Code.org

My father helped found a great university.

My brother and I together co-founded Code.org, but really it's my brother Hadi is the one who deserves all the credit for that.

They've each made such great contributions to education and I care a lot about education and the, like I said, the thrust of what NEO is is really like an education enterprise.

Even though it's for profit, hopefully very profitable and organized around making money, but it's making money by betting on young people and teaching them and helping them grow and sharing in their success rather than some other way.

I think we are close to kind of anniversary.

And then you co-founded one of the largest music application on Facebook, iLike.

And then after that, you mentioned about the Code.org, which I think anyone basically in our community or globally know that.

And then your journey as an angel investor is fascinating.

And so I chose computer science as one of these narrative spines because the tech industry used social media and other tools to create a huge audience for coding.

The book opens with Code.org, which is a nonprofit group based in Seattle, and they want to get coding in schools.

And the intentions are good.

The founders of Code.org studied computer science at Harvard and went on to get high-powered, high-paying jobs and start startups and be angel investors in Facebook and Dropbox and others.

And they felt they had been successful in part or largely because of computer science.

And they wanted kids to have the same opportunity.

There were also, you know, folks teaching computer science who had been doing it for years, but most schools didn't teach computer science.

And so it really drove this movement of computer science is the subject of the future and we have to teach it.

But so it starts off very slow, but then eventually we get into using hands-on tools like such as Bebots.

And even some different coding aspects like code.org or a codable is also one that I've used.

It's crazy to just the process of getting kindergarteners signed in.

Yes, yes.

And we started out with Minecraft Hour of Code.

That was one of the first places where Code.org was on their mission to get more students involved in STEM education, interested to have more educators feel empowered to actually bring coding into the curriculum.

And so we've reached over 100 million young people with the Minecraft Hour of Code.

And it's so interesting to me because, of course, Minecraft's a video game.

You know, you've talked about the hour of code and that, you know, Minecraft was part of this huge movement of coding.

And obviously we zip forward to today's big movement right now.

Code.org is now Code.ai and they have the hour of AI.

And AI is something that I think the entire world is really trying to figure out.

What we did was we built a Google gem that we allow participants in our sessions to use, and they can make a copy for themselves too, because we realized that there's nuance and they're gonna change some things about it.

But on its face, we basically have as the knowledge base in the gem, we have some of the really good frameworks that have come out, some of the AI literacy framework that's come out from Code.org and OECD and that.

And then you have some of the other ones where you've got your day of AIs or the C framework from AI for Education.

So we've incorporated some of these things as a knowledge base.