So today I am the founder and executive director of a nonprofit organization called Code Platoon, and we train veterans and military spouses to become professional software developers. I am neither a software developer nor a nonprofit professional by training. I was an engineer by training. I graduated from college, worked as an engineer, went back and got a masters, is an engineer. Aan den promptly left engineering and went into finance where I spent the next 20 years of my life having sort of ah, ah, very career within finance, but mostly in the trading side of it. For most of it, I traded equity derivatives and volatility products. I've built a trading team. I got my MBA in the process from the University of Chicago, and really, that was the bulk of my professional career was in finance, and somewhere in my early forties, the trading side of it had lost its appeal to me. Andi, I have been very fortunate that I had also done quite well financially in the process, So I took a step back and decided that I wanted to re evaluate what my next path would be, but it probably wasn't going to be in trading anymore. And I decided that I wanted for a lot of different reasons, mostly for personal satisfaction, that I wanted to start a company. I had started small organizations within companies, but I've never started one of my own. And so to go down the path of starting a company today, um, many. You know, many entrepreneurs know that you really need to be one of three people. You need to either be the business person, the tech person or the sales marketing revenue person. And I was I had a business background. I had an MBA. I built businesses. But if you start looking around to build a team, you realize that for every 10 business people, there's one tech person. There is maybe one or two revenue people. So I decided that I needed to develop talent on some least a knowledge of how to be a tech person and having been an engineer in the past, not a computer science engineer. But having engineering background, I thought it's something that I could tackle. So I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to become a software developer. Um, and it really had settled. I'm going to get a master's degree When this new kind of program called the coding boot camp. Uh, this new kind of model educational training model was being developed in the first organization that was offering this model was Dev Boot Camp. And the premise that Dev Boot Camp offered was that if you come to our program, if you get admitted and you attend our program, it's on Lee Nine weeks long now, each of those days is gonna be 14 hours long. Um, but in the course of those nine weeks, we will teach you everything you need to know to start a career as a junior software developer. So whereas a four year the traditional path Thio becoming a developer is going to get CS degree computer science degree, that's four years, and you know, you learn a lot about how to be a software developer in those four years. But could platoons or de Beauchamp said, In nine weeks, we're going to teach you enough so you can start working right away. We're going to teach you to be This is the analogy. They like to use how to be a carpenter whereas university teaches you how to be an architect, architect finish with a lot of theoretical knowledge on baby. They're not ready to start building things right away. But they have, ah, really great view of how the entire building process works. Carpenters. They focus on putting the for work together and getting the building up. So I went through the program, and sure enough, I got a job. Was a software developer. I was amazed that in nine weeks I was now working as a software developer and everybody in my class. I also got the job as a software developer, and only two or three of them out of 16 had any kind of technical background. Um, so I was just amazed by this. And so I went to work as a software developer for a little while. That's not what I really wanted to do that seemed, um, I wanted to build something, and writing code wasn't my end goal. It was just a part of the path. So while I sat with this for a while, the origin story of Code Platoon is that my 12 year old son at the time wanted me to get him a video game called Call of Duty and Call of Duty is a first person shooter game. It's fairly violent, and I don't have a problem with the game itself. But I thought he was maybe a little too young, and I told him as much and he said, That's fine But just so you know all the sales from call of duty on the very first day, those go to the call of Duty Foundation and the Call of Duty Foundation is a veteran supporting nonprofit, and so he sent me a link to the website for the call of Duty Foundation. I opened the link and on their website, I don't know. They still do this now, but at the time they talked about why it was that it was important to be a veteran serving non profit. And they talked about the challenges of veterans face re integrating into the workforce, high unemployment numbers incredibly high under employment numbers. And so as I saw this, I realized, Well, I've just been through a program that maybe doesn't solve this problem all at once, but certainly attack a small piece of it where we can just train veterans in software development in a very short period of time and get it in the workforce and not worry about whether it's feeling workforce understands them. So I went to go look for a