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In the MHV Podcast, we speak with leading founders, VCs and operators on their journey in Southeast Asia. In this episode, Jeremy Au, MHV Head of Strategic Projects and host has an insightful discussion with Charles Lee, CEO & Co-Founder of Coderschool.

Listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast or watch the video on Youtube.

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Prefer reading? Read the episode transcript below.

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Jeremy Au:

Hey, Charles. Really excited to have you on MHV podcast. You are building out something truly amazing, which is really helping so many people really get that education that they need to have to get to the next stage in their life. And you also happen to be another alumnus of UC Berkeley, so go Bears. So welcome aboard. I'd love to have you introduce yourself.

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Charles Lee:

Yeah. Long time listener. First time contributor. It's an honor to be here, Jeremy. My name is Charles. I'm the co-founder and CEO of CoderSchool, online coding school based in Hồ Chí Minh city, Vietnam.

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Jeremy Au:

Amazing. So I've got to ask, what were you like back at UC Berkeley? Were you very hippy, did you ever own a tie-dye shirt or were you very much a computer science degree inside the basement?

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Charles Lee:

Wow. So it was a long time ago now. But actually I was a little bit less hippy than that. I would say that there's a lot of time in the basement at Berkeley, the computer labs in the basement where there's no windows, just dark all the time. So I spent a couple of nights in the basement before. But overall I would say one thing I think about a lot is Berkeley was full of kind of tie & dye hippies. Perhaps really more than that, it was about somewhere where people were unafraid to be themselves. So for example, we used to have this guy on campus who would dress up in like a pink body suit from head to toe, just in pink spandex and ride around on a unicycle and do stuff. And that was kind of normal. You'd see the guy, we'd wave.

And I think about that frequently because actually I think Hồ Chí Minh city or Saigon as we call here, it's a little bit similar in that people are really unafraid to express themselves. Just the other day, I saw a guy in the park with pet squirrels here and I thought that's pretty weird. But I kind of really enjoy those types of environments where people are just genuine, authentic, and not afraid to express themselves.

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Jeremy Au:

Yeah. You're making me miss that because I too was also pretty much in the basement all the time and it was nice to just hang out. I too actually managed to at least wear a couple of tie & dye shirts as well so I still have them and my wife always nags me every time I wear them at home. That being said, I wasn't that crazy easy out there. I was the studious one. It was kind of a nice contrast between that freedom and creativity out there and also the rigor that you're kind of putting yourself through. And what's interesting is that there you become a computer engineer at Palm, at Volkswagen, gaming, a company that was acquired by Walmart Labs, local services for solid eight years in SF and the bay area. So what was that like across the spree of startups?

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Charles Lee:

I sort of started out at big companies and got smaller over time. And what was it like? There's a lot of things I think about. But the first thing I think about actually, when I think about my computer science career, especially since you brought up college was that college was really hard, studious, maybe studious is a bit of a stretch, but we worked pretty hard in school. And I was really surprised the first couple of years of what working was like. And I actually felt really useless for a really long time in those jobs. You learn school, you get your good grades and you expect to sort of hit the ground running at your first job.

And that was very much not the case for me. But the one thing I'm really grateful for and one of the reasons I personally got into computer science to begin with, is the opportunity to try lots of different things. So you just mentioned like e-commerce, gaming, automotive, self-driving cars. I've had a chance to do a lot of different things. And that's one reason why I love computer science or learning how to code because it really opens up the types of possibilities you can work in. I can't think of another industry where I could have tried so many different things.

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Jeremy Au:

Any crazy stories that you have from working in a startup, engineer, any war stories?

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Charles Lee:

Any war stories. I think one of the coolest projects I ever worked on, one of my favorite jobs was actually at that Volkswagen you mentioned. So it was at the Electronics Research Laboratory. That's the lab that made the first self-driving cars. I wasn't smart enough to work on that project directly, but I did lots of cool stuff. We made a robot that would sit in the car and we had this interesting... There's all these interesting things about cars actually about how we spend so much time, in the US especially, you spend so much time in the car, but it's not a fundamentally user-centric experience. So you take lessons on how to drive a car, that car doesn't really try to make it easier for you to drive. But one thing we're looking in particular is things about safety.

