Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Today's guest is Douglas Calhoun.
Douglas is the co founder of Hack Reactor, a San Francisco based startup whose vision is to create the CS degree for the 21st century.
Hack Reactor runs 12 week intensive coding boot camps which you can do in person or online, designed to accelerate your software career.
According to Hack Reactor, 99% of its graduates receive at least one full time job offer within three months of graduating and earn an average salary in the six figures.
Doug, welcome to the show.
Douglas Calhoun (01:02.790)
Thanks for having me.
Omer.
Glad to be here.
Omer (01:04.870)
Now I gave the audience a brief overview of your business, but tell us a little bit more about yourself personally.
Who is Doug when he's not working?
Douglas Calhoun (01:13.110)
Yeah, so.
Well, I'm just an ordinary guy.
So I am sort of living here in Austin at the moment.
I'm teaching folks how to program.
I like to sort of play my guitar and go to coffee shops and food trucks and enjoy the company of my fellow human beings.
Pretty normal sort of story, I suppose.
Omer (01:39.160)
Awesome.
Now we like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
Do you have a favorite quote?
Douglas Calhoun (01:50.120)
I wouldn't say it's a quote necessarily, but I do have.
There's an exchange actually that came to mind when I was thinking over this question when you sent me the pre interview sort of checklist there.
And it was between two individuals who, you know, the first had said that he was working as a programmer in Silicon Valley and he was seeing all of these people around him just sort of go and sort of hit it big in the gold rush, so to speak, starting these software products and getting funding and getting a lot of accolades.
And he kind of felt like he was being left behind and he was saying, you know, I've been able to sort of lock myself in my room and get a few hours of work done every night at home and I feel like I'm being able to grind for it and I'm finally being able to push myself and I think I'm getting better towards launching my own sort of product and being successful like my peers.
And someone wrote him back with this very sincere response on the thread that just said it's not getting better, it's getting worse.
You will never keep up with someone who has a natural passion for what they're doing.
And is excited and, and sort of thinking about it in the shower and thinking about it on the walk to work and sort of, you know, always sort of mentioning it to their sort of friends and colleagues and sort of weaving it into their life.
And you'll never be able to compete with that sort of natural enthusiasm and passion by sort of grinding it out.
And that was really, you know, for some reason, you know, I read all sorts of things all day on the Internet, but that one really has stuck with me as their sort of right mindset in terms of going into this sort of line of human endeavor to really find something that sort of aligns with you at a deeper level.
Omer (03:29.350)
Why?
Why, why did it resonate with you personally?
Was there something in.
In your own life that.
That kind of resonated?
Douglas Calhoun (03:36.230)
Yeah, I think that I, you know, I've always sort of, you know, this entrepreneurial idea of sort of, you know, doing your own thing and having something greater than a paycheck has sort of been tickling at the back of my mind, you know, for.
For a long, long time.
And I guess sort of after graduating from college, maybe the first decade, my whole 20s were spent sort of doing things that felt like the right thing to do, quote, unquote.
But that really didn't resonate at a deeper level.
And I was working in a sort of a paralegal law firm for a little while, and I was sort of doing business sales for a little while, and I was doing all of these different things that seemed like they should be successful, but they weren't resonating.
And I was thinking, you know what, maybe if I just sort of, like, put my nose to the grindst a little more, like, I'll see this sort of, like, thing that other people see.
And to go into work every day, maybe I'm just sort of missing it or something.
And then, you know, that was one of the moments that I really realized that you got to search out something.
You know, it's not that you make partner and then figure out, you know, which sailboat to buy, but you really got to find something that resonates with you at a deeper level.
And when you find that, then, you know, you know, you know, the old saw is you never have to work again.
So if you find something you love doing, let's.
Omer (04:50.820)
Let's talk more about you and your background.
Now, from what I understand, you started out on.
On the CF path to get a computer science degree, but that's not.
That didn't quite work out right.
What happened there?
Douglas Calhoun (05:10.500)
Yeah, So I mean I had taken, you know, I came from a very small town and sort of our shop teacher taught HTML and CSS as his sort of elective course in my very small high school graduating class of about 100.
And that resonated with me.
I was making sort of websites for my video games that I like to play when I was in high school.
And I was making websites like talking about strategy for how to play Warcraft 2 the right way and win.
And I thought, oh, this programming stuff is really something that I think could be really interesting.
