Jim McKelvey has stated his intentions to expand LaunchCode, the paired-programming initiative that is primed to help fix St. Louis’ tech talent shortage, to a national — and even international — level.
He’ll start in Miami, where he plans to move with his wife and son in a few weeks.
His 3-year-old son will be attending school there, McKelvey said. And if the city shows a need similar to St. Louis’ — namely, a need for more computer programmers to help grow companies — he’ll set up a LaunchCode division in the city.
“That’s just a place where I have friends and colleagues,” he said. “And Miami has two international airports, so it’s unique for me and what I do. But there is a chronic programming talent shortage that is a problem around the world.”
St. Louis will remain LaunchCode’s center of operations, he said. And McKelvey will continue to be involved in the handful of other initiatives he has going on in the city — SixThirty, Arch Grants, Cultivation Capital to name a few.
“St. Louis is my hometown and I’ll still favor it whenever I can,” he said.
McKelvey is the subject of Friday’s cover story in the St. Louis Business Journal. For more on that story, pick up a paper or visit the Business Journal’s website Friday morning.
McKelvey’s plan to expand LaunchCode was announced in April, when McKelvey said he was eying potential locations such as Miami, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Denver and a location somewhere on the West Coast.
McKelvey said officials at EdX, a joint venture between Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that offers free courses, including the computer science course LaunchCode is using to train some of its aspiring coders, are encouraging him to take the program national before it reaches its year anniversary, which is in September.
LaunchCode founder Jim McKelvey said this morning that he already has office space in Miami and will move there temporarily in June to work on a Miami version of the training and job-placement program. Baltimore, Philadelphia and Denver also are likely destinations for LaunchCode, he said.
McKelvey, speaking at an Innovation St. Louis forum at the Missouri Botanical Garden, said officials of EdX, an education joint venture between Harvard and MIT, encouraged him to expand LaunchCode. In St. Louis, LaunchCode is using a free EdX computer science class to train programmers. The class is offered online, but LaunchCode is offering hands-on sessions to augment the coursework.
LaunchCode, which began last September, has placed 57 programmers in $15-an-hour apprenticeships with St. Louis companies. Twenty-seven of those have been hired for full-time jobs at an average salary of $55 an hour, McKelvey said.
He sees the combination of EdX and LaunchCode as something that could disrupt the model for computer science education. “The program is going to the world with the message that education doesn’t have to put you into debt, and it doesn’t have to take up four years of your life,” McKelvey said.
SixThirty, the financial services tech startup accelerator founded by Jim McKelvey in 2013, has selected four startups to makeup its spring 2014 class. Each startup will receive a $100,000 investment in return for an equity stake (between 5 percent and 10 percent).
The companies will move to St. Louis for the four-month program, where they’ll receive mentoring and access to global financial companies like MasterCard and Edward Jones.
Read more at www.bizjournals.com.
Jack joined one of my companies – we did publishing software for conferences – when he was 15, basically as an intern. He was still at school and worked for us for three summers. His mother owned a coffee shop. This was before you could get Ritalin readily, so we used to use the chocolate-covered espresso beans to stay awake during long hauls. One of my co-workers got talking to her. She mentioned that her son liked working with computers, so we agreed for him to come in for an interview, then forgot about it.
Read more at www.theguardian.com.
Square co-founder Jim McKelvey went on the road last week with a message to aspiring programmers: You don’t need a college degree to make a six-figure salary.
Hackton, Columbia’s new community space for programmers, hosted McKelvey on Oct. 24, where he spoke to Silicon Prairie News and a crowd of more than 50 about his latest endeavor, LaunchCode.
Read more at www.siliconprairienews.com.
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