A Lifelong ‘Maker’ Tackles a Developer Onboarding Problem
Shanea Leven has always seen herself as a maker. In her teens, she made clothes and considered a career in fashion design. In college, where she pursued a business degree, she taught herself programming, using Visual Basic, and wound up co-founding a company at 19, building custom websites for book authors.
The agency she and her business partner created gave her the experience needed to secure a job at Google. About a year into that experience, she took a job in product development at the company.
“I was hooked,” said Leven, co-founder and CEO of CodeSee, in this episode of the Tech Founder Odyssey podcast series. “I saw the most brilliant people making such beautiful things.”
In this episode, a feature of The New Stack Makers, Leven talked to Heather Joslyn and Colleen Coll about her journey, coming to programming later than many tech founders while maintaining the creative spark that drives both her and her peers.
A Video Presentation Sparks an Epiphany
Google, where Leven spent four years in the mid-2010s, helped her fill in a lot of the knowledge she had missed by being a self-taught programmer. But, she said, she also identified gaps in her technical skills; to remedy the situation, she earned a second bachelor’s degree, in computer science
Working on developer tools for Google, she identified a stubborn challenge: deciphering acres of legacy code and getting onboarded to it as a developer. “I kept seeing the same problem over and over, which was, how do you understand all of this code without reading it line by line?
The desire to help untangle this problem for developers percolated as Leven’s’ career progressed, with stops at Cloudflare, Docker and eBay. Then, she found a 2012 presentation, “Inventing on Principle,” by Bret Victor, a noted interface designer and technologist.
She found Victor’s talk to be “transformational” for her, she said, sparking a line of thinking that resulted in the creation of CodeSee.
“The fastest way to understand code is not just reading it line by line and creating a visualization in your head, but having computers create those visuals for you,” she said. “Lots of people had tried to do it before. I definitely, like a lot of people have tried.
“But the ability to do that at a production-level scale, and have the user experience knowledge to be able to bring that to a usable product, was really, really hard.”
Juggling a Day Job and a Startup
In 2019, Leven started tinkering with what became CodeSee, a developer platform that helps developers and development teams better onboard review and understand code bases.
Not long after, she said, what had been a nights-and-weekend project got venture capital funding, allowing her to quit her day job as head of product management at Lob, a direct mail automation platform.
For several months in 2020, she balanced her VC-funded startup with her day job. The overlap could get awkward, she acknowledged: “I didn’t realize that when after you raise VC funding, they want to talk to you during business hours, like during the day, where you also have a job during the day. You can’t be in two places at the same time.”
Check out the full episode for more of Leven’s founder journey, including advice about raising money from VCs and establishing a company culture.
Like this episode? Here are more from The Tech Founder Odyssey series:
How Teleport’s Leader Transitioned from Engineer to CEO
How 2 Founders Sold Their Startup to Aqua Security in a Year
How Solvo’s Co-Founder Got the ‘Guts’ to Be an Entrepreneur
