I had this thought: \u2018I\u2019m going to change the world\u2019…. When you feel like the odds are stacked against you, then you want to do anything you can in order to give yourself the chance to make it to the top.<\/p>\n
\u2014Michael Ellison<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Its mission is deeply personal to Ellison. He grew up in rural Maine and there were times when he and his family were homeless. \u201cWhen you\u2019re that young, you don\u2019t really know what\u2019s going on. I just knew my mom was trying to take care of us,\u201d he says. \u201cI think growing up low income actually gave me a lot of perspective, made me really empathetic, made me really connect with any people who also came from disadvantaged backgrounds.\u201d<\/p>\n
It also drove him to dream big.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I got to high school, I had this thought: \u2018I\u2019m going to change the world.\u2019 I continued to think that when I got to BU.\u201d<\/p>\n
That impulse to have an impact inspired Ellison\u2019s entrepreneurial spirit, though he prefers not to call it that. \u201cI think of it more like a survival instinct,\u201d says Ellison. \u201cBecause when you feel like the odds are stacked against you, then you want to do anything you can in order to give yourself the chance to make it to the top.\u201d<\/p>\n
He founded his first company, Base, as a 19-year-old CAS sophomore. Base was a nonprofit focused on helping low-income students at risk of dropping out of high school turn their grades around and attend competitive four-year colleges. He took some time off from BU to grow the organization, but returned five years later to finish his degree.<\/p>\n
After graduating, he cofounded other companies, including Segment, a customer data management business that was recently acquired by Twilio, a cloud communications platform, for $3.2 billion.<\/p>\n
In 2013, he cofounded a for-profit iteration of CodePath with Nathan Esquenazi and Tim Lee, which provided accelerated software development classes to senior engineers at companies like Google and Facebook. In 2017, they shifted to the nonprofit CodePath.org. Its introductory courses provide a foundation to coding and are targeted to students who, like Ellison, never had experience with programming before entering college. All courses are developed in conjunction with top technology companies to ensure that students are career-ready upon graduation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re really focused on fundamentally changing what is being taught in computer science classrooms all over the country and how it\u2019s being taught,\u201d by tailoring the curriculum to the individual student, says Ellison, \u201cand on the systemwide impact that we can make on the education-to-employment pipeline.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Michael Ellison\u2019s CodePath.org helps students from underrepresented backgrounds become top programmers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":58110,"template":"","department":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/57075"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/r_cas_magazine"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/57075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58065,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/57075\/revisions\/58065"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"r_cas_department","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/department?post=57075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}