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Transcription of our conversation with Austen Allred, Co-Founder and CEO of BloomTech:
Immad Akhund: Welcome to the Curiosity Podcast, where we go deep on a wide variety of technical topics with the smartest leaders in the world. I'm Immad Akhund, and I am the CEO and co-founder of Mercury.
Rajat Suri: And I'm Raj Suri. I'm the co-founder of Lima, Presto and Lyft. And today we're talking to Austen Allred, who is the founder and CEO of BloomTech, formerly known as Lambda, which basically helps students develop technical skills that are very relevant to the workplace. They train new software engineers, helping people from a wide variety of previous backgrounds to qualify as programmers and really dramatically help their income profile. Immad, what were you curious to learn about from Austen today?
Immad Akhund: I think it's pretty interesting. We've seen like a lot of like, what are Ivy Leagues for? And like all of this kind of backlash against like some of this stuff around like Palestine and things like that recently. But even before, you know, people dropping out, like thinking colleges are not worthwhile, Austen has a very different approach to it with BloomTech and like really focuses on careers. And I think that it's kind of interesting to think like, where is education going and like who is innovating here? And it's not actually that much innovation. I think it's great to kind of go deep with Austen on that.
Rajat Suri: Yeah I mean education is like one of the biggest costs ever for any human and you know in the U.S. it's getting bigger and bigger you know it's one of the costs that doesn't decline with time and that gets worse like health care and there's big questions that parents you know you and I included ask about like you know where do we spend our education dollars And there's also this big question about retraining of America as technology is taking over more part of our society. How are regular people going to adapt to that? And one of the big questions is, how are we going to retrain America? And I think Austen is answering that question really head on with this company. It's like, we'll find a way to do it.
Immad Akhund: When you went to college, did you think about it as like mostly like, hey, this is going to help me get a job? Or did you think like, oh, this is like going to elevate my class or like some other kind of non-specific objective?
Rajat Suri: It qualified me for the workplace, was the number one thing. And I went to a very… Yeah, that was 100% for me as well. I went to a very, like, workplace-oriented university, right, which is Waterloo. So, you know, you work four months, and you study four months. That's the way it worked over there. So that was always my mindset. But I think there's a lot of wasted money right now, personally, people going to universities for social reasons.
Immad Akhund: I mean, we both did these kind of, I guess, slightly more trade-oriented college degrees. But, you know, I feel like so much of the three years I spent at Cambridge doing computer science didn't give me skills that were useful in a programming job. I think you could have done it in nine months, which is, I think, how quickly Lambda School's BloomTech Institute is. How much of your time would you say was like, hey, this was like really efficient, useful education versus like NFBS?
Rajat Suri: You know, of my academic time, I would say close to zero was useful. I mean, remember, I ended up doing something very different. So I did like chemical engineering. So you did computer science and you ended up running computer science companies. But I did very little. But almost all the time I spent in the workplace as an intern was valuable. And every single experience was formative for me that I still draw upon today. But yeah, I mean, certainly my computer science courses were relevant. to like the tech companies. But yeah, it's just very interesting to see like a very focused type of company that's actually trying to solve problems versus just living a legacy of the past, which I feel like a lot of universities are just living a legacy of a past where like, you know, they used to teach Latin, you know, to like people, like things that don't make sense just to like learn them just for almost for nostalgic reasons, right?
Immad Akhund: The funny thing is, after all of that, I would still encourage my kids to go to college, right? So it's like these institutions just have a hold on people that is beyond logic in some ways.
Rajat Suri: Why would you say that, though?
Immad Akhund: I just feel like it's just so much more than getting a job. It's like meeting friends. I'm friends with lots of people that I went to college with. It is getting that credential, which gives you options for getting… I didn't know I wanted to be a programmer. I could have been anything. And I feel like having that on my resume gave me the capability of like applying for any job and gave me the confidence to do that. So I think it's a series of things that like I just don't know whether my kids will or even I knew that much about myself when I was 18 and like college is just optionality and it would be hard to like not promote that.
Rajat Suri: I have a different view of it, whereas I want my kids to learn to be independent and not rely on credentials for their confidence and rely more upon their own skills.
Immad Akhund: But the world still expects those credentials, right? How do you get away from the world's expectations?
Rajat Suri: But I think separating your own self-worth from the world's expectations is a key element of building self-confidence. And so that's one thing I hope to do. I don't know if I will succeed at that, but that's one thing I would hope for my kids. And the other thing on the social element, I feel like being able to make friends easily as an adult is a very difficult skill. And I think that is something that college almost coddles people to just having friends around you, people your own same age. Real life isn't like that, you know, it's like it's hard to keep maintain friendships and make new friendships in the real world, I think. But anyways, we've talked a lot. And let's now welcome Austen to the show.
Rajat Suri: Hey, Austen, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you here.
Austen Allred: Hey, thanks for having me. Good to see you all.
Austen Allred: Absolutely. You are really a prolific writer and I've heard reader as well. I think you have probably one of the most prominent Twitter accounts in the tech world. Would you agree with that? Like probably one of the more prolific among them/
Austen Allred: I mean, there's certainly others that, you know, are more influential than mine. But what started out as a really bad habit a long time ago became a strategic decision to keep doing. So, yeah, I'm lucky that my addictions helped the company in some way.
Rajat Suri: Yeah, I know you used to tweet a lot about the company, and now I think you tweet just about a lot of different things. There are some interesting topics. Yeah, definitely one of the most interesting accounts out there, just like with a variety of stuff you talk about, which definitely gets Immad and I interested. Let's just start off with maybe a quick background on yourself and what you're working on. I think it would be helpful.
