Meet the Startup Award Finalist: CodeGorilla
/ Interview 3 of 3 /
Last, but definitely not least in our StartupAward interview series is CodeGorilla — the social enterprise helping the workforce of the 21st century.
If you haven’t heard already, they just won 1st place (!) in the StartupAward competition by TEDxAmsterdamWomen. Congrats to the team!
Read on the see what they’re up to, straight from Co-Founder Diem Do…
MEET CODEGORILLA — Founded by Diem Do & Jelle van der Meulen
- Who is CodeGorilla? -
CodeGorilla is a social enterprise that teaches software development and 21st century skills to unemployed people and helps them get a job at IT companies. We do do this with a 4 month-long IT bootcamp, and now have 5 locations throughout the Netherlands.
- On a Mission to… -
- make the tech industry more inclusive and diverse by providing them with software developers from all walks of life (think refugees, women, people with disability etc.)
- help them learn how to code, together with all the necessarily social skills and methods needed to become the developers that IT companies are looking for
- How it all Started -
I come from Emmen. Located in Drenthe, the North of the Netherlands, which has one of the highest unemployment rates of the Netherlands. I saw that there were jobs in IT and was looking for a job myself. I wanted to work for a cool tech company, CataWiki, and they only had job openings for developers and recruiters.
I didn’t know how to code and got rejected for the recruiter role. I thought that if CataWiki doesn’t want to hire me, I had to make sure to have the skills they were looking for — coding.
When I started learning how to code, I wanted to find people to learn with me and an experienced developer that could help. This is what led to me start CodeGorilla.
Fun fact: 1 year later, CodeGorilla won the Social Impact Award 2017. I got an email from Marco Jansen (co-founder, CataWiki) to congratulate us and he told me that he wanted to work for CodeGorilla as a coach (and he did).
- Giving Back -
CodeGorilla makes an impact in 3 main ways:
- We’re making sure that the tech industry becomes more inclusive and diverse. We believe that, in the end, the pay off will become much bigger.
- Helping unemployed people get the necessary skills to get a job for many many years to come.
- Helping unemployed people to get a job saves us, as a society, in welfare and health costs. It also helps CodeGorilla’s students show their children they can go from unemployment to working for companies such as IBM. We had a single mother with two kids in our bootcamp, who is now working as a developer.
- Current Challenge -
We are now scaling to multiple cities across the Netherlands, so managing scattered office buildings and staff has been quite a challenge. Next, I would love to scale our company to countries and cities where tech education and IT talent is needed.
- Who Should Get in Touch?-
We’re looking for tech coaches who want to teach our students & impact investors also on a mission to good & good business. Someone who finds making impact equally as important as making a profit.
- Diem’s Message to the Tech Industry -
The message I’d like to share is to the tech industry: Keep an open mind when hiring new, tech talent. People who come from different backgrounds, without a traditional diploma, can also be of great value to companies. For example, we need more female developers.
Thanks, Diem, for sharing your vision! If you can help & would like to get in contact with the founders of CodeGorilla, contact shahar@amsterdamcapitalweek.com!
…
Get to know CodeGorilla better online + read more about Startup Award here.
