self-taught-coder
(4)
Katie Fang
Katie Fang is the founder and CEO of SchooLinks, an Austin-based education technology company whose college and career readiness platform serves millions of K-12 students across U.S. school districts. Born in Shanghai and educated across four countries, she taught herself to code and built the first version of the product with $5,000 in savings, then grew it from a student-facing app into an enterprise SaaS platform that school districts use to track and improve student outcomes. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education, she has taken SchooLinks onto the Inc. 5000 list three years running and raised roughly $90 million in venture funding through a 2024 Series B.
Ian Gutwinski
Ian Gutwinski is the founder and CEO of Mosaic, a New York company rebuilding private-equity deal modeling for the AI era. A former Onex Partners principal turned self-taught coder, he started the product as an MIT class project during his Harvard MBA and now counts five of the world's top ten PE firms among its users. In April 2026 Mosaic raised an $18M Series A led by Radical Ventures to turn deal math into software so investors can spend less time linking cells and more time thinking.
Tyson Caly
Tyson Caly is Co-CEO and Chief Product Officer of Offset Partners, a Napa-based company he co-founded with Byron Hoffman that is equal parts wine commerce platform and brand studio. Self-taught coder who forewent college, he started in wine web design at 14 after moving from suburban Chicago, built his first wine site at Don Sebastiani & Sons in the early 2000s, and spent 17 years quietly building Offset into the premier DTC ecommerce and brand partner for America's finest wineries - from Kosta Browne and Bryant Estate to Kermit Lynch and Frog's Leap.
Harshita Arora
Harshita Arora is General Partner at Y Combinator - the youngest in the organization's history - having dropped out of school at 15 in Saharanpur, India, taught herself to code, built and sold a crypto app featured by Apple at age 16, won India's Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Shakti Puraskar, moved to San Francisco on an O-1 visa, co-founded AtoB (the 'Stripe for Trucking' valued at ~$800M), and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 before joining YC as a Visiting Partner in 2025 and ascending to General Partner in April 2026 at age 25.