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Speaker 2: My graduates from my school being forts bad drop drop Mike,
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Speaker 3: All right, guys, welcome back, euy l. This is gonna
Speaker 3: be a fun episode, very very educational. I could feel it.
Speaker 3: This is something that we've been looking forward to for
Speaker 3: a while. So you know, one of the main initiatives
Speaker 3: for this year is to focus more on tech because
Speaker 3: you know, we talked about tech so much on when
Speaker 3: we come to stocks Market, Mondays and stuff like that,
Speaker 3: but we haven't really had a lot of tech entrepreneurs previously.
Speaker 3: So this year we wanted to highlight tech entrepreneurs and
Speaker 3: especially if you know, it's always a good when we
Speaker 3: can do black tech entrepreneurs. So this is what we're
Speaker 3: going to do today. And Rubyn Harris, somebody that was
Speaker 3: introduced to me probably over a year year ago. Shout
Speaker 3: out to my man Jason, Jason Lewis. So he actually
Speaker 3: was telling me about you. Then he actually introduced me
Speaker 3: to Sharen and then she introduced me to you, and
Speaker 3: here we are now. So Ruben Young entrepreneur CEO of
Speaker 3: Career Karma. So, Career Karma is a company that actually
Speaker 3: matches candidates up with jobs in the in the tech industry,
Speaker 3: correct job training programs in the tech industry. So just
Speaker 3: closed the series B right, forty million dollars.
Speaker 4: Last three years.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So yeah, just raised raised fifty two million dollars
Speaker 3: in the last two years. Currently has over two hundred.
Speaker 4: Employees, two hundred employees on contracts.
Speaker 3: Twenty three countries non states. Yeah, right, and eight figures
Speaker 3: in revenue.
Speaker 5: Correct, visit the sight every month?
Speaker 3: Three million organic? That's right, that's right, people visit the
Speaker 3: site every month. Am I missing anything?
Speaker 5: I think twenty five got okay all the time? Bro,
Speaker 5: I know you many.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we're introducing twenty five thousand people a month to
Speaker 4: job training programs.
Speaker 3: And it's so Jason so like this is actually a
Speaker 3: real testimony because Jason is he's from our neighborhood, friend
Speaker 3: of mine, and he actually went through the job training
Speaker 3: program and so that's why when he connected me, he
Speaker 3: was like, yo, I actually like he actually went through it.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure exactly what happened after that, but he
Speaker 3: was so you know, enthusiastic about it. That's what actually
Speaker 3: made him actually reach out to me and was like,
Speaker 3: have you ever heard of this? This is somebody that
Speaker 3: you gotta highlight because it's so great. So I just
Speaker 3: before we even start the episode. Word of mouth is
Speaker 3: always the best form of marketing and doing a good
Speaker 3: job by people. It's always the best for marketing because
Speaker 3: you never know who knows who. And that was a
Speaker 3: way that you know, all of this gets connected, is
Speaker 3: that you know, he actually goes through the job training
Speaker 3: program and it's really really excited about it, feels good
Speaker 3: about it, and then connects to dots.
Speaker 4: So we just kept seeing you everywhere. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 4: it's good people find people.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I feel like I'm like here again, here again.
Speaker 5: Then obviously yeah you got like.
Speaker 4: And Jason Kep saying hey can you leadire and your
Speaker 4: Leasia every time I seen you, guys is bigger and
Speaker 4: bigger and big. This is not just a business, this
Speaker 4: is a movement. I want to be part of that.
Speaker 3: I appreciate it. So yeah, so this is gonna be
Speaker 3: th conplience. Like I said, We're going to talk about
Speaker 3: his start and starting a tech company Silicon Valley, the
Speaker 3: ups and downs, raising money, the road to a billion
Speaker 3: dollar valuation, all of the angel investors that you you know,
Speaker 3: need to know about all of that stuff. So first
Speaker 3: and foremost welcome.
Speaker 4: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so let's get into this. So how do you
Speaker 3: get into starting a tech company when you don't have
Speaker 3: You're not a tech guy originally, right, Like, you don't
Speaker 3: have a tech background.
Speaker 4: I don't have a tech background. I'm not a software engineer.
Speaker 3: What is your background. What was you doing before this?
Speaker 4: So I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia to Atlanta. I
Speaker 4: grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm a musician. I've been
Speaker 4: playing the cello since I was four years old at
Speaker 4: cell've been playing the cello solves four years old. So specialty,
Speaker 4: that's a specialty. It's a different it's a different instrument.
Speaker 4: But I was growing up, I wanted to become the
Speaker 4: best musician in the world. So I did a lot
Speaker 4: of student musician work things like that. My cello teacher
Speaker 4: is the one who told me to actually get into
Speaker 4: business because a lot of artists don't understand. They signed
Speaker 4: up to a lot of bad deals. They don't understand
Speaker 4: what's going on. And so I found a course online
Speaker 4: where I was able to teach myself financial modeling, kind
Speaker 4: of like Uile University. Became an investment banker and that
Speaker 4: worked out very well, very quickly, the tech worlds started
Speaker 4: taking over the technology the finance world, and one of
Speaker 4: our buddies, he quit the investment banking became a software engineer.
Speaker 4: When I was in investment banking, I met one of
Speaker 4: my co founders, Archermeister, and his twin brother, and none
Speaker 4: of us knew how to code, and Atlanta Tech Village
Speaker 4: had popped up across the street, and we're like, what's
Speaker 4: this tech thing that's happening, and everybody kept talking about
Speaker 4: Silicon Valley. There was a company called bit pay across
Speaker 4: the street at the same time that coinbase was starting early.
Speaker 4: So we saw crypto very very early days, and we
Speaker 4: were like, if we want to start a company, like
Speaker 4: you said, if you want to start a billion dollar company,
Speaker 4: it has to have tech at his core. But none
Speaker 4: of us knew how to code. And that guy that
Speaker 4: quit the bank and became a self engineer, he did
Speaker 4: it in three months. He went to something called a
Speaker 4: boot camp, which is a job training program, and so
Speaker 4: that boot camp had a guy named Jack Altman who
Speaker 4: runs a company called Lattus today, who was also investment banker.
Speaker 4: He did the boot camp and he was a self
Speaker 4: engineer and his brother was Sam Altman, who was the
Speaker 4: president of y Combinator at the time, which we'll talk
Speaker 4: about in a second. And that's when we learned that
Speaker 4: there's these accelerators that will train you to be entrepreneurs,
Speaker 4: and there's these boot camp instead will train you even
Speaker 4: if you didn't go to college to get six figures
Speaker 4: and then teach you how to build billion dollar companies.
Speaker 4: And the two things were all paused here that Y
Speaker 4: Combinator says, if you want to start a billion dollar company,
Speaker 4: you have to write code, you have to talk to users.
Speaker 4: So my co founders decided they're going to be the
Speaker 4: right code guys, and now it's going to be the
Speaker 4: top to users guys, which is the CEO and the
Speaker 4: person that sells. So that's where it started.
Speaker 5: All right, So we've heard combinator before, shout the player
Speaker 5: as lounds. Yeah, one of the companies that we actually
Speaker 5: covered on Alisia, your partners, you knew them from the
Speaker 5: bank and they, you guys, moved and went to Y
Speaker 5: Combinator altogether. How did that process take place?
Speaker 4: We didn't go to Y Combinator immediately. It's harder to
Speaker 4: get into Y Combinator than stand.
Speaker 3: Well, let's let's let's just talk about because some people
Speaker 3: might not have seen that episode. Can you explain what
Speaker 3: why Combinator is.
Speaker 4: So Y Combinator is the world's largest tech accelerator. So
Speaker 4: in the last sixteen years they've generated three hundred billion
Speaker 4: in value. So companies like Airbnb, Stripe, drop box, door
Speaker 4: that that was all created through y Combinator. So what
Speaker 4: they do is they'll let anybody apply. There's two cohorts
Speaker 4: a year, and if you get accepted, they'll give you money.
