Lambda School

“Five years from now, we're probably half a million students a year.”

“We didn't have a pitch deck for a series B.”

“We got to a point where I knew that if you give me a dollar today, I can give you back maybe it's three or four dollars a couple of years from now, and when you have a machine that's working like that, you really should be raising as much as you can.”

“But we were not planning on raising a series B. We still had the vast majority of our series A in the bank, actually.”

“So we sent out an email, you know, making it six months long, and we're teaching computer science because we thought that's something that code bootcamps were lacking, and it was going to be completely free until you get a job, basically our model today, and t…”

“And we found that of those companies that we brought in, they would stay, they would interview students, and a third of those interviews ended up being hires.”

“I think people vastly underestimate the psychological impact of having just a little bit of money, even if it's a couple thousand dollars between how you can think and take risks and, What your life is like from having no money to having just a little bit of m…”

“I actually think that the faster you ship things, the higher quality they will be over time, and that if you focus on making things really high quality and delaying the time to ship, it will be lower quality overall.”

“Our data shows that schools that are trying to acquire students in a B to C format today are struggling across the board, and I actually think while Lambda's newer to the game, you look at some of the older coding boot camps, they are also struggling as they'r…”

“And what's more important when you're in a learning state is expectations being met exactly more so than it getting marginally better and whiplashing you.”

“When we got into YC, I was like, okay, I need to like cut back On Twitter and just be heads down, but it was kind of fun to share what was happening. So it was just like an honest outgrowth of my personality that I thought it was fun to share stuff as things w…”

“So we did a syndicate through AngelList, which is nice from cap table construction perspective, because it's just one name on the cap table.”

“I know that Lambda would not be what it is today if we were doing it all remotely, just random lunches and dinners and meeting up with other founders and investors and people that I really admire was really, really unique.”

“But when you are poor, or when your salary or your income is low, I mean, most people don't even have salaries, they have incomes or wages coming into Lambda, you have to think really, really hard about downside risk, because any little thing that goes wrong t…”

“And so we had five different tracks running. We were on three different continents. We were spinning up in India as well. So we're starting on our Fourth continent. So we're in the U S Europe, Africa, and we're starting in Asia as well. And we just kind of did…”

“I tend to move really fast and do things 80% of the way and jump from thing to thing at kind of lightning pace. I'm not very good at finishing things or making sure things are well documented. I'm not I'm not as good at thinking about the edge cases of what I …”

“Transparently, I have done basically zero secondary relative to where Lambda is at”

“We've had chances to sell Lambda School.”

“We hold pretty sacred our ten-year goal at Lambda School of Increasing our student incomes over the next 10 years, so by 2030, by ten billion a year annually.”

“But I think we picked the wrong one. We went with the Uber model. And the educational model is so sensitive to changes and so sensitive to experience that you can't Really get away with that.”

“So we weren't, we were spending maybe like a hundred grand a month, right?”

“At Lambda School, we implemented a new, like, chat opportunity for our students, and we didn't loop in customer service, and customer service had, like, an entirely different chat element. And so it just, like, caused a ton of backlash, like, across the compan…”

“For example, what we did was we hire people from Apple Genius Bar or Best Buy Tech Support or people who did like Lambda School or some CS Bootcamps.”