And I got to college and I sort of like sat in the back of the class in the CS101 class and the sort of professor was up front.
Nobody had computers in front of them.
There wasn't any sort of experiential component in the classroom.
And he's sort of up there sort of, okay, exercise three from the textbook, from your homework was this and sort of writing on the whiteboard.
And I just was, you know, and there was a lab component but it was somewhat disconnected from the rest of the class.
But it really, you know, I got really turned off.
I thought this is really boring.
I thought, you know, I was programming was supposed to be fun.
It turned out that the way it was being taught in a traditional CS program was not really resonating with me.
So I ended up going and being an international studies major and going on a sort of, you know, decade in the wilderness of trying to figure out what was interesting to me before I finally sort of chanced back on it again many years down the road.
Omer (06:38.610)
So it was about 10 years later
Douglas Calhoun (06:41.170)
that
Omer (06:43.570)
I guess you got back into coding and you were working as a Rails developer for a while.
How did that come about?
Douglas Calhoun (06:51.330)
Yeah, so I was actually, I was bouncing around like I did every couple of years.
I would live in Washington D.C. for a little while and then I would go and I'd be in New York for a little while and I'd travel around, try to find different places to sort of, you know, see what was going on with the world.
And I chanced into a job in Portland, Oregon.
I had come, I flew out to visit a friend, bought a one way ticket and chanced into a, you know, he said, first day I was there, he said, oh, come, come have lunch with my, my work friends.
I ended up sitting down next to the HR manager.
Turned out that was a company called Survey Monkey.
And I worked as a, you know, I actually talked my way into a job as a sort of, you know, ticketed tech support Basically just sitting there and answering people's questions about bugs they found in the code or they got locked out of their account because of this.
And in the course of that I came across some working developers.
Probably the first time I'd ever sort of met a real programmer face to face, honestly.
And I really just was a bit starstruck.
I had like, I had to go to lunch at my lunch break was like 12:30 to 1:30, but they went for one lunch at 11 and then went for a second lunch at 2 and you know, basically had the run of the place and were paid really well and treated really well and were enthused about what they were doing.
And I said, you know, that's what I want.
So I actually, you know, I went to the library, I checked out One book on PHP, one on JavaScript, one on Ruby, one on, you know, Python.
I thought, you know, if I just sit down and read all these books, then I'll definitely become a developer.
And of course it didn't, you know, I got through half of every single textbook and thought I have no idea what I'm doing.
And I actually sort of kind of gave up on it for a bit until I learned that I was traveling around Southeast Asia actually for a little bit and came across a hacker news post advertising some random guy in San Francisco was going to teach people how to code.
So I was in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia at 4am I got on a Skype call with him and sort of told him my story and learned a bit about his background and he said, yeah, we're going to do this thing, come on down.
And ended up chancing into an opportunity to work with him and some other folks in a sort of experiential in classroom environment where we're doing a lot of writing and sharing of code with each other, pair programming, great stuff like that.
And that's how I ended up breaking into the industry and got a job as a Ruby on Rails developer.
Omer (09:20.680)
How long did you spend learning to code before you got a job as a developer?
Douglas Calhoun (09:25.800)
Oh, well, it was sort of a fits and spurts sort of thing.
I had been fiddling with HTML and CSS for a long, long time and then that sort of experience of sort of quitting my job at SurveyMonkey and checking out a giant stack of textbooks and sort of wandering in the wilderness for a little bit and then finally making it.
That took me maybe around, you know, less than a year, probably at that point, maybe six months even before I landed that first job as a Rails developer.
Omer (09:55.740)
Now if you look back at the day that you started that CS degree, if that experience for you hadn't been the way it was and had engaged you more, do you think you would have maybe spent another decade as a.
As a developer?
Do you feel like you lost a decade?
Douglas Calhoun (10:24.630)
You know, it's really, it's hard to say, you know, what.
What if this had happened?
What if that happened?
I definitely don't feel that I lost a decade because I had so many sort of rich human experiences in that time.
You know, I, you know, from a sort of career standpoint, if you ask my mother, she would probably, you know, kind of shake her head a little bit that I spent, you know.
You know, just, you know, I was again, I was.
But, you know, in addition to doing this sort of crappy, you know, enterprise B2B sales and sort of doing the law firm thing, where I didn't really feel, you know, like I was almost like this robot that sort of filled out forms and sat at a desk and, you know, wasn't really true to myself at all.