So today, a lot of things in car safety are very punishing. So it's like, "Let me beep this signal to annoy you until you put it on your seatbelt." for example. And one experiment we've worked on was we built a little robot that's set in your car dashboard and express emotions for you. So we actually had that robot look worried or scared when you didn't put in your seatbelt, for example. Instead of the check engine light, we had the robot look sick and try to give your car a personality and see how that influenced user behavior. And that was a pretty weird project. We worked on it with the MIT media lab actually. They're responsible for all the creativity there. But that was a fun project.

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Jeremy Au:

What was that? Did people like it or people didn't like it? What was the learnings from that?

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Charles Lee:

Social robotics. People did like it. And so there have been a couple of products that have followed up from that. Ours was an R&D lab so it was not really productionable, but I think one of the products that came out of it was little assistance for your car. So if you imagine, they later built a small little kind of robot that would say dashboard or a little toy that had some ability to emote as well. But I think you're seeing the next generation with the voice assistance and things like that, and really curious what it will become.

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Jeremy Au:

That's awesome to hear. I'm so curious about the next stage. There you are in SF area and then you decide to move to Vietnam. So there you are. Tell us what was going through your mind. What helped you make that decision at that point of time? Obviously I think there's a different decision between why you moved versus why you stayed, but why did you move?

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Charles Lee:

Sure. At the time, I was really enjoying working in different startups. And to be honest, I was fortunate enough to work at some startups that did okay. And it all looked very easy to me. When you're around someone who's good at what they do, what they do looks easy. But then you realize later how good that person was. So for me, I worked a few companies that did well and I thought, "Hey, I could start my own company." As an engineer, you work pretty hard. And I'm like, "Hey, I can possibly take more hours that I'm putting in now." So I worked on various startup ideas, a lot of crazy ideas I don't talk about. We tried to start a dog walking startup. We tried to start a tool for personal trainers to train people better. We tried personal analytics around GitHub commits.

We had a lot of different idea. None them really took off at the time. So basically I was feeling a little discouraged. And actually living in the bay area is also expensive. So after about a year and a half to two years at this, I realized that perhaps it was time for me to go back to working for someone. And that's when I decided, "Okay, before I do this, I should try something different." And that's what led me to choose Vietnam as a point. And I originally only thought about staying here for a few months just to get something out of my system, to try something else. And that's how I ended up here. But then one thing led to another and six years later, still here, happily working on CoderSchool.

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Jeremy Au:

And that's amazing. And I've got to ask then, how did you fall in love with CoderSchool and why take something that you knew so well, because you know coding so well? You've been a coder for such a long time. You studied it, you worked in it across multiple companies. So why did you decide to say, "Hey, let me take something I'm good at and start teaching it." Was it something you were teaching before? What was the context of all of that?

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Charles Lee:

Actually, the context before that, there were two things that happened that made me really interested in coding education. One was I took a course at a coding school that's still around called CodePath. And they've been great supporters of CoderSchool, the founders there. But it's the first time I had taken a course since college and I had taken it maybe like 10 years after I graduated. And it kind of blew my mind because I was like, "Hey, this is really useful." And I haven't learned anything new really in a classroom setting since university. And I thought that was kind of weird how you spend the first 20-something years of your life, basically full-time student, and then you go from that to zero. And many people never go back. And so it was a really good experience for me. I enjoyed a lot.

And what I had learned there was iPhone programming. So despite my first job out of college was working for this company called Palm, which actually made the first smartphone. There's a documentary about it now out actually. It was called the Handspring Treo at the time or Handspring Visor was it? There was a company called Handspring that built it, which later became Palm, which built the first smartphone. So I worked there and I made smartphones for the first couple years of my career, which is awesome. But I remember when the iPhone came out and that caused a lot of waves in the industry. And eventually of course the iPhone has now worn out. But even being on the kind of vanguard of that, I never really learned how to program iPhone apps. And it wasn't until I actually sat down, took a course many years later that I was like, "Oh, now I know how to build iPhone apps."

It'd been all in those things. I've always told myself I'll learn, but I never actually was able to complete the loop until I signed up for a course. So that was really interesting about how there's something about taking a class that just works and helped me accomplish something I've been thinking about for almost a decade. I had to build apps properly. At the same time, I had that really great educational experience. I also started teaching as a result part-time for a friend's coding school. So coincidentally, one of my housemates had founded one of the first online coding schools called block.io and raised a bunch of money for it. And I became one of the mentors there and I really enjoyed the experience. That was also almost decade ago and I still actually get updates from some of the people on LinkedIn, saying that they're moving up, senior engineers, VPs of engineering now. It's so cool.