Speaker 4: In our case it was one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Speaker 4: They take seven percent, and then you're part of a network,
Speaker 4: a club of all the other Y Comminator company. So
Speaker 4: there's over two thousand y Combinator company. So I can
Speaker 4: email any CEO in the network and we're fam and
Speaker 4: we look out for each other. And essentially they help
Speaker 4: you raise money, which is how I was able to
Speaker 4: learn how to raise all this money. And then you're
Speaker 4: able to get mentors that help you execute after you
Speaker 4: raise money, to build and solve problems that you've set
Speaker 4: out to do.
Speaker 5: So Tim and you're the person that decided you're going
Speaker 5: to go to y Combinator.
Speaker 4: So what happened is so we said we wanted to
Speaker 4: do y Combinator, but to get to the point where
Speaker 4: you're n y Combinator, our philosophy was like, rather than
Speaker 4: go straight into starting a company, US work at tech
Speaker 4: companies first, and rather than work for the same tech company.
Speaker 4: Let's actually learn the game first and in the same
Speaker 4: amount of time, let's take three years and split up.
Speaker 4: So Archer he decided to go to a fintech marketplace
Speaker 4: called Funding Circle, so he went there Early Team Or
Speaker 4: he was an auto trader at the time, which is
Speaker 4: a car marketplace. And then he wanted to get into
Speaker 4: augmented reality, so he went to Blipper. And then I
Speaker 4: went to an education company called alt School, and then
Speaker 4: a healthcare company called Honor, and then a political company
Speaker 4: called Hustle, and so we all spent time during that
Speaker 4: period learning our skills. So I focused on sales, they
Speaker 4: focused on self engineering. My brother also went to a
Speaker 4: boot camp. He became a software engineer at a healthcare company.
Speaker 4: And we did that for about three years, and then
Speaker 4: we organized a bunch of events in the city of
Speaker 4: San Francisco that I learned about to build my network,
Speaker 4: and then we eventually started the company.
Speaker 5: All right, so everybody decided, look, I got a skill,
Speaker 5: let me go master it. You have a skill, go
Speaker 5: master it. You got a skill, go master it.
Speaker 4: Let's come back together, like a backwards version of the
Speaker 4: wilten clients I started together and then they eventually split
Speaker 4: you split and then came back together.
Speaker 5: That's a real team work.
Speaker 3: So all right, so when you started it, you have
Speaker 3: one hundred and fifty thousand dollars as startup. Did you
Speaker 3: have any other money outside of that or that was
Speaker 3: like that?
Speaker 4: So that's a good question when we applied to why Combinator.
Speaker 4: So this is actually an interesting story. So I told
Speaker 4: you I was a musician. I did studient musician work.
Speaker 4: I did stuff with like Zetoven, I did stuff with
Speaker 4: triggering and dream, all these different people. That's how I
Speaker 4: got into the club space. So I did. I used
Speaker 4: to promote parties with Studio seventy two and Jermaine Prix,
Speaker 4: stuff like that. I took that same philosophy in Atlanta.
Speaker 4: This is how I met Michael Sibel. I did it.
Speaker 4: I noticed that they people kept saying there's no black
Speaker 4: people in tech. So and a lot of the events
Speaker 4: were like world boring. So I did a big party
Speaker 4: at a club in San Francisco called Infusion Lo. It
Speaker 4: was kind of like the event that you and I
Speaker 4: met in Oakland. And I made sure that instead of
Speaker 4: having celebrities, we had founders and CEOs and one of
Speaker 4: the people that was there was Michael Sabel, who is
Speaker 4: now the CEO of a combinator that started Twitch. It
Speaker 4: was a beautiful event and when Michael met us, he
Speaker 4: pretty much was like, hey, you guys, just start a company.
Speaker 4: Let us know. And at the time we actually started up.
Speaker 5: That's the conversation.
Speaker 4: Yeah you started, let me start a company. Like you
Speaker 4: see what you're doing you out here, like, have a
Speaker 4: good night.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he started twitch.
Speaker 4: He started Twitch.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So Michael Sible was a black man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So and what's interesting is that similar to you guys
Speaker 4: when we came when we got our first jobs and technology,
Speaker 4: we wrote a story about it called Breaking the Startups.
Speaker 4: That took off and then it turned into a podcast.
Speaker 4: And so when Michael was like, you need to start
Speaker 4: a company, we was like, we started this podcast. He
Speaker 4: was like, have you quit your job though? Are you
Speaker 4: doing it full time? Like you got right? I wasn't
Speaker 4: doing it like that. He was like, I said no.
Speaker 4: He said, well you're not ready yet, so check it out.
Speaker 4: I quit my job to go full time. We applied
Speaker 4: to y combinator, got rejected. That might what's going on?
Speaker 4: He said, start a company then, so he says, so
Speaker 4: he says, he says either CEO right, I said yeah,
Speaker 4: he said go raise, So so I set out to
Speaker 4: raise one hundred and fifty thousand. I ended up raising
Speaker 4: three hundred thousand in two weeks. And then I applied
Speaker 4: to why Combinator again and then got in and then
Speaker 4: eventually had about half a million before we when we
Speaker 4: were going through the cohors.
Speaker 3: So, yeah, how do you apply for why Comminator?
Speaker 4: You literally just apply. You go to lack why comminated
Speaker 4: our contrast, apply and it breaks down what you got
Speaker 4: to do. So the reason we didn't get in the
Speaker 4: first time, personally, I believe is because I didn't do
Speaker 4: the best job of communication. One of the biggest things
Speaker 4: this is this is important not just for entrepreneurship but
Speaker 4: even career navigation in general, is like, you want to
Speaker 4: explain what do you do very clearly. What problem are
Speaker 4: you solving for?
Speaker 5: Who?
Speaker 4: How often do they have that problem? How are you
Speaker 4: solving it software? And when you solve it, how do
Speaker 4: you make money? How much traction do you have? Have
Speaker 4: you launched, are you going at it full time? Who's
Speaker 4: technical on your team? What market are you dressing? How
Speaker 4: big is that market? Those are essentially like the the
Speaker 4: the the foundational questions that they'll be asking you. And
Speaker 4: it's very similar to like when you're trying to play
Speaker 4: for a company. They're not looking to see if you
Speaker 4: actually know how to code or know how to sell.
Speaker 4: They're looking to see, like who are you and how
Speaker 4: can you solve problems for me at this company?
Speaker 3: So okay, so all right, so you go through. And
Speaker 3: then one other thing about why comedy is that it's
Speaker 3: also something where like all the successful tech founders come
Speaker 3: and speak to you guys. Right, Yeah, it's like it's
Speaker 3: like a camp almost right, Yeah, how long is it?
Speaker 4: Three months?
Speaker 3: Three months? But you got to live there, right you?
Speaker 4: Yeah, everybody come to San Francisco. Everybody come to San Francisco.
Speaker 4: I mean it has gone more virtual now, but everybody
Speaker 4: goes San Francisco. You have different cohorts. You meet up
Speaker 4: every week and then they have dinners and stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you meet other other people are teaching you the game.
Speaker 4: It's like it's straight. It's like it's a boot camp.
Speaker 4: It's it's a boot camp for entrepreneur. Same thing that
Speaker 4: we're talking about job training programs to get a job intech.
Speaker 4: It's the same thing for entrepreneurs after you've learned the game.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so very important. If anybody's interested, definitely check it out.
Speaker 3: So all right, so now you have the money, you
Speaker 3: pass the you go through ye Combinator, you go to
Speaker 3: different you learn from different you know, careers. But you
Speaker 3: still have the five hundred thousand dollars that you saved originally. Right,
Speaker 3: you didn't blow that money.
Speaker 4: Didn't blow it, but you definitely had to spend some
Speaker 4: of it.
Speaker 3: You spent it before you started the company.
Speaker 4: I expect it to run the company. It didn't. I
Speaker 4: didn't blow it at all.
Speaker 3: So, like, at what point do you actually start the cot.
