Nicholas
Bergson-
Shilcock
He never sat in a classroom as a kid. So he built a place where nobody has to - and thousands of programmers showed up.
The unschooler-in-chief. Apple IIe BASIC at home, then HyperCard games, then a company built on the radical idea that people learn best when you trust them.
A school with the rules removed
Picture a room in lower Manhattan. A sixteen-year-old who taught herself Python last spring sits beside a staff engineer who left Google to remember why she liked computers in the first place. Neither is being graded. Neither paid to be there. There is no syllabus on the wall, no professor at the front, no certificate waiting at the end. This is the Recurse Center, and Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock built it on purpose to look exactly like this.
He is the co-founder and CEO, and the easiest way to understand the place is to understand the man. Nick grew up unschooled. While other children moved through grades and bells and standardized tests, he directed his own education - chasing what interested him, dropping what didn't, learning to code on an Apple IIe in BASIC and building games in HyperCard before he was old enough to drive. That childhood is not a footnote. It is the whole blueprint. The Recurse Center is what happens when someone who learned by following his own curiosity decides to build that experience for everyone else.
The model is deceptively simple. Programmers apply to spend up to three months at the retreat, working on whatever they want, however they want. It is modeled less on a coding bootcamp and more on a writers' retreat or an artists' residency: a quiet, well-lit space where serious people get serious about their craft. The only structure is the structure you build for yourself. And that, it turns out, is the hard part - which is why Nick and his colleagues talk so much about volition.
"Building your volitional muscles," the Recurse Center teaches, "means growing your ability to make decisions about your work and learning based on your own curiosity and joy, rather than external pressures and fears." It sounds gentle. It is actually demanding. Strip away the deadlines and the grades and you are left alone with the question most schools never let you ask: what do I actually want to make? For many people who arrive at RC, answering that honestly is the whole point of the three months.
Founded in 2010 and incubated in Y Combinator's summer batch that year, the company first went by the name Hacker School. The first cohort of programmers arrived in 2011. In 2015 it rebranded to the Recurse Center, partly because "hacker" carried baggage the place never wanted, and partly because the new name pointed at something truer: recursion, the act of a thing referring back to itself, of learning that loops and deepens. Today it operates out of New York City and has welcomed thousands of programmers through its doors.
"Both the educational and business value of RC comes from the strength and quality and diversity of participants themselves."
Four small rules that do enormous work
There is almost no structure at the Recurse Center. The exception is a short list of social rules - lightweight by design, but quietly responsible for why the room feels safe enough to be a beginner in.
The pedantic correction that adds nothing but friction. Banned.
"You've never heard of X?!" makes people hide what they don't know. Don't.
Lobbing advice over a wall without committing to the conversation.
The small, often unintended slights that quietly tell people they don't belong.
Rewriting who belongs in the room
Nick has been blunt about the goal. "We don't want RC to look like the broader technology industry where women and other groups are vastly underrepresented." The numbers suggest he means it.
Distributed in grants since 2012 to women, trans, genderqueer, nonbinary, Black, Latinx, Native American, and Pacific Islander applicants.
Of a recent batch identified as women, trans, or nonbinary - a number almost unheard of in professional software.
Of participants hold a computer science degree. The rest are self-taught, career-switchers, dropouts, and the relentlessly curious.
How he got here
- 2006Moves to New York City - the place that becomes his lifelong obsession and the company's home.
- 2010Co-founds Hacker School and goes through Y Combinator's Summer 2010 batch.
- 2011The first batch of programmers arrives at the retreat.
- 2012Begins distributing diversity grants to underrepresented programmers.
- 2015Hacker School becomes the Recurse Center; alumni start interviewing applicants.
- 2017Starts teaching himself Mandarin Chinese - flashcards and all.
- 2020Turns nick.is into a "collection of things he likes," a small-web love letter.
Off the clock
Mandarin, by hand
By May 2020 he'd logged 314 hours on the Anki flashcard app, studying 360 of 365 days. And yet he still prefers handwriting physical 3x5 index cards. The man who removed all the structure from learning is, in private, gloriously disciplined.
A guide to NYC's bookstores
For fun, he maintains a curated, neighborhood-by-neighborhood guide to New York's independent and specialty bookstores. He is fascinated by the city itself - its history, architecture, food, and transit.
Still writing code
Despite running the company, he still occasionally programs. The CEO has not entirely escaped the keyboard, and doesn't seem to want to.
"Build your volitional muscles."
The quietest radical in tech education
It is tempting to file the Recurse Center under "nice idea" and move on. That would be a mistake. Most experiments in education that remove grades and curricula collapse into chaos or drift into vagueness. RC has done neither. It has run for well over a decade, kept itself free, paid its own way, and along the way produced a community of programmers who tend to describe the experience in the language people usually reserve for things that changed their lives.
What makes it work is the thing that is hardest to copy: trust. Nick built a place that trusts adults to know what they want to learn, trusts them to ask for help, trusts them to be kind to one another with only four small rules to lean on. In an industry that loves to gate, certify, rank, and filter, this is a genuinely contrarian bet. The bet is that talent is everywhere and what most people lack is not ability but permission and a good room to work in.
There is a neat symmetry to it all. A child who was never schooled grew up to build a school. A person who learned by following his curiosity built an institution out of that single habit. He even named the company after recursion - the loop that calls back to itself and goes deeper each time. The kid on the Apple IIe is still in there, and so is the philosophy that raised him.
He is not loud about any of this. There is no founder mythology, no manifesto tour, no relentless self-promotion. He studies Mandarin with index cards, keeps a list of his favorite bookstores, occasionally ships some code, and runs - patiently, for years - one of the most quietly humane institutions in technology. The work makes the argument. That seems to be exactly how he wants it.