that teachers doing that kind of job are going to be making
a lot of money.
Because if they do, it means that only rich people are going to be able to afford to pay
them.
Right.
For any hacker starting businesses, they do tend to go that high, high revenue, like making
it very expensive route.
So let's say you're like, you know, you're a software engineer, and you decide you want
to quit your job and start a new company and you're going to bootstrap it and you don't
have funding and you want to sell a course online.
It's really hard to get to the point where you're making a living if your educational
material is super cheap.
You might need to find thousands of students, we need to be super good at SEO, etc.
And so often a lot of the advice that I give on the show and a lot of the patterns that
I see are like, people who do make it big actually are kind of the opposite of both
of you two and end up charging quite a lot.
You know, and I think it's not aligned with the mission of sort of educating the world,
but it is aligned with their mission, I think, for them of finding some people to help and
basically achieving like some sort of amount of freedom so that they can then, you know,
do whatever they want to do that's their mission after that.
Yeah, one of the one of the most interesting trends that I see a lot of huge amount right
now in technical education across a lot of different subjects are people that were consultants
then created an online course distributed through a Udemy so they didn't have to worry
about the marketing, made a solid amount of money, and then we're able to shed the consultant
building, because teaching if you can pull it off, it can be higher ROI.
And those courses don't have to be in the thousands.
They can be, I mean, Udemy discounts heavily, they can be in the 50 in the less than $100
range.
And for professional education, that's high quality.
That isn't an extraordinarily high sum.
Yeah, if you've got an aspect that doesn't completely scale, like Darrell mentioned with
MOOCs and everything like, oh, it's video, you know, everybody can just watch the best
lecturer in the world teach algebra, and then we won't need all these algebra teachers doesn't
really work that way.
There's a whole lot of additional considerations, trying to help that specific person and everybody
learns slightly different way, and probably in different world languages and in different
settings and at different times, you know, depending on whether they're working or taking
care of their kids or elderly relatives.
So there's going to be a very specific type of teaching that resonates with any individual
person.
And I do think that, you know, you can leverage these platforms to very quickly build up a
sizable audience, and then release subsequent courses and build a reputation and do all
those things.
And I can rattle off the names of tons of people who've done just that.
The cyber mentor comes in comes to mind.
He does like cyber security, really good teacher, for example, who kind of I think started off
on Udemy and now has his own platform and everything.
And he was just a security consultant prior.
All right, David Perrell tweet number two, that education will be cheap education transformed
a decade ago with the explosion of the internet.
It's the credentials that are expensive and they're monopolized by universities.
We'll look back at the present day and laugh about the predatory and prohibitive cost of
college.
What do you think about that?
My co founder had had a phenomenal insight about a college degree in the future of college
degree in the future of college, which is it so so there's nothing dramatically wrong
or anything in this in this and certainly the cost of college is prohibitive and predatory.
But there's no one college system.
If you're going to Stanford or Harvard, you're not doing it for what you learn in the classroom.
In fact, the storybook thing where you drop out of Harvard early just to start Microsoft
or Facebook.
That's actually the most respected way to get to go to Harvard, which is like they wanted
me but I didn't want them and I'm going to drop out.
That's an entirely different thing.
There almost would be a different word for it than college than if you're going to community
college to earn your bachelor's degree or if you're going to a phenomenal state school.
There's multiple different college systems.
The question I think for this area, because again, it's not like this isn't this isn't
wrong that that that the cost of college is predatory for a lot of people.
But the question is how long will it take to change?
There's an increasing expectation among a lot of politicians and a lot of people who
vote for politicians that you need a college degree in order to succeed in life.
Now at the same time, out of 100 high school graduates, 80 of them are enrolling in college
and of those 80, about 50 are graduating and of those 50, about 20 are using the degree
they got.
So the funnel for college is changing dramatically.
The average age for a college student is no longer in their early 20s.
It's like 26 is the average age for a college student.
So the time it's going to take for this period that David calls, we'll look back at the present
day.