Speaker 4: When you're when you're you've already started the company when
Speaker 4: you apply to I see some people will apply with
Speaker 4: just an idea. But there's a really good quote that
Speaker 4: Michael says, it's like you're nothing until you launch. All right,
Speaker 4: everybody can apply with an idea they launched, even if
Speaker 4: they don't know to code. There's a lot of amazing
Speaker 4: no code tools like Bubble, like web Flow. You don't
Speaker 4: even have to code. You could literally just be like
Speaker 4: what problem do I want to solve and just make
Speaker 4: an MVP, which is a minimum viable product and just
Speaker 4: like try it, and when you're in there, they give
Speaker 4: you the money to continue running it because what you're
Speaker 4: doing during those three months is trying to make it
Speaker 4: grow as fast as possible so you look as best
Speaker 4: as possible. So when you present on something called demo Day,
Speaker 4: which is the end of it, you literally have the
Speaker 4: biggest investors in the world that you're presenting to and
Speaker 4: billions of dollars change hands.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, talk about that because.
Speaker 5: Before you before you do downwadate it because that's huge.
Speaker 5: I want to when you were thinking about this, right
Speaker 5: and the number one question you said was like what
Speaker 5: problem you're trying to solve? At that point, like what
Speaker 5: was the problem that you were trying to solve?
Speaker 4: It was a good question. So we want to really
Speaker 4: focus on career navigation. So when I saw that my
Speaker 4: brother was able to get a job making one hundred
Speaker 4: and fifty thousand and five months without going to college,
Speaker 4: that's how my co funders did the same thing my
Speaker 4: sisters started. I was like, what would happen if the
Speaker 4: world knew that there's these job chain programs that exist
Speaker 4: that help millions or billions of people gets money, but
Speaker 4: more importantly, skills that allow them to build solutions to
Speaker 4: problems for their own family, but eventually start their own
Speaker 4: companies where they're not dependent on anybody else.
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Speaker 4: And the biggest reason why I thought that we didn't
Speaker 4: know about these things is because we've never been exposed
Speaker 4: to it, which is why media was so important, which
Speaker 4: is why we started a podcast. And so the first
Speaker 4: step was like, how do we create the number one
Speaker 4: destination for career of us on the internet so people
Speaker 4: are aware of the opportunities that exist. What we realize
Speaker 4: is that even if you expose people to these career
Speaker 4: paths like we did on the podcast, some people will
Speaker 4: take the initiative that are like super driven and have
Speaker 4: the psychological confidence to do it. But most people need
Speaker 4: a community of people behind them to help them. And
Speaker 4: so we wanted to make sure that people have peers, coaches,
Speaker 4: and mentors to make sure that they don't just start
Speaker 4: a program, but they finish it and then once they're
Speaker 4: done with the training. There's a lot of people that
Speaker 4: are extremely intelligent, have the best degrees in the world,
Speaker 4: have gone to the best training programs that still struggle
Speaker 4: in the job search. Why because they don't know how
Speaker 4: to communicate, They don't know how to tell their story,
Speaker 4: and so we need to help them with that. So
Speaker 4: we have this network of companies. We have love of
Speaker 4: audio rooms in our community to be able to connect
Speaker 4: people directly to companies. And so the short answer is,
Speaker 4: were the easiest way to find a job training program
Speaker 4: online that is now growing to become the world's largest
Speaker 4: community career transitioners on the internet that will eventually become
Speaker 4: the world's largest staff in front.
Speaker 3: So two questions when he said to raise the money,
Speaker 3: how did you who did you raise the money from it?
Speaker 3: How did you go about raising the money?
Speaker 4: Great question? First thing that he said is like, what
Speaker 4: is the bare minimum amount of money that you need
Speaker 4: in order to survive?
Speaker 3: S e.
Speaker 4: Francisco is one of the most expensive places to live.
Speaker 4: They had about four of us that will live in
Speaker 4: in one place. The rent was like seven thousand a month,
Speaker 4: and we like broke down the math and without paying ourselves,
Speaker 4: like we're like, we just need one hundred fifty thousand.
Speaker 4: So so so, so the what we did in order
Speaker 4: to find who the initial people were going to be,
Speaker 4: I just leveraged the people that I met through working
Speaker 4: at companies that I knew that were investors. But I
Speaker 4: didn't just focus on the traditional angel investors or traditional entrepreneurs.
Speaker 4: I reached out to people that I know that were
Speaker 4: accomplished that will cut a check as well. One of
Speaker 4: the people I met at Atlanta Tech Village was a
Speaker 4: guy named Paul Judge from Greenwood Yeah, the show, Yeah Judge.
Speaker 4: Paul Judge cut a check very early. Arlin Hamilton from
Speaker 4: Backstage cut a check very early. Michael Cybele cut a
Speaker 4: check very early. And what I was able to do
Speaker 4: as I was able to be like pretty much within
Speaker 4: the first few days, say fifty percent of the round
Speaker 4: is full with people that I already knew, and then
Speaker 4: I use that and being like, hey, look there's only
Speaker 4: a week left. Are you in? Right? And I got
Speaker 4: the rock stars here, I want you? Are you in
Speaker 4: and out? And that kind of like created this whole
Speaker 4: fomo type of thing. But a lot of the stuff
Speaker 4: that I learned through investment banking around putting together a
Speaker 4: presentation really helped me a lot. If for anybody who's
Speaker 4: putting together pictures, could I get this question a lot,
Speaker 4: go to Sequoia Business Plans, check it out and they
Speaker 4: explain the flow. Sequoia is one of the biggest venture
Speaker 4: capital firms. For the people that don't know what a
Speaker 4: venture capital firm is, it's people that give you money
Speaker 4: to start companies, kind of like Shark Team. So saqoya
Speaker 4: business plans and then watch this video called Thing Big,
Speaker 4: Start Small by Jim Getz that really broke down how
Speaker 4: to tell my vision or our vision for what we
Speaker 4: want to do.
Speaker 3: And then okay, that's so yeah, that's actually the scarcity model.
Speaker 3: And then also using like you have like Paul Judge
Speaker 3: who's highly respected, so once he gives money, that automatically
Speaker 3: gives credit ability to it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so what you do is like once you get
Speaker 4: your first few checks, right, so you always want to
Speaker 4: you want to you want to stack all your meetings
Speaker 4: back to back, right, So I would do like and
Speaker 4: then this is early days. Early day was just like
Speaker 4: five minutes a day. Now since we got Zoom, I'll
Speaker 4: do like ten fifteen meetings in the day. But like,
Speaker 4: you want to do as many meetings back to back
Speaker 4: to back, and then you want to follow up with
Speaker 4: all your material material. You got to be tight. You
Speaker 4: got to have your deck, your data room, your financial
Speaker 4: model is everything like really really clean.
Speaker 3: And then.
Speaker 4: Let's say that somebody cuts a check. You follow up
Speaker 4: with people that may not have responded to you and
Speaker 4: be like, hey, just bumping this up to catch up
Speaker 4: to see what's going on. Why I'll let you know
Speaker 4: this other person's in and it's about to close. So
Speaker 4: you just want to keep keep following up like.
Speaker 3: That and then all right, So the second part of
Speaker 3: the question is can you explain what the is it
Speaker 3: pitch day at waw Demo dad.
Speaker 4: So demo Day? So So, something that I really like
Speaker 4: about what Combinator is that they bet on first time founders. Right,
Speaker 4: A lot of people don't they weren't born with a
Speaker 4: network that well, they're not privileged, right, I didn't have
Speaker 4: this network coming in here. And so what they'll do
Speaker 4: is literally give you credibility so that you can raise money.
Speaker 4: I'm not saying that it's impossible without it, but and
Speaker 4: there's other accelerators like five hundred Startups and tech Stars,
Speaker 4: hy Combinator is the most known for this. But essentially
Speaker 4: they bet on you and what they'll do is they'll
Speaker 4: create hype. So what's interesting about why Combinator is every
Speaker 4: cohort so they do a summer batch, and a winner
Speaker 4: batch has two to three companies that go public. So
Speaker 4: the whole world knows that Y Combinator is so good
Speaker 4: at picking companies and being selective on who applies that
Speaker 4: there will be multiple billion dollar companies and each batch.