I did, I grew a lot as a person and in all dimensions.
And I actually think, you know, now working with folks.
A lot of the folks who come through Hack Reactor are sort of career switchers or folks that are at least a few years out of college at a minimum and have tried a few things.
I think that a programmer just sort of in isolation without thinking about the other aspects of who they are is a valuable business tool, human resource, but someone who comes with life experience and especially sort of a varied background of other professional experiences is actually, and has that understanding maybe of who their customers are, how people will use a particular feature of their product are actually incredibly valuable.
And so I think that I did learn a lot and grow a lot, just not in that particular in the technical direction.
And I almost wouldn't go back and change it if I could.
Omer (12:02.460)
Okay, so you were working as a Rails developer, I think, around 2012, and then later that year you launched Hack Reactor.
Where did the idea for that business come from?
Douglas Calhoun (12:17.550)
Yeah, so there were.
This was at a time, and this is still at the time in San Francisco, where there's just a massive, massive need for folks with these technical skills able to program web applications.
And we were starting to see a few of this new model of education, a few of these types of schools just starting kind of have their first classes.
And one of, you know, there was a group of us, myself and my co founders, Tony, Sean and Marcus, we were sort of getting together sort of late at night, I was commuting across the bay.
It was an hour and a half each way from Berkeley, where I was living down to the Haight on the far, you know, western side of San Francisco proper, to get together late at night to sort of discuss this phenomenon that we were aware of happening in our industry and talk about how would we sort of take the folks that we knew that we really, you know, our friends and colleagues who are non technical, how would we kind of get them in on this sort of gold rush of jobs?
Because this was, you know, people, you know, the 2007 sort of financial, not, you know, recession, but whatever that was was still fresh on everyone's mind.
We were definitely in the group, the demographic of folks who really got hit hard by the employment.
We all had friends who were sort of struggling to find meaningful work, work that, you know, sort of used the best of their talents and, you know, that was sort of the zeitgeist in which we were sort of operating.
Marcus, one of the co founders, had been teaching internally in Twitter and, you know, teaching some of their non technical staff because he was working at Twitter at the time, some basic programming skills.
And we really sort of got the itch that we could do this and provide a really valuable service and grow a business as well.
Omer (14:10.520)
Okay, so you got this idea.
Sounds good.
How did you go about getting started?
Douglas Calhoun (14:16.280)
Yeah, so I mean, we just basically started sort of putting ourselves out there, you know, finding the watering holes that we knew our target audience, our potential students and ourselves were hanging out at in, you know, the hacker news, the Reddit programming related subreddits on Stack Overflow on various sort of forums like that.
And we started just sort of engaging with people, you know, helping them get unstuck on small problems that they were posting and saying, hey, have you ever considered, you know, investing in a sort of full time learning experience to make the transition into a professional developer role?
And from there it was a lot of just engaging with people, explaining the potential, explaining what we were offering, and sort of feeling them out as well, and then making an honest assessment with them.
Do you think this is something that could be successful to get you where you want to be personally and professionally?
Omer (15:13.050)
Okay.
And how many people were you able to get on board as paying customers when you launched?
Douglas Calhoun (15:22.430)
Yeah, so our first class had 15 students.
Omer (15:25.710)
Do you remember how much you were charging them?
Douglas Calhoun (15:27.950)
Yeah, we were charging about $15,000.
Wow.
Yep.
And you know, again, folks are, this is a, you know, you know, our competitors are charging hundreds of thousands of dollars as being traditional universities.
And, you know, I think we're giving a better return on investment by far.
Omer (15:48.720)
So, yeah, I think, I know you charge a little bit more than that these days.
I think it's about 17 or 18,000.
But now you have a track record.
You have, you know, had hundreds of people pass through this program.
I talked about some of those stats at the beginning that you can say that, you know, 99% of people who graduate get a full time job offer within three months.
The average, you know, salary they're earning is in the six figures.
That's all great stuff, and I think that's great proof for people to be willing to come and spend that kind of money with you.
But when you started, you didn't have any of that.
So how did you convince people to give you that kind of money?
Douglas Calhoun (16:33.370)
It was really down to having, you know, just real human conversations with folks and talking through it with them and convincing them what we felt, which was that with, you know, an outlay of time and effort and also money, you know, that we had from personal experience, you know, confidence that folks could make this transition successfully if they had the right mindset and the right preparation and the right motivation.
