MakerSquare’s Beginnings: The Story of One Founder’s Road Toward Coding Success in Austin

By Shehzan Devani

An entrepreneur, a Teach for America veteran, a Starter League graduate and a UT computer science grad got together and came up with the idea to create a coding school in Austin.

When MakerSquare started, we were in 4 different cities: Austin, Dallas, Chicago, New York City. Every night, we got on Google Hangout and chatted about motivations, visions and personal goals. Early on, we created this document, called Timeline, which tracked what we needed to accomplish, weekly. At the top of this document, we wrote out four goals:

1. We’re really excited about teaching beginners
2. We really want to see the tech scene grow
3. We want to give other people the opportunity to get into development
4. We want to empower people to act and execute on their ideas

We read this every day before our meetings. It has become ingrained in our heads. Why do we care so much for these goals? What do they mean to us?

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My parents are my heroes. They were hard workers. Not the type that will relentlessly code while sitting on their desks sipping on their mocha. No, my parents went through brutal grunt work when they came to America. An easy week for them was spending 70 hours each working at a gas station. This included standing the whole day, serving customers who may or may not completely ignore them, lifting heavy crates of snacks and drinks, cleaning and mopping every inch of the gas station to keep it in pristine condition, and doing many more behind the scenes tasks to earn enough to keep us on our feet. They did this for one reason. To get me and my sisters a solid education so that we wouldn’t have to work as hard as they did.

Programming was the route I chose and I found success in, just as so many others are finding. I worked hard, but not as hard as my parents; I’m driven, but I can’t compare to them; I’m smart, but my parents are smart too. The only difference between their situation and mine was the opportunity. I had the chance to learn programming and dive into a whole new world, while my parents were never given that opportunity. They would never be able to take 4 years off and pay over 100k to universities; they hardly had a couple hours a day to spend time with us. I want to change this for the future. I want to provide this opportunity to people who are working as tirelessly as my parents and give them access to this growing field.

This is personal motivation, but my partners Harsh, Shaan and Ravi are driven in their own ways, too. Harsh has gone through Teach For America and has wanted to improve the school system in general. Shaan’s life has been changed through a similar program in Chicago. Ravi has often felt the need to learn how to code during his business ventures, but couldn’t find the proper resources. We have different motivations, but the same goal.

At the end of the day, my team has two great qualities (among others) – the same two my parents came to America with – we have a vision that we truly care about and we’re willing to work as hard as we need to in order to make it come true.

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