Lambda School's Austen Allred: "Go to university - if you can pay for it in cash"

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 4 October 2018

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Austen Allred, founder of Lambda School, to talk about how he moved to Silicon Valley and lived in his car (2:50), getting his first job (5:05), his first failed startup (6:05), trying to kill payday loans (9:05), landing on his current startup idea of offering free university in exchange for a cut of students’ income (9:50), the education problem (11:50), going to Y Combinator (113:50), expanding the model into other industries (15:00), soaring university costs (17:35), the reasons behind it (21:30), why education has been overlooked as a target for disruption (23:00), the cultural role of university (24:25), how he chooses students (27:45), how universities have responded (29:35), raising venture capital (31:10), the importance of Twitter as a marketing tool (31:40), betting all of his money on Tesla (34:40), finding professors for his school (38:05), and his plans to offer free room and board as well (39:35).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech.
0:07.7	This week, we have some fabulous stuff for you.
0:12.1	Not only do we have your normally scheduled programming, which of course is this, which you're listening to right now.
0:17.9	We also have a bonus episode about a new book called The Big
0:22.0	Disruption, which is a quite fantastic satire of modern Silicon Valley, written by a former
0:29.2	Googler. So we speak with the author, Jessica Powell, and that is over in the bonus episode,
0:35.0	which if you look right now, should be also in your feed.
0:39.1	So do check that out.
0:40.7	And before we get to the current show, today's show, I would just ask you to take a moment, stop.
0:46.7	Or maybe you don't even have to stop.
0:47.9	You can do it while you listen.
0:49.7	Go over to Apple Podcasts, give a rating and review.
0:52.4	As I always say, it helps other people find the show,
0:55.8	and it is a very big help. So just take a second. And while you do that, we will get to today's
1:02.3	show, which starts right now. Yo, technology. What is it all about? I was taught. It doesn't matter what it costs, you go get a degree because that is the ticket.
1:14.6	We're finding that to be less and less true, right?
1:16.6	The cost of the degree continues to increase and the value of just having a degree declines over time.
1:34.2	This week on Danny in the Valley we have Austin Allred, who is a refugee from the great state of Utah,
1:40.4	and he is also the founder of Lambda School, which I find just fascinating.
1:46.9	It's a coding school, but with a difference. So rather than having to pay the usual,
1:53.8	whatever it is, 10 grand, 15 grand, 20 grand, 30 grand, they charge nothing. It's totally free. The catch is that once you graduate, if you get a job that pays 50K or more, they take a share of your
2:00.4	earnings for a couple years. I think it's
	...

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