Speaker 4: So what they do is they create a huge event
Speaker 4: where all the biggest investors come and essentially create a
Speaker 4: lot of fomo as well. So what a lot of
Speaker 4: investors will try to do will try to get to
Speaker 4: the founders early year before demo day, and we're encouraged
Speaker 4: to like wait until demo days so that you can
Speaker 4: present and then have the highest valuation, which is important
Speaker 4: so you're not diluting yourself which means giving away too
Speaker 4: much ownership.
Speaker 5: Yeah, let's talk about that. So, like obviously the demo day,
Speaker 5: I'm sure it was a nerve recor day, but you
Speaker 5: prepare for the first.
Speaker 4: One, first one person in San Francisco.
Speaker 5: How many people at that moment after with presentation do
Speaker 5: they invest right on the spot? How does that work?
Speaker 5: And when you spoke about evaluation, how is it measured there?
Speaker 5: And if people don't know, can you tell them how
Speaker 5: people or how evaluations actually calculated.
Speaker 4: Some people do invest on the spot, so you know,
Speaker 4: whenever you present a demo day, you're going to get
Speaker 4: a lot of people that are gonna follow up and
Speaker 4: show interest, and then it's on you to follow up
Speaker 4: with all of them forever. You founder. It's different, but
Speaker 4: just some people will do their deal beforehand. It really
Speaker 4: it's up to you. They don't why combinator doesn't tell
Speaker 4: you what you have to do. They just give you
Speaker 4: advice and it's up to you to take that advice
Speaker 4: or not. From evaluation perspective, markets are crazy, like especially
Speaker 4: right now. The market valuation right now is way higher
Speaker 4: than it was when I was going through a combinator.
Speaker 4: But just to understand, like quick and dirty evaluation stuff,
Speaker 4: usually it's a function of ten x of your revenue.
Speaker 4: So like if you're i don't know, making ten million
Speaker 4: a year, ten x is like one hundred million dollars valuation.
Speaker 4: But usually y C companies aren't at that stage. That's
Speaker 4: actually a later stage. Usually a lot of people are
Speaker 4: pre revenue, have some traction, but not a ton of traction.
Speaker 4: I think when we were when we were at in
Speaker 4: White Company. Just so people have perspective, I'll just give
Speaker 4: the number. We're at thirteen thousand a month. Just that
Speaker 4: was a long time ago. And yeah wait wait, way back,
Speaker 4: way back, way back, so long ago. And what's interesting
Speaker 4: is that you know it's not just about your revenue traction,
Speaker 4: so you're usually you want to be why Commeday encourages
Speaker 4: you to make sure you have monthly revenue growth. The
Speaker 4: only difference between startups and like everything else is growth
Speaker 4: and momentum. So you want to be growing ten to
Speaker 4: twenty percent monthly from a revenue perspective. Not everybody is
Speaker 4: doing that, but like you want to just have that
Speaker 4: number in your head because you know compounding is key.
Speaker 4: But you're not just going to be evaluated on revenue.
Speaker 4: You're going to be evaluated on who's your team. Do
Speaker 4: not apply to wh acommindator unless you have somebody that's technical.
Speaker 4: I'm not technical. My co founders are technical. We knew
Speaker 4: that if they decided they weren't going to be technical,
Speaker 4: I had to be technical. And the reason why is
Speaker 4: because you don't want to be outsourcing your culture other people.
Speaker 4: That gets expensive and it's just you don't have control
Speaker 4: about what's going on. So be evaluating your team outside
Speaker 4: of technicals are going to be like, have you experienced
Speaker 4: this problem before? So, like, if you're helping people get
Speaker 4: good credit, like, have you had bad credit before? And
Speaker 4: have you gotten out of it? So are you personally
Speaker 4: invested in this? There's a difference between a job, a career,
Speaker 4: and a calling. This is a calling to me because
Speaker 4: I've been through it before. Right, So have you done
Speaker 4: this before? Who is your investor so far? Right? What
Speaker 4: does your software look like? And many other things. And
Speaker 4: so essentially, when you think about valuation, another way to
Speaker 4: think about it is is there one percent chance likelihood
Speaker 4: of achieving this valuation and all the other factors are like,
Speaker 4: it can increase that percentage chance of reaching the valuation
Speaker 4: makes sense, And so whenever you're raising money from investors,
Speaker 4: they're actually going to be investing to own a piece
Speaker 4: of your company. So the more money that you raise,
Speaker 4: if it's a low valuation, then like you actually like
Speaker 4: lose more of your company. But usually you can think
Speaker 4: about you're probably going to be giving up about twenty
Speaker 4: percent of your company in the beginning.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and that's key because most people like they'll dilute
Speaker 5: the company and give away ownership before they've ever made money.
Speaker 5: By the time they've raised it, they don't have they're
Speaker 5: that majority anymore.
Speaker 4: Some people have no choice because they haven't been executing
Speaker 4: and growing their company. Right, So you also got to
Speaker 4: make sure your company doesn't die, all right. So for
Speaker 4: the people that are looking to raise money, just be
Speaker 4: careful what you wish for. Like if you if you
Speaker 4: decide that you're going to raise money, you're not raising
Speaker 4: money to build one hundred million dollar company like I
Speaker 4: know you guys think in bees. I think in bees too, right,
Speaker 4: you know we tell you we don't. One of my
Speaker 4: mentors said, don't tip billions to out trillions, right to
Speaker 4: create these like ten hundred billion dollar company, I think
Speaker 4: very very big. And if you're not thinking like that,
Speaker 4: don't invest, don't raise money from venture capital. You could
Speaker 4: just start a lifestyle business and you can do friends
Speaker 4: and family stuff. It's not for everybody, so mhm.
Speaker 3: And just to wrap up the white comedy in the conversation,
Speaker 3: so the gentleman that runs it, he's black, right, Michael Seibel?
Speaker 3: And how many people get accepted per year?
Speaker 4: It depends the cohorts are a little bit bigger. Now
Speaker 4: our cohort, I believe had about two hundred companies that
Speaker 4: were in there, but like in the beginning it was
Speaker 4: like ten ten people. But out of the two hundred
Speaker 4: is usually a much smaller percentag So yeah, it's about
Speaker 4: two hundred companies year, So it's a good amount of people.
Speaker 4: And it's not just in the US that you have
Speaker 4: Latin America, you have Africa. We talked about global stuff earlier,
Speaker 4: so it's from everywhere. It doesn't matter where you're located.
Speaker 4: So and there's some people that have applied seven times
Speaker 4: right drop Dropbox is a good example of a company
Speaker 4: that got rejected the first time as well. And there's
Speaker 4: a lot of people that give up if they get rejected,
Speaker 4: which is I think is a very important thing to
Speaker 4: understand even in career navigation as well.
Speaker 3: Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe Right or dash Roppie Deal like those
Speaker 3: are all people that came from Just look at why
Speaker 3: and you'll see like they got hitters. Yeah, very important
Speaker 3: for people to understand and to know, you know, you
Speaker 3: don't know what you don't know, you don't know what
Speaker 3: you're doing, and you know that's what the whole platform
Speaker 3: is to educate people. So any tech founders that's looking
Speaker 3: for you know, startup help while looking to white. Yes,
Speaker 3: and it's actually being run by a black man.
Speaker 4: So yeah, one more thing before I see you mentioned,
Speaker 4: Like we talked a little bit about the angels. There
Speaker 4: are different types of funds. So in the beginning, you're
Speaker 4: gonna be looking at pre seed funds and seed funds
Speaker 4: that are usually gonna be cutting checks anywhere between, like
Speaker 4: on the lowest end, like I don't know, ten thousand,
Speaker 4: twenty five thousand, up to like maybe half a million
Speaker 4: at most, like a million dollar checks. So you have
Speaker 4: seed funds and pre seed funds, but also take advantage
Speaker 4: of the diversity funds that are out there, take advantage
Speaker 4: of the funds that are focused on women in tech,
Speaker 4: take advantage of the impact funds.
