E1039: Independent Journalist Vincent Woo reflects on his piece, “Lambda School’s Misleading Promises”, shares insights on what drew him to the story, where Lambda School went wrong, how they can be better & more

This Week in Startups

Jason Calacanis

Technology

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2020

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

0:45 Jason intros Vincent Woo, who wrote "Lambda School's Misleading Promises" for New York Magazine
2:21 What drew Vincent to this story? What wrongdoings did he discover?
6:02 Vincent describes Lambda's ISAs and how they were sold
14:24 How Vincent approached Austen Allred as an investigative reporter & clip from Vincent's interview with Austen
16:19 What is Lambda's school actual placement rate? How does it compare with other coding bootcamps?
20:06 Getting Lambda's former Director of Student Placement on record to speak about the placement rates
23:43 Why ISA coding schools should exist
29:18 How Lambda's remote-only approach differentiates them & how opportunity cost plays into their issues
35:06 Where did Lambda School go wrong?
45:51 Does the business model work in broad strokes if opened up to everyone?
53:54 What does Lambda School need to do now?
58:21 Where is the blindspot in most entrepreneurs?
1:00:57 Vincent also writes about local political corruption in the Bay Area

Transcript

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0:45.0	Hey everybody, welcome to this week and startups.
0:47.0	I'm your host, Jason Callicanus, and on this podcast we talk about startups and we talk about their
0:51.5	journeys and they're often messy and they're trying to figure out where they're going
0:56.0	and especially in the early years things are up and down.
1:00.0	We recently had Austin from Lambda School on the podcast and Lambda School is a Coder School and
1:08.8	What's unique about Lambda is that they use something called an ISA an income sharing agreement. So instead of paying for your
1:17.3	tuition up front you pay a percentage of your salary after the fact.
1:23.6	And I think just broad strokes,
1:24.8	it was originally, you could pay for the nine month program
1:28.2	at Lambda School to learn how to be a developer,
1:29.9	$20,000.
1:31.4	And I think on the back end, you paid 15% of your salary capped at $30,000 and I think on the back end you paid 15% of your salary capped at $30,000.
	...

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