Austen Allred: Yes, my name is Austen Allred. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Bloom Institute of Technology, formerly known as Lambda School until a trademark lawsuit. So more people recognize that name. And yeah, basically, we are trying to build the best technical education in the world. And there are a few important things that we're doing in that regard, among which, which perhaps we're most well known for, is trying to de-risk education. So different forms of financial instruments where you don't pay until after you're hired, or where jobs are guaranteed so much as we can, or at least, you know, we guarantee that if you don't find a job, we'll refund your tuition. And there's a lot of, you know, thinking and experience that goes into why we are so bullish on that. But yeah, that's a high level.
Rajat Suri: Why did you decide education was something that needed to be changed? Where was the gap that you found in particular?
Austen Allred: I went to a normal public school all growing up. And then for college, I did a couple of semesters at BYU. And the whole time, I just felt like it was severely lacking. But when I originally dropped out of school, I was fully intent on waiting to see somebody else do what BloomTech is now aspiring to do. I didn't really want to run a school. I didn't think of myself as an educator. All my grandparents on both sides are educators, actually, but I didn't view myself in that vein. And I was just waiting for somebody, anybody, to do what I felt needed to be done, and it wasn't happening. So when I was in college, I just felt very, and in high school as well, very stuck. It was moving very slowly. There's so much stuff that I wanted to do, and it wasn't aligned with what college was in so many different ways. So basically, I took one semester, basically pulled the, I think I had like $1,000 in my bank account at the time. It was probably even less. And I had like a two-door Honda Civic. And I was like, you know what? I'm just going to go figure this out on my own. So I drove out to Silicon Valley. I didn't know where to go. I didn't know what to do. I didn't have any skills. I didn't really have anything. I was just like, I'm going to show up and hustle and figure it out.
Pretty quickly in Silicon Valley, you learn that if you don't know how to code, your value is 1/100th of what it would be if you actually knew how to build stuff. So I was like, okay, I guess I need to teach myself how to build stuff. So I spent most of my time doing that and the rest of it just trying to understand how tech works and what the ecosystem looks like and ended up working out really well. I got a relatively high paying job for someone with no degree. No experience in San Francisco. And then, you know, when I go back to where I moved to San Francisco from in small town Utah, everybody would be like, that's exactly what I want to do. You know, take me through all the details. And, you know, you're talking to somebody with three kids running around in the background behind them. And you're like, that's not, my path doesn't, isn't going to work for you. I wish it would.
So originally we just said, you know what, let's just put a really high quality, like deep computer science education on the internet. As lame as that sounds, that was the original idea. And then, you know, we knew that we wanted to go a lot deeper than a code bootcamp, um, having, you know, hired and looked at resumes for a whole bunch of, you know, would be engineers from code bootcamps. I was like, you're just not, you're not at the level that you can, actually produce value for me yet. If you would go a little bit more, and that was pretty universal in everybody that I talked to. So it's like, oh, well, if we do a much longer, much deeper version of a code bootcamp, closer to what you learn in a CS degree, but still super practical and hands-on, we could do that online and it would be really interesting.
So we started there and pretty quickly learned that everybody that we were talking to was very interested. but they didn't have enough. I mean, you're trying to help people get a better life and a better income and a better career and asking for them to pay for that up front. They just don't have it most of the time. So then we started thinking through how do prospective students think about the risk of this, right? Like what if it doesn't work out for them because it's not going to work out for 100%. what does that mean if we charge X dollars and you don't get a job? Are you financially ruined? In some cases, the answer is yes. As a school, how can we manage and offset that? Because I just talked to so many students, I'm like, look, I know that you can get a six-figure job really quickly out of this. I know that you're making $20,000 a year. I know that there are a whole bunch of people that are in the same situation. there's got to be some way that I can manage the risk and pool all of this and make it work the way a fintech or lending company would. Really, combining those two things originally was a crazy idea. We just started saying, hey, pay us after you're hired, and that blew up. Originally, we I still have messages of me and my co-founder going back and forth where we're like, I don't think we'll ever train more than 100 students a year. That was the size of ambition we had originally. But when we started talking to people and realized how dire need was, that would be a bad monthly number for us now. And hopefully, soon, it'll be a bad daily number for us of people that we're training.
Immad Akhund: But yeah, when I first heard about you and I guess what was Lambda, I really loved your kind of feel good posts. Like you'd be like, oh, this person just got a job offer. Now they're going to make this much and they're making 30K before. And I was like, wow, this is like, you know, I need to do that because it still happens. Yeah, I just, yeah, I was actually wondering about that. Does that not happen or it just became so normal to you that you've got to do it.
Austen Allred: Yeah, it's the latter. Like, I mean, if somebody comes to me and says, oh my gosh, like, you know, BloomTech changed my life and I've tripled my income and I can do all this stuff that I couldn't do before. It's become so normal for me that I don't react. I need to resensitize myself to it.
Immad Akhund: And it's like, yeah, you know, like no one wants to read that for back end program.
Austen Allred: It's like our median student, uh, who was hired increased their income by more than $90,000 a year. I got 90. That's a big number. But then when you actually talk to those people, they're like, yeah, I went from making, you know, $25K working retail straight to $150K a year job a year later. Like that's a, that's a completely different life trajectory, but yeah, I have become desensitized to it. And I need to further.
Rajat Suri: And do videos, like I would do short, like 30 second video clips. Yeah, you know, and like, you know, mothers like show their life.
