Rik started teaching back in 2012, firstly at General Assembly where he was one of the first instructors at their London office. After a year, he felt that learning code could be done in a more friendly way so with his co-founder, Amelia, he set Steer, an in-person coding school based in London (read about it on It's Nice That). Steer ended up growing quickly and Rik left 2015. In 2016, Rik moved to New York and decided to set up something that could be accessible anywhere.

SuperHi was started in October 2016 by Rik Lomas. Initially SuperHi was started to be a way to help creative people learn to code but over time, our mission has changed to be helping creative people learn the skills they need to improve their careers.

The rules for SuperHi was to make something:

• Highly accessible – why punish people for not living in a major city city?
• Budget friendly – in-person bootcamps need to cover expensive physical spaces and online bootcamps seem to be inspired by the US education system's pricing model (e.g. way too expensive!)
• Time flexible – why force people to be in a space at a particular day or time? Why is most education not on-demand?

At the same time, we didn't want to make something that felt like just a book or just a set of videos but something with real human interaction and great customer support too.

Secret sauce

Whenever we get asked what makes SuperHi so different and why our students love what we do, we like to talk about three things that compliment each other:

1. Specialized education – Expert-led courses that get people jobs and grow portfolios. We focus on “Show, Don’t Tell” – remixable, real-world portfolio projects, rather than just a bullet-point in a résumé.
2. Best-in-class products – Beautiful tools that help people learn quicker by reducing the friction of learning online. For example, for code courses, we created a world-class, proprietary code editor to help people spot and fix mistakes.
3. A vibrant community – An active, international, and diverse community of tens of thousands of creative professionals. Our community exchange advice, share jobs and start friendships. Over a million messages and counting!

The name "SuperHi"

Originally SuperHi had a few work-in-progress names and nothing really fit for a while. One name was 'Craft' but there were already a lot of things called that. Another was 'Tailor' but that felt too masculine. Another was 'Seamstress' but that read like 'seem stressed' which is the last thing we want people to feel!

The name came from a video that was put on YouTube from a 1994 British TV episode of a show called Tomorrow's World that covered future technology. In the show, it covered the internet which back in 1994 was cutting edge.

In the show they were calling the internet 'The Information Superhighway' so we used the 'SuperHi' part of 'Superhighway' to give a nod to the early days of the internet where everything was brand new, chaotic and fun to explore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8cnP-RtRHU