Jeremy
Keeshin
He co-founded a satirical newspaper and a coding company with the same college friend. One made people laugh. The other taught a generation to speak computer.
Jeremy Keeshin. Section leader turned founder. He still grades the whole country's homework.
The section leader who turned a teaching job into a company
Most people who take Stanford's famous introductory computer science course move on. Jeremy Keeshin stayed at the front of the room. He became a section leader and teaching assistant, helping run the intro program, grading, mentoring, and quietly building tools to make the whole thing work better. That instinct - notice a gap, build the fix - is the seed of everything that came next.
In 2012, weeks out of college, Keeshin and his classmate Zach Galant launched CodeHS. The pitch was disarmingly simple: give middle and high schools a real way to teach computer science, with a curriculum, teacher tools, and coding that runs in the browser. No lab of finicky machines. No teacher who needs a CS degree to get started. Just a class that any school could actually offer.
The idea landed. CodeHS joined the Imagine K12 edtech incubator that fall, won NBC's Education Nation Innovation Challenge in 2013, and kept growing until it became the largest platform for coding in American high schools. Today it reaches millions of students, and Keeshin still runs it as CEO.
What sets him apart is that he never handed the teaching off. He has personally visited more than 200 schools, sitting in classrooms and watching kids write their first lines of code. For a founder, that is an unusual amount of chalk dust. It is also the whole point: CodeHS is not a coding company that stumbled into schools. It is a school project that grew up.
His argument, spelled out in his 2021 book, is that coding belongs next to reading and writing as a basic literacy. Not because every kid will become a software engineer, but because software now runs the world they live in - and understanding it should not be a specialist's privilege.
He ran a comedy paper first
In high school, Keeshin started a satirical newspaper modeled on The Onion. When he got to Stanford as a freshman in 2008, he did it again - co-founding The Stanford Flipside with Zach Galant and Adam Adler. It ran as a weekly leaflet slipped into dorms and dining halls, and it became a campus fixture.
Here is the detail that gives the whole story its shape: the friend he founded the comedy paper with, Zach Galant, is the same friend he later founded CodeHS with. Two very different products, one long collaboration. The jokes came first; the curriculum came second.
The comedy instinct never fully left. Keeshin talks about coding the way a good editor talks about writing - as something anyone can learn to do, and something a lot more fun than it looks from the outside.
A career in chapters
Read Write Code
A friendly introduction to the world of coding, and why it is the new literacy. Keeshin starts at the beginning and explains the building blocks of modern tech: programming, the internet, data, apps, the cloud, cybersecurity, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.
It is written for the non-programmer - the parent, the teacher, the curious student - who wants to understand the machinery running their world without a computer science degree.
WRITE
CODE
Off the clock
He juggles
An avid juggler - the kind of hobby that rewards patience, repetition, and not minding when you drop the ball.
Crosswords & riddles
A committed fan of crosswords and riddles. The pattern-hunting brain never really clocks out.
All over the map
His personal site roams from self-driving cars and cryptocurrency to air travel, city design, books, and management.