Immad Akhund: Yeah. You know, when you started, there was this big vacuum where like, you know, tech was just getting big and everyone was getting funding. And there was just not enough people doing CS degrees. Right. I feel like the world has changed a little bit, right? If you look at those graphs, STEM education is way up. So is the demand for, I guess this is like a supply and demand thing. I mean, also we're going through like a bus cycle. Have you found that like there is enough people that have engineering degrees, backgrounds now, and that like the demand for like getting new people trained is smaller or is the demand infinite and like, you know, you're still like cannot satiate it?
Austen Allred: Yeah, the demand has shifted. And what we've found is, and Sam Altman talks about this, Sam Altman, obviously the CEO of OpenAI, learning to become an engineer today is in some ways exactly the same as it was five years ago, and in some ways dramatically different. He talks about the biggest corporations found metrics by which they could, as best as you can, approximate the level of a junior engineer, and going up through a staff level or whatever their super senior VP, but I see level engineer is. They basically found that according to those metrics, a new junior engineer would increase in ability, and I get it's difficult to measure, but by about 50 percent every year, and that just compounds upon itself. Now they've found that the junior engineers are actually growing dramatically more quickly in their ability and senior engineers just haven't changed. And obviously what's happening is You know, and I consider myself part of the old guard here. I am not as good at utilizing AI in engineering as some of our most junior engineers. They're AI native, for lack of a better way to describe it. What we're seeing happen is, you know, we train engineers, you know, obviously you have to understand how to code. You have to understand, you know, how the engine is working just like a mechanic would. But now there are tools on top of that that give you superpowers that more experienced engineers are more hesitant to use and more unfamiliar with. It's a lot harder to 20 years into your career be like, actually, I'm going to rewire my brain and start over. It makes me feel old, frankly, sometimes when you talk to these people, because some of the engineers, they can't even imagine typing out all of the boilerplate code with all of the syntax. Like, why would you do that? You know, it'd be like, I don't know what a good analogy is.
Immad Akhund: I feel like this conversation is making me feel old. What are they using? Is it Copilot or is it like something? Like, what are the AI tools that are like such enablers?
Austen Allred: Copilot is the big winner. But like, it's like, I don't know if you read histories of like World War II, right? And in the very beginning of World War II, everyone has figured out trench warfare from World War I and everyone is down in their trenches and they pop out of the trenches. Well, World War II, you have mustard gas and machine guns that just wipe out the entire trench. It's just a totally different strategy and mental model. And that's what I'm seeing in engineering. like sitting there all day, fine tuning exactly where you're going to name each variable is still important. But if you can let AI do some amount of the work, I mean, we literally see junior engineers that can do almost 10 times as much as a junior engineer would be able to five years ago. And that's just completely new, right? And so what's new for the companies on the other side, and I used to think that as soon as there was a technology that was obviously superior, companies would instantly grab on and use all the advantage that they can, but the companies are trying to figure out what to do as well.
And so we've actually had quite a few companies, they hire our engineers to go in and like AI-ify the rest of the company. Because if you're a 40-year-old staff engineer, you've probably dabbled with AI on the side, but you didn't learn to code with AI. And in some ways, it's a fundamentally different thing. And again, I consider myself, a lot of our very recent new grads are better at coding, utilizing AI than I am, because I don't write code anymore. And some of our instructors, too. So we're all trying to retool in real time. But it's a very dramatic shift, and it's just barely starting to play out. And from a macro scale environment, what I think it will lead to is smaller engineering teams, but much more companies. It's just so much easier to build so much more than you used to have, you know, to build something. I'm not smart enough that I can try to predict all the macroeconomic trends of 37 things falling together, but it's really, really interesting to watch. You know, I think back to when, you know, my dad was working at a company and people like me grew up being like, oh, just do this in the cloud, do it on the internet, you know, later on, do it on mobile. And it was so obvious and so simple. You can explain it to people and they can wrap their minds around it. But that's how AI feels right now to me. We have an AI native coder generation, and they have a completely different mental model of the way software is built than someone who's been working at Google for 15 years.
Rajat Suri: It's a bit like the Assembly language, right? When we started coding, nobody coded in assembly anymore. And, uh, so just like, it's just like a lost skill.
Austen Allred: And I think a lot of people who want to write machine code and, or, you know, spend all day and see, and that's a valuable skill, right? Like getting to that level of optimization. But, you know, when you look at what the bulk of engineers are doing, it's not, you know, it's time.
Rajat Suri: It becomes like a nostalgic thing, right?
Austen Allred: Yeah exactly, it's like old cars where you're like man you really have to pull on the gear to…
Immad Akhund: I mean, is it just a temporary kind of generation in the sense like will all of programming be just like taken over by ai like you just you know are we just like five years away from someone just saying hey i just want this thing to do x and like you don't even have to touch the code i mean
Austen Allred: And for some instances of X, you can do that right now. The problem is you have to understand how that happened and how that worked and how you need to tie it to other stuff. So I think AI will keep getting better and better. You know, I have grandparents that never had interest in the internet and were never going to touch it, right? And what happened wasn't necessarily that the internet replaced everything that they could do, But the Internet got so much better so fast that after a while, I was like, I can't believe you would even try to do that without the Internet. I think that's basically how AI works. I don't think it's going to do everything for you, but it'll be the equivalent of a machine gun. You're going to have to fight with a machine gun if you want to fight, and the fight is going to look different than when you're fighting with bayonets. But the machine gun can't do everything by itself. It still has to have somebody wielding it. Obviously, you can devise a generative AI superhuman hypothesis where it can do everything that a human could and more. If that happens, then everything changes. But I don't think we're, we don't seem to be too terribly close to that point just yet.
