Neal Sales-Griffin (born July 28, 1987) is a Chicago entrepreneur and educator. He co-founded the first coding bootcamp program in 2011 and is the CEO of CodeNow, a nonprofit that teaches coding to low-income high school students.
Video Neal Sales-Griffin
Early life and education
Sales-Griffin grew up in the Kenwood and Hyde Park neighborhoods of Chicago at East 49th Street and South Drexel Boulevard. He attended St. Thomas the Apostle School in Hyde Park and Mount Carmel High School in Woodlawn. He was on the track team and played cornerback on the football team at Mount Carmel.
Sales-Griffin attended Northwestern University. While in college, he served as president of the student government. He also helped start ContextMedia (now known as Outcome Health), a healthcare technology company; managed a barbershop with two locations on Chicago's South Side; and was a teaching assistant for an entrepreneurship class at the school's Harvey Kapnick Center for Business Institutions. Sales-Griffin graduated from Northwestern in 2009 with a degree in education and social policy.
Maps Neal Sales-Griffin
Career
After graduating from college, Sales-Griffin joined Sandbox Industries, a Chicago venture capital firm, as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. He left this job to learn coding with his Northwestern classmate and friend Mike McGee, an experience that led them to launch their own coding program. Sales-Griffin and McGee turned down an opportunity to join the technology team for Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign so they could work on their idea for a coding bootcamp.
In 2011, Sales-Griffin and McGee launched Code Academy, offering three-month intensive courses in Web development and design. In 2012, Code Academy changed its name to The Starter League to eliminate confusion with a competing New York-based program called Codecademy. The program also took an undisclosed investment from Chicago software company Basecamp (formerly known as 37signals). In 2016, New York-based coding bootcamp Fullstack Academy acquired The Starter League.
In 2016, Sales-Griffin joined CodeNow as its CEO.
Sales-Griffin is a member of the faculty at the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering. He serves on the boards of Mount Carmel, his alma mater, and the Chiaravalle Montessori school in Evanston, Illinois. He is the co-chair of the MakeWork Council at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Sales-Griffin was named to Crain's Chicago Business's "40 Under 40" in 2013.
References
Source of article : Wikipedia
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