And then, you know, I would sit in, you know, for the first nine months, I did almost nothing but take people out for coffee.
Folks would say, hey, I'm interested, kind of curious about what you guys are doing.
Maybe it's right for me or maybe it isn't.
And I would say, that's great.
Come down, you know, check out our sort of offices.
I'll, you know, take you out for coffee.
We'll sit down and talk about your sort of situation.
And from there, you know, I'd sit down for sometimes as much as an hour or two hours and just, you know, have real human conversation with people and talk them through it.
And by the end, apparently many of them felt persuaded enough that they were ready to take the leap.
So I think a lot of folks like myself had been, this wasn't the, you know, they didn't kind of like walking down the street one day and catch sight of our sort of sign and say, hey, maybe I'll learn to program.
Maybe I'll quit my job, put my life on hold and drop a significant amount of money on this.
Now these are folks who had been sort of poking around in the wilderness for sometimes years, trying to teach themselves this stuff, buying online courses, online videos, or, you know, sort of beg, borrow and steal from their technical friends to try to, you know, patchwork, put software products together or help them sort of figure different things out.
WordPress themes, hosting, who knows what.
So these were, these were sort of, you know, the grizzled veterans that were sort of finally making it to our door after maybe even years of trying to do it on their own.
So they knew the value proposition, they were familiar with what it took, and they knew the potential.
And then we just had to convince them that we were the right people to take them over the finish line.
Omer (18:41.810)
When you were having coffee with these people, were you trying to sell them on the course?
Were you pitching or were you just generally just having a conversation?
Douglas Calhoun (18:59.490)
I try to, I think genuineness and authenticity are something that, you know, I don't know if I even strive for it.
It's just sort of part of who, you know, I'm not good at pitching.
If I, if I tried to pitch them, I would not be successful.
They would, they would, they would just see right through it and say, what is it?
This guy's trying to sell me something.
So, no, I guess not.
You know, I did want them to attend the program, but.
And I did try to steer them in that direction, but it was really because I truly believed that we were going to be able to affect a huge change in their life and help them get to, you know, a goal, a milestone that they had set for themselves, which was to be able to either build their own software products or step into a programming, professional programming role where they could sort of launch a career and grow and be successful.
But, you know, a lot of it just took the.
Really took the form of, you know, almost two old friends sitting down in a coffee shop.
How have you been doing?
What have you been up to?
You know, how's it been?
What are you trying to.
What are you working on these days?
And just in the course of those conversations, sort of discussing where they were, what was easy and hard for them, where they were looking to go and sort of talking through the options and how Hack Reactor potentially could get them, get them to their goals.
And some folks, you know, we would get, you know, there were some minority of people, we'd get to the end of the conversation and it would, you know, I'd say, oh, it sounds like you got an interesting path set out.
You know, let me know.
You know, email me if you have any, you know, if I can help you in any way and if you have any questions.
And off they would go.
And, you know, I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't send, you know, automated reminders saying, hey, have you Changed your mind about Hack Reactor yet?
No.
And it turned out that there was even at that point, enough inbound interest.
I mean, I was doing up to, you know, four or five, sometimes six interviews, hour plus long interviews every single day, which was exhausting.
But that, you know, even in those early days, even during, I'm thinking now during the first class, there were that many people who were interested in what we were offering.
Omer (20:58.380)
What did you learn by talking to these people and having coffee over those nine months?
I mean, in many ways they were like customer development interviews, right?
Douglas Calhoun (21:08.860)
Yeah.
I mean, well, first of all, I learned that I could speak as a sort of.
Prior to this experience, I had never really risen above the level of sort of account executive or whatever you want, you know, account manager, salesperson, you know, support staff.
I, you know, to represent an entire business felt very sort of foreign to me and a little bit scary.
So I definitely learned a lot about myself and how to sort of, you know, take, take ownership of that role and, you know, feel confident and represent my company well.
And then I just, I think if anything, just talking to probably several hundred people over those nine months, I think I just sort of had a sort of realization about at least that segment of humanity.
Everybody's, you know, we're coming from different backgrounds where some of us went to, you know, I'd meet people who went to Harvard and then got, you know, six figure law jobs and had worked in white shoe law firms ever since.
I'd meet people who, you know, had been bumming around the country and hadn't had a permanent home in, you know, months or years and just sort of like taking everything as it comes.
And I'd meet people with all sorts of different backgrounds and you know, there was a sort of common core of sort of humanness.
