Austen Allred: Betting On Yourself And Merging Your Interests Into A Business That Changes Lives

In this episode with Austen we talk:

• About his mission he went on to Ukraine after leaving BYU
• To living in his car as he went all in on betting on himself
• To writing a book to get the seed money to start the Lambda School which is all about helping people transform their financial lives 
• To his experience with Y Combinator 
• To managing a business that is getting hundreds of thousands of applicants a year (managing growth can be tricky)
• To his best and worst money decisions 

Austen Allred is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lambda School. A native of Springville, Utah, Austen’s start-up journey began in 2017 with him living in his two-door Civic while participating in Y Combinator, a San Francisco-based seed accelerator. This experience became the foundation of Lambda School’s rapid growth.

Before founding Lambda School, Austen was the co-founder of media platform GrassWire. He co-authored the growth hacking textbook Secret Sauce, which became a best-seller and provided him the personal seed money to build Lambda.

Austen’s disruptive ideas on the future of education, the labor market disconnect, and the opportunity of providing opportunity at-scale have been featured in: The Harvard Business Review, The Economist, WIRED, Fast Company, TechCrunch, The New York Times, among others. Austen is fluent in Russian and currently lives in San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two kids.