After growing CodeCombat to a strong, profitable position, I handed off CEO/COO responsibilities to our excellent leadership team in order to focus on AI R&D.

Programming is magic. It's the ability to create things from pure imagination. We founded CodeCombat to give learners the feeling of wizardly power at their fingertips by using typed code and real programming languages.As it turns out, that enables them to learn faster too. Way faster. It's like having a conversation instead of reading a manual. We want to bring that conversation to every school and to every student, because everyone should have the chance to learn computer science.From an open-source project with hundreds of contributors from around the world, CodeCombat has grown into a movement in computer science education. From the first line of code to the hundreds of thousands of schools and tens of millions of students reached, I've had the opportunity to oversee both the game and the business.

My cofounders and I grew Skritter to the #1 app for learning Chinese and Japanese characters. We then handed it off to the current team, under whose expert guidance it continues to grow while we use the lessons we learned teaching Chinese to teach the language of computer science (see CodeCombat).

Chinese is viewed as one of the most difficult languages to learn, and most of the difficulty comes from having to learn thousands of complicated characters (汉字) and the corresponding vocabulary words in a rich language with almost no common ground with English. And on top of the characters, there's the tones!But what if you could remember 95% of all the characters, words, and tones you ever learned? And what if you could permanently learn a new piece of Chinese every 54 seconds? Then anyone could learn this beautiful language. With Skritter, I developed a Chinese-specific spaced-repetition learning algorithm and a stroke-level handwriting recognition system to make Chinese as easy as Spanish.