Immad Akhund: Do you think everyone can learn this skill, can become a programmer, or do you think it requires a certain brain? I could never be an artist, for example, but my brain works very well as a programmer. Is it a similar thing that only a certain percentage of people can be good programmers?
Austen Allred: Look, I love the meme of everybody can become a programmer. I think it's, for a long time, On the balance, the general consensus would push people away from becoming a programmer who would have really enjoyed it and appreciated it. But if we're being super literal, no, I don't believe that 100% of people can become programmers. I mean, to look at the extreme outliers, there are people who can't learn to function at all. And there are a number of intersecting numbers.
Immad Akhund: In the numbers you see, what percentage do you think can become, assuming they have the motivation?
Austen Allred: Yeah, that one's more difficult to answer. What I am more confident in is that if you take the way that BloomTech teaches, the way that people go through our curriculum, somewhere between 40 and 50% of people that we see coming through our front door are going to be, you know, have the right mix of whatever it is to become successful in our programs. Obviously, you know, our model is, you know, that we're paying for most of our costs up front out of pocket and trying to recoup it on the back end. So it's very important for us to identify the times when it's not going to work out for somebody. And I do not feel confident, unless there's been a severe mental handicap or something, I don't feel confident telling anybody you don't have what it takes to become a programmer. I am very confident at times in saying, look, I don't think that BloomTech is the right fit for you, and I don't want you to waste months of your life figuring that out.
I think that there probably is some genetic IQ aspect to that, but I think most of what we see, even more so, is the willingness and the desire to write code. That's one of the most important things that we solve for in admissions, is there are a lot of people who want to make money as a software engineer, and some subset of them would be happy writing code all day or doing some career that involves writing code, it's definitely not 100 percent. So I don't know how to play God or to fix that broadly. I consider my job taking the people who would enjoy being engineers and helping them become engineers or data scientists, or hopefully in the future we'll have the same thing for every high-paying career that you can imagine. But I do think Silicon Valley, we can do ourselves a little bit of a disservice pretending like everybody must learn to code in order to be happy and everybody should learn to code and that's the most valuable thing that they can do. That's not always true. And I mean, obviously I'm coming from a biased place of seeing how learning code and, you know, becoming a technologist can transform people's lives. And it's obviously very lucrative. It's obvious. I love it. It's very fun. It's very powerful. I would be lying if I said, hey, I think that's the thing that everybody should pursue. It's just not.
Rajat Suri: Do you guys do like an entrance exam?
Austen Allred: We've done every possible type of entrance exam you could possibly imagine. We've trialed every type of test, every type of trial, every, you know, that's one of the core things of our business. We do know a few things that work really well. One of them is like the least sexy from an intellectual property standpoint and the most obvious in retrospect, but we basically require that everybody goes through a free trial of learning how to code with us. We've tested 87 different things and there are tests that are really predictive, but it turns out the most predictive, you know, are you going to be able to learn to code in this environment test is trying to learn to code in that environment. So, you know, we've mostly replaced all of our testing with what we call trials. So, every student before they enroll, they go into a trial and they, you know, try to do some stuff and we can look at that and Sometimes we quickly identify, like, you know, hey, just so you know, like, it doesn't look like this is going to be fun for you. And people are generally grateful. They're like, yeah, you're totally right. This freaking sucks. Like, I wanted to make a lot of money, but this isn't worth it.
A lot of the time, the student realizes, the prospective student realizes that themselves. So like, oh, when I, you know, When I envisioned myself being a software engineer, I just wanted to play video games all day. I didn't want to actually write code or whatever. I didn't even know what that meant. It turns out this is not my cup of tea. So it's like a week-long trial? Three weeks. And then even once you enroll for the first little bit, there's still a withdrawal period because we don't want you to have to make the decision. And then after the withdrawal period where you can withdraw for free, the payment that you owe us starts really small and goes up gradually. We really only want you in the school if you really want to be in the school and vice versa. So we try to make it as smooth of an on-ramp as it can possibly be.
Immad Akhund: When you think about traditional college, I see it fulfilling a few different functions. Number one is teaching you a trade, which if you do computer science or engineering or law or something, you're getting towards that and then you can get a job. Number two is just building a network and socializing and getting friends and things like that. Number three is like actually getting researchers and scientists like trained, which I went to Cambridge in the UK and like their computer science thing was all about research, right? Like it was very much not, like they were against teaching you how to program. They were like, that's not what we have. They were like, that was the thing. I guess number four is like some level of credentialism, just so you can get a non-trade job. And you've like shown that you can, you're like above the bar or something like that. Check the box. Do you think that BloomTech will try to attack things beyond like, hey, I just want to get a better job and I want to be trained up for it? Or do you think you just want to focus on that first segment?
Austen Allred: Yeah. When we were first starting, when you're thinking, okay, what do people who are in these shoes want? First and foremost, I was solving it for myself. Because I don't know what everybody else wants. I know what I would have wanted and I built exactly what I would have wanted. And I feel like it's really, really easy for education companies in particular to try to do everything all at once and do it all really poorly. So we made the decision early on that, hey, there may be other stuff like Community is an important aspect of what we do, but even when we foster a community, so we'll have meetups all over the US, so every major city there are BloomTech students and grads going to get dinner together. We've had marriages come out of our Slack channels. There is a major aspect of community. But when we try to foster community, we try to do everything with one particular goal in mind, and that is helping people impact their careers. We give people a credential to make sure that they know what they need to know.
