We believe that there are three positive actions in life:
Making Money ... because this allows us to eat.
Having Fun ... because, well, its fun!
Doing Good ... because this is where deep life satisfaction occurs.
And when we say Doing Good, we don't mean writing checks to charity, or even doing field work in foreign countries. We mean helping people directly ... who are neighbors. Not with money, but with something much more precious ... our time.
For this reason, we have helped launch Code Camp. While coding is the literacy of the 21st century and a path to gainful employment, inner city kids have almost no access to high-quality CS education. Code Camp solves this problem by running a CS bootcamp in East Palo Alto during the summer, and weekend workshops throughout the year. For free.
The goal is to get EPA high school students enough knowledge to get a technical internship which will then lead to a successful technical career. And its happening!
The technical founders in our Peer Groups do not have the time to set up mentoring relationships on their own. But they all have an hour or two during the week to donate. Code Camp gives them a vehicle to use that hour in a very high-impact way -- using their own skills to help kids launch into a life-long career.
We do not require our technical founders to participate in Code Camp. We don't have to.