Heather Payne

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Heather Payne is the CEO of HackerYou, Canada’s original programming bootcamp and to date, the only one of dozens around North America that was founded by women. HackerYou offers Toronto’s best full- and part-time courses for people who want to learn to code. Heather also operates a 7000-square foot digital literacy education facility in the heart of downtown Toronto called The Lab.

In 2011, Heather founded Ladies Learning Code, a Canadian not-for-profit organization that runs popular workshops for women (and men, and girls and boys) who want to learn computer programming and other technical skills in a social and collaborative way. Ladies Learning Code now has chapters in 19 cities across Canada and thriving programs for youth. In 2012, Heather spent a year working on a project for the Mozilla Foundation: her job was to build a community of people and organizations in Toronto who care about raising youth as creators – not just consumers – of technology and the web. The project was granted $365,000 in funding from the Ontario Trillium Foundation. Heather was the first investor in ShopLocket (acquired in 2014 by PCH International), and was recently named one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women in the Trendsetters & Trailblazers category, as well as one of the Globe and Mail’s Top 12 Canadian “Innovators at Work”.