With First Code Academy, a founder gave up her dream job to prepare kids for the future

To many, having a dream job can keep one motivated through the daily grind. For the rare few who manage to attain their dream jobs, they tend to cling to them for their dear lives. Michelle Sun, however, became an outlier when she left her position as growth hacker at Buffer to establish a Hong Kong-based coding school for kids called First Code Academy.

As expected, it wasn’t an easy decision for Sun to make. “I love the culture and the team at Buffer, and greatly admire the leadership of the founders Joel and Leo,” she tells Tech in Asia. “The role of a growth hacker was a great combination of my business background and technical ability to code.”

Having one failed startup under her belt, Sun had also previously promised herself that she would not go down that road again. However, her passion for technology and love for working with kids soon became too compelling for her to resist.

A marriage of passions

Sun wasn’t always a technology geek. As a student, she was interested in mathematics and science, but ended up majoring in economics in university and working as an investment banker in Goldman Sachs afterwards. Curiously, that was where she first encountered the tech industry.

“[At Goldman Sachs] I covered the technology sector, including companies like Alibaba and Tencent – that’s where I discovered my passion for technology,” she recalls. “My first (failed) tech startup prompted me to learn to code, as being a curious person by nature, I wanted to have a deeper understanding of the technology products that I wanted to build.”

After learning to code, Sun landed jobs at high-growth Silicon Valley startups such as Bump and Buffer. Beyond that, she spent her weekends teaching middle school students how to code at a community program in Stanford University.

Sun’s side gig left a huge impression on her, and laid the foundation for her future startup idea. “My students in that program expressed such a high level of creativity combined with technology,” she says. “I reflected on my primary and secondary education, and wished that I could share this opportunity with my younger self studying in Asia.”

So Sun took the plunge, running a one-day, girls-only coding workshop in collaboration with Google’s Women Entrepreneur Online when she relocated back to Hong Kong in 2013. As word of these courses began to spread, Sun and her team began to operate more of them to accommodate the demand, marketing the birth of First Code Academy. She recounts:

The mission to empower kids with the ability to create technology was simply something I could not turn down […] I read a quote that really resonated in me: ‘If you have an idea that keeps you at night, do something with it. If not, it will always only be a dream.’ For me, that was First Code.