There are hiring partners that come to us directly and other people that… We ensure that you know what you need to know in order to you know, become a qualified engineer. But I, you know, I think there are other places that focus on more of those, you know, more so than we do. Like if you're, if you're going to debate, should I go to the University of Florida or BloomTech, if your only goal is to party and meet friends, you should definitely go to the University of Florida. You know, we think that at least for now, our space in the world is very career oriented and career focused. Some of that stuff will happen, but we don't focus on it unless it leads to a career. So we are leaving out people from a prospective audience or market standpoint who want the other stuff primarily. If you look at the age of people coming into BloomTech, there's like a bell curve around about 31. Then there's another smaller bell curve around 18, 19. Most of the people who are enrolling in BloomTech have been in the real world for a little while. It's a different audience than, hey, I don't know what I'm going to do after high school. I'm going to go do a bunch of self-discovery and figure it out over four years. They want to get down to business. They want to get on with their life. We want to do it as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. I guess the short version of the answer to that question is we want to be extremely, extremely career focused.
Immad Akhund: If you were to say, and this is not necessarily with your BloomTech hat on, if you were to say, hey, how would you disrupt Harvard or MIT? Do you think it's possible or do you think it's not an important task? How do you think about that?
Austen Allred: I mean, we've seen some experiments that I think have effectively done that for different subsets of what MIT and Harvard do. For example, the Thiel Fellowship comes to mind, where I think the Thiel Fellowship was an experiment largely in is credentialism and selection the most important thing? Can we create a network strong enough that if you say, I'm a Thiel Fellow, that instantly means something as great or similar to I'm a Harvard grad or an MIT grad. I think it'd be hard to argue that that experiment has been a failure. It's also hard to argue that it's I don't know how the backend works financially, but it looks very different than what you would try to do if you're going to try to disrupt them from a standpoint of, say, research.
Another example is Y Combinator. There are a lot of people who drop out of or decide to go start a company and choose life that way instead of going to a more traditional computer science research university. So yeah, I think it's definitely possible. I think we often underestimate how strong of a hold even the Ivy League schools have, even in government. I would go to spend a lot of time in the White House. I spent a lot of time talking to Congress people and senators. They love the idea of technical education. Some of them did. Some of them had no interest in anything that didn't have degree at the end because that's I mean, if you're going to make your way in Washington, that's 1,000% requirement. That's a very credential-driven place. You don't just walk your way into Congress without getting a degree and working your way up in 99% of cases. My goal would be that we would chip away at the people who are like, okay, I have to put up with all of this other stuff because I want to basically people like me. I went to college because that was the default. I wasn't getting out of it what I wanted to get out of it. There's a bunch of stuff that I didn't care about. I don't need to go to a school that has a football team. I don't need to go to a school that has Greek culture. I just want to learn and do cool stuff and meet new people and get on with my life. So yeah, I think taking a sliver of that and focusing intensely on it was the right strategy for us. I think you could do that with other slivers, but it's going to be a different model than what we've gone after.
Immad Akhund: Why don't we see more people just create new colleges? Is it regulatory capture or is it just hard to do?
Austen Allred: Yes, it's regulatory capture. It takes an insane amount of time and money to become an accredited institution. And then by the time you do become an accredited Title IV granting college, your hands are tied in 87 different ways around what you teach, how you teach it. You basically have to look like every other university in order to go there. So it's really hard to disrupt when it's like, okay, how much money and time are we talking about? Just to get the approval is minimum three, four years. Regardless of how much money you spend, and you have to go into that with the right staff, the right board, the right curriculum. What happens more often is you can bootstrap that with some partnership with some university that's willing to lend you their credential. But then similarly, you have to do exactly what the accrediting bodies want you to do, which puts you in such a small box that I've looked at this every different way and I've spent outrageous amounts of time trying to figure out how to how to offer a degree in a way that isn't so broken that it ruins everything that's special about what we're doing. I haven't been able to do it yet. I'm still looking at it. Because there is, you know, very, you know, people are very, less so now than when we started. Like, you know, in 2016, 2017, saying, oh, you can, you know, get a good job in tech without a degree was like, controversial. Now it's fully accepted.
But it's still, you know, a lot of the times the decision makers around this stuff are actually your parents or even, you know, future or past generations beyond that. And if you would have told my parents that, I mean, me, I don't have a degree. My older brother doesn't have a degree. My older brother's made more money than, you know, anybody else in the family. And then, you know, my littler siblings do have degrees in some cases, you know, advanced degrees. When I graduated high school, if you had told my parents that you could have been as successful as someone like my brother or whatever without a degree, it was difficult to believe. When I dropped out of college, I sat around. I had a really big family. My grandma has now I can't remember, it's like north of 50 grandkids now. We'd go over to her house for dinner every week. She has a master's degree and that was not common for a woman in those days to have. Basically, I told everybody, yeah, I think I'm going to just drop out of school and I'm going to go live in a car in Silicon Valley and we'll see how it works. And there was the only way to describe it is an intervention, right? Everyone was like, I could have been saying, I decided to try doing meth and it would have been the exact same response. And that's not because they don't love me. They want only the best for me. But in their minds, I was very literally walking away from the greatest opportunity that they'd ever been given. And I was walking away from a successful life. And I was walking away from being happy. And so they're obviously going to try to corral you back in. But I think that's an example of how extreme the viewpoint was that degree equals success. And that's been, you know, my generation, I think was among the first to watch that play out and be like, Oh, actually, sometimes getting a degree totally screws you up for the rest of your life. And it's not a golden ticket that you have, you know, is that the word?
Immad Akhund: is a word like degree a protected word? Like you can't say you're getting a; you're giving a degree? Can you come up with a new word?