Speaker 3: Can you talk about that a little bit.
Speaker 4: So one of our investors is Emerson Collective, right, So
Speaker 4: that's Loreene Power Jobs. So it's a big fund. Who's it,
Speaker 4: Loreene Power Jobs.
Speaker 3: Steed Jobs is yes, sex wife.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, and so she and she has a multi
Speaker 4: multi billion dollar fund, right and she's impact focused investor.
Speaker 4: So in the beginning, they gave us a six hundred
Speaker 4: thousand dollars check. All right, But we have another fund
Speaker 4: like Imaginable Future.
Speaker 3: It's an impact investor.
Speaker 4: So they're usually family offices, so like Imaginable Futures another investors,
Speaker 4: so they're the eBay founder Piero Medior so multi billiant
Speaker 4: billionaire as well, so he could have checked as well
Speaker 4: into this round. There's the founders of Pailocity, so they're
Speaker 4: usually just wealthy people that want to invest in, people
Speaker 4: that want to do good and what's cool about these days,
Speaker 4: and people that want to start companies At least our generation.
Speaker 4: We don't just want to create something that makes a
Speaker 4: lot of money. We're focused on solving problems that are
Speaker 4: for them. My SoCs hicky of needs. What you all
Speaker 4: are doing with EIL with financial literacy is like one
Speaker 4: of the most important issues out here for our people,
Speaker 4: and people will fund that type of stuff all day long.
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Speaker 4: like we're gonna continue to be digital cout pickers forever
Speaker 4: because we're driving all this value for everybody else's platforms
Speaker 4: that we're not creating our own. And the jobs that
Speaker 4: we have like at warehouses or in retail companies, they're
Speaker 4: going to be taken over by robots and what are
Speaker 4: you going to do after that?
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Speaker 4: To figure it out.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you spoke about something that I'm sure people if
Speaker 5: they read and they hear us talk a lot, they
Speaker 5: hear seed round seed round. Can you explain what the
Speaker 5: actual seed round is and how many seed rounds are
Speaker 5: needed or if they are needed to raise a certain
Speaker 5: amount of capital.
Speaker 4: Running the companies like running a child, right, So as
Speaker 4: a raising a child, it's not like there's a a
Speaker 4: book to raise kids, even though there are books to
Speaker 4: raise kids that give you guys, right, And so think
Speaker 4: about the the rounds kind of like in the beginning,
Speaker 4: like a friends or family round, right, So you're gonna
Speaker 4: hit these days where we can't take advantage of really
Speaker 4: cool things on the internet, where let's pretend that you know,
Speaker 4: you might hit up everybody in the neighborhood over here
Speaker 4: to give money. But then like you ran out of
Speaker 4: people that you know, you can leverage crowd funding things
Speaker 4: like angelist and refunder and stuff like that, so that
Speaker 4: you can raise money from doctors and lawyers that want
Speaker 4: to invest into attack companies. That's usually going to be
Speaker 4: what you call a friends and family around, maybe music executives,
Speaker 4: athletes or stuff like that. Then you have your pre
Speaker 4: seed round that you might have an institutional investor, which
Speaker 4: will include somebody's like funds that I was telling you
Speaker 4: about before, Like one of ours is like unshackled A ventures.
Speaker 4: They they invest in immigrants, so that's like a really
Speaker 4: good one. Then you're in cap or Capital kp or
Speaker 4: Capital is like an impact investor. But they also invested
Speaker 4: in like uh Twiliyo for example, and Uber and many
Speaker 4: other things like that, so that they have big hits
Speaker 4: that they've that they've done very well. And then after
Speaker 4: that you'll do like your seed round, then Series A,
Speaker 4: Series B, all the way till you go public. Going
Speaker 4: back to what you said about evaluation, if you want
Speaker 4: to build a billion dollar company, usually when you're raising
Speaker 4: your Series A, you're going to be in the two
Speaker 4: million dollars a year range.
Speaker 3: For the Series A making two million, making two million.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's a difference between raising money and making money.
Speaker 4: I'm glad that you called that out because too many
Speaker 4: times people are celebrating raising money, and I think it's
Speaker 4: very important for us to not highlight just that, which
Speaker 4: I love that you guys did with your intro, where
Speaker 4: we're focused on solving the problem whatever, make sure that
Speaker 4: you're actually making money as well. And two million a
Speaker 4: year is like the baseline for the A. Then you
Speaker 4: want to remember these these five numbers, triple triple double
Speaker 4: double double. Right, So so if you go your next year,
Speaker 4: you want to be shooting for six million, the year
Speaker 4: after that, eighteen million, the after that, thirty six seventy two,
Speaker 4: and then this one has some flexibility because then it's
Speaker 4: one hundred and forty four. But like at one hundred
Speaker 4: million a year, then you're a billion dollar company. That's
Speaker 4: probably when you're going to go public.
Speaker 5: Once you get one hundred ten exit you that's to
Speaker 5: a billion, that's right.
Speaker 4: And you know these days you're seeing twenty thirty fifty
Speaker 4: one hundred x revenue multiples. That was like the end
Speaker 4: of twenty twenty one, not twenty twenty two. You see
Speaker 4: what's going on the public markets. You know, so'st it's
Speaker 4: a little cool, cool cooler, but it'll come back.
Speaker 3: But like so when we spoke to John Henry, he
Speaker 3: was saying that, you know, depending on what kind of
Speaker 3: company you can have, they could even have much higher.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, so like any AI is like twenty percent
Speaker 3: twenty five percent, I mean twenty five times.
Speaker 4: It depends, yeah, evaluation, It really depends. Like you have
Speaker 4: to like look at, okay, what are the public company comparables?
Speaker 4: This is where like the investment making Dodge comes in Like,
Speaker 4: so you know, investors are like pattern matches, so like
Speaker 4: what could this company be, right, what's the future of it?
Speaker 4: So like something that we would say all the time
Speaker 4: is like we're like booking dot Com for your career
Speaker 4: because you're comparable. That's my comparable. That's a very big one, right.
Speaker 4: But there's others like if I have the community side
Speaker 4: of things, there's like dual Lingo, which is public, right,
Speaker 4: and they have a big community piece where there's like
Speaker 4: over five hundred million monthly at the viewsers, but the
Speaker 4: very small percentage of them that they monetize. Right. You
Speaker 4: have Zilo as well, which is a marketplace, and many
Speaker 4: other things like that. And so to your point, you know,
Speaker 4: depending on which company that you're trying to evaluate compare
Speaker 4: yourself against, you want to be have an understanding if
Speaker 4: not just public companies, but also private companies as well.
Speaker 4: Oh gotcha.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I'm thinking like now, if they're looking at
Speaker 5: like at Uyol University, they might say like they could
Speaker 5: be the next check or something like that.
Speaker 4: Yeah chack, yes, good one check Courserra you to me
Speaker 4: that just went public exactly because gotcha?
Speaker 3: Okay, So all right, So now going back to career karma,
Speaker 3: so you you go through all of that, Now, what's
Speaker 3: the beginning stages of actually getting career karma up running
Speaker 3: to where it is? Now?
Speaker 4: Such a good question. One of the first one of
Speaker 4: the first things that they teach you that I see
Speaker 4: is doing things that don't scale all right. So a
Speaker 4: lot of people, even though they encourage you to like
Speaker 4: have a technical co founder, they go straight into coding
Speaker 4: a solution for the problem in the beginning. You want
Speaker 4: to do things that are manual, right, So what's the
Speaker 4: first thing that we did. We started inviting people to
Speaker 4: our house. Andy'd be like, Yo, pull up, what's going on?
Speaker 4: What what what's your career goal? What's your number one problem?
Speaker 4: And what's your timeline?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 3: Talk about So you said that they teach you to
Speaker 3: do things that aren't scalable.