But that really helped me also kind of work with people and see the potential for change. People can totally change their careers, learn coding in three to six months and become totally new people. And I thought that was cool. And so when I came to Vietnam, these things kind of collided, where in 2015, when I first arrived, the biggest trend worldwide was actually started by a Vietnamese person. It was the game Flappy Bird. So if anyone remembers that game, it's that little bird that would pop in your screen that just took over the world in a way that's never been done since, actually I would say. But that was created by some Vietnamese guy in his parents' basement in Hanoi. And so at the time, there was so much interest around iPhone programming as a result. I had just learned and started teaching. So those things kind of collided and I opened an iPhone programming course as the first course of CoderSchool.

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Jeremy Au:

Wait, so Flappy Bird, was that the same timeframe? Did it trigger a wave of people wanting to learn coding? Is that what happened?

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Charles Lee:

I really think so. People were like, "Hey, this Flappy Bird, this guy's making such a big impact in the world and tons of money and how do you build stuff like this? Is it hard?" And people just started getting really interested in it. And if you really think about it and look, I'm sort of adding my own inference here, but it's like, "Whoa, that guy did it. Well, I could do that too." And it really hit home. And the fact that the next huge world phenomenon could come from Vietnam or anywhere just by one person, I think is really powerful and kind of helped inspire a lot of people.

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Jeremy Au:

So now I got to ask. For that first class, do you remember what projects they were trying to build? Were there people trying to make Flappy Bird clones?

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Charles Lee:

So actually for the marketing for that class, we were trying to get people to sign up. Anyone who's tried to learn programming probably knows the first thing you try to learn is a to-do list, things like that. So we'd run like workshops, learn how to build a to-do list with iOS. People sort of signed up and would come. But then we tried "Build your own Flappy Bird iOS." workshop, sold out immediately. People were like, "Whoa, I can do that." And it's actually really easy to build. So I think today, anyone can build Flappy Bird in like two hours, at least like a basic version.

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Jeremy Au:

I am so excited to put a link code to your Flappy Bird workshop in description after this.

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Charles Lee:

I got to dig it up.

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Jeremy Au:

It's like, "I've listened to this podcast. I can learn two more hours of listening after this and I can learn how to do Flappy bird." So there you are. You learned how to take something that you've already been passionate about for a long time, which is coding. And now you're taking that into teaching. And one interesting thing of course, is that everybody can teach, it's just that not everybody makes it a startup. So why make it a startup? Why make it something be large or try to be large or try to scale it or be huge? Versus keeping it small. There's so many small coding academies around the world for the one city, for the one district.

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Charles Lee:

Yeah. It's a really good question. And I think people have different ways of going about different startups and everyone's journey is a little bit different. Mine already, I think you're kind of getting the sense that I was a little bit like not planned from day one. I didn't come to Vietnam with the idea to do this and I kind of fell into it. But the other thing when I reflect on it, why a startup? I think founding a startup is maybe not so different than achieving mastery in anything. For example, how do you become a great podcaster? How do you become a great author or artist? There's a saying that you say just stay on the bus. Meaning if you think about how bus lines work in a city, imagine in the middle of the city, you stay on the bus.

And for the first half an hour or so, first 10 stops, they're all the same. So you go to the same places, everything's very similar. So for example, you're starting a company or starting a podcast. Nothing special really happens in that first little phase. But you stay on the bus long enough and eventually, they filter out and you get farther and farther away and you start to get to places that no one else can go to. And that's very much how I feel like my experience with CoderSchool was. At the beginning of Flappy Bird workshop, anyone can do that. And in fact, there are many people. But how do you stick with it? How do you stay with it and how do you sort of start discovering more and more about education, more and more about how you can train people at scale or how to really deliver great experiences. And that's what I think I stuck with because now I feel like we are starting to get out of the main city and starting to get into really exciting places now.

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Jeremy Au:

As you build that out and scale it out, what does it allow you to teach in a way that you couldn't teach before? Because before this, you were teaching it yourself or you were teaching in a small group format. I guess, what are you getting to do now as a school, as a startup that I couldn't have gotten before as a student. What makes you special that makes me say, "Yes, I want to learn from not Charles as a person, but Charles as a founder, as a leader of this organization, in terms of his spirit and ethos and his differentiation as a product."

