Board Member
Nick Winter
SVP Frontier Lab Safety at Gray Swan. Cofounded CodeCombat (CEO until 2024, now chairman) and Skritter (CTO until 2013). Wrote The Motivation Hacker.
SVP Frontier Lab Safety at Gray Swan. Cofounded CodeCombat (CEO until 2024, now chairman) and Skritter (CTO until 2013). Wrote The Motivation Hacker.
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Experience
CEO
Programming is magic. We built CodeCombat so students could feel that by typing real code to play a real game. I cofounded it in 2013 and led it for more than a decade.
-... more Y Combinator W14. Paul Graham and Sam Altman interviewed us onstage at Startup School and admitted us on the spot.
- Raised $14M from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Third Kind Venture Capital, Allen & Co., and Hone Capital, and grew the team to 45 people.
- Grew CodeCombat's reach to over 20M players and 320K teachers.
- In addition to running the business, I'm the top contributor on the main repo (6,289 commits), which has 600+ contributors.
In September 2024 I handed the CEO role to our leadership team, with the company in a strong, profitable position.
-... more Y Combinator W14. Paul Graham and Sam Altman interviewed us onstage at Startup School and admitted us on the spot.
- Raised $14M from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Third Kind Venture Capital, Allen & Co., and Hone Capital, and grew the team to 45 people.
- Grew CodeCombat's reach to over 20M players and 320K teachers.
- In addition to running the business, I'm the top contributor on the main repo (6,289 commits), which has 600+ contributors.
In September 2024 I handed the CEO role to our leadership team, with the company in a strong, profitable position.
Skritter
CTO
George Saines, Scott Erickson, and I started Skritter in 2008 and built it into the leading app for learning to write Chinese and Japanese characters. It is still growing... more 18 years later. It teaches Chinese and Japanese characters by having you write them, with stroke-level handwriting recognition and spaced repetition.
As CTO I built the handwriting recognition, which started as my CS honors work at Oberlin, and spent thousands of hours engineering everything else, from the backend, to the web frontend, to the iOS app. I also led the pedagogical design and the Chinese-language-specific design.
We handed Skritter to a team led by Jake Gill, who has taken it to new web, iOS, and Android apps. We took what we learned teaching Chinese and used it to teach programming at CodeCombat. I'm still on the board.
As CTO I built the handwriting recognition, which started as my CS honors work at Oberlin, and spent thousands of hours engineering everything else, from the backend, to the web frontend, to the iOS app. I also led the pedagogical design and the Chinese-language-specific design.
We handed Skritter to a team led by Jake Gill, who has taken it to new web, iOS, and Android apps. We took what we learned teaching Chinese and used it to teach programming at CodeCombat. I'm still on the board.
Employee
Board Member
Projects
Measure your cognitive performance.
Developer · The state of the art in measuring cognitive performance, Quantified Mind is a web-based tool for running experiments on what affects your brain.
I wrote a book on how to hack your motivation
Author · “Moderation in all things,” they say. That may keep a society together, but it’s not the protagonist’s job.
Wrote this book in three… · More months while simultaneously attempting seventeen other missions. How? By hacking motivation.
The Motivation Hacker shows you how to summon extreme amounts of motivation to accomplish anything you can think of. From precommitment to rejection therapy, this is your field guide to getting yourself to want to do everything you always wanted to want to do.
Wrote this book in three… · More months while simultaneously attempting seventeen other missions. How? By hacking motivation.
The Motivation Hacker shows you how to summon extreme amounts of motivation to accomplish anything you can think of. From precommitment to rejection therapy, this is your field guide to getting yourself to want to do everything you always wanted to want to do.
A happy Mac keylogger for Quantified Self purposes.
Developer · A personal computer analytics dashboard for Quantified Self purposes, Telepath Logger also can produce time-lapse videos of a concept… · More called the "maniac week", where you ignore all distractions, fight no fires, and just work as efficiently and hard as you can for a week. See the time-lapse video: "The 120-Hour Workweek - Epic Coding Time-Lapse" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0qlr22cF14, or check out the blog for more details at http://blog.nickwinter.net/the-120-hour-workweek-epic-coding-time-lapse
Multiplayer programming game for learning to code
Learn programming with a multiplayer live coding strategy game for beginners. Learn Python or JavaScript as you defeat ogres, solve mazes, and level up. Open… · More source HTML5 game!
Education
About
Achievements
In addition to cofounding my startups, I also wrote a book called The Motivation Hacker, which explores the science of motivation and offers techniques for getting yourself to want to want to do all the things you've always wanted to want to do.
Describe the most impressive thing you've done.
Skills
Locations