TechLab Education

TechLab Education was an afterschool and summer program in the Bay Area that taught computer science and hardware prototyping to people of all ages. I started it in 2013, and converted a retail space into the first facility with my own hands.

In the image above, I'm on the very bottom. Above me are some students and instructors who have gone on to do amazing things. There is a CTO of a YC 22 startup, two senior software engineers at Apple, a game developer at a major studio, and several others. If you see yourself in one of these photos, I would absolutely love to hear what you're up to today - you can share either privately or publicly, I'd just love to hear your story.

The slogan was "we make makers"#

I designed the curriculum around an emerging idea at the time, that kids learn best by making things. Instead of teaching a bunch of boring computer science theory, teach them how to make a game. Instead of just turning an LED on and off, teach them how to move motors and glue those motors to cardboard.

Growing and selling the program#

I scaled to multiple locations over several summers, and pretty quickly found that the biggest challenge to scaling was finding great instructors. It is common to find people with the right technical skills, but it is a much more unique combination of technical communication skills that makes for a great teacher. One way to cultivate a great teacher out of a college student is to have them create a lesson plan, and then iterate on how well they actually communicate their idea to the students.

The company was acquired in 2017, and the new leadership continued operating it for several more years, until the pandemic rapidly shifted the nature of in-person education programs.

Building the facility myself#

I constructed the entire facility myself. I wanted to have directional lighting that could be selectively dimmed, large projection screens, and enough space for teachers to stand behind students and interact with them. I also wanted to avoid creating tangled messes of wires, and ended up mounting everything under desks and using wireless peripherals.

Yelp is the worst#

I hope people never forget what this period of time was like for small business owners when it came to Yelp. Yelp is the worst company ever, their sales tactics are borderline predatory, and I celebrate their current irrelevance and impending demise. Yelp did manipulate reviews and ratings for their own personal gain, by the way.

However, Yelp is great because I was able to capture some snapshots of people's good experiences at Techlab and preserve them here for posterity.