Today is my last day leading @Codecademy after 12 years.

@ryanbubinski and I went from a prototype we hacked together in 3 weeks…

To a business with more than 50m users that we sold for $500m+.

Here are a few things we learned turning a breakout product into a great company: In 2011, we built and launched @Codecademy in the 3 wks before @ycombinator demo day. We hit a nerve: 200k+ users in 3 days.

We thought our success as a company was guaranteed, until @paulg reminded us that if we’d built the first version of Codecademy in 3 wks, others could too

For @Codecademy's first 4yrs, we were in the 📰 every wk. Those weeks, we made $0. The past 4 years, we've been out of the headlines. Now, we've raised $40m, our first raise in ~4yrs.

How'd we go from the center of the hype cycle to the brink of bankruptcy and back? Read on... We started @Codecademy in 2011. With software eating the world and few ways to learn to create it, we saw a huge opportunity. In YC, we built Codecademy as "the easiest way to learn to code." We posted it to HN as a Hail Mary before Demo Day and got 200,000 signups in 3 days.

1/ To help students and teachers affected by COVID-19 and school closures around the world, we are offering 10,000 scholarships to @Codecademy Pro for free to students and teachers across the world. What does this mean?

pro.codecademy.com/learn-from-hom… 2/ With schools closing rapidly, more students and teachers are thrown into an uncertain situation with no experience with remote learning.