Zach Sims
Zach Sims is an American entrepreneur who co-founded Codecademy. He currently serves as the CEO of the company. Biography. When Sims was 13, he started to email manufacturers with the idea to build a waterproof IPod case. Sims later entered Columbia University with the class of 2012, as a political science major. During his junior year, he realized that most of the students did not have the skill set relevant to their job search. He also worked for GroupMe, founded by his college friend Jared Hecht, after seeing him demo the application at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010 . However, he was frustrated with the lack of effective programming courses. As a result, he decided to teach himself coding with the help of his friend Ryan Bubinski, who he met while working for the "Columbia Daily Spectator". The two built the first version of Codeacademy to teach Sims how to program. In 2011, Sims and Bubinski were accepted into Y Combinator's summer program. That summer, Sims launched Codecademy with Bubinski and dropped out of college, a year before graduation. In 2011, the startup was the runner-up of TechCrunch's Best New Startup awards, losing to Pinterest. During  the first weekend of the launch, it attracted more than 200,000 users and had 1 million users by the end of 2011. As of 2021, Codecademy has a user base of 45 million. In 2013, Sims was named one of the finalists of the Time 100. In 2015, Sims was invited to attend the World Economic Forum and was introduced as "the man with 26 million students".