Breaking Into Startups

Ameer Brown is a Software Quality Engineer at Adobe. He talks about what it takes to be a successful engineer at Adobe. Outside of work Ameer also organizes parties. He also covers how that helped him take it to another level hosting parties in multiple cities. From being a journalism major, he suddenly left his job, flew to LA, and applied to General Assembly. Through the bootcamp’s Opportunity Fund, Ameer’s coding education was fully funded by Adobe until ultimately getting hired (and he didn’t even apply for it!)

Dan Rosensweig is the CEO of Chegg, an American education company with the aim to provide education that is less expensive, more available, more affordable, and more relevant. On the podcast, Dan explains how it's their responsibility to learn from, listen to, and build for young people. He was formerly the COO of Yahoo! and CEO of Guitar Hero. He's also on the board of several amazing companies. Dan admits Chegg was considered a failure for most of its first 7 years. 8 1/2 years later, they're a $3.5 billion Education Technology company and is considered a leader in their space.

Cameron Yarbrough is the CEO of Torch and one of the best leadership and executive coaches in the world. In this episode, Cameron talks about coaching for everyone! How Torch got its start and the problems that many CEO’s as well as startup employees have when they are faced with pressure.

Dan Sommer is the CEO and Co-Founder of Trilogy Education Services. Dan has launched partnerships with over 37 of the world's leading universities, providing alternative forms of education on their campuses. smarturl.it/trilogy_learn_more They have instructors teaching 200 classes every week. They have thousands of students who have completed Trilogy-powered programs, and 1,500 companies employ them. In May, Dan secured a $50-million Series B and he's been doing a lot of exciting things related to future work. Prior to Trilogy, he was the President of Zeta Global, also a large education company. Interesting takeaways from this episode: learning how to learn, developing your superpowers, and being aware of not just engineering jobs but specific technologies companies are hiring for in different geographies!

Announcements: Watch the video recording of this episode on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Rg8SHeq1Ns Rich Smith is a Senior UI engineer at Netflix but did you know this was his 17th job? Today, he talks about how he started hustling as early as 4th grader and eventually discovered his interest in coding! On the episode he covers a lot of topics as what it was like growing up with role models who were athletes, which a lot of us could relate with. And how not until he dropped out of college that Rich stumbled upon coding and later realized that this could be a viable career path! Rich’s journey to become a Senior Engineer at Netflix was certainly not an easy feat, but he lays out the roadmap on this episode that anyone can follow to attain the same results. Hint: it doesn’t involve a computer science degree :)

Balaji Srinivasan is the CTO of Coinbase. Prior to that, he was a co-founder of Counsyl, Earn, Teleport, and a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Today, he talks about his insights into traditional education vs. alternative education, as well as numerous concepts on technical debt, voice vs. exit, idea maze, idea vs. education, and more! Balaji has a very interesting mindset in that he believes that not everybody can be a founder, but everybody can be an investor.

Rick O’Donnell is the Founder and CEO of Skills Fund, a place that provides people with an opportunity to acquire skills and they also provide financing for students as they're doing a career transition. Prior to Skills Fund, Rick worked as an Executive Director for the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies as well as the Director for the Department of Higher Education where he oversaw 29 public colleges and universities in Colorado. Since its founding in 2015, Skills Fund has provided over $100 million in students loans. Today, Rick talks about how you should be thinking about your career transition and how you can afford it as well.

There are half a million open tech jobs, and yet, diversity in tech continues to be a problem. The key is in building relationships and connecting people with the right companies that need their skills the most. Leanne Pittsford is the founder of Lesbians Who Tech, the largest LGBTQ community of technologists in the world with over 40,000 members. She is also the founder of Tech Jobs Tour, connecting diverse, underrepresented, and nontraditional talent with companies across the country. Among other companies she has created are include.io, and Lean Impact. Fun fact about Leanne is when she’s not helping people find jobs she really loves to surf.

Our guest on the podcast has a remarkable story. Madelyn Tavarez did a part-time bootcamp, while holding a full-time job. She taught herself how to code. And became a software engineer at Pinterest now building products for hundreds of millions of people. She is also a Dominican Republic-native who grew up in Washington Heights and due to her own drive and curiosity was able to change her circumstance. Her senior year of college she went from being a bartender to an “eat, pray, love” moment which took her to Italy. Which eventually played a big role in Madelyn deciding to teach herself how to code. Fast-forward to today, she works as an Android engineer at Pinterest. She also continues to get actively involved in different community projects, including the TECHNOLOchicas among others.

Austen Allred is the CEO and Co-Founder of Lambda School. Recently coming out of Y Combinator, Lambda now has thousands of students. Prior to this, he served as a Growth Expert at LendUp. Lambda School is an online bootcamp that gives students the tools and training they need to launch their career in software engineering at no upfront cost. Their end goal is to eliminate all the distractions related to income, living expenses & time so students can focus on transitioning into their dream careers. They also don’t get paid, unless you get a job!

Avi Flombaum is a lifelong educator. He is the Co-Founder of Flatiron School, which grew to thousands of students and got acquired by WeWork. Prior to starting Flatiron School, Avi also built several companies. Avi’s philosophy believes that education should mold and flex to the needs of the student. On this episode, he shares his insights about their different programs and how they’re making education more accessible to people without having to carry that huge financial burden themselves.

Moving from Atlanta to the Bay Area, from being a writer, artist, to mathematician, David Harris completed App Academy and became a software engineer. By combining hard work and the power of networking, David ultimately landed a full-time job at Omada Health. In this episode, David talks about his struggles and how he hustled his way to success. He’s also dishing out a ton of resources you can use whether you’re preparing for a bootcamp or prepping for an interview. David is the brother of Ruben Harris. He also shares how Ruben, Timur, and Artur have helped him throughout out this entire journey, along with some other amazing people in the industry that he met along the way.

In 2017, Iris Nevins decided to leave her work as a teacher in Florida to attend a bootcamp in the Bay Area - but it was not without its own struggles. Iris believes that when you’re on your path, no matter the road blocks, serendipitous things will happen. In 2018, Iris landed a job as a software engineer at MailChimp, an Atlanta-based marketing automation platform (although Iris works remotely in Oakland). Quick trivia: MailChimp sends out a whopping billion emails per day! Iris is also the founder of Organeyez, an organization that provides relevant tools and content to groups and organizations that work towards fostering social justice.

Galvanize and Hack Reactor have now merged to become bigger and better in the bootcamp space. With the merger, Shawn who is the Cofounder of Hack Reactor and a returning guest on the Podcast, is now serving as SVP of Strategy and Innovation. Galvanize has eight campuses across the U.S. including San Francisco, Seattle, Phoenix, Austin, Denver (2), Boulder, and New York City. They're primarily engaged in immersive education, enterprise work, and co-working. Hack Reactor is one of the largest coding bootcamp that focuses on web development and is now expanding their offering to corporate clients. In their effort to create lifelong learning programs for alums and work transformatively with companies trying to set up, they decided to join a bigger company in order to realize this. As the industry is going through consolidation, together Galvanize & Hack Reactor will be offering software engineering and data science across eight campuses and become the largest bootcamp.

Ryan Carson is the Founder and CEO of Treehouse. He grew up in Colorado and is currently in Portland. Today, he talks about the future of education, work, and more! Treehouse is an online school that teaches adults how to code and build apps so they gain a super power. Running for 8 years now, they've taught over 850,000 people how to code, with currently 80,000 enrolled students. Their mission is simple: to change lives through rebooting the talent pipeline in America and the world!