And everybody, everybody's story was unique, but everybody's story kind of sounded exactly the same kind of, you know, out there trying to figure it out, figure out what's right for them, what they wanted to do with their sort of time on earth, and, you know, hear about how they were trying to get there.
So sort of a Norman Rockwell sort of style lesson, I guess.
Omer (22:52.070)
What is it that you guys do at Hack Reactor that is different to other ways that people could learn to code?
I guess on the one end we've got of the spectrum, books, maybe online courses, which is basically, you know, just watching videos, and on the other extreme of the scale we've got a, you know, full blown degree.
And I guess you guys are somewhere in the middle there yeah.
What makes you different?
Douglas Calhoun (23:31.860)
Yeah, so, I mean, I think it's different.
Yeah, I can see how we might be in the middle there.
And I think that, you know, it's not necessarily a linear spectrum.
It might be a sort of network graph style, but there are a lot of different ways to learn to code, obviously.
And I tried several of them.
Right.
I tried sort of, you know, teaching myself out of textbooks.
I tried building my own websites out of just sort of messing around, fiddling around and trying to see what I could figure out on my own.
I took sort of a formal classes, you know, from the.
From the perspective of why, you know.
So one of the early criticisms we faced quite frequently is all of this stuff is available online for free.
Why would you pay someone for this?
You just go online and use stack overflow.
You can figure it out.
And it turns out that trying to teach yourself to code can be incredibly frustrating for almost everybody is incredibly frustrating because there are so many resources.
Yeah, there are a lot of resources out there, but it's sort of this jumbled.
It's almost a curation problem.
There's just so much out there and they don't fit together well.
And a lot of the resources are people's personal blogs, and they're putting stuff up there for other reasons because they would like you to subscribe to this or that.
So it's hard to get a cohesive path from not really even knowing your options to what is programming, what can it do for me, to which specialty should I study, to even what skills do I need, in what order?
And then there's just so many waypoints in between.
And it can also be incredibly.
Besides being sort of like lost in the wilderness with this tangled mess of different options of what to learn next is you hit these roadblocks where you hit one point and you says, step three, run this line of code.
Then step four, open up your terminal and type this in and you do step three and a big red error message pops up that says, error, no, cannot access the TA widget.
And you go, what?
And then you like, kind of look at your, you know, your online resource or your book and says, yes, step three, step four.
And there's just no help and you start Googling and you lose hours.
And a lot of times what I would do, you know, from my personal experience is I get through that point and then I just.
I couldn't move forward and I'd give up and I'd go back and try to, you know, find some other path forward, some other resource or other project to work on.
And so it was a lot of starting and stopping and restarting, and it was, you know, it's very isolating.
I would spend hours and days sort of locked in my room, like the fellow I mentioned at the top of the podcast, sort of trying to, you know, grind his way to a successful sort of startup software product.
I was in my room trying to grind my way to learning how to code, and it really sucked.
And I eventually, you know, gave up on that path entirely because it was just so sort of, you know, I was so demotivated and so sort of, you know, feeling like that wasn't going to be successful to me.
So from, from that standpoint, having, you know, what hack reactor provides over that sort of do it yourself experience is first of all, very cohesive, well thought out, well plumbed in the details, curriculum and path of what to learn in what order to be successful.
And then, you know, instructors there in the classroom sort of roaming the halls, almost, you know, catching questions, making sure people are working on the right things, making sure they're being successful and not spinning their wheels or grinding unproductively.
And then just the classroom environment of incredibly sort of talented and motivated people that you can identify who are working towards the same goals.
You know, almost exclusively.
We're doing sort of exercise work and we're working in pairs or groups.
And so that is just.
I mean, I would personally, if I had to go back and put myself in the shoes of a student, I would pay for the social experience, overlocking myself in my bedroom and suffering through trying to teach myself.
But maybe that's just my personality.
Now, on the other end of the spectrum is a traditional CS degree.
You know, to put it briefly, you know, academia moves very slowly.
Technology moves very quickly.
And so sort of, you know, first of all, they're still teaching in a style that's thousands of years old, where one guy gets up in front of the room with a sort of piece of chalk, or maybe now it's a sort of PowerPoint presentation and sort of talks and talks and talks.
And then maybe at the end he says, does anyone have any questions?
Or she says, does anyone have any questions?
