I was really fortunate that I knew from a young age what I wanted to do with my life. I think that though many people come to the path of software development late later in life, that then there's nothing wrong with that, it doesn't hold you back in any way that for me. I knew by the time that I was entering in tow junior high school that I either wanted to be a software developer or a psychologist on. I figured that you have to deal with people every day anyway, so that I would go be a software developer. Um, that led me down this path really early on, which I think was really, really helpful to me as faras just knowing kind of where I was headed. I also knew that, so I'm a second generation software developer. My my dad's a software developer, and I knew that I didn't want to go work for a big company. He worked for NASA for his whole career. Andi. US government turns out to be a pretty big company. Um, and I knew that I wanted, um, or entrepreneurial path on dso. I did a lot of work in college and right after college, trying to figure out how to break into that sort of creating a business piece of what I dio. A few years later, I was in a good position that I could start a software consultancy called Notch Eight, which I founded, and the goal there was always to do is many projects as possible and learn as much about what makes projects succeed. What makes companies fail like we know in the start of space, the majority of companies fail. So how do we You know what? What's the recipe for success there? Um, and one of the things about not yet is it means that I get to work with really bright people all the time, and they were kind of ready when an opportunity arises. Fast forward again to 2014. There weren't any code schools in Southern California at the time, and we had worked with the code school in Portland to bring some employees on that had gone really well. We're looking to replicate that here in Southern California, and there just wasn't the right thing to draw from, and so we came to the conclusion that we basically had to start it on. DSO Learn was sort of born out of notch eight and born out of the consultancy on, but really enabled us to have the right team in place from day one to sort of launch this thing and make it make it happen. Um, there was this perfect storm week where I went to the San Diego used Ruby User Group and there were five or six people trying to hire and only 1% who was looking for a job that one person's like, almost scared to raise their hand and say they're looking by the end of the meeting because they know all these people are trying to hire. And, um, at that same week, I had had a personal friends talk about moving to Omaha to go to code school and like, that seems like a huge thing. They were giving up their apartment. His wife is going to go live with her dad for six months while he went to Omaha to go to a good school. And ah, friend of my wife and co founders, uh, her son was like trying to figure out code schools and wanted to buy us dinner so we could talk through, like what being a software developer was about. And so it's just like the whole universe was sort of converging on this moment of doing a co school and so that that really, um, was the impetus for starting it. Like I knew that, like the CEO of Learned has a big background in technology, education and in creating communities and organizations, right with combining that with my expertise and software development and the curriculum we could put together that we could build something that was really productive for our studio, it's

sure eso are. Program is a four month full time committed. So in order to complete the learn course, you are spending Monday through Friday 9 to 5. Working as in the same way you work as a software developer for the first three months, it's all in classroom pieces. So, um, as I'm sure you and all of your students know, it's been a bit of a year. Um, right now California is currently in another lock down. We've been remote for this last year. Normally, we're in classroom, and our transition to remote has really been about being remote workers and not about sort of the traditional online famous saying, I believe I'm saying traditional online class, but the sort of at your own pace. Online class, right, folks, they're still They're logged into the classroom at 9 a.m. They're taking a lunch break at the same time, and they're finishing out their day At the end of the day together, there's still a lot of pairing. There's still a lot of, but we're working more like a remote software development team and less like, uh, not able to actually be in the physical classroom together. We're doing a lot to try and replicate that physical classroom experience right now. Ultimately, the normal program is things return to normal next year will be face to face Monday to Friday 9 to 5 those first three months in the classroom. The last month of our program is a one month placed internship. So every single learned student, uh, interviews at 3 to 5 companies, and then they rank those internship opportunities. Thean turn partners rank them. And then there's a matching meeting where the staff who's now spent three months like working with you, hands on everyday ups to find the right fit for each person. And that means that the last day of group projects the first day of your internship and the last day of internships on the first day of a full time job should all feel, is much the same as possible, Right? We pattern the day it learn after the day, not a like I want that to be this really natural and smooth transition. I don't want there to be sort of the cliff between education and working right. We wanted to just be the sort of, well, this is exactly like I was doing in the classroom. Now I'm doing it. My internship At the end of your internship, Maybe your internship becomes a full time job, which, in case great now you don't have a job hunt that's huge on debt works out for about 40% of our students on those that are job hunting like them. They do land that full time position. It should still feel very much like the Internet. Like that's a very real thing. So everybody is really doing that four month plan. It's all right now, this remote thing, but very much still face to face every day on. But that's kind of our structure on. We really believe that the immersion is important, right? If I wanna learn French, I could do to legal on my phone, probably for the next 100 years, and still only be like 3% fluent in French, right? I'm not necessarily making a lot of progress, but if I go and live in France for six months, I'm either gonna learn French or I'm never gonna be able to find a bathroom. And I'm never gonna be able to order dinner, right? Like I'm gonna have to learn it, and by being in this software developer space, basically every day, whether that's through your laptop or physically in person, like you're just getting that really emergent into it into the space.

This is another place where the partnership between the two companies really comes into effect. And we're actually now partnering with in another software consultancy to do work on our curriculum as well to sort of expand the scope of it. I think that it is reasonable to be just extremely selfish about the critical right. So what you learned at Learn Academy are the things that you need to be successful at much, right? We're doing a lot of ruby on rails development. We're doing a lot of react and react native development. When we started doing more and more reactive, he added, react to the curriculum I learned and that that thing is very like That's very good for me as the person running the consultancy and for my coworkers there. But it's also extremely good for the students, right? It means that we're constantly re driving the curriculum towards relevancy in today, right? If testing techniques are changing, we're gonna update the curriculum on testing techniques because we don't have to return you with the wrong thing, right? If libraries air changing, his new features come into the stack, which happens constantly and will continue to happen constantly throughout your career like we need those things to stay fresh. Um, and what's nice is that it's easier to justify the time and effort it takes to keep all those things fresh. When you're saving training down the road, right, I'm training 30 people. It wants to do the thing. I really only need two or three people to get good at, but it doesn't cost more effort necessarily to train that whole class. So that means that all of our students, whether they end up but not yet or not, and most of them don't write most of them go. Other places are getting that constant refresh of relevancy and constant refresh of usefulness. We want a balance between the sort of heady theory things right, Like one of the things that's interesting about computer science is that the fundamentals haven't really changed since the early fifties. The data structures and that kind of thing, those air forever. But the languages change all the time, and the tools change all the time, so we want to give you some of those fundamentals. But we want to really focus on hands on work. I want developers that graduate from the LEARN program to be submitting poor requests and seeing their code live, uh, in days, not months, and that that constant drive towards relevance means that that someone could afford to have you on staff and then be paying for a future training. Right. You can go learn advanced data structures or other pieces down the road like there will be time for that if you know how to do the fundamentals and you take those fundamentals and, you know, really apply.