nonprofit coding boot camp where I could volunteer on it. Turns out it didn't exist, not when the serve veterans. So at this point, I realized, OK, this is the business that I wanted to start. I have been very deliberate about my next path. I wanted to bring me personal satisfaction, and I knew that that meant having control of my of my work space, having control of who I worked with on DSO service to others. Usually a lot of people find tremendous satisfaction on does when when you look at the classes that teach happiness, for example, ah, lot of times they break out the factors that lead toa folks people, satisfaction and happiness in life service. Others is really an important part of this. So I took my business background. I took this vision and put together a board and built um co platoon. We took a lean startup approach. We did one session, um, took us a while to do it, but we had great success. We had eight students placed them all. And our goal was to be like the best coding boot camps out there in terms of curriculum and education, but also make this program that was accessible to the career path, which means very large scholarships. Nobody would pay more than 20% of the tuition cost on been working with tech enabled companies to commit to host our graduates for apprenticeships. So now we work with companies like J. P. Morgan and Granger on Deck Center and lots of other companies who help take our graduates and place him to that first apprenticeship. And once I have that first job, the career in software engineering is terrific. Um, so sorry. I don't know. There's a little wordy for how it got to where I am today s Oh, now I've been We've been doing this for four years and we're doing great. Um, we have record numbers of applicants are placements are terrific, and really, it's just been very fulfilling to do what we dio

so we effectively offer four programs and they're all the same curriculum. Two of the programs are the immersive programs, and those two programs are attached. One is Thean Person version, and when is the remote version? Although, as you can imagine, today all the classes of being delivered remotely but under normal circumstances, the remote and the on and the in person classes occur concurrently, Um, they last for 14 weeks, thes air very full weeks each day, not unlike my experience that de Beauchamp each day is 10 to 12 hours a day, sometimes Mawr. We teach in the morning time we go over lectures and we teach them in the material and then, for the rest of the day, their hands on coding on the writing code, small challenges and exercises in the beginning. Later on, they're building up the bigger projects, and we're always working to stay current on the curriculum. So currently we teach javascript and python and and frameworks to help them learn how to be Web developers. But that that changes a session to session. Um, typically, that's that's the full immersive experience. Um, that we offer the same curriculum in an evening and weekend program that takes about 28 weeks. That's still very challenging. Now we're talking three nights a week plus weekends or plus a Saturday weekend. But it's the same exact curriculum Onda same support, and then we have the South based program, and that is a free program to veterans and military spouses. And that is our entire curriculum with the videos online that veteran military spouse can go through on their own. So it's unsupported, which means it doesn't cost us anything. They put it out there, but they don't get any real time feedback from instructors or t A s. But it's free to use where our goal is to make this career accessible on. For many people, that means that they can only do it on their own pace or they can't afford it. Um, so we've had folks going through that that, you know, get through much of the curriculum and really get a lot of the value without paying anything, and at their own pace

great question. So we update our course every every 14 weeks is one of our sessions. And we're constantly asking what are the frameworks? Material were teaching relevant to the industry. So we do we ask that question not just of ourselves on. By the way, our leadership includes a senior engineer at Venmo, which is owned by PayPal. Um, it includes other, uh, engineers have been in the industry, but also, we work very closely with a lot of senior engineers in the industry to come be mentors and t A s. And our board also has senior technologists from different firms in Chicago. And so we constantly are asking kind of tactical level. Are we teaching the right material aan den? At a strategic level, we step back probably every 18 months and ask, Are we teaching the right frameworks we teach? Is this with the industry wants So there we will. We will take a look to see what are the industry trends for job placement on DFO for development cycle of work. And then also we we do want a factory in the ease of learning. So a language like C eyes incredibly powerful language that everyone maybe should learn, but not much production work. It's done and see, and it's difficult to learn. So we focus on the higher level scripting languages that are easier to teach, and they're also very, very wide lose. Which is why, again, why we teach JavaScript and Python today. Um, 2.5 years ago, we were teaching Ruby, which was a great learning language, but not not as much a favor in the job market as Python. Um, yeah, so that's that's both your questions.