Austen Allred: Yeah, every version of credential, there's nanodegrees and now there's a big legal battle over whether that's okay to say, you know, so it's a whole thing. And, you know, similar to when you watch like Uber battle the taxi industry, like the university industry puts the taxi industry to shame in terms of its like alignment with the government and the like, the cabal basically that is, and this is all stuff that I know I'm going to get in trouble for saying at some point, but it is very literally regulators working hand in hand with the universities saying, how can we shut down any potential threat to you guys?
Immad Akhund: It's not like… This honestly sounds worse than getting a bank charter, which I've always thought is like a bane, but this seems even more extreme.
Austen Allred: I mean, yeah, so the way it works is if you don't get a degree and you're not an accredited institution, then every state decides how they want to regulate you separately. So as an online school, you know, we have a compliance team that is like, they spend all day checking boxes with each of the individual states. And, you know, they all have different laws that I mean, there are laws that are like, you can't teach students in state A if the teacher is in state B because they're trying to avoid people getting around taxes and all that stuff. And so we know that if we have an instructor that's in that specific state, we have to make sure there aren't any students that happen to be living in that other state. And it's just like, I mean, all the laws are totally, well, not all the laws, some of the laws are completely insane. Some of the laws are actually impossible to follow. And I mean, in a literal sense, like you cannot, like in some states, as an example, you have to submit three years of audited financials before they will approve you to become a school. And until you're a school, you can't enroll any students. So how do you get three years of, I guess, theoretically, you could set up a company that does nothing for three years and then submit three years of audit financials doing nothing. But you can't, like, it's a chicken and egg problem. And when you go to the regulators, you're like, hey, this is a chicken and egg problem. Okay, what do you want? You know, comply. What do you want me to do? So it's a whole thing.
Rajat Suri: I'd too love to hear a couple of stories from you, Austen. Maybe some of the most remarkable, a couple of the most remarkable stories that you've dealt with, you know, people whose lives have changed, you know, going through this program.
Austen Allred: Yeah, I think one of my favorites that comes to mind is a gentleman by the name of Chris Atoki. And he was, I'm not going to go fully into his background, that's his story to share. But at the time he enrolled in BloomTech, he was working in a failing mattress store that basically had nobody coming in to try to make ends meet. And he was living He used to say he was living in his car. He was actually living in the mattress store. He just didn't want the people who owned the mattress store to realize that he wasn't going home at night. He attended BloomTech at night from a Wi-Fi hotspot in the back of a failing mattress store when he was literally homeless. He's sharing pictures now like, hey, this is the house that I bought and it's a beautiful house with manicured lawns and bushes. We lose visibility into how much they're making after a few years, unless you ask and get answers. So I don't know exactly how much he's making now, but I know he's doing really, really well. Better than the median student probably, and far, far better than the median American homeowner. So that one comes to mind. But a lot of times it's not so much the crazy story where this guy was homeless and figured it out as it is.
One of the stories that always sticks out to me is I was just randomly, you know, there's a student who was trying really hard to get a job and he had, you know, no credentials, no work history, no anything, which always makes it a little bit harder. And, you know, he was living with his wife and daughter in like a 400 square foot studio his job was in the $90K range. So he went from making minimum wage straight to $90K. And when that happens, we have to sit down with people and be like, okay, here's what that means. You're going to pay a lot more taxes than you're used to. Don't go buy a BMW tomorrow. Let's work with you on personal finance stuff so you don't go. Because it's a new skill.
As I was talking to him, like, man, how does this feel? Because I remember very distinctly the first time I got a job offer when I was didn't have a penny to my name, and my first job was a six-figure job offer, and I thought like something had gone wrong in the universe, that like they had made some mistakes somewhere. So I was kind of talking to this student, this gentleman, and relating my story and I was like, yeah, I was so excited to like not worry about bills and like not have to, you know, I could go to the grocery store and not have to check my bank account immediately before to see if I could, you know, buy tortillas and beans or if I could, you know, splurge a little, buy bread or something. And I was like, so, you know, what are you thinking about? And he kind of broke down in tears, like, all I care about is I know that my little girl is finally going to have her own bedroom. And like, that was his thing that carried him through the entire time. And I, you know, I have two daughters of my own. And so just hearing, like, When I got my first job, I was newlywed, I wasn't single, but when you put kids in the mix and people fighting for their families, that hits me at a completely different level than like, awesome, I get to buy a new phone and buy a new car and not have to worry about bills. That's fundamentally different for me.
Rajat Suri: Yeah, no, it's a great story. And what's the what's the rough distribution between like people like age, you know, range or family status, you know, people going through the program are like, do a lot of people have families when they go through the program? Is that a big motivation?
Austen Allred: I don't know that we have data on you know, what's your familial status? Do you have kids independence or whatever? It's the norm that somebody would have a family that is, you know, they're working towards supporting in some way. That's, that's the norm.
Rajat Suri: So like that's like a big driver for them is like their kids and like, you know, supporting their families. Yeah.
Austen Allred: Yeah. It's different for everybody, but you know, we used to do a series, I guess you share some of these videos where we have a bunch of videos where people would secretly record them telling their family that they got the job offer. And that is the coolest, like, I mean, there's a video of, I don't know if this one's under, you know, shareable because they go into more detail, but like, um, is it, you know, student who studied English and was teaching English for a few years and, you know, went through our iOS program and got hired at Apple. And, you know, so she like gathered her family together and they could tell that something was going on, but like when she was like, I got hired as an iOS engineer at Apple, they're like, Everyone's so excited and so happy and everyone's crying. It's a life-changing event. It's a fundamentally different trajectory for the rest of your life to be an engineer at Apple.
