The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 38 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
Lambda School Couldn't Have Succeeded as a Fully Remote Company Initially
“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.”
Allred: A Small Financial Cushion Dramatically Increases Founder Risk Tolerance
“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…”
Allred: Founders Must Model if VC Leaves Them Better Off
“And I feel like that's the fundamental analysis everybody should be doing before they raise VC, sitting down and doing the math and saying, does this make sense for the business I'm running?”
Allred: Lambda School Raised Its Series B Without a Pitch Deck
“We didn't have a pitch deck for a series B.”
Allred: Strong Fundamentals Turn Fundraising Into Pure Optimization
“You can get to a point, at least in this funding environment, where fundraising isn't a problem, and it's just an optimization of who do you want to take money from, at what price, and which players are you getting involved, and you can get there if you build …”
Lambda School Converted 2,000 of 7,000 Leads With Free Upfront Tuition
“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…”
Allred: Great Startup Visions Make Sense Immediately but Face Execution Skepticism
“In my mind, a vision is worthwhile when you tell it to people, and they say, yeah, that totally makes sense. I love it. I'm just not sure if you can get there.”
Allred: Flappy Bird Creator Would Have Become a Solo Billionaire
“I think if the Flappy Bird creator hadn't turned it off, he probably would be there.”
Allred: I Operate at Lightning Pace but Struggle With Documentation
“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 …”
Lambda's Twitter 'Building in Public' Brand Was Completely Unscripted
“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…”
Lambda School Held Most Series A Capital When Raising Series B
“But we were not planning on raising a series B. We still had the vast majority of our series A in the bank, actually.”
One-Third of Lambda School On-Site Interviews Yielded Hires
“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.”
Allred Slept in His Car in Palo Alto for Three Months
“I bought a two-door Honda Civic, and I drove out to Silicon Valley, and I slept on the streets of Palo Alto for about three months.”