Interview, Fireside Chat
A CS Education That's Free Until You Get a Job - Austen Allred of Lambda School
Y CombinatorAusten Allred, Craig Cannon, Steven Klaiber-Noble, David Kofoed Wind, Dave Dawson, Dayo Koleowo
- The school plans to announce a new living stipend program in the near future to support students who cannot leave their jobs, aiming to expand enrollment among working professionals.
- Admissions will increasingly rely on difficult pre-course work, potentially replacing interviews entirely over time to streamline the process, though this carries risks of false negatives and positives.
- The school aims to become "very data-driven" within a few years, utilizing machine learning to underwrite student success likelihood before enrollment and predict outcomes by the start of the program.
- Future growth plans include raising capital to become "10 times bigger" with an anticipated 15% dilution, expecting revenue growth to validate this decision retrospectively.
- To reduce student reliance on manual applications, the school plans to hire 37 interview sourcers, evolving the business model into a "talent agency" that proactively matches students with companies.
- A new "Lambda Nursing" program is scheduled to launch by the end of this year to address labor shortages, potentially requiring centralized housing unlike the software engineering program.
- The educational experience will remain "probably always online" for the foreseeable future, with monthly meetups, as decentralized housing is deemed much cheaper than centralized options.
- The school intends to hire approximately 100 individual contributors quickly and face challenges recruiting executives with 100-150 person team experience, who remain concentrated in Silicon Valley.
- Grads are projected to have three years of experience and be $250,000 ahead financially compared to traditional university graduates upon the latter's completion.
- Student body diversity is expected to remain under 50% white as a natural outcome of targeting "untapped talent" rather than intentional skewing, a trait companies welcome.
- The school aims to measure its scale by the percentage of programmers trained annually, noting the current dropout rate has improved to over 85% due to better data and financial awareness.
- Remote work culture will be built from first principles to ensure engagement, contrasting with traditional high-growth companies that may retain executive teams in Silicon Valley while schools remain remote.
- The school expects to leverage a "data loop" advantage to write tighter models for capital costs and services, predicting student repayment and success more accurately than competitors.
- Instructional design must ensure everyone works on the right thing at the right time without physical oversight, using software to prevent disengagement seen in traditional classrooms.
- The school anticipates the market remains unable to measure product quality, leading to undervaluation of companies with strong "taste" that can be cultivated over a long enough time frame.
- Vocational training is positioned as a pathway to enable students to earn money first, making liberal arts education more accessible later in life.
- The "90/10 rule" in US education funding is identified as a primary driver of market inefficiency and labor shortages in sectors like nursing, creating a five-million-person gap.
- Machine learning applications will eventually allow the school to determine if a candidate possesses average mental intelligence and high work ethic based on data inputs.
- The "talent agency" model is expected to eventually dominate operations as a primary revenue driver, moving beyond the education component to handle the full application process for students.
- The school views the market for human capital as the most unoptimized asset class, with a goal to improve efficiency through its data and software approach to remote education.