We might be looking back 100 years from now because for the time being, we have a new
president who's saying college should be free because getting a college degree increases
your lifetime earnings and it's going to take us a generation before we prove that right
or wrong for this generation.
So the change underway or the future of the college degree is extraordinarily slow, like
just disappointingly slow.
I will say something like On Deck is an incredibly interesting phenomenon.
So On Deck basically, you could call it unbundles the college education in a lot of ways.
So if you think of college education as the community you meet and the access to employers
that come to campus and the skills or the topics you learn or the ways you learn how
to learn and the specific skills you learn and it packages all that stuff together and
then you live in a dorm and then you go into debt for 20 years.
If you think of that as the college experience, On Deck by creating communities of people
within industry, practitioners doing kind of stop by lectures and stuff is an incredibly
great way and it's succeeding to create a pathway to industry, which is exactly what
college has been doing for 150 years.
And so the On Deck model says, well, we're not going to do like classroom learning.
We're not going to have homework assignments, but you're going to prove yourself in the
eyes of people that are going into, you're going to meet everyone who's going into the
same career that you want in tech and then you're going to meet people who are active
in that career in five years and more advanced and they're going to give you some good advice
and they're going to inspire you and they're going to keep you going.
That model is incredibly interesting and it seems to be working really, really well.
They're growing at this massive clip.
They're going to do a huge amount of revenue if you just look at the, if you just do the
math from what they charge on the 10.
The issue is, boy, are they charging a lot of money for a lot of that stuff.
Now, I think that's solvable if they wanted to and if they wanted to create scholarships
and all these kinds of things, but it's not cheap.
It's not cheap to run.
It's not cheap to provide, but it does provide a really good ROI, so it costs a lot of dollars
and it provides a lot of ROI and it is unbundling one of the core elements of college education.
And lo and behold, I bet you that the average age of the people that go to On Deck are five
years into some career, meaning they're in their late 20s probably, they're probably
pretty similar to a thankful student.
Their average age, 30 plus or minus a lot of years, I think the students are all over
the, are everywhere on an age spectrum, but they're certainly not fresh out of college.
I'll bet you that's what On Deck is seeing as well and I'd be really interested to know
because it's growing quite fast and it's doing really, really well because it's creating
this community.
But just keep in mind when you think about the future of college is that there is no
single college.
The reason I go to Harvard is to get the credential, the reason I go to state school or community
college which are phenomenal schools where people can actually advance their learning
is to get a job.
And those are just very different kinds of outcomes and you'll see the system provide
different kinds of solutions for them over time.
One of David Perrell's sort of related tweets was that community learning is going to make
a comeback.
So he said the internet's great for self-motivated learners, but most people need a social group
to hold them accountable.
Which is kind of like what I found for myself, being self-employed or I mean I'm working
at strike now, but basically like I don't have a boss.
I just do whatever I want and like there are things I'm authentically super excited to
do and learn, but there are other things where like I really need like to have a time slot
on my calendar to have someone to help me prepare for this because like I just will
delay and procrastinate, etc.
And so the top schools of tomorrow will build strong communities and alumni networks just
like an Ivy League university does.
Quincy, I know you're kind of doing this at free code camp.
You've got this massive forum that's super impressive.
I was looking at like the stats on SimilarWeb.
I don't know how accurate it is, but it was like it gets close to 2 million visits a month
and looks like you're getting like 600 posts a week, which means you're getting way more
traffic than any hackers is getting even though we've got more posts.
So people were super like engaged in this community forum.
How do you think community plays a role in education?
If you think about schools, I mean they are communities and a community has always kind
of played a role even at like the one room in a schoolhouse is out in the middle of the
pioneering West and it was just a big community effort.
And if you go all the way back to like human prehistory, you know, humans lived in tribes
and they would pass down knowledge through tradition.
So the community aspect and the social aspect and to a large extent, the in-person aspect,
I'll say it out loud.
Online learning is not like the holy grail that I think a lot of people think it is.
I really do believe that like in-person study groups and in-person schools will continue
to play a part going forward because of the way that humans are hardwired to learn.
So free code camp, what we do online is just a small part of it.
