self-taught-developer
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Aaron Elder Turned a Recruiting Headache Into a 25,000-User Product
A visual-arts dropout taught himself to code, helped design Microsoft CRM, and learned that hiring was the stubborn problem hiding inside every growing company. Crelate is his attempt to turn that lived frustration into useful software.
Dhanush Balachandran
Dhanush Balachandran is the founder and CEO of Sortly, a visual, QR-code-driven inventory and asset tracking platform used by small businesses, families, and teams in construction, medical, retail, and education. A marketer-turned-iOS-developer, he taught himself to code, built an app originally called 'My Things,' rebranded it to Sortly, and grew it to millions of downloads. Before Sortly he spent over 15 years across Intel, Apple, DJI, and Y Media Labs, where he forecast worldwide CPU demand, priced server chips, and built ResearchKit medical research apps.
Alex De Simone
Alex De Simone is the CEO and co-founder of Avochato, a business messaging platform that lets sales, support, and operations teams talk to customers over text. He launched it the summer after his first year at Stanford GSB, grew it to seven-figure revenue in under a year, and raised a $5M Series A led by Amity Ventures in 2018. Before Avochato he co-founded Jobr, a Tinder-style job-search app acquired by Monster.com. A self-taught coder with a mechanical engineering background, he turned a side project into a product used by 1,000+ businesses for millions of two-way conversations.
Gregg Mojica
Gregg Mojica is the founder and CEO of Kinter.ai, the AI-accounting company that grew out of Alloy Automation, the integration platform he co-founded with Sara Du in 2019 (YC W20). He started coding at 12, shipped three apps before he turned 18, got into Cornell and skipped it to build payments infrastructure at First Data/Fiserv, then helped build Alloy into the connective tissue for thousands of ecommerce and AI-agent workflows backed by a16z and Bain Capital Ventures. Today his AI Accountants close the books for enterprises including Amazon, Mastercard and UPS.
William Sankey
William Sankey is the co-founder, CEO and Head of Product of Northspyre, a cloud intelligence platform that has helped manage more than $175 billion in real estate development projects. A Yale- and Harvard-trained developer who once helped run the billion-dollar Madison Square Garden renovation, he taught himself to code on nights and weekends to kill the spreadsheet drudgery he saw everywhere in the industry. That side project became Northspyre, which he founded in 2017 and has since grown on more than $32 million in venture funding.
Kilo Loco
Kilo Loco is the alias of Kyle Lee, a self-taught iOS engineer, instructor, and content creator who turned a string of dead-end jobs into a nine-year career building production mobile apps. After teaching himself Swift to build apps for his own family, he became a Senior Developer Advocate at AWS Amplify, reached tens of thousands of developers through YouTube tutorials and courses, and now leads iOS work on accessibility testing tools at Deque Systems while tinkering at the edge of AI and developer tooling.