How Learn.co Started

Learn.co, the Learning Management System built at Flatiron School, drove significant institutional success. The platform commanded a price point unheard of in the market and scale beyond our physical campus spray-painted walls. The system ultimately generated over $60 million in annual revenue, and was sold to 2U for eight figures.

The Origin Story

Learn.co's genesis occurred around August 2013, approximately nine months into Flatiron School's operation. As the school expanded to three concurrent cohorts led by different instructors, inconsistencies emerged in curriculum implementation. Various instructors customized the provided materials, creating quality control concerns for future scaling.

The Sunday Meeting

"A Sunday Meeting?!?!"

The faculty convened on a Sunday (teaching schedules prevented weekday meetings) to address curriculum management challenges. I proposed a solution for managing multiple instructors' contributions while maintaining quality standards.

The concept involved a way for lots of people to share the curriculum at once, each maintain their own copy that could easily be monitored from the canonical, where changes could be taken and integrated across copies, and versioning was built in so you could rollback mistakes.

The team designed a curriculum management system using Git and GitHub as foundational infrastructure.

Platform Evolution

The internal tool "Ironboard" (the Flatiron Dashboard) expanded from curriculum management to cohort administration. Lectures stored as README files in GitHub repositories became interactive coding labs. Students submitted work through pull requests, with automated testing providing immediate feedback.

Recognizing linear growth limitations of physical school models, leadership pursued exponential scaling through an online campus. Rather than offering isolated courses, we envisioned replicating the complete in-person experience online, targeting 90% job placement and 80% graduation rates.

Pricing Strategy

The strategic insight: people are buying an outcome, an end result. The value proposition centered on life transformation through coding education and employment placement, not merely course delivery.

Online education buyers weren't seeking course access—they sought life-changing outcomes.

The Job Guarantee

The differentiator: launching with an industry-first Job Guarantee—ROI guaranteed or a full refund.

Results

Within three months, Learn.co reached 250 customers as projected. Year two generated approximately $10 million annual recurring revenue.

Post-acquisition, the platform administered all courses (in-person and online), supporting over $60 million annual revenue before my departure.