Once the pandemic is over at one point, we had about 2000 study groups around the world.
And I had the luxury of being able to like go and visit some of these places in Asia
and in Europe and stuff.
And it was just awesome.
And I think that it's going to be like people that get together at like a local startup
office or a local library and learn to code together.
I think that's going to be a huge part of people finding the extrinsic pressure and
support in order to be able to continue to progress their skills.
Darryl, any thoughts about community and education?
Does this feel like a necessary part of education for you in the future or take it or leave
it?
Absolutely.
So for adult education, community is probably a majority about a group that can vouch for
your skills and expertise.
Accountability sure is also very, very important.
You can get that in other places.
The hard part about community is making it trusted in the eyes of whoever is evaluating
you.
So again, like the Harvard example, just by virtue of having been accepted into Harvard,
you can get a lot of doors open that others will never have open.
And that's the Harvard community in a lot of ways.
But one of the things I'm really loving seeing, and I'm helping this company now, is in childhood
education and really like almost pre-K education, sort of two to five and then five to eight.
There's really interesting work around how do you create outdoor community to drive learning
and social skills better than you can do in a traditional classroom.
So a traditional classroom, it hasn't been around forever.
It's been around since like the industrial era.
So in a world where you can make trusted teachers within a five or 10 minute walk of young kids,
what kind of new types of learning for socialization can you create for those kids in their cities,
in their neighborhoods, in their suburbs?
And that's really, really fascinating.
Very cool.
Well, both of you are titans of education and you've done a lot of cool things.
What's your advice for people out there who are trying to start businesses in the education
space?
What can they take away from Thinkful?
And what can they take away from Free Code Camp?
Probably the number one piece of advice is there's a lot of change happening across lots
of different areas of education.
If you have a passion for some area, you can make a solid business out of it.
And you have to have a passion.
It's different than a SaaS business or like an infrastructure piece of data engineering
business, where I think that you in a lot of ways scratch an itch for a customer.
But education brings meaning to both the employees and to yourself and obviously to the student.
And that's a special dynamic of it.
So you have to love that in order to really stick with it.
It has a higher chance.
One of our investors described the education sector as, it's a great mixed metaphor, fewer
grand slams, but more shots on goal.
Meaning you don't see, like Chegg might be the largest US based education company if
you just look at the public markets at about 10 or $12 billion.
You don't see 60 or $600 billion education companies, but you also don't see the kind
of flame outs and crazy, crazy wastes of money and time that go into education.
So you can create very solid businesses in education.
They don't tend to be as large as in social media or in an enterprise tech even.
That's the general lean.
But there's some fantastic business in education, especially in transformation.
If you love it, you can do extremely well and create a lot of meaning for a lot of people.
Yeah.
And my general guidance for education specifically as a field to go into would be try to start
small and prove out your concept and try to go direct to consumer rather than going direct
to institution.
I do believe that most of the money is in working with these large institutions, but
education is notoriously long sales cycles and it's just very difficult to get them to
adopt things.
But if you can get them to adopt something, you've got potentially a giant industry and
you've got a lot of similar potential customers that you can go and sell your solution to
because there are like 5,000 universities in the United States and God knows how many
high schools in K through 12 kind of school systems and then private schools, Montessori
schools, trade schools.
Education is a multi-trillion dollar industry for a reason.
It's because everybody spends a huge amount of their life learning and it's the source
of their earning potential, their human capital for many people.
So I think if you start small, you start with just a few consumers, go straight to consumers,
get them to like your product and then scale it from there.
That's a winning process.
All right.
Quincy, Darryl, thanks for coming on the show.
Quincy, you want to let us know where you can go to find more about Free Code Camp?
If you just go to freecodecamp.org and you click sign in and it's going to give you a
whole bunch of information, basically reminding you how hard it is to learn the code and then
you can opt in to my newsletter and you'll get an email from me each Friday with some
links that are helpful.
And Darryl, where can people go to learn more about what you're up to nowadays?
Probably just Twitter, twitter.com slash Darryl Silver.
All right.
Thanks, guys.