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**Quincy Larson:** ...is knowing my limits, and knowing when I can realistically be of help and when I'm just gonna get in the way trying to help. So I wear a lot of hats... For example, a lot of organizations have dedicated fundraisers. People on the team who are basically marketing people, who go out and convince ric... |
I have tremendous respect for Wikipedia, but I hope that freeCodeCamp never resorts to the kind of scare tactics that a lot of these organizations do resort to... Because I know they work, but it just feels intellectually dishonest to me. freeCodeCamp is doing okay, and a big part of the reason we're running this fundr... |
But I wear a lot of hats, so I do all the fundraising myself. Whenever we're trying to get a grant, I apply for the grant myself, I talk to the grant makers myself... And a lot of people are surprised when they have a meeting and it'll be like 4-5 people from a company, and then it'll just be me on our side. So it's ki... |
I'm okay with learning these new things. We don't run any of our articles by a publicist or anything like that. I write it, and then usually Abbey edits it, and then we publish it, we go with it. As a result of doing that and just doing the accounting for freeCodeCamp, doing a lot of the budgeting, all that stuff, with... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Quincy Larson:** I'm gonna read a quote from Robert Heinlein, if that's cool... Because he's like this great science fiction author. He has this really profound quote about what he believes that all us humans should be able to do. He says "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a h... |
**Jerod Santo:** I love that quote. I've heard that one before... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that right? |
**Jerod Santo:** As you started getting into it, I was like "You know what - I've heard this..." And especially "Specialization is for insects" - that resonates, and I totally agree with that sentiment. |
\[01:00:08.19\] You have all these hats on, and you have all these people helping you. Like you said, your budget is thin... You have managed to do what I think is an amazing job of getting support from the community. As you said, you don't do the few large donors game, you do the mini, small donors game. That's the ga... |
**Quincy Larson:** Yeah, 7,000 monthly active donors. |
**Jerod Santo:** Spectacular. |
**Quincy Larson:** Yeah, and it adds up. That's enough of a budget to be able to pay for servers and to have some full-time staff. And it's robust. We're not hanging on the word of some rich donor, "Is he gonna have the money to give to us this year or not?" I think that it's really healthy to have a really robust, gra... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** They're your customer. |
**Quincy Larson:** ...keeping in mind when you're writing things or determining what you're gonna do next. And if you don't have a whole lot of big patrons, if it's mostly just your core community who you're already trying to help, then the interests are aligned. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You have like 7,000 - is that right? 7,000 monthly contributors, donations-wise? |
**Quincy Larson:** That's correct, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I think what you've done on that front is very wise, and I also think it's very wise to do a lot of the jobs, because -- you know, Jerod and I both believe this, too... Being in the details about your business is pretty smart, in my opinion... And your business is freeCodeCamp, and you could never t... |
Only if you're trying to move as fast as possible doesn't make sense to hire for people. Only then. Otherwise, enjoy the journey. |
**Jerod Santo:** Are you enjoying the journey? |
**Quincy Larson:** Oh, yeah. \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** You're on a podcast, you can't say no... You'd be like "Oh, actually this is terrible..." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "Actually, I kind of don't like this journey..." |
**Quincy Larson:** You know, I worked at Taco Bell for like several years, just taking orders and making tacos. I worked at grocery stores, \[unintelligible 01:02:33.16\] I worked as kind of like a middle manager in a larger school chain, and as school director and as a teacher... And I loved being a teacher too, but i... |
**Jerod Santo:** There you go. So for this new push into the world of data science and machine learning you are doing a fundraiser, and trying to raise $150,000 starting now... And you have a fellow by the name of Darrell Silver, who has agreed to 100% match those donations up to that 150k. So tell us that story... Whe... |
**Quincy Larson:** Well, Darryl also has run education-focused startups, and he's exited a couple of times. Most recently he sold his company - or got acquired - by Chegg, which is part of a bigger textbook company system; I don't know the hierarchy of who owns what, but yeah, he has the means to support freeCodeCamp a... |
\[01:04:09.29\] And I have a lot of respect for what he did through Thinkful, and The Odin Project is another project that Thinkful is patrons of that open source project as well... And yeah, he just wanted to see us grow. The Odin Project uses freeCodeCamp as one of its learning resources as well... But I think he's f... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** We're gonna link out to the blog post that he wrote, but I like the first paragraph of what he wrote... I'm gonna quote him if you don't mind. He says "freeCodeCamp is a non-profit unicorn. They delivered 1.3 billion minutes of free coding education last year, they grow 60% every year, and it is sus... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well said. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. A non-profit unicorn. |