Immad Akhund: not only their life, but the life of all the people around them.
Austen Allred: Right. The generational impact from there is, yeah.
Rajat Suri: On a marginal basis, like that's like some of the biggest impact you possibly can have, right? Like, it's like from that to minimum wage, you know, you're a free functioning human being, you can make a minimum wage, right? But like, you know, from that to like an iOS engineer is like, that's way better than an iOS engineer to like a founder even getting their first exit. You know, like, I think it's a huge difference.
Austen Allred: We had somebody run the numbers once where I showed that you could actually, I haven't convinced anybody to do this yet, but you could fund all of BloomTech with like 50% of the increase in taxes that our students pay as a result of the shift in income. You could pay for everything. Unfortunately, Uncle Sam makes way more money from BloomTech than we do. But that's how it goes.
Immad Akhund: All of this education is available online, right? In theory, just looking at YouTube, you could probably learn a lot of this stuff. And with AI, potentially, it's even more accessible. And you could ask a chatbot to tell you how to learn Python or something like that. What is it that you know, doesn't work there? Like, why can't people educate themselves? And like, will AI change that?
Austen Allred: Yeah, I think about this a lot. And at different times, I've described it like our product is more about mastering human psychology than it is curriculum. Curriculum is necessary for us and our curriculum, I believe, is special and it's comprehensive. But the reason that BloomTech is as successful as it is isn't because of curriculum. It's because we know how to get people doing the right thing at the right time. There's a point in my life when I lost like 50 pounds. I was spiraling out of control. And I hired a trainer not because there's nothing on the planet that can show you how to lose weight and exercise, but because I needed help and guidance and motivation to do that. And obviously, the What the students spend most of their time looking at is the curriculum and writing code. What they don't always realize is a lot of what matters the most is creating the structure and the incentives to get you to sit down and write code and have help when you're stuck. I think that's actually always been true.
Immad Akhund: Do you think AI will also not be able to solve that, like this kind of human psychology motivation?
Austen Allred: We use a lot of AI in doing that. If anybody knows how to have AI magically do that across the board, please let me know because I will pay a lot of money for that. Similarly, libraries have been around for a really long time. But colleges exist because they create the right environment to make sure you're learning the right things in the right way. There are humans who figure out how to do everything on their own just with a library, and I respect the hell out of those people. I think it's a tiny subset of the population, not including myself, that have the ability to do that from zero.
Immad Akhund: You mentioned AI being used by the people that are learning to program. What has been the biggest application of AI for BloomTech in terms of teaching people?
Austen Allred: I mean, we would not be able to run the company without AI right now. Everything from curriculum development is, you know, it's not good enough that you can just be like, hey AI, go write me a, you know, learn to code curriculum. You have to be very specific and train it in the right ways, but it fills in a lot of gaps. Our job search is actually very heavily AI. So we, you know, for a student say, We understand their profile and say, what kind of jobs are you looking for? Okay, here are all of the jobs, you know, apply to them. And then AI is going to write you a custom email to send to the hiring manager and another one to send to somebody who works at the company saying, Hey, I just want to learn more about what the company is like. I know I've never met, you know, and identifies the right person and writes the email for you. So there's a lot of stuff that's just time saving. Our first line of defense from a support standpoint now is like, The AI is already better than the average human at answering most support questions. I could go talk for hours about, you have to train the AI a little bit differently. That doesn't work out of the box. You have to do some very specific stuff so that AI understands what you do know, what you don't know, how you want to learn, how you need to learn. To not give you the whole answer, there's an art to that. It's touching every piece of the company. I try to be pragmatic about this stuff and not like, you know, oh my gosh, AI is going to swallow everything instantly. But even then, it's like, I can't. It's so impactful to the company that you can't. I could not go back to a world without AI, even already.
Rajat Suri: Wow. It's amazing. I feel like we could have talked for another hour, but we are out of time. Thank you so much, Austen, for making the time.
Immad Akhund: It was good connecting, Austen. This was a great chat and we'll publish this in the next few weeks. Yeah.
Rajat Suri: So that was a great conversation with Austen. I felt it was really interesting to hear some of the stories that he talked about, like how people could transform their own lives and their family's lives. It sounded like it was still very emotional for him even to talk about that. I can imagine it's a very inspiring role just as another founder to be running that kind of a company.
Immad Akhund: I think it's such a privilege to, you know, work in tech and be in Silicon Valley. And I think we just forget that sometimes. And it's nice to go like, hey, someone going from like a $30K job to a $90K job. I mean, that's game changing, right? Like all of that's like extra disposable. And it doesn't just change them, it changes their peers, it changes their kids, it changes so many lives. So I think that's super important. And I often think to myself, right, I was born in Pakistan, right? Like, what are the steps it took for me to get where I am? And there is a lot of kind of luck involved. And the point of the internet is to enable that luck to be an opportunity to be spread more equally. So I really like how Austen is pushing that.
Rajat Suri: It was really touching to hear some of those stories and I think what's also interesting, I mean, I think you asked a really good question about how difficult it is to start these education companies. I couldn't believe that.
Immad Akhund: Yeah, that was unexpected. I had no idea. Yeah. I just thought you could say; yeah it's funny because it's so difficult, but like the average college is so crappy right, you would think like the benefit of the difficulty is like the bar is really high but it makes no sense too it's not like life and death right it's not like a hospital like you you want your hospitals to be accredited because so they don't kill you but I do I mean what's the worst case scenario with a school right? They just teach you something that you know maybe you don't.
