Founder Profile: Enlight

Website: enlight

Our team has been eagerly awaiting the opportunity to catch up with enlight founder, Samay Shamdasani. Samay has been building things start to finish consistently since a time when the majority of us were more worried about obtaining a scratch and sniff textbook cover sleeve than even bothering to learn the word “entrepreneur.” Being one of the most experienced builders on campus as a sophomore, we couldn’t wait to have enlight to join our community.

Check out the interview below to get a deeper look into this months final V1 Newsletter feature. With one of the most creative approaches to solving the holy grail problem that is creating a real world learning experience, Samay’s interview is one for the books!

Can you give us a little enlight background?

Earlier this spring, my good friend and cofounder Max called me about a potential opportunity: Georgia Tech’s CREATE-X program, a summer-long startup incubator. It sounded really cool, and much more appealing than a virtual internship.

We brainstormed ideas, and eventually decided to take my side-project, Enlight, to the next level. When we were accepted into the program, we put a team together and got to work.

If there’s anything I’ve learned over the course of the summer, it’s the people that make the journey so special.

Now, we’re incredibly excited for the potential to grow our team.

Elevator the enlight platform!

Enlight is the educational platform and online community to learn, build, and share programming projects. We provide the best-in-class education paired with a supportive community and accountability.

Our latest product, Enlight Cohorts, teaches web development by building three unique projects in two weeks within a supportive community. This isn’t an ordinary coding bootcamp or course, but instead an interactive cohort, where learners attend live workshops and build projects. Combined with learning by doing, all projects are shared within the community, which motivates learners to continue building.

What inspired you to build enlight?

Learning to code is hard.

A few years ago, it was extremely difficult for me to learn to code. I had so many ideas, but had no idea where to start. Online courses, theoretical CS classes, books, etc. just didn’t click for me. Although I knew syntax, I couldn’t build anything useful, such as a website or mobile app.

I was frustrated until I discovered the concept of learning by doing — and I started to build fun mini-projects, such as a to-do or weather app. Finally, I was motivated. I looked forward to seeing what was possible, and more importantly, what I could create. It was so much fun.

A few weeks later I posted some of the projects I created on an online blog called Enlight. It then hit over 900 upvotes on Product Hunt and the top of sites like Hacker News and Reddit…and that’s where it all began.

Tell us more about your team!

Samay Shamdasani is the CEO at Enlight. He’s a Venture Partner at Contrary Capital, has previously worked in Software Engineering at DataCamp, and is currently a CS student at Michigan.

Maxim Geller is the COO at Enlight. He’s the organizer of one of the largest data science hackathons, Hacklytics, and is currently a data science student at Georgia Tech.

Enlight also has 19 student mentors, who support the coding journeys of all learners within the community.

Recent milestones you would care to share?

This summer, we launched Enlight Cohorts: a two-week program to teach Web Development by building projects. Since the launch, we’ve had 180+ learners complete the cohort and the program was recently vouched for by Jeff Atwood, founder of StackOverflow.

Enlight recently went through Georgia Tech’s CREATE-X Program and received $4k in funding and mentorship from top entrepreneurs.

Enlight currently has 12,300+ registered users, 1 million+ lifetime pageviews, and 40+ projects in Web Development and Data Science.

What’s on the roadmap for the year ahead?

We’re looking to build the best experience for learning to code online. This means expanding our cohort program, improving our virtual learning infrastructure, and doubling-down on our project offering.

Online course completion rates are ~6%. Our completion rate for Enlight Cohorts is 50%+. We want to keep or improve that percentage while scaling our program to hundreds of learners at a given time, thus creating one of the most valuable online learning experiences in the market right now.

What’s the big picture, what do you guys want this to be 10 years down the road?

We’re focused on impact. We want to reach millions of people who are learning to code and show them that building is the best way for them to do so.

The market for technical skills, from students to professionals, is huge. We want to become the dominant leader in this space through our unique approach to online education and accountability, driven by a large focus on community.

How are you looking to grow your team?

We’re looking to bring on full-stack engineer(s) and UX designers to our team.

Specific skills include React.js, Firebase, & Git.

We don’t expect you to be an expert. We’re all learning at every stage. If you have any sort of JavaScript experience and are interested, we’d love to hear from you!

If you’re a UX designer with experience working with code and front-end technologies or are open to the opportunity, please reach out as well!

Qualities of new team members

• Impact-driven

We’re here to make a long-term impact. This means doing whatever it takes to get things done, while keeping our vision in mind.

• Open to growth

Working at Enlight is challenging, but incredibly rewarding. We’re a young and passionate team that’s always growing and evolving, but also incredibly flexible and adaptable to different situations.

• Product-minded

You’re interested in building products with seamless user experiences — the types of products people rave about because it was that good.

• Great communicator

You know how to present powerfully, especially in our online medium. When you have ideas, it’s easy to share and articulate them to others. You’re somebody who puts a smile on anybody’s face! :)

Thanks for for reading! If you are a designer or engineer at the University of Michigan interested in working with Samay and the enlight team, be sure to visit our website and sign up for our monthly newsletter today. Additionally, stay tuned for more Founder Profile’s to come!