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Charles Lee:

And I wish I could explain all the different things we're trying to do. We're definitely still searching for what to build, but what we always want to do, we want to do this since day one, was provide opportunity for everyone everywhere. So part of the thing that really attracted me when I came to Vietnam was I realized that people didn't have access to quite the same quality of experience in education that I did. I talked about that great class I took about iPhone programming. That class didn't exist here. And as a result, people just didn't have the opportunity to learn. And so that's what we've really been focusing on. And how we do that, I think there's a lot of pieces to it, but kind of at the big picture. One thing I really like about education and reason why I think a lot more people should be working on it, it's the world's largest service industry.

Peng at Monk's Hill has a thesis about what you guys invest in. And it's about, "Hey, we like to use technology to disrupt service industries." And I think that's one of thesis of many of those startups at Monk's Hill. But you think about it, education is one of the few service industries that affects everyone. There's an audience of seven billion out there. And for such a business, it's one of the least customer-centric things as well. It's the same observation I have about cars, but education as well too. There's not a lot of focus on how to make a student succeed and who it ultimately rests on.

So for example, I think one of their earliest students for our course or full-time course that helps you become an engineer. He was a student at a top at the top university here, science university. And he was a mechatronics major. He was doing well, but junior year he discovered that he really liked programming. He wanted to build software instead of sort of robots and mechatronics stuff, but the university wouldn't let him change his major. He had to finish these credits at this time. And to me that blows my mind that this institution, you're paying these people for this thing and you're going through all the things they do, but they won't let you work to find a good solution to what you want as a customer, that you just want to work on cool stuff and get a career building the knowledge you need to do what you want to do.

And so when I think about these types of systems, that's what really inspires me at CoderSchool is like, "Hey, how can we really provide people what they really want? And how can we listen to them?" I don't like to think of like when a student fails at CoderSchool, like it happens from time to time, that student somehow isn't succeeding. It's not because a student's lazy. It's not because something's wrong with that. How can we try a better experience? And that's what I really will hope we can bring to education moving forward, is how can we really have a customer centric experience that delivers what people want?

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Jeremy Au:

Yeah. That's something that's really rare. And I think the truth is that education is not customer-centric because it's about getting as many people through from point A to point B at the lowest cost possible in a very batch format. And what's interesting is that you are bringing high quality education and making it accessible. What's interesting from my personal perspective as well is that you've also noticed that there is that wave of democratization in terms of coding education in the US. But what is that level of democratization for the middle class or the lower class in the US is actually still price is way to high for emerging markets across the world, for example, Vietnam. It's still priced for the upper class effectively.

And so it's interesting where I feel like you've actually been able to go one level deeper. There's a huge wide space where so many countries, the rest of the world from America's perspective/the majority of the world from the majority of world's perspective really needs a coding education that is not US-centric, but is really developed for the rest of the world. I keep using the rest of the world. I hate using the world rest of world because it shows a US-centric dynamic. And I hate myself so much.

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Charles Lee:

No, but it's absolutely what we need to be thinking about. The quote-unquote, rest of the world, but that's where all the innovation's going to happen. You get that really high level of metrics about what automation is going to do for the world, how, how the future of work is going to change. All that's now going to happen out here. And so I think the changes will be much larger and much more important, large sweeping changes. And that's where the education start. But I also think if you think about how these trends could happen, I would love to export this to the US later. We can build a better experience that's more efficient under a different set of constraints. There's the saying about how constraints breed innovation. And I think we have really interesting constraints here that we can learn from.

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Jeremy Au:

Let's talk about constraints breeding innovation. What does that mean to you personally?

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Charles Lee:

I think that, particularly with education, you talked about how we can make it accessible. It's a big thing for us. But if you have the ability to pay a hundred thousand dollars a year for education, I think that's a very different question than how can you do it for, let's say a 10th of that price or for 10 times more people, or even for things like when people don't have great internet connections. How are you going to solve these problems? Or when people don't have the right background. And there's just all these problems. I think the other thing too is like when you're kind of in a more developed market, you have a lot of advantages that let you focus on just a small part of the problem. So here there's a big reason why there aren't enough engineers.

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Jeremy Au:

I think what you're saying here is there's an innovation dynamic that's happening regardless. And the constraints are enabling an aspect of it that is pretty rare. I guess when you think about Vietnam has certain constraints, what constraints about Vietnam do you think is the style of constraints that you think would breed or be relevant for America leader? I guess one is GDP per capital. Would that be one aspect of it? The prime price points, you're designing for lowest set price points. I mentioned it earlier. I'm so curious.

