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

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Episode: 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
Pub date: 2020-09-18


Podcast Notes Key Takeaways The reason Lambda School is so successful is that they cover the downside for their students: Students don’t have to pay anything until they get a job “If it doesn’t work out, you don’t pay anything” – Austen AllredWhen you raise a round of capital, chances are you’re also letting that investor join your board“It is a marriage” – Austen AllredHiring a Chief Operating Officer requires customization, you can’t just hire one off the shelf. You want the COO’s strengths to be the founder’s weaknesses and vice versa.“It’s a really symbiotic relationship” – Austen AllredSilicon Valley was like Florence during the Renaissance except for techAusten believes that because so many people are moving out of San Francisco, you no longer have to go there to network and build a great company. The next tech city will be in the cloud.“I definitely think we won’t ever really go back to 2019 Silicon Valley” – Austen Allred

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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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