Natasha Singer

Along the way, they're beginning to say, by the way, these are great jobs.

They're interesting jobs.

They're powerful jobs.

And then in 2013, you get Hadi Partovi, who is a well-known tech entrepreneur in Seattle who had started his career at Microsoft.

and then became an investor in companies like Uber and Dropbox.

He comes along and he starts a new nonprofit group called Code.org to promote coding in schools.

And although it's an education nonprofit, it acts very much like a startup with viral marketing methods.

Like what?

Well, the first thing they do to promote coding in schools is Code.org made a video in 2013.

I was 13 when I first got access to a computer.

Starring the biggest tech titans of them all, including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

And it opens with them talking about how they got started learning to code.

And you have these powerful billionaires making this pitch that anyone actually can learn to code.

Any kid.

These are our heroic innovators, and they're rich, and they've achieved the American dream, and they're telling every kid in America, you could be us if you just learned to code, and by the way, we'll hire you.

Like, what's better than that?

You know, the video was very influential.

Millions of people saw this video in the first couple of weeks.

And I think it also, you know, just the idea that coding is you give computers an instruction of what to do.

In many families with school-age kids, this video helped coding become a household word.