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Charles Lee:

I think also a big one here is it's a pretty big deal when someone takes a CoderSchool class. So I think in the US lot, people will be like, "I'll try learning coding see how it is." But here at CoderSchool, it's terrify to me because if we let someone down, someone really puts down, which is still a substantial investment in something that doesn't work out. It's quite a disaster. It can be quite bad. So I think there's a lot of responsibility here, but at the same time, it's such a high reward thing. So here we have the ability to really 10X and earning potential over a lifetime or even just like 2X or 3X within six to 12 months. So that economic impact we have is so large that I get excited about that. It's great power, great responsibility type of dynamic but that's what always what kind of drew me to CoderSchool at the beginning or kind of solving problems out here.

The marketing around coding is really interesting. I think in the US actually you get a lot more about aspirational stuff like, "Hey, learn coding, it's the future, it's really cool." And I think that's really true. I told you about how much I love coding because it allowed me to explore so many different diverse interests of mine and learn a lot. At the same time, I really like that in a more emerging market. It's much clearer what people want. It's like, "Hey, I want to create value. I want to have a better career. I want to make more money and have a better job." And it's really actually refreshing. And the way our marketing works is it's more about that. So at CoderSchool, we guarantee that you'll get a job within six months after graduating in IT. And so that speaks really a lot better to the market out here. And I like that. It helps. Our students are motivated. They know what they want and they go get it.

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Jeremy Au:

Awesome. I love how you've been learning and been able to use that constraint as a way to actually give you more freedom to innovate around those and I love that aspect of it. Actually on that note, what's interesting as well is that I've also not only gotten a chance to observe you not only learn about the constraints of coding and education, but also learn about fundraising as a founder as well which is a whole new skillset that both you and I had no idea 10 years ago. And so what would you say that you've learned about fundraising as a process over time?

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Charles Lee:

Yeah. I have to preface with this, I'm not an expert, clearly, possibly just super lucky. But I've learned a few things that I share with people. The first is that as an early founder, you're often very focused on what solution you're building, how well your solution works. And that's very important. But really the piece that I never thought about as much before fundraising was what the opportunity size is. So for most venture, if you're looking for venture-backed funding, mostly they're trying to make a big win. They talk about unicorns, but it's really serious. Can this go into a billion dollar business? And that's almost a prerequisite. If you build something that's wonderful, that works great, but doesn't have the possibility to grow into that huge business, it's probably not a good fit for venture capital. And that's nothing against how good your product is or how good your team is. That's just like the kind of dynamics of the market you're in. So I think I learned a lot about that.

The second thing I think you learn is how to evaluate what kind of investors you want and what draws you to certain people. And the thing that I found myself really drawn to, and one reason I'm so happy to be working with MHV is I really want to work with people that understand what it's like to build companies and specifically how hard and slightly irrational it is to build your own company. My favorite is, and this is my one life hack on how to fundraise by the way, most investors or VCs are also like very prolific speakers or writers out there. So just like Google them on YouTube, search for them on YouTube or Google their blog and try to read what they say and see how you feel and see if anything resonates with you.

Before talking to Peng, I watched several of his talks on YouTube and I was like, "Wow, this guy has some really good points." It gives you something to talk about when you meet the person. But specifically for... So one of our partners is Justin in Monk's Hill. And in your last podcast, he said something to me that was like, "Oh yeah, this is why I like working with this guy." Your opening quote, the cold open for your podcast was Justin talking about how he got shingles, this horrible disease because he was so stressed out running his company. And first of all, I don't think he went to detail about how horrible that disease is because it's like I haven't had it, but I had a friend who had it and my understanding is like your skin hurts and your skin is everywhere so it's super unpleasant.

But then he followed that up with saying that sometimes he misses the build part of a company, "I miss the build." And so I think that's almost the profile person I would like to work with, is someone who went through it, knows how terrible it is and he still misses it and wants to help other people get through it. So that was the thing that I was like, "This is type of person I want to work with." And when fundraising, I think you not only have... You want to be able to choose your money, but you also like have a better chance of getting funded by people you vibe with, because they'll probably vibe with you and understand what you're trying to do and be more like you.

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Jeremy Au:

A lot of truth there. Definitely triggering the part where you're making me feel like I'm missing the build as well.