"I started taking programming seriously in high school. The summer after my junior year I wrote my first iPhone app. It sold 50 thousand copies in the app store. This was by far the coolest thing I had ever done to that point, and I got tons of job offers after that. The fulfillment of creating a real product was unparalleled to anything I had ever experienced. After that I became obsessed with building products.
When got to UCLA I was fairly disappointed because I had already learned much of what was being taught, through teaching myself how to build apps in high school. And the coursework was not very fulfilling in the sense that we just wrote programs that other people had written. I ending up taking time off from UCLA to build a game with a buddy of mine. One day, while we were working on the game, we had an idea: to start a company around helping other people build real products and give people the same experience we were able to have. We graduated from an incubator, Y Combinator, in Winter 2012. This past summer we had 120 high school and college students for our first formal summer program, and launched in San Francisco, Palo Alto, and New York.
College computer science classes are very theoretical; they teach you certain things that are very important to know in order to have a successful career-- but fewer of them teach you how to sit down and actually code, build, ship a product. We’re building something to bridge this gap in the traditional education system."
Ashu Desai | Make School
