Neal Sales-Griffin

Sales-Griffin attended Northwestern University, where he majored in Learning and Organizational Change. He soon became involved in several entrepreneurial endeavors during his college career. He helped start ContextMedia (now known as Outcome Health), a healthcare technology company which provides digital health information to patients. He also managed a barbershop with two locations on Chicago’s South Side, and was a teaching assistant for an entrepreneurship class at the school’s Harvey Kapnick Center for Business Institutions. He interned for 3 months at UBS Bank, making more money in 3 months than his mother made in one year. Sales-Griffin volunteered at the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship as a mentor, coach, and judge to motivate kids from where he grew up to start their own businesses and solve meaningful problems for themselves. Sales-Griffin served as student body president his senior year, and graduated from Northwestern in 2009 with a degree in education and social policy.

After graduating from college, Sales-Griffin joined Sandbox Industries, a Chicago venture capital firm, as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. While there, he learned that the coders were the people putting ideas into action, and resolved to learn it himself in order to lead a more impactful life. He left this job to learn coding with his Northwestern classmate and friend Mike McGee, an experience that led them to launch their own coding program. Sales-Griffin and McGee turned down an opportunity to join the technology team for Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign so they could work on their idea for a coding bootcamp.

Sales-Griffin is an adjunct member of the faculty at the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering. He also teaches coding at Dyett High School, which is located near where he grew up. He serves on the boards of Mount Carmel, his alma mater, and the Chiaravalle Montessori school in Evanston, Illinois. He is the co-chair of the MakeWork Council at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sales-Griffin was named to Crain’s Chicago Business’s "40 Under 40" in 2013.

Sales-Griffin ran in the 2019 Chicago mayoral election, announcing his candidacy in March of 2018.

In 2016, Sales-Griffin joined CodeNow as its CEO, a nonprofit coding school that focuses in on high school students in low income areas interested in coding, design and entrepreneurship. It is a project-based educational program with 4 levels of classes that aims to provide the tools for each student to be able to solve meaningful problems students experience and want to address. The majority of graduates of this program attend college and have pursued careers in STEM.

In 2013, Sales-Griffin served on Chicago's first ever Technology Industry Diversity Council, where he served as co-chair to help produce a technology plan for the city. The council's purpose was to create opportunities for minorities in Chicago’s technology economy through partnerships with Chicago Public Schools and City Colleges of Chicago with the goal of increasing the percentage of minorities in tech firms as well was minority-owned tech firms.

In 2011, Sales-Griffin and McGee launched Code Academy, the first ever coding bootcamp, offering three-month intensive courses in web development and design. In 2012, Code Academy changed its name to The Starter League to eliminate confusion with a competing New York-based program called Codecademy. It was one of the first tenants of 1871, Chicago's center for technology and entrepreneurship. They partnered with Chicago Public Schools to help bring code education to the classroom. The program also took an undisclosed investment from Chicago software company Basecamp (formerly known as 37signals). In 2016, New York-based coding bootcamp Fullstack Academy acquired The Starter League.

Sales-Griffin grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the Kenwood neighborhood at East 49th Street and South Drexel Boulevard. Sales-Griffin's father is African-American. His mother is of Honduran, Filipino, and Mexican descent. Sales-Griffin comes from a low-income background. He attended St. Thomas the Apostle School in Hyde Park and Mount Carmel High School in Woodlawn. He was on the track team and played cornerback on the football team at Mount Carmel. He had an opportunity to participate in the Junior Olympics, although he did not attend due to a serious back injury. He also was an avid and competitive chess player, winning 6th place at National K-12 Championships in 1998.

Neal Sáles-Griffin (born July 28, 1987) is a Chicago entrepreneur, educator, and aspiring politician. He co-founded the first coding bootcamp program in 2011 and is the CEO of CodeNow, a nonprofit that teaches coding to low-income high school students. He was a candidate for mayor of Chicago in 2019.