Hi, my name is Jason Gilmore, and I’m the new Treehouse CEO. On December 14, 2021, Treehouse was acquired by Xenon Partners. In a nutshell, Xenon acquires and operates online companies. With so many online educational coding platforms on the market, why did Xenon leap at the opportunity to acquire Treehouse? Oddly enough, it was because of a particular feature that generally doesn’t scale very well in the software world: people.
Treehouse has a long track record of not only producing amazing, award-winning content (check out this free one-hour course introducing JavaScript functions for an example), but also helping to ensure the 1.1 million students who have participated in our platform aren’t learning alone. A lot of this interaction takes place through the internal forum; however, in the case of Techdegrees, students interact with our staff on a regular basis over Slack, and more recently our team has even been scheduling one-on-one Zoom calls with struggling students to ensure they are on the right track.
It’s this human element that has generated tremendous loyalty among our student base. For instance, check out this Slack message sent by student Aaron Gomez just a few weeks ago:
I have to say I am thoroughly impressed with what Treehouse has created here. The support is fantastic, and the videos and projects are top-notch. I’m doing an online CS program and am pretty much on my own since my school has virtually no means of communicating with other students and the professors are mostly unresponsive. Treehouse has been a breath of fresh air for sure.
I’ve taken courses through Coursera, Edx, Freecodecamp, Udemy and Codeacademy, and would rank Treehouse above all of them in terms of quality of both pedagogical material, and support. Keep it up!
Another recent testimonial came by way of Marc Rivas, who used what he learned from Treehouse to transition from a $9/hour construction worker to making more than $100,000 annually as a software engineer at Wells Fargo. Here’s the tweet:
I was just three weeks into my role as CEO when I read Marc’s tweet, and I’ve thought about it every day since. Marc’s story is just one of so many students who are transforming their careers using Treehouse. I invite you to read through some of these inspiring stories at https://teamtreehouse.com/stories.
So What’s Next for Treehouse?
So what’s next for Treehouse? To be sure, we will continue publishing more of the same great content that students have come to love. We’ve recently published updated NodeJS content, improved content associated with our Python Techdegree, and new interactive SQL exercises. We’re also hard at work reinforcing our relationships with the many nonprofits who have partnered with Treehouse to help underserved communities break into the tech industry, as well as building out improved ROI analysis and curriculum management tools for our partners in the private, library, educational, and public sectors.
To be of further assistance in job placement opportunities, we are launching two new services for organizations in search of motivated, talented software developers and technologists. These services include granting organizations access to profiles associated with students searching for job opportunities, and to a job board where position details (whether remote or in-office, FTE or contract) can be shared with our entire community. If you’d like to learn more about these opportunities, I invite you to email me directly at jason.gilmore@teamtreehouse.com.
We’re Hiring!
You may have heard Treehouse went through a round of layoffs back in September, 2021. This did indeed occur, prior to Xenon’s involvement with the company. I’m pleased to report that we’ve more than doubled the team size in the past 3 months, and are actively hiring for many positions, including instructors! Feel free to email me at jason.gilmore@teamtreehouse.com with inquiries!
About the Author
Jason Gilmore is the CEO of Treehouse. He’s spent the last twenty years in the software industry building products, leading and training teams, and advising companies on technical strategy. Jason is the author of nine books on web development in addition to hundreds of tutorials, and is the co-founder of CodeMash. Prior to joining Treehouse, Jason served as CTO at DreamFactory, now part of Integrate.io.