And, you know, one sort of meek student raises their hand and maybe offers some small question, but, you know, it's not an interactive experience.
And it's also sort of, you know, they are teaching, you know, just now they're moving from maybe C to Java to maybe, you know, something more modern.
They're teaching operating systems and compilers, which is great if you want to go, you know, you know, do artificial intelligence research and move to a PhD program.
But it turns out that the way that traditional university programs are teaching and what they are teaching is not sort of well aligned to what the jobs need that are available out there, what skills they're looking for, and the tools and languages that you'll be using.
As a web developer working in a place like San Francisco, working for a company like a startup, there's not a lot of alignment there.
And so Hack Reactor is teaching sort of a more modern sort of pedagogy, we believe, and also a more sort of focused and direct skill set that will make you incredibly valuable to either for either starting your own software startup or working for one.
Omer (29:26.250)
Now, talking about what you teach, when I first heard of Hack Reactor, I assume that you'd be teaching, you know, there would be a heavy emphasis on maybe Ruby or Python or something like that.
But from what I found, there seemed to be a heavy emphasis on JavaScript.
Is that right?
Douglas Calhoun (29:53.300)
It's JavaScript all the way down, yeah.
Omer (29:55.540)
So why is that?
Douglas Calhoun (29:57.060)
Well, you know, first of all, it is now the case that you can do full stack development in JavaScript, so you can do front end programming and back end programming.
So in the client's browser as well as on your company's web server, you can program both of Those environments in JavaScript using tools like Node and Express.
And there are certain advantages if You Google isomorphic JavaScript, you can learn about some of them.
But I'm actually not, you know, I'm not so incredibly sold on that.
But it turns out, you know, more to the point, the world, the web is moving to this sort of, you know, from this old when the web was first envisioned, when HTML and CSS first came out, and even in the early days of JavaScript back in that Netscape world.
Web pages, it's sort of like reading a newspaper, right?
You load the content onto the screen, you scroll up and down, you read all the news articles on that page, and then you sort of click on the link that turns the page, throws that old page away and opens this new page from scratch.
And that's the way the web used to work.
And it was very server heavy.
A lot of the programming happened on the server side where there was, you could use any language like Python or like C or Perl or Ruby or whatever, Java, whatever you wanted to.
So that world has been and continues to disappear and it's being replaced by a world of not websites, but web applications, things like Google Map or Gmail is the classic example where you're clicking around on your different messages.
There's a lot of interactivity, things are changing on the page, but you're not, you know, the page doesn't go blank and you don't wait until a new page shows up and then all of the things that you typed into your compose new email box sort of disappear because you sort of clicked on a different message or something.
You know, now we are living in a world of sort of web applications where you need a lot of sort of live updating of the screen and that is all done in JavaScript.
JavaScript is the only scripting language that runs on the client side in your user's web browser.
And it turns out that there are a lot of fiddly pieces of JavaScript, a lot of sort of idiosyncrasies in this language that was famously sort of written in like, you know, two weeks or something by Brendan Naik working for Netscape or something like this.
So.
And it's not something that's taught in traditional CS programs and it's not something that a lot of sort of old school working developers who have been, you know, programming for 20 years or whatever are really well versed in, they're sort of only now sort of catching up with.
So it is both the case that it is a growing market and very quickly growing market for these JavaScript developers and also that this traditional CS programs and the developers working out there.
If you wanted to do back end programming with Ruby primarily, you might be competing with a bunch of developers who have 20 years of working experience.
If you want to do client side programming using JavaScript, front end development using JavaScript, a lot of those folks coming out of CS degrees and have been working in the industry for a long time are not competing with you for those jobs.
And it also turns out that front end development using JavaScript is a world in which is sort of a nice place for entry level developers to take their first steps for a lot of reasons.
Omer (33:18.670)
Got it, Got it.
So you're teaching people who sign up on Hack Reactor the fundamentals of computer science, but training them with a set of skills that fits a gap in the market.
Douglas Calhoun (33:38.990)
Yeah.
And a gap that's also growing.
In addition to not having a lot of developers who can fill those roles, that sort of gap is also the demand for those jobs is also growing incredibly rapidly.
Got it.
Omer (33:52.600)
Is there an example you can share with me of a success story?
Somebody who maybe wasn't doing so well, signed up for Hack Reactor and lived happily ever after.
Douglas Calhoun (34:05.560)
Yeah, I mean there are hundreds of those stories.