Speaker 4: In the beginning. Why is that so that you could
Speaker 4: really understand the pain points all the way?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 4: This is a very important So Paul Graham and Jessica
Speaker 4: Livingston started by a combinator for if you want to
Speaker 4: really learn the game, read us all free, essays Paul
Speaker 4: Graham's essays, It's literally like the Startup Bible like read that.
Speaker 4: There's also how to Start a Startup by Sam Autman.
Speaker 4: Read that Read zero to One by Peter Till I
Speaker 4: got that on my booklet fire Like that all teaches
Speaker 4: you the game on how to think about this stuff.
Speaker 4: That's all the stuff that starts studying but doing things
Speaker 4: that don't scale. It is like one of the most
Speaker 4: important concepts to understand because it gets you in the
Speaker 4: trench just to know what's going on. It's like what
Speaker 4: you guys are doing now through doing all these interviews
Speaker 4: and talking to people. It's like when we started the podcast,
Speaker 4: I knew the pain points that people felt consistently in
Speaker 4: addition to my own personal pain points going through it,
Speaker 4: So then I knew what the MVP was supposed to
Speaker 4: look like. Right, And what you do is, let's say
Speaker 4: that I don't want to coach something and I want
Speaker 4: to do a paper wireframe. I could literally draw up
Speaker 4: mockups of what it would look like in an app
Speaker 4: and be like, hey, would you use this and try it?
Speaker 4: And then you will be watching him to see how
Speaker 4: he's using it, where he gets stuck, where he's confused,
Speaker 4: and then you can like iterate on it. And then
Speaker 4: once you have an understanding of like how it works,
Speaker 4: then you start coding stuff up.
Speaker 5: So if you scale too fast, you might miss some
Speaker 5: of those pain points. You miss some of those points detrimental.
Speaker 4: The ability to talk to your users is one of
Speaker 4: the most magical things. You always want to be writing
Speaker 4: code and you always want to be talking to users.
Speaker 4: And a lot of people after they raise money, they
Speaker 4: stopped talking to people, They stopped talking to their using
Speaker 4: They just get caught up and running the business, which
Speaker 4: is challenging whenever you're at this scale, right with millions
Speaker 4: of people coming to you and all these things. But
Speaker 4: you know what's cool about having audio rooms is like,
Speaker 4: I'm going to be on an audio room today with
Speaker 4: Arlen Hamilton talking to over a thousand people in our room,
Speaker 4: and they can always feel like they can talk to me.
Speaker 5: See.
Speaker 3: So, what are some things that's not scaling?
Speaker 4: So you said events, Events is a good example, signing
Speaker 4: them up to spreadsheets, putting them in we had, we
Speaker 4: had telegra. So I'll tell you this is how it happened.
Speaker 4: In the beginning. People come to our office, they'll share
Speaker 4: what their goals were, what their pain points were, tell
Speaker 4: us the career that they wanted and what time on
Speaker 4: that they did. We'll sign them up on a spreadsheet.
Speaker 4: We'll put them in a telego group, which is kind
Speaker 4: of like signal. Put them in a telegram group, and
Speaker 4: then we would help them, would monitor them, were like, okay,
Speaker 4: apply to this school, apply to that school, get in
Speaker 4: and out. And then once we understood what the motion was,
Speaker 4: we actually cloned telegram and then we put profiles on
Speaker 4: top of it, and then we eventually like turned it
Speaker 4: into the basics of what we had in the beginning
Speaker 4: before it became a marketplace in all each other stuff.
Speaker 3: So you got all that.
Speaker 5: So at this point, like you said, most people don't
Speaker 5: they raise money, but they forget that they have to
Speaker 5: make money. So how if you guys making money in
Speaker 5: the early stages.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So we've always we always wanted to think about
Speaker 4: when you're building a marketplace, which is a type of
Speaker 4: business that we're running. It's not an air business. Were
Speaker 4: thinking about a marketplace, you have to pick a side,
Speaker 4: like who are you going to serve? Right, Ernest?
Speaker 3: What's up?
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Speaker 4: just in the US but globally, and they spend billions
Speaker 4: of dollars a year to get enrollments. Look at where
Speaker 4: we are right now. You probably heard about the Great resignation.
Speaker 4: Have over ten million open jobs, four million people quitting jobs.
Speaker 4: And why are they quitting their jobs? Because they don't
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Speaker 4: job that pays well. The problem is, just like people
Speaker 4: don't trust higher education no more. They don't want to
Speaker 4: pay fifty thousand a year to go to college if
Speaker 4: there's no guarantee of a job anywhere. To be very clear,
Speaker 4: I'm not saying I'm anti college, but college is starting
Speaker 4: to recognize that they need to innovate because they don't
Speaker 4: want their enrollments to stop keep dropping. So what they're
Speaker 4: doing is not just launching shorter, faster and cheaper models
Speaker 4: that train you to get a job in three to
Speaker 4: twelve months like Trilogy and things like that and My
Speaker 4: Homies at to You and My Homies at Chair. They're
Speaker 4: spending a lot of money to attract students not just
Speaker 4: on Google and Facebook, but also through virtual events and
Speaker 4: stuff like that. This is an interesting stat that Shama says.
Speaker 4: I don't know if it's still the same, but he says,
Speaker 4: like forty cents of every VC dollar raised goes to
Speaker 4: Google and Facebook, and that's paid advertising to attract users.
Speaker 4: And similar to and the reason why people do this
Speaker 4: because there's so many apps that are out there in
Speaker 4: order to get users get seen. You know, zero to
Speaker 4: one says just you know, it says essentially like when
Speaker 4: you build a product. I'm messing up the quote, but
Speaker 4: essentially like building the product is not enough. You have
Speaker 4: to actually get it out to people. And a lot
Speaker 4: of people think building a good product loaners will gets
Speaker 4: you where you want to go. And the last thing
Speaker 4: that I'm going to say here is just that colleges
Speaker 4: and boot camps started spending a lot of money in
Speaker 4: order to attract users, and so we decided, in order
Speaker 4: to make money, we would charge for every enrollment in
Speaker 4: the beginning to prove that it worked. So we charged
Speaker 4: about ten percent of the tuition.
Speaker 5: So you're charging the schools.
Speaker 4: We charged the schools teen percent for every enrollment of
Speaker 4: their tuition, and the tuition would range between ten to
Speaker 4: fifty thousand a year. So who's the first school that
Speaker 4: you went after it was interesting. So before I see
Speaker 4: we started a podcast. The first school was actually hack Reactor.
Speaker 4: So hack Reactor was a school that my my co
Speaker 4: founder Archer went to and they were five thousand months,
Speaker 4: so it's about sixty thousand a year. We're like, wow,
Speaker 4: sixty thousand a year from one school, Like how much
Speaker 4: do other schools pay? And like some schools pay hundreds
Speaker 4: of millions of dollars a year. That's how we discovered
Speaker 4: this market. And now that we're going to high education,
Speaker 4: we're realizing that it's not just par enrollment. You want
Speaker 4: to do a per introduction. So now we've moved to
Speaker 4: a per introduction model, so we can do like really
Speaker 4: interesting things like dynamic pricing. So if you're interested in
Speaker 4: a data science program, you might be interested in an
Speaker 4: economics degree or a math degreer statistics degree, So we
Speaker 4: can charge different schools different prices based off of what
Speaker 4: the individuals can study.
Speaker 5: Like that all right, So like if I'm going to NYU,
Speaker 5: the tuition is sixty thousand, ten percent of that is
Speaker 5: going to if I enrolled, but I could be more
Speaker 5: if I decide to study, like get my doctorate in
Speaker 5: something gotcha?
Speaker 3: So how do you put together your curriculum and what
Speaker 3: is your curriculum to actually get them trained?
Speaker 4: So we actually are in the school. We are the
Speaker 4: platform that matches people to the curriculums.
Speaker 3: So where's the curriculums coming from?