**Jerod Santo:** So for the next 30 days - and of course, we had some production time on this, so for the next N days; don't wait, go check it out right now - this fundraiser is gonna be going on. And during this time, up to the first 150k, Darryl is gonna match dollar for dollar, right? So every dollar you put in is w... |
**Quincy Larson:** Yeah, 100% of this money is going to go toward the data science curriculum. So the big cost is usually people in any organization... And we have already found a really good instructor who's got like 20 years of experience teaching collegiate and high-school level... So he's on, and we're gonna identi... |
So we're not gonna try to bring in total outsider star math professors. We don't really care about that. What we care about is people who are passionate about teaching, and people who have a lot of experience teaching. |
**Jerod Santo:** So let's assume you get the 300k and you put it towards the curriculum... When's the curriculum coming out? What can we expect? I mean, probably there's some work ahead, but do you have deadlines and ETAs? |
**Quincy Larson:** Yeah, that's a good question. |
**Jerod Santo:** Any promises you'd like to make here on the air? |
**Quincy Larson:** We don't use deadlines internally, at all, period. And that's kind of a radical thing that people are like "Oh... That's very contrarian of you, Quincy. Why don't you use deadlines? How do you get things done?" But things get done, regardless of whether you put a deadline on... And I've found that th... |
Now, I can understand certainly the use of deadlines. We happen to have a really motivated team who just gets things done and is very communicative of the state of those things... We also work in massive parallel. I like to call ourselves the Massively Parallel Organization, and this means that we have so many differen... |
If you can take work and you can make it discreet enough and put it on its own thread, then you don't have people blocking one another, and you reduce the communication overhead, and like "Oh, that got done over there. Great." But I wasn't waiting on it. It's just -- I'm delighted that that's done. "Well, that happened... |
And I suspect for the data science curriculum - we've already done a tremendous amount of planning around that, and you can actually browse through a lot of the sheets that we've created that kind of break down all the concepts that we'll be able to teach, and those are gonna continue to evolve. And those are public. A... |
\[01:08:09.13\] And there's a form -- if you're a math professor, or if you're a computer science professor or if you're a practitioner, or machine learning, or some other form of data engineering or something like that - fill out that form, send us feedback on the curriculum. We might discover a new textbook that we c... |
But there's a very good quote about deadlines... Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Zelda and Mario Bros/Super Mario Bros, he says "A rush game will be forever bad. A delayed game will eventually be good." I think if you look at Cyberpunk 2077, it's very much a victim of that overly ambitious deadline. And the whole cult... |
So I think the world will be much better if managers listen to engineers rather than dictate it downward on engineers. Now, I'm sure there are lots of managers who do do that, and a lot of projects are successfully shipped on deadline or even ahead of deadline. But I do think that having a deadline results in compromis... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You still have those expectations for this though. You have a roadmap, you've broken it down into three stages, you know that two stages will be done in roughly two years... You have at least expectation, if not some variation; it's not a deadline, it's more like "Expected in two year, maybe." The m... |
**Jerod Santo:** Maybe. \[laughs\] No promises. |
**Quincy Larson:** Yeah. Well, I'm optimistic that we'll be able to ship parts of this curriculum this year, in 2021. And the reason why is because, again, we're gonna start with specific deliverables that people need the most. People need to be able to build the certification projects in order to claim the certificati... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** On your YouTube, yeah. |
**Quincy Larson:** So we can slice those up into atomic little bits, and we can add some comprehension check questions, and that's basically what we do with our Python curriculum so far, is just use video. Video is good, and text is good too, but there's no beating interactive. Interactive is hands down the ultimate wa... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, we haven't given our audience an exact Why yet in this show. I think we've meandered to a possible Why, but let's end it with a good Why. Why help fund this mission? I think you've laid out the rough budget is around 300k. You have a benefactor giving, which we've discussed, $150,000 of match.... |
**Quincy Larson:** \[01:12:14.21\] We're gonna put into existence a well structured, well thought out, vertically-integrated -- okay, I'm using a lot of buzzwords, I apologize... |
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