Austen Allred
Founder & CEO, Bloom Institute of Technology. On 2 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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.
2shows
3appearances
63statements
7resolved
2supported
5contradicted
29%fully supported
18said about them ↓ Everything Austen Allred said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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: Lambda School grads are financially $250K ahead of university peers
“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.”
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: Lambda School graduates more than 85% of its starting students
“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.”
Allred: Human capital is the most unoptimized asset class in history
“Human capital is the most unoptimized asset class we've ever had.”
Allred: ML will soon predict candidate software engineering success before tuition
“Pretty soon you can underwrite the likelihood that a person will be a successful software engineer before they've paid a dollar.”
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: Lambda School grads get six-figure job offers immediately upon applying
“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?”
Allred: MIT PhDs and 1600 SATs do not correlate with startup success
“But just because you went, you have a PhD in computer science from MIT and you got a 1600 on the SATs as a freshman doesn't necessarily mean you'll have a successful company. It's not directly correlated.”
Allred: University of Phoenix incentives are misaligned by government-backed loans
“They're backed by, the loans are backed by Uncle Sam, and whether or not you're successful, they get paid. So the incentives are fundamentally misaligned, and if the University of Phoenix can get you to sign a piece of paper, they get 80 grand.”
Allred: Advising students to attend college at any cost is bad advice
“Everybody growing up just said, go to college. Doesn't matter what it costs. Just get a degree. It doesn't matter what you study and you'll be successful. And I think my generation is now realizing like that's fundamentally untrue. It isn't only not good advic…”
Allred: Debt-funded liberal arts degrees are impractical for mid-career switchers
“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.”
Allred: Lambda School may launch a nursing school by late 2019
“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”
The other half of the tape: Austen Allred's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 18 times in 8 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 8Jeff Richards 7Craig Cannon 2Karn Saroya 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 15
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 3
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 13 mentions in 4 episodes 3 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
- Jeremy Rossmann of Make School on Income Share Agreements and the Future of College · Y Combinator
- 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
- Karn Saroya on the Capital-Light Way to Start an Insurance Business · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Austen's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Bloom Institute of Technology | 2 | 38 | 50% 1/2 | full record on 20VC → |
| Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Bloom Institute of Technology | 1 | 25 | 20% 1/5 | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |