Richard Wang, co-founder and former CEO of coding bootcamp Coding Dojo, is launching Idea to Launch, a 30-day program that helps would-be founders turn a startup idea into a working product using AI coding tools and hands-on engineering help.

Nearly four years after selling Coding Dojo to Perdoceo for $70 million, Wang was looking for a way to keep doing work that had a measurable impact on people’s lives. He found it in mentoring aspiring founders.

Wang thinks AI is about to do for software what smartphones did for video. Cheap cameras and cloud platforms gave rise to the influencer economy, and he believes AI will push the cost of building a product close to zero.

“We’re going to create this whole new builder economy that’s about to come in the next three to five years,” he said. “Baby boomers are gifted with cheap housing. I think Gen Z is going to be gifted with a cheap price to build.”

He sees plenty of demand. Citing a Shopify-Gallup study and a Zapier/Harris poll, Idea to Launch says 60% of Americans have a business idea but only 9% launch one. Wang said the reasons people hold back include fear of failure, not knowing how to get started, and not wanting to give up a paycheck or benefits.

Unlike accelerators such as Techstars or Y Combinator, Idea to Launch doesn’t take equity, and participants don’t have to quit their jobs. Over 10 evening sessions, founders get coaching, run customer interviews, build a product with AI tools such as Lovable, Replit and Cursor, and plan a launch. Each founder also gets 10 hours of one-on-one help from professional engineers.

Wang said people without technical backgrounds can now vibe-code 80% to 90% of a product on their own. The hard part, he said, is connecting it to other services, setting up the database correctly and making it secure.

“We’ll provide that type of knowledge with real engineering support,” he said. For engineers who have never done customer discovery or marketing, the program fills in the business side.

Security researchers have found serious vulnerabilities in apps built on vibe-coding platforms. A 2025 scan found 170 of 1,645 apps built with Lovable exposing user data, and another case this year exposed nearly 19,000 user records. Wang said the program’s engineers will make sure security holes are fixed “before they launch or before they get onto the first customer.”

The first cohort starts Jan. 11, followed by three more through April. Each is capped at 15 to 20 founders. Tuition is $3,500 for the inaugural cohort, down from the normal $5,000. Sessions will be held in person in Seattle or Bellevue, and Wang said he expects to pick a space within the next month. He is self-funding the venture.

Wang, who immigrated from China at 13 and was the first in his family to attend college, became Coding Dojo’s CEO in 2015. He left in 2017 for Trupanion and returned in 2019. The company grew to $50 million in peak annual revenue, according to Wang, and had 194 employees at the time of the sale, according to GeekWire’s earlier reporting. It operated campuses in several states before shifting online during the pandemic.

Wang sees Idea to Launch expanding to other tech hubs, then online, and eventually licensing the program globally, much as Coding Dojo grew to multiple campuses. If the first cohorts go well, he can envision a follow-up program, Launch to Traction, to help founders find more customers.

He doesn’t plan to invest in participants’ companies. Having spent years building and selling Coding Dojo, Wang said he knows how hard that road is and would rather “cheer them on from the sidelines.” He said taking VC money at Coding Dojo created pressure to grow 100% a year, something he calls “startup steroids.”

For Wang, the point isn’t to find the next unicorn. It’s to give more people a shot at building something now that AI has made it cheaper and easier.

“I think everyone should try at least once just to bring their idea to reality,” he said.

Plug and Play Seattle selected 11 startups for the fourth batch of its accelerator program, bringing together a group of founders building everything from space-servicing robotic arms and data-center optical links to opioid-countering antibody therapeutics.

The 12-week program kicks off today and runs through mid-December. Ten of the participating startups are based in Seattle, joined by Tokyo-based wireless power developer Aeterlink, which is participating in an exploratory international track to support its expansion into the U.S. and Pacific Northwest.

Programming will mix virtual sessions with in-person work across Plug and Play Seattle’s regional hubs at the University of Washington’s CoMotion Labs and the SNBL Global Gateway in Everett, Wash. The cohort will present their progress to investors and corporate partners at a Dec. 3 expo at the Boeing Future of Flight in Mukilteo.

“Seattle has the talent and research depth to build companies that shape entire industries,” said Jack Callaghan, director of Plug and Play Seattle, in a statement. “This cohort reflects that potential, from advancing drug discovery to building the infrastructure behind AI.”

Here are the 11 startups in Batch 4:

• Aeterlink (Tokyo): Develops wireless power systems that deliver electricity to devices without physical cables, targeting applications in industrial automation, buildings, and medical devices.
• Athanor AI (Seattle): Builds Kairos, a verification platform using mathematical proofs to validate AI-generated chip-design code.
• Coda AI (Seattle): Creates an AI-native vehicle diagnostics platform combining language models with deterministic computation to help automakers analyze vehicle data across cloud and onboard systems.
• CounterX Therapeutics (Seattle): Develops antibody therapeutics and vaccines designed to blunt the effects of opioids and help prevent accidental overdose in high-risk patients.
• DiffBio (Seattle): Bridges computational protein design with wet-lab testing via gene synthesis, cloning, and automated screening to help researchers evaluate designed protein functions.
• Mindmorphic (Seattle): Builds foundation models for brain signals that function across individuals, reducing the need for person-specific retraining in neurotechnology and brain-computer interfaces.
• Orbital Robotics (Seattle): Builds AI-powered robotic arms for in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing using vision-based control to capture objects without specialized docking hardware.
• Q-Immune (Seattle): Analyzes protein interactions in live cells to predict treatment toxicity and guide the creation of safer cell therapies.
• Raydx (Seattle): Develops silicon-photonics interconnects using optical links to replace copper connections, speeding up AI inference in data centers.
• Talus Bio (Seattle): Measures compound effects on hundreds of gene-regulating proteins inside live human cells to accelerate drug discovery for hard-to-drug targets.
• Thoron (Seattle): Manufactures U.S.-made enterprise drones paired with Commander, an AI-powered data-processing software platform.

Silicon Valley-based Plug and Play launched its Seattle presence in March 2025.

In addition to startup accelerators, Plug and Play runs corporate innovation programs and has an in-house venture capital fund that has backed companies such as including Dropbox, Guardant Health, Honey, Lending Club, N26, PayPal, and Rappi.