Rajat Suri: Maybe it's not the right thing.
Immad Akhund: The problem is, you know, America has this like subverted public slash private schooling, right? So you get a loan, which is done by the government that you can't go, you can't excuse by bankruptcy. So like, because of that format, there does need to be some some limits on like, who are the people that can qualify for it, but it feels like there should be another path that should be like, okay, you know, this is the normal system. And now this is the non government funded system that, you know, still can call itself a degree or like call itself education, but doesn't need to go through all these loops.
Rajat Suri: You know, I think that we need to have more innovation in education and it's great to see, you know, entrepreneurs. And what a great personal story he had too, you know, dropping out of school, driving to Silicon Valley and yeah, it really hustled his way. And you talked about his first job, that was… big moment for him as well and how he wanted to bring that to everybody else. That's what we want for everyone in America. I mean, I think if more people felt like they had an opportunity, you know, could be upwardly mobile, maybe we wouldn't have some of the political divisions that we have today. I mean, you know, there's probably a root cause for some of the issues that we have as a country.
Immad Akhund: I mean, one thing we didn't talk about is, you know, he started BloomTech before COVID, before remote work, like the power of being able to work from wherever you are and having access to these kind of well-paying jobs is also huge. Right. So, I mean, it's a perfect storm. Like I can just imagine in five years time, you can be anywhere and, you know, have very little experience or skills and you can get a high paying job and contribute. Yeah, 100% agree. I think the other thing that was interesting was the AI stuff. I wasn't expecting that. Have you tried using AI when you're programming?
Rajat Suri: I haven't personally, but I have talked to my former CTOs and stuff who say it's totally changed the game for programming, and I can believe it. Have you tried it?
Immad Akhund: I haven't, I played around a little bit, but I just don't actively program anymore. I've tried to encourage people at Mercury to do it. There's definitely like a little bit of this thing that Austen was talking about where, you know, engineers are just, they get stuck in using tools and like, I'm like that too. Like I use Vim because I learn on Vim and like, I'm just used to that. So I think there's an element of that. Also Mercury is written in a weird programming language, Haskell and like these, these copilot type things are just not trained on enough examples of it, so they're just not that good for us. I want to encourage it more and I can see it being the future for sure.
Rajat Suri: Yeah, you and I should do a hack day. We need to upgrade our skills. Yeah, we could be real programmers again, right? That would be super fun, actually. I miss programming. But, you know, actually one thing that kind of concerned me a little bit about what you said, You know, we said like the junior engineers are using AI to program now. I mean, I do believe that programming is much easier now than it used to be. And so I kind of wonder what the future of that career is going to look like of a software engineer. Like integrations, for example, I've heard are much easier now. Like a lot of the complexity of programming is taken away. So for me, I think the bottleneck is going to move elsewhere when it comes to building a company. He seemed to think that you have less programmers in any given company, but you have more companies. But the truth is that we don't just need more products in the world. To build a company, you need salespeople, you need entrepreneurs, you need an ecosystem. Maybe programming is not going to be the bottleneck anymore to building a company. It's going to be sales or it's going to be marketing.
Immad Akhund: I don't know about that. I know this is somewhat of a myopic view, but I actually think you can apply programming to a lot of other parts of a company and you can make them way better. So, I mean, take something like sales. In my previous company, I wrote a scraper that went through every single iOS app and we were selling to iOS game developers. And as soon as it became big, it would get flagged. And there was a bunch of things that we did And it was because I was a programmer that we were able to do that, and that made sales work. And it made it much more efficient. And I think about that at Mercury a lot. It's like, how do we apply engineering to every single function? We have a customer service product team. We have a risk fraud product team. So we try to apply engineering pretty broadly. So maybe there's element of like, okay, actually, the engineering is not just used to build the product, but applied at every level at the company. And yeah, it doesn't have to be engineers doing the engineering, it could just be, you know, maybe there's no code slash AI solutions for this.
Rajat Suri: But I think there's enough slack so that like, if the programming cost goes down, there's way more productivity gain still to be seen.
Immad Akhund: Yes, exactly. And I mean, the cost of people, if your programming cost goes down, the cost of like everyone else, like sales teams, marketing, whatever, goes up, right? Relatively. So you want to apply even more efficiency to the other cost centers. The interesting thing about, I guess, the combination of capitalism and the world is like the more you have, the cheaper something gets doesn't mean the less you use of it. Like actually most of the time, the more you use of it and like you just end up filling that space in some ways. So I think programming is one of those things just because it's like abstractly, it's like the making of things, like the making of custom things that help you. And that like that has like a lot of applications.
Rajat Suri: Yeah, you'll use more, you still use more programs. You're right. Yeah, you can apply them to other areas, as long as there are areas to apply them, which I think you make a good case that there are many other areas to apply them.
Immad Akhund: And we'll come up with more complicated things to do as well, right? Like, I mean, when I started in 2006, like, you know, we used to make shitty apps, and they were simple, and they didn't do that much, but still took a lot of work to do. Now you have like, you know more complicated like a startup has like a higher bar and we build more complicated things and uh like expectations are higher and you know we'll end up making you know this whole like software is eating the world we'll eat more of the world and the apps will be more complicated and the expectations will be higher and all that kind of stuff as well and maybe there's a limit to
Rajat Suri: All right, that concludes our show. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or whatever other podcast channels you prefer. And we're also on Substack. It's curiositypodcast.substack.com.
Revolutionizing Computer Science Education with Austen Allred, Co-Founder and CEO of BloomTech