20VC: Lambda School Founder, Austen Allred on How To Assess Your Relationship To Risk and Money, Why San Francisco Is A Case Study For The Greatest Squandering of Wealth in History & Why Complexity Increases Exponentially with Scale
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 18 September 2020
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Austen Allred is the Founder & CEO @ Lambda School, the startup that remotely trains people to become a web developer or data scientist and the students pay no tuition until they are hired. Just last month, Lambda's $74M Series C was announced led by Gigafund bringing their total funding to date to over $129M with prior investors including Stripe, Bedrock, GV, Gigafund and GGV to name a few. Prior to founding Lambda, Austen was Senior Manager for Growth @ LendUp and before that co-founded Grasswire.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Austen made his way into startups having slept in a Honda Civic and how he went from homeless to rockstar founder @ Lambda?
2.) How does Austen evaluate his own attitude to risk? How does Austen think about downside protection today? How has this changed over time? How does Austen feel about founders taking secondaries? How does Austen think about his own relationship to money?
3.) Having raised his Series C last month, why did Austen choose the investors he did? How did the round progress? What made Gigafund different to alternate options? What makes the best board members in Austen's mind? What makes the worst?
4.) What have been the most challenging elements for Austen of scaling the team? How does complexity change with time in team scaling? Why did Austen bring in a COO? What did he look for in the role? How does Austen advise others on bringing in a COO?
5.) Why does Austen believe that post-COVID we will never go back to the valley as we knew it? Why does Austen believe the valley represents the biggest potential squandering of wealth in history? How does Austen evaluate the government intervention we have seen?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the 20 minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I need your advice today. |
| 0:03.7 | Do you think we should drop the the in the 20 minute VC? |
| 0:06.8 | Is it really cleaner? |
| 0:08.0 | Let me know what you think on Instagram at H. Stebbing's 1996 with 2Bs or on Twitter at Harry Stebbings. |
| 0:13.8 | But to the show today, and I returned to the hot seat for one of my favourers. |
| 0:17.0 | Just last month, they announced their $74 million series C, led by Gigafund. |
| 0:21.4 | And so with that, I'm thrilled to welcome back, Austin Allred, founder and CEO at Lambda |
| 0:25.5 | School, the startup that remotely trains people to become a web developer or data scientist, |
| 0:30.0 | and the students pay no tuition until they are hired. |
| 0:32.8 | To date, Austin has raised over $129 million from some of the best in the business, including Stripe, Bedrock, |
| 0:39.0 | GIV, Gigafund and GigiV, to name a few. And prior to founding Lambda, Austin was senior |
| 0:44.4 | manager for growth at Lendup, and before that, co-founded Grasswire. I'd also want to say a huge |
| 0:49.0 | thank you to Sean Maguire at Sequoia and Jeff Richards at GGV for some fantastic question |
| 0:53.7 | suggestions today. I really do so |
| 0:55.6 | appreciate those. But before you dive into this show today, I'm sure you've heard me talk about it |
| 0:59.3 | before, but I love Carter. Carter simplifies how startups and investors manage equity, track cap tables |
| 1:05.2 | and get valuations. Go to Carter.com forward slash 20 VC to get 10% off. More than 800,000 employees and shareholders |
| 1:12.8 | use Carter to manage hundreds of billions of dollars in equity, and Carter now offers fund |
| 1:17.9 | administration so you can see real-time data in the Carter platform and work with Carter's |
| 1:22.3 | team of experienced fund accountants. As I said, head over to Carter.com forward slash 20VC to get 10% off. |
| 1:28.9 | And speaking of a transformational product like Carter there, 2020 has been a year full of |
| 1:33.1 | unexpected changes. But one thing that's remained very constant, the most important part of |
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