So that was actually me giving a talk
when I was just 17 years old. So at the age of 15, I actually interned
as a software engineer at HubSpot. A year later,
I enjoyed the Segment, super small but fast growing startup in Silicon Valley
as a full time software engineer, after high school at the age of 16.
And a handful of years later, the company was acquired for a 3.2
billion. And I went off to start my own startup. And today I'm 24 years old and the founder of a startup
that's been valued at $600 million. So how did I get into coding? I wanted to take a bit to talk about my
story, getting into software and startups and all this stuff. So, you know,
it really goes back to the fourth or fifth grade when I really wanted
to just learn how to build a website. I was super fascinated by idea of websites and going on the web and,
you know, being able to play games or explore this huge wealth of content. And I wanted to know how to make a website
myself. I remember the most early versions of playing around with code
and web development was actually for me, I learned that you could go on a Word
document and an export it as HTML. And it actually opened on your browser and
you had like a little bit of a website. But I wanted to learn
how real websites were made and how to really do, you know, web
development and software stuff. So I did some Googling. I learned how to build websites for fun. Using websites like W3 Schools
was the big resource back then and just cobbling things together in a notepad
and reopening it in Google Chrome. And and as as things went on,
I just became really fascinated and obsessed with this idea
of being able to build software, whether it was a website or a game
or a program or a mobile app later on, you know, I developed some some apps for my school
or different clubs in our local community. But the big inflection point
of my whole journey to finally becoming a full time software engineer was actually
getting the chance to code with others. The first time I really got to code
with others for a long period of time was when I scored this unpaid internship
actually as completely free. I wasn't getting paid at a local startup
in Tennessee where I grew up, I got the internship actually just by, you know, stumbling across this startup
in a newspaper actually back then and seeing that some article
around the lines of, Nashville Startup goes to Silicon Valley and comes back after going through
like an incubator over there. And they were going through a program called 500 Startups,
which is pretty similar to Y Combinator and programs like that,
except probably not quite as prestigious. And I actually reached out to them
and I just said, Hey, I'm a local high school student. in the ninth grade looking for something
to do over the summer. And I love to code
and I love the opportunity to just come in and do some work for free. Since it was free,
they pretty much immediately took me up on it, which was awesome. I'm super, super thankful for the founders
of that company in terms of taking bet on me and letting me join
for the summer and really learn from them. And this was a huge inflection point
to to learning how to code. Before that, I didn't really know
how to use tools like GIT or GitHub. I didn't know really how to collaborate
on software development. I didn't know how to organize my code
to be, clean and friendly for other people to work on it or how to navigate
a big code base and really only worked on code that I had written versus,
you know, a larger piece of software. It was a website
builder says pretty complicated that many people had been contributing
to over the course of years. And it was a huge inflection
point for my learning using the technique
of called out bounding. I found a variety of different
opportunities. I got to go to some hackathons
that were developed for college kids as a high school student by
just shooting over some emails. I got an internship at HubSpot
the following year by connecting to a bunch of people on LinkedIn. And finally, after all these internships and just fun
doing software and programing, I thought it'd be really awesome
to get creative and figure out how to graduate high school early
that I could take a gap year and actually go work in Silicon Valley
before finally going to college. that's where our Segment comes in. Back when I was at the first startup in my free unpaid internship,
there was this tool that we used as a website
builder company called Segment.io And what it did, the super simple, just like many startups, we wanted to analyze
our customer behavior. And to do this, we wanted to use tools
like Mixpanel and Amplitude and Google Analytics. And KISSmetrics
was another of the tools back then. And in order to do that,
we needed to send data from our websites about what people were doing on them
to those services. But as a developer,
you didn't want to integrate each of these services individually
and you also wanted a try all of them because they were all new early stage
startups with different pros and cons. So Segment was the way to do that. You would put their library
on your website and boom, all the data that you were collecting on your website
would now be going to, five, ten or 20 or 50 tools and hundreds of tools
versus just one system at a time. I thought that value proposition
was really fascinating. And I started following the company
actually all the way back for my internship. saw them a little bit on Hacker News
with all the open source projects and cool technical blogs
they were putting out. saw them releasing new projects
and new large forms of funding, and when I had decided that
