Lelia King did not enter Build Carolina with a software development background or a plan to become an entrepreneur. Her experience was in communications, public relations, and marketing. When an opportunity arose to help start a nonprofit coding school, she agreed to take on work she had not done before.
In this Founder Factor conversation, King describes how that initial school became one part of a broader effort to help people enter technical careers. Along the way, her job expanded from running a program to building partnerships, making hiring decisions, and deciding what the organization should attempt next. Her story makes room for a founder who learns the role while doing it.
What you'll learn.
- A program can grow into a broader organization when its team listens carefully to unmet needs.
- Communication and research skills can help a nontechnical leader ask useful questions and build partnerships.
- A smaller program can be appropriate when participants need intensive support.
- Values can guide hiring and funding decisions as well as the public mission.
Build Carolina developed several routes into technical work.
King describes Build Carolina as a nonprofit that supports the tech talent ecosystem by developing programs. In the interview, she explains three different routes aimed at people with different starting points.
Carolina Code School offered an immersive, full-time, in-person program for adults seeking to become software developers. SC Codes provided free coding education across South Carolina. Develop Carolina, a fellowship being piloted at the time, addressed the gap between finishing an educational program and being ready to work in a professional environment.
The six-month fellowship recognized that learning to code is one part of doing the job. New developers also need to understand how a product gets built, how teams work, and how to communicate with clients. King’s account starts with those specific gaps rather than treating every learner as someone who needs the same course.
A communications background helped her learn unfamiliar work.
King became interested in coding education while working for a company in that field. The stories of people changing careers drew her in. When the company closed, the next step required deciding whether to try something unfamiliar.
Three people formed the founding board behind the new nonprofit idea and hired her to run with it. King says the first two hiring decisions were not hers, while her responsibility for the organization grew afterward. A board, technical advisory committee, partners, and supporters provided knowledge that she did not have to hold alone.
She sees her communications training as directly relevant. Researching, interviewing, asking questions, and working with clients prepared her to say that she had never done something and ask someone experienced to explain it. Those skills helped her operate as a generalist while building relationships around a technical mission.
Listening expanded the mission beyond a single school.
The original idea had a fairly narrow shape: establish a nonprofit coding school. Over the following four and a half years described in the interview, conversations with employers and other organizations revealed needs that one school would not meet.
Build Carolina began thinking about how different programs could support the path from education into work. King’s role changed with it. She had initially imagined work similar to that of a campus director, with a focus on operations and students. She increasingly needed to look across programs and identify gaps in the broader system.
That wider view did not remove ordinary management responsibilities. Budgets still had to work and people still had to be hired. It changed the questions she asked alongside them: where are people struggling to enter training, move into companies, or find a real opportunity to practice their skills?
Staffing required judgment under imperfect conditions.
King gives staffing as a concrete example of the creative work in her job. The programs had separate goals but shared some needs. She had to decide when one person could contribute across several programs and when a program required someone’s full attention.
An instructor dedicated to the code school made sense because of the depth of that role. Other needs prompted questions about contractors, full-time positions, and timing. How certain should incoming funding be before the organization commits to a hire? How far ahead should it staff for a program that is still developing?
Books and models could help, but King says they could not answer every question for her particular team. Trying an approach and examining its result became part of the work. She identifies hiring as one of the organization’s largest risks because a single decision can substantially change a small team. At the time, that team included about five full-time employees and several close contractors.
Imposter syndrome became a question she could examine.
Because she had not been trained for every part of the role, King had to resist treating unfamiliar work as evidence that she did not belong. She connects this experience to the career changers Build Carolina supports. A person can be a year or two into something new and still question their competence.
Her approach is to step back and examine specifics: what does the role expect, what skills does the person have, what are they still learning, and where can they ask for help? A missing skill becomes something to address rather than a verdict on the person’s potential.
She also credits a supportive local technology community with making that process easier. People who acknowledge what they do not know can find others willing to help them learn through projects and work. Her experience is a reminder that confidence depends partly on the environment around a learner, not solely on private determination.
Different needs can justify different kinds of scale.
King treats workforce preparation as a shared problem involving education, employers, public institutions, and organizations such as Build Carolina. Technology changes quickly, and she sees a role for focused programs that fill specific gaps while the broader system adapts.
That view affects how she measures growth. A program serving a particular group may need to remain small enough to offer the support those participants require. A fellowship cohort, for example, depends on available funding, staff support, and employers willing to host participants. Adding seats without those conditions would change the experience.
Growth could therefore mean another class, a different program format, or a new experiment. King does not present small size as a failure. She argues that the program should fit the need it exists to meet. A foundation of established programs and nonprofit support gives the organization some room to test additional approaches.
Leadership meant giving herself permission to act.
King describes herself as historically risk averse. Losing a job early in her career pushed her into freelancing, where she had to learn unfamiliar work and discover that she could recover from uncertainty. Later experiences built on that earlier one.
For a long time, she did not describe herself as an entrepreneur. She thought of herself as someone who had agreed to try something and was figuring it out. Over time, she recognized the same hiring risks, failures, creative decisions, and growth questions that other founders faced.
The most persistent mindset change concerned permission. Earlier jobs had layers of oversight, and she was accustomed to approval before acting. Build Carolina still had a board and collaborative decisions, but she needed to recognize which actions were hers to take. She especially encourages women to consider entrepreneurship without waiting for someone else to identify them as the right kind of person.
Values supplied limits while the organization changed.
King closes with a clear commitment to the values Build Carolina had defined, including diversity, opportunity, impact, and agility. Goals and ambition did not justify compromising them.
Those values appeared in hiring and reviews, and she also applied them to partnerships and funding. Her role included supporting each team member’s development and creating the structures people needed to do their work.
Agility mattered because the needs around the organization would continue changing. King wanted Build Carolina to keep listening and adjusting while remaining dependable for the people it served. That balance gave the organization a basis for deciding what to change and what to protect.
King’s experience shows how a founder’s role can emerge from sustained responsibility rather than a predetermined identity. She learned to connect people, test programs, and make decisions without having every answer in advance. The constant was a specific purpose: helping more people find a workable route into technical careers.
