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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

Sep 18, 2020

Austen Allred, Founder and CEO of Lambda School, shares his incredible journey from homelessness to successful entrepreneur. He delves into his unique approach to risk and money, highlighting how his viewpoint has evolved. Austen also discusses the complexities of scaling his rapidly growing team and the vital role of a COO. He reflects on the importance of choosing the right investors and how post-COVID dynamics are reshaping the educational landscape. Plus, he shares insights on the digital growth of Lambda School amidst changing tech environments.

32:27

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Episode guests

Austen Allred

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Episode notes

Intro

4min

From College Dropout to Startup Success

12min

Scaling Challenges in Education

5min

Navigating Personal Weaknesses and Organic Growth

2min

From San Francisco to Utah: A New Chapter

6min

Engaging Conversations and Valuable Sponsorships

3min

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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