I wanted to try working in Silicon Valley, they were one of the first companies
that I actually reached out to. So I already had some familiarity
with the segment folks from contributing to Open Source,
which was also a big catalyst for my software engineering knowledge as a kid or student and segment
had a lot of popular open source projects, especially in the JavaScript community,
which I became pretty active in. The meet up that we showed
earlier was actually a node speedup that I spoke out later
when I came to San Francisco and working at segment
just seemed like the dream. So I decided to shoot them
over a cold email saying, Hey, I've been following the company
for so long, I have these skill sets. I actually have been contributing
to open source projects by segment, and we'd love to get a chance to interview
there and again, cold emails shined. It's a process that I highly recommend. I have the craziest stories of people
responding on cold emails. They actually let me get an interview. The funniest part was, you know,
in this whole process of reaching out, I didn't actually disclose that I was 16
years old or a high school student or thinking about this whole gap year
shenanigans. From my experience, I found that,
you know, usually introduce more barriers than advantages, even though obviously
you can't discriminate around age. If you're 16, you don't have a college degree,
you don't have much experience. And a lot of these startups especially are
looking to hire more experienced folks. So I put different contract positions
I had and, you know, showed those in a fancy way on my my resumé,
I removed all the education sections. I think someone probably just assumed I went to a college
that I wasn't super proud of. I said I was in Tennessee willing to move to San Francisco and I
went through some of the interview process all under that sort of context
and eventually they actually asked me for my date of birth
in order to book some flights for me to come to San Francisco for the onsite
where I would meet the rest of the team and and do about five interviews in person
over the course of a day. And at that point, I basically got
an email back from the segment asking me, is it legally allowed for me to work?
they were happy. Yeah, they're excited to interview
me from an interview perspective based on what I had shown,
but had no idea whether it's even possible to hire me at the company or what
I was looking for. Eventually we worked through
all the legal sort of stuff. I had done a ton of research online
and found out that California was actually super flexible with regards to kids
wanting to graduate early and start working early and stuff like that,
You can actually get a job in California as long as you have a high school
diploma or graduation of some sort. ended up getting the job at segment
after all this course of interviews. Again, super thankful for that to them
for taking in the founders, especially for taking a bet on me
such a young age. When I got the offer letter from segment I was in awe.
This was my ticket to Silicon Valley. It's actually one of the first offers
I got after reaching out to tons and tons of companies and interviewing
at them and the craziest part was, you know, as a 16 year old
who hadn't made much money in the past, this was actually a full time job
with a full time salary of $110,000 a year. You know,
never thought that moment would come. A normal 16 year old would probably, you
know, sign this offer as soon as possible. And just jump on the opportunity.
As the kind of entrepreneurial spirit person I was. I ended up trying to fly to more
and more companies and negotiate a bit. But all in all, I ended up joining segment
and I would say that really changed the course of my career
and my experience in software and startups and building a business
and moving to San Francisco and just being exposed,
the whole tech community. It was absolutely a game changer. If you're in a similar situation
or know someone who is first off, feel free to reach out to me. I love talking to, you know, young folks on their journey
into software engineering or even folks that are, you know, transitioning careers
or anything like that. My top three tips broadly would be, one,
there's an insane amount of good online content out there. When I was growing up,
I felt that way. And now looking at the content and games
and courses and, you know, stuff like Code Academy
that exist today, it's just crazy. learning to, you know, be a software
engineer or program has never been easier than today. And I think GPT probably just made that a lot easier, actually
to find a way to work with others, even if you're
not going to get paid for it. Like if it's an unpaid internship
or helping a local business out with something,
just find a way to work with others. Every time
I got a chance to work with others in code with others, that was a huge inflection
point into my learning. Just put yourself out there. There will always be opportunities
out there that aren't listed that you can create,
and I think that's a recurring theme. Through my experience no startup was out there saying
they would hire people out of high school. All the applications mentioned
having to have a college degree, no internship was out there
at a public company like HubSpot built for high school students. I just connected with folks on LinkedIn
and removed education from my resume and did all these sort of tricks. And lastly, it just started to contributing to open source projects
that were out there and in various communities
by various companies as well.
