The Steve Jobs start-up method lives on.
After dropping out as a junior at Columbia University last summer, Zach Sims, 21, teamed up with fellow student Ryan Bubinksi, 22, to start Codecademy, which provides free online tutorials in computer programming. The duo, currently the company's only employees, have already raised $2.5 million in a Series A round of financing that included Union Square Ventures and CrunchFund and plan to hire 15.
Bubinksi, who graduated with a degree in computer science and biophysics this year, and Sims developed their idea and website over the summer at the Y Combinator incubator in Silicon Valley. That enabled them to get "introductions to whatever investors we wanted," Sims said.
The majority of the company's new hires will be technical, said Sims. Codecademy's technology stack is built in Ruby, Javascript and MongoDB, he said, but candidates need only be able to pick up new technologies quickly to apply.
In particular, the company wants user experience and interaction designers, as well as engineers with experience in information architecture and web development.
The company's services are free, and it currently has no revenues. However, in the two months since launching, the site has gained as many as 800,000 users, Sims said. The company's cash and equity compensation is competitive, he said, and often at above-market rates.
"We come into work everyday motivated by our ability to change the way education works for millions of people," Sims said. "We're looking for people who live and breathe their work."
Write to Joseph Walker at Joseph.Walker@dowjones.com
