Austen Allred
Founder & CEO, Bloom Institute of Technology · 2 appearances on the record.
computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →
founderexecutiveauthorinvestor@Austen ↗LinkedIn ↗austenallred.com ↗
Austen Allred is the co-founder of Lambda School (rebranded as BloomTech), an online coding academy that popularized Income Share Agreements for tech education. He also co-authored the book Secret Sauce and founded Gauntlet AI, an intensive training platform for AI engineers.
38statements → 11claims → 2claims resolved → 3.79/5average certainty → 2.21/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 15said about them ↓
1 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 8 not checkable as stated how the 11 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
5 predictions · 6 assertions · 3 opinions · 14 insights · 8 disclosures · 2 what ifs · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 11 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 8 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Austen argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. We have 10,316 words of Austen Allred, and that is not enough to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
How the interview went all their pushback → series average →
Across 2 rated episodes:
host pushback ▾ 1.5/10
pushed back at the host 2.5/10
setup questions received 85%
host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 21:21“What's your biggest weakness, do you think, Austin?” ▶ 24:08“Why did you make the decision to move, and how do you think about the future of SF?” ▶ 16:12“what have been the most challenging elements of scaling the team for you over the last 18 months?” ▶ 7:03“How would you describe, and this is a very personal question, so I'm sorry for that. How would you describe your personal relationship to money?” ▶ 9:12“Two years later, and forty-eight million dollars later, I have to ask, what fundamentally changed your mind to raise for Lambda versus the initial disregard?” ▶ 21:09“What was the biggest challenge in the building of Lambda, and was there a real sticking moment where there was a real question for you?”
Everything Austen Allred said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Allred: The Bay Area Is History's Greatest Squandering of Potential Wealth
“I think Patrick Collison has said something about the idea that in 50 years we'll probably look back at the Bay Area as one of the greatest squanderings of potential wealth that the world has ever known, and I tend to agree.”
Allred Predicts San Francisco Faces Potential Bankruptcy and Budget Disarray
“From a governmental status, I'm sure the budget is going to be a wreck for a while. There is a possibility San Francisco goes bankrupt.”
Allred: Unemployment Will Be Solved as an Optimization Problem Within 20 Years
“That unemployment is an optimization problem that will be solved in the next 20 years.”
Founders With Zero Net Worth Optimize for One Year, Not Ten
“A founder who has zero net worth, and this is something that I've battled with in myself, you can find yourself optimizing for a year from now and not thinking about 10 years from now because you're optimizing for today.”
Allred: San Francisco and Palo Alto Permanently Lost Default Hub Status
“I think because of coronavirus, there is now enough of an impetus that it won't be obvious that you should go to San Francisco or Palo Alto anymore, and because of that, I think it will change permanently, and I think more will move to the cloud.”
Lambda School Targets $10B Annual Student Income Increase by 2030
“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.”
Allred: Raise Maximum Capital Once Unit Economics Yield 3-4x Return
“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.”
Allred: Lambda School Will Reach 500,000 Students Annually in Five Years
“Five years from now, we're probably half a million students a year.”
Allred: Private Market Startup Valuations Are Paper Money and Don't Matter
“And the nice thing about private markets the way they are right now is it's all paper money. Like, whatever your last valuation was actually doesn't matter.”
Allred: Lambda School Has Passed on Opportunities to Sell the Company
“We've had chances to sell Lambda School.”
Lambda School Expanded Too Quickly Across Four Continents
“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…”
Allred: Lambda School Erred by Adopting Uber's Decentralized Operational Model
“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.”
Danner and Hastings Are the Sole Founders Scaling Public EdTech
“There are a lot of people who know a lot about education. There are a lot of people who have Built billion dollar companies and taken technology companies public. I think John Danner and Reed Hastings are basically the only people who are both at the same time…”
Allred: Wealth Beyond Basic Survival Has Negligible Impact on Satisfaction
“After a pretty small threshold, the differences between having a lot of money and a little money are fairly negligible. I mean, it comes down to, you know, once you're making, you know, enough to survive and have a car, you know, what car you drive might be di…”
Allred: Running a Company to Please VCs Is a Disaster
“We've never lived to please investors. We've never run a business to try to make it marketable to VCs, and I think that's a recipe for disaster.”
Allred: Faster Product Shipping Results in Higher Long-Term Quality
“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.”
Allred's Prior Startup Failed After Billionaire Investor Pulled Series A
“We had a series A close, all the docs were done, had this big billionaire investor who was leading the round, and he just called me, like, on December 23rd and said, hey, I'm not going to send a wire, and that was the end of that company.”
Low-Income Individuals Must Constantly Hyper-Focus on Downside Risk
“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…”
Allred Has Taken Almost Zero Secondary Liquidity in Lambda School
“Transparently, I have done basically zero secondary relative to where Lambda is at”
Boards Give Random Advice Unless Founders Make Specific Asks
“Figure out exactly what your ask is, and then come to us with exactly that ask, and we will go crush it for you. But until then, you're just going to be getting random advice, and it's probably stuff that you've thought about 10 times as much as the board, and…”
Structure Round Docs to Avoid Chasing Every Angel Signature
“And we also set up our docs in such a way that if X percent of the seed round has signed docs, then we're good. I think that's really important. So you don't have to chase down literally every single person.”
Consistency Matters More Than Minor Updates in Education Products
“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.”
The COO Role Must Be Customized Around the Founder's Weaknesses
“COO is one of those roles where there's not like a single COO. It's very much a custom mold to what the CEO is and what the founder is and finding someone whose strengths are the founder's weaknesses and vice versa, more so than it is just Hire a COO off the s…”
The other half of the tape: Austen Allred's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 15 times in 6 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 8Jeff Richards 7
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2020 5 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Ashton Kutcher on Early Lessons From Investing in Airbnb and Spotify, Why VC Ownership Requirements Are Becoming More and More Egregious & What Being Good At Product Truly Means
- 20VC: Calm Founder Alex Tew on What It Takes To Build Viral Products Today, The Current State of Customer Acquisition Costs, What Makes The Best Brands
- 20VC: Lightspeed Partner, Merci Victoria Grace on The Future of Collaboration Tools, Bundling vs Unbundling, Synchronous vs Asynchronous & What It Means To Productise The S*** Out of Venture
- 20VC: Moxxie Ventures' Katie Stanton on What It Takes To Raise A First Time Fund As A Solo GP, The Entrance of Multi-Stage Funds Into Seed Rounds and The Inverse Relationship of Those That Fund Diverse Managers and Those That Say They Do
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2019 10 mentions in 2 episodes 5 per episode
- 20VC: The Transition From Founder To CEO, How To Determine When To Stretch On Price in Venture & The Benefits of Attribution for Partnership Dynamics with Jeff Richards, Managing Partner @ GGV Capital
- 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
Appearances (2)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| 20VC: Lambda School Founder, Austen Allred on How To Assess Your Relationship To Risk and | Sep 18, 2020 | 20m |
| 20VC: Lambda School Founder, Austen Allred on Why Unemployment Is An Optimisation Problem | Mar 8, 2019 | 24m |