Taking on Amazon...and winning?

Michele Hansen  0:01
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Colleen: Welcome back software, social listeners, Colleen here, and I am super excited to bring you a special guest today. Today on the podcast we have Nadia the founder of story graph. Story graph is a site that helps you track your reading and choose your neck next book based on your mood, mood, and your favorite topics and themes.
Nadia, thank you so much for coming on.
Nadia: Thank you so much for inviting me. 
Colleen: I would love to start with a little bit about your background. You are an economist by trade, right?
Nadia: Right. So my degree was philosophy politics and economics, and I focused, I focused mainly on the economic side, I was moving to the math mathematical side of things and I was heading into investment banking, post university. 
Colleen: Wow.
Nadia: Yeah. And I was just lucky with the people I met in my final year of uni. I'd done a summer internship in the banking world and I was just very, not very enthused with it.
It just felt, I felt like there was more to life and I'm in my final year of uni, I met so many young entrepreneurs and people running social enterprises and charities, and I just felt like I've always felt entrepreneurial. And I just thought, you know, I want to go into that feels more like. And I'd also started a creative writing online publication called the story graph. 
Colleen: Oh, I didn't know that.
Nadia: yeah. That had given me the first taste of running my own thing. And so I, yeah, and I was lucky to meet people who were in the tech space as well. And that's when I started to be familiar with, oh, maybe I should learn how to code. And yeah, essentially, I, I got, I want a couple of places on coding courses and that's how I got into software post universe. 
Colleen: So, did you go work at all in investment banking or did you go right from college or university to learning how to code? 
Nadia: So I had a graduate offer for bank and I turned that down and then I wasn't sure what I was going to do. And I'd applied for this entrepreneurship scheme and it got to the final round. And I remembered that when I was filling out the form, there was a checkbox that said we may be piloting a new coding course for women.
Do you want to be considered for this? And I was just like, why not check the box? I wasn't really interested. And I thought, why not? You know? And so when I remember I got the call from the, one of the people who run the program and they said, we've got good news and bad news. And I was like, I immediately knew I didn't get into the main program.
So I said, well, what's the, what's the bad news. And I was like, yeah, you didn't quite make it. And I was like, Okay.
what's the good news. And she said we're going to give you, we're going to do this program. It's called code first girls, and we're going to give you a place. And I remember at the time I was just so disappointed and not getting a place in this entrepreneurship program because it was meant to be my ticket out of not going into the bank.
That I just thought, what do I want with this coding course? And then I remember thinking about it and realizing that I was also. Like the next day, I was offered a summer internship at my college at Oxford where I was. And so I thought, you know what, I'm going to come to work at Oxford for a bit after uni, I'm going to travel to London twice a week.
I was from London, but I was at, I was in Oxford and and I'm going to learn to code and then figure it out from there. And it's so, I'm so glad I did that. And then while I was. Twice a week coding course, I saw a tweet saying we're doing a competition for someone to win a free place at makers academy, which was a new software boot camp in London at the time.
And I had a taste of this coding thing. I saw how powerful. It was. And so I said, I'm going to apply for this scholarship free place. And I got the scholarship. And so then I did a three month bootcamp at the beginning of 2014, immediately after. Well, at the end of 2013, rather immediately after the two months that I spent at Oxford traveling twice a week to do the part-time cutting costs.
So that's how I 
Colleen: Wow.
Nadia: into software from being like all along since I was like 12, 13, I was going down the investment banking. 
Colleen: Wow. Did you get pushback from yourself or from your family to have invested so much time at Oxford? No less. And then be like, I'm going to go do this coding bootcamp.
Nadia: Yes. So it was actually quite funny. I come from a poor background and I remember that, you know, the reason why I was going down the investment banking route since I was young is because when I was at school, you know, it was always this typical doctor, lawyer and your banker or something like that.
And I remember we had this day where you could go with your parents or a parent to work with them. And I remember trying to go with my dad who's an accountant or like, um, my mom worked for herself at home and, and my dad was like, no, you should find someone who acts in a bank or something like that.
And so I went with my best friend at the time her dad worked at. And, you know, when you're 14, everything looks so amazing. And like I, so I remember going and seeing the trading floor and seeing all these, like men and women dressed up in their suits and carrying their blackberries. And I remember at the time thinking I want to be like them.
And it wasn't until I was doing the internship when I was in between my second and third year of uni that I was just disillusioned. And I was like, oh, like, this is not very fulfilling. This is not like, I feel like there's more I can do and give. And, and so that's when I got disillusioned when I was like about 18 and I was thinking.
This isn't really exciting. I'm not sure of the value that I'm bringing while doing this work. And I also just thought there must be more cause I was working so hard at, it was quite academic. I was working so hard at my studies and I thought, is this it? And so when this whole entrepreneurship software thing came up, it was very, yeah, it was so much more appealing and. 
Colleen: Wow. So after you did the bootcamp, did you then get a job, your rails background, right? 
Nadia: Ruby Rails So back then the, the main focus was Ruby rails and it was funny because I went to that was this jobs, fair tech jobs fair. And it was during during the course, the point of the courses you do the 12 weeks, and then they help you get a job. And I just thought I didn't plan to get a job.
I just said, let me go to this job fair and see what's out there. Even when I started the bootcamp in my mind, I still thought, oh, I'm going to be an entrepreneur. I didn't know what that meant. I was just like, I'm going to be an entrepreneur. But you know, since I'll know about coding, I'll know how to talk to developers.
Like I had just, you know, stereotypes in my head of, you know, developers, don't talk to people, and I can never be a good developer anyway, cause I'm starting, you know, 19. But 
Colleen: at like 32 
Nadia: like 2...