Lambda School

“The capital provider by themselves with just the income share agreement, wasn't getting properly compensated for how much risk they were taking. It was basically a mediocre or crappier version of a consumer loan, but you were getting paid either the same or sl…”

“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.”

“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…”

“In our last round we raised five million US and we have incredible angels as well. Lots of interesting folks from Shopify Lambda School, Solana, Endeavor, very interesting people who are participating.”

“I think my prediction if I had to bet money on it is that it won't work.”

“Lambda School switched to live cohort based. And with a clear, like sort of a high bar for entry. ... And so because of the filter on the front end, plus the format being live and in a peer group, they had like 75% plus completion rates.”

“Lambda School, I invested in Lambda School. Lambda School had like an 80% completion rate when I invested way back in the day.”

“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…”

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

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

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“I gave money to them. I gave a million bucks to him.”

“When you have a low cost of training it's a great model because it reduces the friction to join because you say, well, it's free. And so it's, I only have to pay them if I get a high paying job out of this. So your incentives are aligned, right? Because we wan…”

“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…”

“Like the minute they start applying, they get interviews, they get hired, they get a six-figure job, and it's like, what were we waiting for, right?”

“We have experiments running where we pay people living stipends. That will be expanding greatly. We'll be announcing something in the near future along those lines in concert with a few other tech leaders here in the valley.”

“By the time the student's graduating from university, the Lambda School student has three years of experience and has paid Lambda School off and is a quarter million dollars ahead, at least, of the university grad.”

“We are hiring right now, 37 interview sourcers.”

“The future we're going to look a lot like a talent agency basically for software engineers and designers and whatever else.”

“The prospect of, let's take out 50,000 dollars of loans to study Shakespeare is not a bad thing per se, but probably not the right thing at the right time.”

“So we are, yeah, we are entirely Vocational we're a trade school basically, and we want to help you make as much money as you can.”

“Now we're graduating, you know, more than 85% of students that start day one, and a lot of the dropout is because of reasons outside of our control.”

“We were profitable by any definition.”

“So you know, we're not working on it right, right now, but don't be surprised if you hear by the end of this year, an announcement that Lambda nursing is going live and we're launching a nursing school”

“Pretty soon you can underwrite the likelihood that a person will be a successful software engineer before they've paid a dollar.”

“So we're, I think as a school, we're less than half white, which is not the traditional makeup of a code school by any stretch of the imagination.”

“Our students who are great engineers are generally speaking more diverse than Stanford would be.”

“Like, you do need to know how to write C to be a good engineer. You do need to know how memory management works, but maybe let's not start with memory management as like an entry level point to software engineering.”

“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…”

“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.”

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

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“One of the folks, the first folks I did it for was Austin at Lambda School. And I ended up being like one of the first investors. It gave me the opportunity to be one of the first investors in Lambda School too.”

“Lambda School is one that seems to be doing great on that and, you know, it's taking, The ISA, the code, the skills, you know, and then lining them up with a job at the end, and it's, you know, found this really great niche in a market by delivering a very spe…”