Speaker 4: So we actually built the directory of four hundred for
Speaker 4: the boot camps, seven thousand trade schools, colleges and universities,
Speaker 4: so kind of like glass Door. What we've done is
Speaker 4: we've organized directory of different schools and we have reviews
Speaker 4: from other students that kind of like the Better Business
Speaker 4: Bureau to show that they're credible. Every student puts pros
Speaker 4: and cons about what's going on. They upload projects, and
Speaker 4: they show ultimately where people are getting jobs by school.
Speaker 4: So when people come to career come or if you
Speaker 4: go to career combat Complash apply, you'll say what career
Speaker 4: path you're interested in, or if you don't know, and
Speaker 4: let's say that you do say that what you're interested in.
Speaker 4: Will recommend about three to five schools to you that
Speaker 4: are best for your desired timeline, and then you'll start
Speaker 4: talking to them. To those schools, you're usually not going
Speaker 4: to make a decision about what school you want to
Speaker 4: go to in the beginning, because you're not going to
Speaker 4: make a left tain decision that fast. Then you're going
Speaker 4: to start talking to people in our community that actually
Speaker 4: attended the schools, so that you're not just hearing people
Speaker 4: just I mean, if I want to go to Rashade's
Speaker 4: Cold School, of course you're going to say you're the best,
Speaker 4: but you want to talk to people that actually went
Speaker 4: through it. And so usually it takes people about a
Speaker 4: month in order to make a decision about where they
Speaker 4: want to go. And then if you're doing something full time,
Speaker 4: it'll take you three to six months to get a job.
Speaker 4: If you're doing something part time in six to twelve months,
Speaker 4: and if you do something self paces twelve to twenty
Speaker 4: four months. So but to your point, in our platform,
Speaker 4: we do have some like quizzes to like help you,
Speaker 4: like personality tests to understand what you're interested in. We
Speaker 4: do have a mini boot camp where if you want
Speaker 4: to build a clone of YouTube, we've done that as well,
Speaker 4: so you can do it and that will automatically get
Speaker 4: you accepted into different schools. But we never want to
Speaker 4: be a school. So being a school is not how
Speaker 4: you create a monopoly in education.
Speaker 5: So you. The schools pay you to bring in people.
Speaker 5: Yeah right, they get training from you, Yeah, they match it.
Speaker 5: But the career part, so like after they completed, now
Speaker 5: they got to get the job. That's why you're still
Speaker 5: involved with that process of them actually getting the job.
Speaker 4: Yes, so we're a career navigation platform. So we're the
Speaker 4: wrap around service around everything. And so it's interesting that
Speaker 4: you say this because the guys that let our series
Speaker 4: be is top tier capital partners. The people that let
Speaker 4: our series A is an initialist capital. It's Gary Tan.
Speaker 4: Gary Tan actually built book Phase for y Combinator, which
Speaker 4: is the internal directory for YC. And Gary calls career
Speaker 4: karma y Combinator for the people where why combinator bets
Speaker 4: on first time founders and career karma bets on people
Speaker 4: for the first time. So not only do we want
Speaker 4: to say that again slows down that.
Speaker 5: That's good, that's good, st.
Speaker 4: Why combinator bets on first time founders and career karma
Speaker 4: bets on people for the first time. Thank you for
Speaker 4: letting let me catch on. And so what's interesting about
Speaker 4: it is, and I'm glad that you're calling this out,
Speaker 4: is we don't want people to think that we just
Speaker 4: send people to schools and we leave them alone after.
Speaker 4: We want to be there with you before, during, and
Speaker 4: after the program, and even after you're employed. If you
Speaker 4: ever want to do something like start a company, we
Speaker 4: could help you get connected to that or change company.
Speaker 4: We can help you do that through our audio rooms.
Speaker 4: So yes, so I'll just.
Speaker 5: That one one more thing, because you said, this is
Speaker 5: your quote. You said, this is probably the greatest reallocation
Speaker 5: of labor since World War Two.
Speaker 4: That's right, that's right. So during World War Two. What's
Speaker 4: very interesting about that is the government got involved and
Speaker 4: they created the the GI Bill, right So the GI
Speaker 4: Bill essentially paid for the education for veterans. Right now,
Speaker 4: obviously the government's really focused on healthcare stuff after that.
Speaker 4: You know, they've started touching on positive student loan payments
Speaker 4: or whatever. When Obama was in power, there was the
Speaker 4: WOA Act, which is the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act. But
Speaker 4: like this real focus on reskilling hasn't happened yet. In
Speaker 4: my opinion, something that the CEO of Check says, Dan
Speaker 4: Rosen's like I'm gonna give him shout out. He says,
Speaker 4: bet on the inevitable. My opinion is going to be
Speaker 4: inevitable for government to get involved to help its citizens reskill.
Speaker 4: Why because every politician measures themselves on getting jobs for
Speaker 4: their different cities and countries and whatever, and so you're
Speaker 4: already starting to see different workforce boards get involved with
Speaker 4: laptop programs or skill programs or Wi Fi hot spots.
Speaker 4: And in my opinion, the student loan bubble will pop
Speaker 4: at some point and the cost of education will go
Speaker 4: down and will be primarily funded by government, philanthropy and employers.
Speaker 5: Well, I'll go back to that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, guys, you said that you said had a monopologe.
Speaker 3: Education is not through talk about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so zero one. It's very important to understand because
Speaker 4: like something that people talk about is TAM right, total
Speaker 4: addressable market. So whenever you want to what does that mean?
Speaker 4: So whenever you're raising a starting a company and you're
Speaker 4: coming up with your idea for what you want to solve,
Speaker 4: if you want to build a billion dollar company, you
Speaker 4: want to build something that has an addressable market that's
Speaker 4: big enough. So let me give you an example. Let's
Speaker 4: say that you want to build an app for people
Speaker 4: that like to play polo. That world is small, right,
Speaker 4: The people that want to play polo, but the people
Speaker 4: that ride horses is probably bigger than that. I don't
Speaker 4: know if that's a billion dollar company or the people
Speaker 4: that play sports in general. Outside sports in general is
Speaker 4: much bigger, so that TAM is a lot larger. But
Speaker 4: you know there's riches and niches, right, So you can
Speaker 4: start with the people that play polo if you're a
Speaker 4: polo player, because if you lock that down, then that
Speaker 4: allows you to take over the outside sports right, exactly exactly.
Speaker 4: And I was in Argentina and I found out about
Speaker 4: Ladelfina and all these other things like that and so similar.
Speaker 4: The reason why I bring this up is because the.
Speaker 3: Two Nike or Nike right started as a running company.
Speaker 4: Exactly and then they expend it right, so similar like
Speaker 4: with us.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: So the the two point six trillion dollar post secondary
Speaker 4: education and workforce market is massive, but the boot camp
Speaker 4: market is five hundred million something like that. So in
Speaker 4: the beginning when we were raising, a big pushback is
Speaker 4: like that market is too small. So as a founder,
Speaker 4: you got to be able to communicate our beach head market,
Speaker 4: take over boot camps, and then take over the rest
Speaker 4: of the stuff. Why do we focus on boot camps,
Speaker 4: because boot camps are the the the the fastest growing
Speaker 4: post their education market model that traditional education players are copying.
Speaker 4: And now you know, fast far to today, everybody's copying it.
Speaker 4: Nobody knew the pandemic was going to hit. The pandemic
Speaker 4: just proved us right, and now you know, with the
Speaker 4: main player, we're sixteen times bigger than everybody else because
Speaker 4: of that. Going back to the piece about monopoly, be
Speaker 4: careful about monopoly. In the book it talks about it
Speaker 4: talks about if you want to build a company that
Speaker 4: dominates a market, you want to figure out a software
Speaker 4: solution that can be a layer across across these things.
