LearnStreet

» see learnstreet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In 2012 the internet decided everybody should learn to code, and I was about ten years past the point where the first lesson does anything for you. LearnStreet was built for the other end of that curve. Lessons ran in the browser: you typed JavaScript or Python into a panel and it checked your work as you went. The claim that was supposed to separate it from Codecademy was that it carried you past syntax and into code you would actually push somewhere.

It launched publicly on 7 November 2012 with $1 million from Khosla Ventures. The Show HN three weeks earlier had done well at 101 points, and Wired had called it the addictive new way to learn how to code that October. Laurence Toney, who had come from Zynga Poker, became chief executive in January 2013, and the site was still shipping new material a year after that.

Then on 31 July 2014, twenty months after launch, it closed. No blog post went up and no farewell page appeared. The site served an ordinary homepage through the middle of July and then simply stopped being there. The only reason anybody can date the death at all is that one user got the email and pasted it into Hacker News.

~ the dossier ~

~ five sentences ~

The whole notice, reproduced on 4 July 2014, runs to five sentences. "We will be closing down LearnStreet on July 31st, 2014. Over the past few years, it has been our pleasure to have helped many users like yourself learn how to code. Please return to the LearnStreet site prior to July 31st to complete any courses or projects. We want to thank you for your past business and tell you how much we have enjoyed having you as a user. Thanks, LearnStreet Team."

No reason appears anywhere in it, and nothing about where the courses were going. The person who posted it wrote underneath, "There's nothing on their blog and I enjoyed the courses, does anyone know anything?" He got one reply four hours later, two letters long. That is the complete public record of the end of a company that raised a million dollars.

~ the quiet year before ~

The email surprised users, but the company had been fading in public for a long time. Its blog's last post is dated 12 June 2013, thirteen months before the shutdown. The last activity on its social accounts was February 2014. It did keep shipping for part of that silence, including a Java course in January 2014, and then there was nothing visible from outside at all.

The money behind it is the strangest part to read now. Vinod Khosla funded LearnStreet, and his wife Neeru Khosla co-founded CK-12, the nonprofit behind a large library of free textbooks and courseware. A learn-to-code site backed by one half of that household died in July 2014, and its domain ended up pointing at the other half's website. The connection there is a family one, and a good deal of the internet has it filed as an acquisition instead.

~ the redirect nobody dated ~

learnstreet.com sends you to CK-12's student page today. When that started is not recoverable. The Wayback Machine holds no capture of any learnstreet.com address between 1 August 2014 and 2 November 2020, and the first capture after that six-year hole is already the redirect. There was no acquisition announcement, and CK-12's own writing about itself does not mention LearnStreet. A domain changed hands somewhere inside a window six years wide and nobody wrote down the day.

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