#120 - Austen Allred

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Austen Allred. Austen is the CEO and co-founder of Lambda School. Lambda School is a CS education that's free until you get a job. They were in the summer 2017 batch of YC. You can learn more about Lambda School at lambdaschool.com, and Austen is on Twitter at Austin.
All right, here we go.
All right, so today we have Austen Allred. He is the CEO of Lambda School, which was in the summer 2017 batch, and Lambda School is a CS education that is free until you get a job. So, Austen, what I wanted to ask you about, you mentioned this on a few podcasts that I've listened to you on, and basically there's this core idea in Lambda School that you have to be kind of confident enough to even apply. And this is a great opportunity for many people. But what I'm curious about is, how do you encourage people to do something that's probably good for them, that they might just be scared to do or they make excuses about?

**Austen Allred** (1:03)
Yeah, I mean, I think that's actually the problem we grapple with the most.
And, you know, I think Patrick Colson said something along the lines of, you know, if you think about it, the highest leverage activity any human can have is inspiring other humans to do what they're capable of. And in many ways, I see Lambda School as like the realization of that. So we've had a lot of students, you know, in the past, you would graduate, and then whenever you felt ready, you would start applying for jobs. And we'd have students that would just wait and wait and wait. And we'd be like, what, you know, why are they not working hard? What's going on? And you talk to them and you realize it's massive imposter syndrome. They're just not, they're not confident or comfortable with the idea that they're now a software engineer. And so they're just kind of procrastinating that.
So now we have some mechanisms that get you to, you know, start applying earlier. But yeah, like the minute they start applying, they get interviews, they get hired, they get a six-figure job. And it's like, what, what were we waiting for, right? You're totally capable.

**Craig Cannon** (2:03)
And what about, what about the people before Lambda School? A few of the questions that came in from Twitter were basically like, isn't this just an opportunity for rich people?
You know, like being able to leave your job and commit full-time to a seven-month program.

**Austen Allred** (2:17)
Yeah. My first answer to that would be we have part-time programs as well, so you can do it evenings and weekends. We have experiments running where we pay people living stipends.
That will be expanding greatly. We'll be announcing something in the near future along those lines in concert with a few other tech leaders here in the Valley.
But yeah, I mean, the number one problem we have to solve on the admissions side is getting the people who are qualified to actually apply. Yeah. It's kind of a, you wouldn't think of it as being a problem.

**Craig Cannon** (2:52)
It's a YC problem too.

**Austen Allred** (2:55)
Yeah, no, it totally is.
Some of the best companies are just like, yeah, I just don't know if I can get into YC. And that's the difficulty of having a good reputation where a lot of people want to go there. You just, there are people who assume that they won't get in, which is not the case.

**Craig Cannon** (3:12)
Right. I mean, so your acceptance rate, maybe it's changed, but I heard you say it's 25% of the people who make it through that first initial test.

**Austen Allred** (3:21)
Of the people that make it through the pre-course work, it might even be higher now. I mean, the pre-course work is more difficult, but the vast majority of our selection mechanism is the pre-course work, how well you do on it, if you put in the time.
Sometimes I wonder if we could just make the pre-course work really long and have that be it. No interview, no nothing, just the work.

**Craig Cannon** (3:44)
Yeah, I mean, because that's obviously, like your business hinges on you assessing that risk, right?

**Austen Allred** (3:49)
Correct.

**Craig Cannon** (3:49)
And so if you could make it sufficiently difficult, it would work.

**Austen Allred** (3:54)
Yeah, in theory. I mean, you run the risk of negatives or positives, I guess.
But yeah, all that we need to find out is, are you of average mental intelligence and will you work really hard? And I think YC is similar, right? Like when I got into YC, I felt super intimidated. There were and there are brilliant people all over in the room. But just because you went, you have a PhD in computer science from MIT and you got a 1600 on the SATs as a freshman, doesn't necessarily mean you have a successful company. It's not directly correlated.