First Draft

My name is Raghu Betina, and I'm the founder of First Draft. Over the past 13 years, I’ve taught 3,000+ non-programmers how to program. Before that, I was a non-programmer myself — a non-technical founder of technical startups. That was frustrating, at times. The engineering part of the company — the core part — was a black box to me. I didn’t know what features would be hard, what features should be easy, why things were late, or how to help. I was desperate to learn to program myself, so that I could have some some understanding of these things. I tried a lot of different ways of learning — books, online courses, even going back to college to study computer science. None of it stuck, and I almost gave up. Then, I heard about a brand-new startup claiming to teach people how to program in just a few months. (This was the first “coding bootcamp.”) I was skeptical, but I took a chance on it — and it clicked. I learned enough to start bringing my ideas to life, all by myself. It was so empowering that I soon dropped everything in order to teach other non-programmers how to take that first step. I’ve built courses at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering, the University of Illinois’ Discovery Partners Institute, and the University of Chicago. For the past 10 years or so, my day job has been at the latter’s Booth School of Business, where I’m a Clinical Associate Professor of Operations Management & Entrepreneurship. I’ve taught the course over a hundred times now. I refine it every time I teach it, integrating student feedback and new technologies, while remaining laser-focused on helping beginners take that first, transformative step.