Hi Ryan, welcome!

Hello. I'm honored to be on the show. I'm really nervous because I'm the first man. I feel the pressure of representing. 

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No pressure, only excitement, and curiosity! Let’s start with a summary of what Treehouse is.

At Treehouse our mission is to diversify tech through accessible education and apprenticeship. We do all that through teaching people how to code, and then we find companies who need amazing talent, who need diverse teams, who want to do the right thing and hire people from their neighborhood, and we help them do that. My wife and I founded the company nine years ago. Every day I wake up and just can't believe this is my job. It's just so amazing to be able to serve and help people like this.

What is the importance of a degree?

I got a computer science degree from a traditional kind of university in the United States, got a job, and then I was just shocked to realize that actually, 80% of the skills I learned were not useful. But I have gotten a job because of the degree. And I knew deep down that I got the degree because somehow I was privileged, I didn't know what to call it. But I figured, "Gosh, my parents had enough money to send me to school. It was easy for me, I had a computer in the home." I kind of felt like the system was rigged, and I was benefiting from that, and it bothered me. 10 years later, my wife and I finally decided, let's do something about this. 

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"I don't want to die doing this.

I don't think this matters."

Was there a game-changing moment for that lead to the creation of Treehouse?

My wife Jill and I believe that technology gives you access to power, and we started a company to teach people technology, in-person trainings at the time. Then in 2008, we had our first kiddo. Having a kid really made me feel my mortality in a way that I'd never felt before. I just realized I'm not the youngest one anymore, I'm going to move on, and I'm going to die someday. I asked myself: Are we actually changing the system? And the answer is no, we're not. We're not actually changing anything, we're just making it easier for you to learn if you're privileged. I said, "I don't want to die doing this. I don't think this matters." My wife had the idea, in 2010, that putting our lessons on the internet would make the education accessible, effective and affordable. I immediately knew she was right. We did it, and we bootstrapped it. I got a bank loan for 50 grand, this is not fancy venture capital stuff, I was just trying to make it happen. And we launched Treehouse, and that was the beginning of this journey, that nine years ago. And as I've explained, we've come a long way since then. Now we've taught 850,000 people online.

Pretty impressive. 

It is. But yet has the system changed? No, it hasn't yet changed. That's why we're refocusing on a more practical, powerful path through apprenticeships. 

What I realized is that I'm extremely privileged as a white, able-bodied, tall, male. I really am at the top of the privilege chain, born in America at a time where there wasn't a war. I actually have tremendous power and I can use it for good. And what I have access to is the door to opportunity, I know how to get in. I know how to work the environment, I know how to get access to powerful people. 

Can you talk a little bit more about that? Why is the door locked? What's in the way?

It turns out that we have all these systems in place that kind of perpetuate the wealth gap. And there's a really good study I would recommend everybody download it's free, it's by the Kapor Center, and it's called The Leaky Tech Talent Pipeline. And it explains with research and data why this is happening. It actually starts in K-12 in America. If you can't afford to put your kid into Pre-K at age four, you actually immediately start falling behind. If you have money, like we do, to pay for Pre-K, your kids immediately start getting ahead.

And then the gap widens because what happens is, if you're black or Latinx or you're a woman or you're LGBTQ, when you go into computer science classes at your high school, if you're lucky enough to have them there, you don't see anybody that looks like you. And then you're much more likely to quit. Also, we have fewer people studying computer science in high school that are from underrepresented groups. If you're someone like me, you grow up in a home where you are well-fed, you have a computer in your home, and you look at the tech industry and you see white men like Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs, you just go, "Oh, I can do that."

These people are like me. And what needs to happen instead is proactive work by white powerful men, like me, to say, "You know what, we actually are going to do something about this, and it's not their job to fix this it's actually our job." It's pretty neat what can happen, once people do that. 

Was there a pivotal moment for you also just say we need to make a change with regards to diversity at Treehouse?

Yes. In October of 2016, I signed this document called ‘The Diversity Pledge’. It was kind of obvious to me. Of course, I believe in diversity, I'm a moral person. I signed it and then that immediately caused me to realize that Treehouse, my own company, was majority white male. If I believe that, then how did I do that to my own company? And I even started a school that was supposed to solve this and we did all these things. We anonymize our job application, so when you apply we don't know who you are. You're not allowed to upload a resume so we don't see, we don't know anything about you. All we say is tell us about a time when you did X, Y, Z. And yet we still had hired white men majority, I just thought something's really wrong. Because it's definitely doesn't seem to be equal opportunity. 

I just went into learning mode and I started reading books like The New Jim Crow, I started listening to podcasts like Seeing White. I started just listening to people, spending a lot more time with people from groups that have been locked out of tech. And I learned so much, it was just amazing. And we realized, okay, we have to do something different. We built this pilot apprenticeship in partnership with our community Boys & Girls Clubs program for ourself, it wasn't supposed to be a product, it wasn't supposed to be a thing, it was just the wish to change Treehouse.

What are the skills that you want to teach and that you want people to have after having run through your program? 

It turns out that actually most of the skills you need to be successful in today's market are soft, what we soft skills. They're actually not soft, they're actually really hard to get. How do you collaborate? How do you work creatively? How do you process data quickly? I mean, there's so much to that, that we teach a lot of that during the period, during the tech degree and in the apprenticeship period. We basically start preparing for this reality, Okay. You're going to be using tools like Slack, you're going to be doing stand-ups, you're going to be communicating over email. How do you do that in a collaborative, helpful way so that people want you to stay? How do you get around the work culture? How do you navigate it? How do you be successful? That's actually a large part of what we do. The hard skills actually aren't that hard to teach. How to code is like learning how to bake, it's straightforward. It's not easy, but it's simple. And I think that's kind of part of it. I would say the hard skills that we teach are probably I would say 50%, and then the other 50% are soft. And then there's another problem connected to that as well, which is basically the perception around how valuable is that education. And that is on both sides. But the vision though that we have is to expand outside of coding into other exciting job titles as well. 

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 "(...) I'm extremely privileged as a white, able-bodied, tall, male. I really am at the top of the privilege chain, born in America at a time where there wasn't a war."

One the one hand, there is evidence that individuals are not aware they might not need a college degree for certain tech jobs, but then it is also reported that many companies won't consider them for an interview if they don't have a computer science degree. That seems like a chicken and egg situation. 

What we're doing is going to companies directly who have the money and the power, and say, "Do you have like 300 jobs open right now? Do you need help filling them?" "Yes, we do." "Do you actually need that talent to be diverse and balanced?" "Yes, of course, we do." "Do you want that talent to literally be created for you from your local neighborhood?" "Yes, we do." "Okay, great. Just say yes and fund the program." And actually the company is excited and welcoming this cohort of apprentices, they want them to win. And they realize, "Oh wow, there's all this talent in our neighborhood, and we're just not interviewing them." And then you build an emotional connection and a powerful bond. And it's way better than anything you could do through a traditional kind of hiring model. 

Speaking from the mindset of young women or girls in high school, what do you think we can do to raise more interest, and even just make these types of jobs more exciting? 

I think you need to see more people like you that you want to be like, who happened to be software engineers. I think there are some really neat things going on, on Instagram where women of all colors, of all sexual preferences, are beginning to show that you can be a woman and not act like a man, not be like a man, you can truly be a woman and you can be successful, and in software engineering. And it's creative, it's powerful, it's high paying. I think we're at the beginning of that movement where younger women are going to start to see women they look up to doing these things. That's why I got into tech. I could see Steve Jobs, I could see, and it's like, "I want to do that. I want to change the world, and make things." And I think that's the start of it.

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