Forbes
Backed by Arielle Zuckerberg, Juni Learning's 20-Something Female Founders Are Teaching Kids to Code
By: Susan Adams
Ruby Lee, 26, and Vivian Shen, 25, believe that their one-year-old startup, Juni Learning, can succeed in the crowded field of online coding instruction for kids. Last week Juni announced a roster of angel investors who contributed to a $790,000 funding round. They include Mark Zuckerberg’s youngest sister, Arielle, a partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins, where Lee used to work.
Lee and Shen, who met as classmates at Stanford, are modeling Juni on VIPKIDS, the China-based startup recently valued at $3 billion. VIPKIDS pays an army of 60,000 American teachers to moonlight as online English instructors for students in China.
Lee and Shen rely on computer science students at schools like Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, Harvard and MIT, whom they recruit through Facebook groups and through word-of-mouth. Juni pays its instructors $20 to $25 an hour to teach private and semiprivate online coding classes to students who range in age from kindergarten through high school. It charges a monthly subscription fee of $250 for weekly private one-hour lessons and $160 for semiprivate sessions. So far Juni has more than 300 students in 10 countries and 27 states, many of whom have signed on for six months or more.
Juni is competing with established live-instruction coding schools like CodeWizardsHQ and Tekkie Uni. But Shen said that most of them teach students in large groups. The majority of Juni’s courses are one-on-one, and Shen said she and Lee have put together a sequenced curriculum, starting with instruction in the Python computer language, that prepares students for most college computer science programs. “When we talked to high schools,” she said, “we found that they struggled to find a standardized curriculum.”
Shen was in Manhattan this week to visit friends. She also met with Randi Zuckerberg and talked about signing Zuckerberg’s 8-year-old up for Juni classes. And she appeared on Zuckerberg’s Sirius XM radio show and discussed entrepreneurship.
Over lunch, Shen told me about her own frustration as a high school student who wanted to learn how to code. Dressed in black slacks, spike heels and a green turtleneck sweater, a tattoo of the Chinese symbol for monkey on her left wrist (“people born in the year of the monkey are supposed to be the cleverest”), she said that her well-regarded public school in Palo Alto, Gun High, offered only an advanced placement computer science course aimed at students who had studied coding outside of school. A straight-A student before she got to college, she got her first B in a computer science class at Stanford. “I was woefully unprepared,” she said.
Lee’s public high school in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, offered only coding as supplemental courses through an online portal. A fan of a virtual pets website called Neopets, she taught herself to build her own websites for her pets, which helped her pass her school’s AP coding class as a senior. Coding at Stanford was less of a challenge for her than for Shen.
When they graduated from Stanford in 2013, Lee and Shen took corporate jobs, Lee at Google and Shen at McKinsey in Palo Alto. After a stint working in Google’s associate product manager program, Lee went to Kleiner Perkins and Shen left McKinsey to join Operator, an artificial intelligence shopping startup launched by Uber cofounder Garrett Camp.
In early 2017, the Operator job took Shen to Shanghai where, she says, “everyone was talking about VIPKIDS.” As Operator was winding down, she considered applying for another corporate job. But after conversations with Lee about the continuing lack of coding instruction in American schools and the success of VIPKIDS, they decided to try to form their own company.
To test their idea, in May of 2017, the friends printed up paper flyers and handed them out at Shen’s old Palo Alto middle school, offering a summer’s worth of one-hour-a-week classes for $200. Ten families signed up and Shen and Lee taught the courses themselves, using free Google docs and Zoom video conferences.
Juni Learning was accepted at Y Combinator, the prestigious Silicon Valley incubator that invested $130,000 in the business, graduating in March of this year. Lee has built a software platform for Juni’s courses and instructors still use Zoom’s free video conferencing to conduct lessons.
Shen and Lee won’t comment on revenue, but considering the number of students Juni has and how much it charges, revenue this year should come to less than $1 million. But Juni’s costs are low and the company is already profitable, said Shen. In the early months, she and Lee didn’t draw a salary, and until June they worked out of Shen’s San Francisco apartment before moving to a WeWork space on Market Street.
Other investors in Juni’s funding round include Y Combinator’s Jessica Livingston and Tim Brady and leading edtech investor Deborah Quazzo of venture firm GSV.
Reached by phone in San Francisco, Lee told me that she is especially proud that more than half of Juni’s instructors are female. “We want our instructors to serve as both teachers and role models,” she said. “Girls who take courses with us get to meet and form a relationship with someone who is a female in a technical field.” Juni’s student base is 40% female. When those girls look at who is running Juni, they may see a reflection of themselves.