We have a sort of all alumni event that's coming up in middle of July where we have 800 of our alumni coming back to celebrate hacker actors success and their success.
So I mean there's just like names and faces come flooding to mind when you ask me that question.
But one in particular that I'll remember forever because he was very expressive, gentleman, and also it was a story that happened very early in our sort of journey.
He was in the second ever class and I did a Skype interview with him.
I remember sort of an entry interview, sort of a get to know you admissions interview style.
And he was living in Massachusetts and he was making in the $30,000 range.
He told me, very forthcoming on that.
And he'd always loved sort of programming and he'd loved being a nerd, but you know, he didn't have his community out there.
He felt very isolated.
And he also didn't feel like he was growing and building a real career.
He sort of felt like he was punching the clock.
And so I actually, I said come on out.
I actually let him.
He was living with me for the time that he was the Hack Reactor program.
And he came out and he tripled, he tripled his salary.
So he was making in the $100,000 range.
He was over the moon, ecstatic.
And he was, you know, he was surrounded by people in the classroom and in his workplace that really got him who valued, you know, the things that he valued were excited about the nerdy things that he was excited about and just sort of, I just remember his reaction when he got that offer letter.
I remember exactly sort of what he was wearing, where he was sitting, who was around when he got that offer letter for the job coming out of Hack Reactor, that was, that tripled his salary and led him onto a path.
Now he's, you know, he's in charge of his own code base at the company he works for.
Currently he's making north of $150,000.
This is, you know, less than two years after, maybe a year after he graduated, year and a half.
And it's just doing fantastically.
He's, you know, so that is just one of many, many stories.
Omer (36:18.240)
Okay, great.
Now a lot of people listening to this are going to be entrepreneurs who will say, okay, that's fine, but I'm not looking to get a job as a developer.
I'm building my own business.
What, what would you say to those people?
And why do you think that Hack reactor is something that they should also pay attention to.
Douglas Calhoun (36:43.560)
Yeah, I mean I totally identify with the sort of potential skepticism there.
People who say, well, I don't want to be a working developer.
It turns out in my personal experience and also from working with a lot of different folks that the power that you have by being able to even make small changes, you may not go whole hog and become a professional developer, but whatever path you choose, you know, if you.
The more technical background you have, the better understanding of the web ecosystem, the more sort of ability to mess around, get your hands dirty in the code base, make small changes.
It just gives you.
I've heard 10x and I really, you know, that sounds very hyperbolic, but it really does feel that way to me personally.
The power that you have in terms of, you know, I just, I just.
So many stories again flooding to my mind from these hundreds of people that I've worked with.
Folks who say, you know, I have these developers, they're in, you know, on the far side of the world, they're sort of steeped in a different, you know, sort of software tradition.
They use a sort of outdated tech stack and I only, I communicate with them once a day and if I want a small change, I write them an email or explain to them what I want.
I go to bed, I wake up the next morning, it's not quite right.
I'm frustrated.
It's not to my vision and I feel a bit powerless.
And I'm talking, I'm actually teaching a guy right now who's a site in Mexico.
They do, I think he said they have thousands of customers, paying customers, sort of a B2B enterprise.
He showed me their website.
It's just a mess.
And just the emotion in his voice when he talked about what his site was compared to what he wanted it to be.
It gives you an incredible power both in terms of making manifest your vision for a software product and also to be able to iterate rapidly, not have to wait overnight or even in the professional development sphere, days, weeks, months is not unusual to make somewhat small to medium sized changes in a code base.
To be able to get in there and know exactly what you want and then make it happen is incredibly liberating and incredibly gives you an incredible power.
Great.
Omer (39:05.880)
Okay, Doug, it's now time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I'd like you to answer them as quickly as you can.
Are you ready?
Douglas Calhoun (39:11.400)
Sure.
All right, let's do it.
Omer (39:13.320)
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Douglas Calhoun (39:17.160)
Probably something along the lines of don't sweat the small stuff.
Yeah, it's just there's so many career ending sort of disasters will happen to you and your business.
And it turns out in retrospect, they were only speed bumps on the path to eventual success.
Omer (39:36.150)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Douglas Calhoun (39:39.430)
So I love to read.
I'm definitely an information addict, but I don't read books very often at all.
Actually.
If I had to give someone a piece of advice on where to sort of spend their time sort of learning about the world around them, I would give them a tip that if you go to Reddit.com rrandom you can.
