Richard Wang knows what it feels like to stand at the edge of a big decision. He did it when he left a comfortable path to help build Coding Dojo, and he did it again when he walked away from the daily grind of running a company after selling it. The sale to Perdoceo for $70 million, nearly four years ago, should have been the end of a story. Instead, it left him searching for a new chapter. Wang had spent years helping people learn to code, and he wanted to keep doing work that had a measurable impact on people’s lives. He found that impact in an unexpected place: mentoring aspiring startup founders. It started informally, with coffee meetings and video calls. A friend would introduce him to someone who had an idea for an app or a service. Wang would listen, ask questions, and offer advice. More often than not, the person would say they had been thinking about it for years but didn’t know how to begin. There’s a particular look people get when they first articulate an idea they’ve been carrying around. It’s part hope, part fear, part disbelief that someone is actually listening. Wang started seeing that look again and again, and he realized that the thing these founders needed most wasn’t a lecture or a term sheet. It was permission to try, plus a practical path forward. That realization became Idea to Launch, a 30-day program that helps would-be founders turn a startup idea into a working product using AI coding tools and hands-on engineering help. The name says it all: no one is promising a unicorn, just a real, usable thing that didn’t exist before. For Wang, that’s enough. It’s a modest goal, but it’s also a radical one in an industry that measures success by valuations and exits.
Wang’s belief in this moment is rooted in a powerful analogy. AI, he argues, is about to do for software what smartphones did for video. Cheap cameras and cloud platforms turned ordinary people into directors, editors, and influencers, creating an entire economy that didn’t exist twenty years ago. Wang thinks AI will do the same for product builders by pushing the cost of creating software close to zero. “We’re going to create this whole new builder economy that’s about to come in the next three to five years,” he says. “Baby boomers are gifted with cheap housing. I think Gen Z is going to be gifted with a cheap price to build.” The numbers back him up. Idea to Launch cites a Shopify-Gallup study and a Zapier/Harris poll showing that 60% of Americans have a business idea, but only 9% ever launch one. That’s a staggering gap, and it’s not because people lack ambition or creativity. It’s because they’re stuck. They don’t know how to get started. They’re afraid of failing in public. They have mortgages, student loans, and families, and they can’t afford to quit their jobs or lose their benefits. The traditional startup path—quit your job, move to Silicon Valley, pitch investors—is a privilege that most people simply don’t have. Wang wants to build a different kind of on-ramp, one that meets people where they are and lets them keep their lives intact while they test their ideas. He’s not asking anyone to take a leap of faith. He’s asking them to take a step, one evening at a time, and see what happens.
The structure of Idea to Launch is designed to fit real life. It’s not a full-time immersive bootcamp. It’s a 30-day program built around ten evening sessions, so participants can keep their day jobs and their health insurance while they work on their projects. Each founder gets coaching, learns how to run customer interviews, builds a product using AI tools like Lovable, Replit, and Cursor, and finishes with a launch plan. They also get ten hours of one-on-one help from professional engineers, which is where the magic happens. Wang is refreshingly honest about what AI can and cannot do. He says people without technical backgrounds can now “vibe-code” 80% to 90% of a product on their own. They can describe what they want in plain English, and the AI will generate code, screens, and even entire features. But that last 10% to 20% is where things get tricky. Connecting the product to other services, setting up a database correctly, making it secure, handling edge cases—these are the unglamorous tasks that separate a demo from a real product. “We’ll provide that type of knowledge with real engineering support,” Wang says. For engineers, the program offers something just as valuable. Many of them have spent years building software but have never done customer discovery or thought about marketing. They’re brilliant at the “how” but less comfortable with the “why.” Idea to Launch fills in that business side, creating a cross-pollination that makes both groups stronger. It’s a model that treats building a startup as a team sport, not a solitary act of genius.
Security is one area where Wang refuses to cut corners. The rise of AI-powered app builders has opened the door to a flood of products made by people who don’t fully understand the infrastructure underneath. That’s exciting, but it’s also dangerous. Security researchers have found serious vulnerabilities in apps built on vibe-coding platforms. A 2025 scan found that 170 of 1,645 apps built with Lovable were exposing user data, and another case this year exposed nearly 19,000 user records. For a founder, discovering a breach after launch is a nightmare. For Wang, it’s an avoidable one. He says the engineers in his program will make sure security holes are fixed “before they launch or before they get onto the first customer.” That commitment to doing things right is part of what sets Idea to Launch apart from a casual hackathon. The first cohort starts January 11, with three more cohorts following through April. Each group is capped at 15 to 20 founders, which keeps the experience intimate and ensures that every project gets real attention. Tuition for the inaugural cohort is $3,500, a discount from the normal $5,000. Sessions will be held in person in Seattle or Bellevue, and Wang expects to choose a space within the next month. He’s self-funding the entire venture, which gives him the freedom to make decisions based on what founders need, not on what investors want. That independence is rare in the startup world, and it shapes everything about how the program operates.
Wang’s own path helps explain why he’s so committed to this mission. He immigrated from China at age 13, learned English in a new country, and became the first person in his family to attend college. That experience of starting from zero gave him a deep appreciation for the power of opportunity. He became CEO of Coding Dojo in 2015, left in 2017 for a role at Trupanion, and returned in 2019 as the company faced the challenges of growth and the pandemic. Under his leadership, Coding Dojo reached $50 million in peak annual revenue and had 194 employees at the time of the sale, according to GeekWire’s earlier reporting. It operated campuses in several states before shifting online during COVID. That journey taught him a lot about what works and what doesn’t in the world of education and startups. It also taught him that success is rarely a straight line. Looking ahead, Wang sees Idea to Launch expanding to other tech hubs, then moving online, and eventually licensing the program globally, much the way Coding Dojo grew from a single campus to a national presence. If the first cohorts go well, he can envision a follow-up program called Launch to Traction, which would help founders find more customers and take their products to the next level. He’s thinking long-term, but he’s also careful not to get ahead of himself. The first step is simply proving that the model works, and that starts with a small group of founders in Seattle and Bellevue willing to give their ideas a real shot.
Despite all his experience, Wang doesn’t plan to invest in the companies that come out of Idea to Launch. He’s not looking for the next unicorn, and he doesn’t want his judgment clouded by a financial stake. Having spent years building and selling Coding Dojo, he knows how difficult that road is, and he’d rather “cheer them on from the sidelines.” He’s also wary of what he calls “startup steroids”—the pressure that comes with taking venture capital money. At Coding Dojo, that pressure created an expectation of 100% annual growth, and it changed the way the company operated. Wang doesn’t want that for the founders he mentors. He wants them to build at their own pace, for their own reasons, without the constant anxiety of needing to become a billion-dollar business. For Wang, the point of Idea to Launch is simpler and more human. It’s to give more people a shot at building something now that AI has made it cheaper and easier than ever. Not everyone will build a company that changes the world. Most won’t. But that’s okay. “I think everyone should try at least once just to bring their idea to reality,” he says. That sentence captures the whole philosophy. The value isn’t in the exit. It’s in the act of creation. It’s in the moment when a person looks at something they’ve built and realizes they can do it again. And if that happens, Wang will have found the impact he was looking for.
