The Story of Formation: Building the Future of Technical Education
Most founder stories start with a clear vision and venture capital. Sophie Novati‘s journey began with depleting savings and a one-person coding bootcamp that wasn’t supposed to become a company at all.
“I had no idea that when I left next door that this kind of venture capital landscape was something that existed,” Sophie shared in a recent episode of Category Visionaries. “I wasn’t one of the founders that decided that I was definitely going to be a Founder.”
After leaving her role at Nextdoor, where she had been deeply involved in diversity hiring efforts, Sophie spent two years running a coding bootcamp entirely by herself. “I ran all of the recruiting, all of the instruction, I did all of the grading,” she recalls. “It was almost two years of doing this and actually pouring my own savings into this company to pay the rent.”
Her parents thought she had lost her mind. “I think that my parents probably thought that I was even crazier than most parents of founders thought, because not only was I leaving a job to start a company, I was also spending all of my own money trying to fund it. So it was like I was paying to do a job.”
But this hands-on experience revealed a fundamental disconnect in technical education. While working at Facebook and Nextdoor, Sophie had learned “how to solve problems at scale using engineering and product.” Yet the programs trying to teach software engineering were “entirely devoid of technology.”
This insight led to Formation’s core innovation: dynamic, personalized learning powered by technology. “What we do differently is every lesson, every class, every assignment that every student does is dynamically computed by our technology based on each person’s performance in the program,” Sophie explains.
The results speak for themselves. In 2022, Formation’s students saw an average compensation increase of $100,000. Their adaptive approach has proven particularly valuable in the current market downturn, where “people just need to be a lot more prepared for the interview process.”
Formation’s success has also attracted corporate partners looking to improve their diversity hiring initiatives. “Most recently, we just launched a partnership with Netflix as part of their diversity hiring initiatives,” Sophie shares, showing how their platform can support larger organizational goals.
The company’s commitment to authenticity extends to their community management. When faced with online criticism and competitor manipulation on platforms like Reddit, Formation chose transparency over quick wins. “We’ve constantly been very middle of the road neutral in terms of our stances, applauding our competitors in ways that they are doing things well and fairly firmly pointing out areas in which they are not doing a good enough job.”
Looking ahead, Formation’s vision extends far beyond their current base of 400 active learners. “Fundamentally, we’re here to build a more diverse, a more equitable and more inclusive workforce,” Sophie explains. “We think the highest leverage action that we can take to make a dent on this mission is to really remove the barriers of access in terms of education.”
The ultimate goal? To create an open platform that could potentially reach all 12 million software engineers globally. “The kind of long term vision is to have an entirely open platform, free to use to start to absolutely anyone who needs training to be able to get started on the platform right away.”
For founders, Formation’s story illustrates how deep domain expertise, combined with a willingness to challenge industry assumptions, can lead to transformative innovation. By bringing product thinking to education while maintaining a focus on individual student outcomes, Formation is building a future where technical education can scale without sacrificing quality.