“We want to give you an offer.”
It was two months ago that I was told this by a VC. As an 18-year-old immigrant and high school student, raising a pre-seed round of 800k is a surreal moment.
I’m both thankful and excited that Water Tower Ventures and RTP Global have invested in our pre-seed round, and I’m looking forward to what the next 12 months will bring! Jeremy, Idan, and the entire Water Tower team have been professional and incredible to work with along with Tom and Alex from RTP Global! Thank you for believing in Kodezi, and I know we’ll accomplish amazing things together.
Special thanks go out to Eric, who was the first to invest in my vision and has guided me through possibly every aspect of the startup journey. Thank you for your guidance and unwavering support. I know answering questions at 3am on Slack isn’t fun.
Over the course of the past year, I’ve been working relentlessly on Kodezi, a Grammarly for programmers. After finishing our closed beta last year, I realized this could have a much bigger impact than I initially thought.
I received thousands of sign-ups during the closed beta. I spoke with engineers, students from my own high school, as well as students from top universities like MIT, Stanford, and Harvard. Each person shared a common pain point, they wanted to spend less time debugging and more time building. Can you believe it takes 30x longer to fix a bug than to write code? It’s a problem programmers at all levels deal with every day, and existing solutions don’t solve it.
During this time, I never imagined I would also be spending countless hours talking to angel investors, venture capitalists, and CEOs of major tech companies.
“We love your idea, but you’re too young.”
“Will people actually want to use this?”
“I think you’re better off working for a company than starting your own.”
Despite receiving validation from my beta users, these were the most common responses I received from these meetings. I would also be lying if I claimed these rejections didn’t affect me. However, they didn’t stop me from pursuing my startup goals since I realized Kodezi could have a profound impact on education.
Today, Kodezi is on its way to be piloted across my local school district. We were also selected as part of the Elite 200 for the ASU/GSU Summit, a prestigious event showcasing the most innovative ed-tech startups.
There is also a commercial side to Kodezi. We’ve had engineers from Slack, Airbase, Amazon, Tesla, and others reach out to us asking how we can improve their debugging and product delivery times. We are now building an infrastructure that can support team collaboration, extensions with IDEs, large code files, and other features business teams will benefit from.
So yes, I’m an 18-year-old student. I’m unproven, untested, and I can’t legally drink at networking events. However, I’ve learned a lot in the past 12 months alone by doing and feel like I’m in my final year of an MBA program. The experience so far has been fun, exciting, stressful, and sometimes scary. I know I still have a long way to go, but with this new round of funding, a talented team, and a strong support system, I’m excited and optimistic about Kodezi’s future!