I love to.
When I sort of need some time to sort of let my mind wander, instead of picking up a book, I actually click on that button a bunch of times.
It brings up a random subreddit community.
And it's a very insightful look into a lot of different folks, what they're working on and what they're doing.
So that's where I go for sometimes for information and inspiration.
Omer (40:20.900)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Douglas Calhoun (40:25.620)
Definitely I would say sort of dogged persistence.
I really do believe that the path to success leads through failure after failure after failure, failed attempt after failed attempt after failed attempt.
And I often tell folks who I'm teaching, I say the only people who don't end up learning this stuff are the people who stop trying to.
So I would say, yeah, just the ability to shake it off and keep moving forward.
Omer (40:50.660)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Douglas Calhoun (40:55.780)
Yeah, so I go for long walks.
I like to sort of listen to podcasts and walk around, especially at night through sort of neighborhoods and just sort of let my mind wander there.
The other thing that I would say has been really helpful for me is I do about 20 minutes of yoga once or twice a day.
I try to do sort of like the mindfulness, mindfulness meditation thing.
I even attended a 10 day course on it and have tried to integrate a sort of meditation practice into my life.
I find it, I cannot, I cannot get it, you know, sort of moving.
So what I actually found is by doing some yoga and it doesn't, you know, yoga is not, doesn't need to be what they do in the gym and follow, okay, this is downward dog and this is.
But just sort of, sort of even, you know, maybe even throw that loaded term yoga away and just say sort of just stretching and some different sort of movement based strength Building and balance exercises while sort of doing that mindfulness thing of sort of throwing away conscious thoughts and sort of trying to find a sort of emotional peace has been really sort of transformational.
My ability to sort of, like, center myself.
Omer (42:06.630)
If you had to start over tomorrow, what type of business would you go and build?
In other words, what are some of the crazy ideas that you have that you wish you could go and work on?
Douglas Calhoun (42:16.970)
Oh, yeah.
I mean, there's just crazy ideas, like a lot of us, they pile up in a Word document somewhere folder somewhere.
So one that has been big on my mind is sort of Airbnb.
So I really like ideas that have a sense of community, building a community around them, anything in that direction.
Instead of building a software product, how can you build a community first and then build a product to serve that community?
And one that really has been stuck with me for a long, long time is sort of an Airbnb for local guides.
So I was traveling around in Southeast Asia for a while, and I was staying in sort of these, you know, hotels or, you know, hostels, and I wasn't really.
What I really wanted more than anything was to make a real connection with a local person and, like, learn about their life and what is interesting to them in their area and have them take me around to their favorite sort of coffee shops or hang out with their, you know, seeing their crowd.
So anything that I would really like to see a product built, sort of an Airbnb for local guides where you could go to a foreign country or foreign place and look up sort of a, you know, with Yelp reviews, people who would be willing to sort of take you around the city, you know, or the.
Or the place that they are and show you around from a local's perspective.
Something like that would be.
Omer (43:32.820)
That's an interesting idea.
All right.
If you had to start over.
I've already asked you that.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Douglas Calhoun (43:40.480)
So, right now I'm technically homeless.
I'm traveling around the country.
I was last month in San Francisco, this month in Austin.
Next month I'll be in la, starting small learning programs for folks and teaching in these different locations.
So I'm technically.
I suppose I don't have a permanent place of residence.
I don't know if I can apply for some government benefits or something, but it's been awesome.
Omer (44:09.460)
Finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Douglas Calhoun (44:12.740)
Oh, yeah, I've definitely mentioned a few already, but I have been on a big push for the last couple of years towards less consumption and more creation.
And that could be in the business realm, that could be in the programming realm.
Writing I love to draw on my iPad, so different drawing apps.
I love to play the guitar.
Anything that has to do with creating is a passion of mine.
Omer (44:37.490)
Awesome.
Doug, I want to thank you for joining me today and sharing your experiences and insights with our audience.
And thank you for letting us get to know you a little better personally as well.
Now if folks want to find out more about Hack Reactor, they can go to hackreactor.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Douglas Calhoun (44:56.850)
Yeah.
Dougackreactor.com so d o u g hackreactor.com, i'll try to send you at least a short note in reply.
Happy to hear from everyone.
Thanks again for having me.
Omer.
And thank you to your audience for joining us.
Omer (45:11.050)
It's been a pleasure.
Thanks Doug.
Cheers.
