u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
Hi, my partner and I both have many years as staff, principal SWE's at FB and Nextdoor. My partner left Nextdoor and ran a free coding bootcamp for a year or two. After seeing how good intentioned people were trying over and over to "fix bootcamps" but had numerous quality issues, she wanted to do it better. She did, and the people she worked with have great careers now, but it didn't scale beyond a number of people she could train herself (\~10 at a time). What she realized though is that the brokenness of bootcamps was resulting in tens of thousands of new engineers who were employable but lacking fundamental skills needed to grow in their next career step. So we joined forced to start Formation - which is a personalized and dynamic coaching and training program for experienced engineers.
If you want my advice - be ready to run a company and not to create a coding bootcamp. Almost all of the bootcamps I know the founders of, they started it for the best reasons and truly care about teaching and making the world better.
But there is a big difference in teaching a course and running a company.
If you don't have a passion for managing and growing the careers of all of those around you and managing the entire stack of your company (from contracts, to taxes, to legal paperwork, company registration, insurance, payroll, credit card companies and banks) then you'll just end up making another bootcamp like everyone else wanted to do - one that was great when it had up to 30 students and then faced all kinds of problems where the founders either sold it, or decided to not grow it any further.