Speaker 4: So think about, like my father's a physician, so he
Speaker 4: if you're going to build a hospital, you can't build
Speaker 4: a hospital that heals the entire world. One hospital that
Speaker 4: heals the world, because it's so complex, right, there's just
Speaker 4: so many different versions of cancer. You're not gonna do
Speaker 4: that with one hospital. But you can build a platform
Speaker 4: that heals the world by connecting to every type of
Speaker 4: healthcare clinic and healthcare institution that serves people with various
Speaker 4: needs all over the world. Soon And so if I
Speaker 4: want to help a billion people through careercom which is
Speaker 4: our mission. We want to connect the world's talent to
Speaker 4: us next opportunity. Then I can't do it by starting
Speaker 4: the school. As much as I love education, my sister's
Speaker 4: a teacher, I want to build a school, but I can't.
Speaker 4: That's not how I'm gonna I want to see this
Speaker 4: in my life. So I want to help a billion
Speaker 4: people in my lifestyle. The only way I could do
Speaker 4: that is through software and connecting to the schools, connecting
Speaker 4: to companies, and connecting to the people.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: You said employer paid tuition something that's coming in the future,
Speaker 5: but most people are here that like, oh, it's too closely,
Speaker 5: but it actually it could be a benefit. Can you
Speaker 5: talk about why employers should be actually thinking this model
Speaker 5: before this which it segues into it.
Speaker 4: So when I was in Demo dem not only did
Speaker 4: I talk about that, we launched in traction. I talked
Speaker 4: about how three hundred and seventy five million workers are
Speaker 4: going to switch careers between now and twenty thirty that
Speaker 4: are going back to college. They're going to go to
Speaker 4: job training programs to find the next jobs. I talked
Speaker 4: about how income share agreements are changing the landscape. What
Speaker 4: does that mean. It means that historically, when people go
Speaker 4: to school, they either pay for it out of pocket,
Speaker 4: they take out a loan, or they get government funding
Speaker 4: or they get a scholarship. There are two things called
Speaker 4: income share agreements and deferred tuition. So income share agreements
Speaker 4: in defer tuition are a promised where it says, hit Troy,
Speaker 4: I promise I'm going to get you a job. If
Speaker 4: you don't get a job through my training, you don't
Speaker 4: have to pay me anything. But if you do get
Speaker 4: a job that's in the lane that you want to
Speaker 4: be in, then the tuition comes out of your new
Speaker 4: salary up to whatever maximum did I tell you, right?
Speaker 4: And what's cool about that is like literally you can
Speaker 4: try any type of education that you want to. If
Speaker 4: you don't get a job, you don't pay anything. And
Speaker 4: so most of people that come to career CROMA they
Speaker 4: do either an income share agreement or defer tuition option. Okay, Now,
Speaker 4: the employer thing is very interesting because it also fits
Speaker 4: into the great resignation stuff. Employees have the power and
Speaker 4: contractors have the power these days.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 4: What a lot of employers are starting to do. Part
Speaker 4: of the reason why employers pay for your healthcare, which
Speaker 4: is the big reason why people go there is because
Speaker 4: you know, people will work in factories and things like that,
Speaker 4: and if they get injured, they you know, and people
Speaker 4: want to have start families and retire and things like that.
Speaker 4: That's why they would do that to attract you to
Speaker 4: join the company. Since people aren't just going to school
Speaker 4: for four years and being there forever, companies are actually
Speaker 4: starting to get involved to make sure that they're funding
Speaker 4: your ongoing training so you don't have to pay for it.
Speaker 4: And so you see like Amazon paying seven hundred million
Speaker 4: for warehouse workers so that they can get their tuition
Speaker 4: paid for. You see PwC putting three billion towards this.
Speaker 4: You see at and T putting a billion towards this,
Speaker 4: may Sye's Walmart. All these people are starting to get
Speaker 4: involved because everybody's going digital target Look at targets like
Speaker 4: digital numbers going crazy, Domino's digital numbers are going crazy.
Speaker 4: It's not just tech companies.
Speaker 3: And so.
Speaker 4: The World Economic Forum they just made a big plague
Speaker 4: to reskill a billion people by twenty thirty with companies, governments,
Speaker 4: and philanthropies. And I was like, that's my mission too.
Speaker 4: And there's another really cool organization called one ten dot
Speaker 4: org that was started by kenchin Out, former CEO of
Speaker 4: American Express, also a black dude, which we got a
Speaker 4: shout out, and he's also on the board and Guild Education,
Speaker 4: which is the pioneer in education as a benefit Give
Speaker 4: had that shout out to Rachel and they're doing really
Speaker 4: amazing things on the enterprise side.
Speaker 3: So yeah, So as far as all right, so you
Speaker 3: just closed the B round, So when you're raising this money,
Speaker 3: like you're hearing the news like are you raised forty
Speaker 3: million dollars? What does that actually mean? As far as
Speaker 3: like how much of that is going to get allocated
Speaker 3: towards like infrastructureloyees? Like when people raise that kind of
Speaker 3: money like a broad overview or you can speak specifically
Speaker 3: to your situation either or like where does that money go?
Speaker 3: And like you said, each round, I guess it dilutes
Speaker 3: the ownership, right.
Speaker 4: It can, Okay, it depends on how much lover is
Speaker 4: you got.
Speaker 3: Okay, So like you start off for the company, you
Speaker 3: have one hundred percent ownership, right then you have the
Speaker 3: family and friends around, and then you might give up
Speaker 3: a ten percent the family and friends maybe I'm just
Speaker 3: using an example, or you could give the example of
Speaker 3: like what's usually typicalp going and then like precede, you
Speaker 3: give another ten percent, right, so now you got eighty
Speaker 3: you gave up twenty percent.
Speaker 4: Now I would say, I would just say, like every round,
Speaker 4: there's that lution, but it's not always that extreme. I
Speaker 4: think like you could you could definitely expect to still
Speaker 4: have most of your company and buy the B stage
Speaker 4: for most people if you played.
Speaker 3: It right, more than fifty you for for a lot
Speaker 3: of people.
Speaker 4: But some people, a lot of people don't end up
Speaker 4: like that.
Speaker 3: What could they give up too much early? Or yeah?
Speaker 3: So all right, what's the what's a good amount to
Speaker 3: give up?
Speaker 4: Depends? Like it's kind of like raising raising sid Like
Speaker 4: there are definitely different Like it depends on the industry
Speaker 4: that you're in, depends on the market, depends on the investors.
Speaker 3: How much you need money too.
Speaker 4: How much you need money, yeah, how desperate you are.
Speaker 4: The best time to raise money is when you don't
Speaker 4: need money, right, So like for example, so like let
Speaker 4: me let me give you exactly right, So when we
Speaker 4: raised that Series A, so we finished, we finished, I
Speaker 4: tell you raise half a million, dem with day I
Speaker 4: raised one point five right, so pandemic hit markets dry.
Speaker 4: Everybody's telling me, yo, you got to keep eighteen to
Speaker 4: twenty four months of reserves of reserves because because nobody's
Speaker 4: cutting checks, so we had to get scrappy and we
Speaker 4: got profitable, and we were profitable for five months. So
Speaker 4: when I raised money at the end of twenty twenty,
Speaker 4: I still had a million in the bank out of
Speaker 4: the one point five that are raised, and I have
Speaker 4: forty five people working for the company, so you have leverage. Right,
Speaker 4: They're like, oh, it's capital efficient. Well, that said, you'll
Speaker 4: also get the flip side where some investors be like, oh,
Speaker 4: you too capital efficient because you're not investing in your
Speaker 4: growth and he's supposed to not be profitable. So it
Speaker 4: really depends on who you're talking to. But we've always
Speaker 4: been like that same thing with this With this round,
Speaker 4: when we raised the Series B, we only spent three
Speaker 4: million out of the ten million that we raised, and
Speaker 4: we had about one hundred fifty people working for the
Speaker 4: company at the time.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I mean, because even us, we've been approached
Speaker 3: from different people like interested in buying it's like, fortunately,
Speaker 3: fust we didn't need the money. So I was like,
Speaker 3: you know, we're not very interested.
Speaker 4: That's the best way to raise right there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well you don't need it.
Speaker 4: You don't need it. And like even even now, so
Speaker 4: this is this is another thing that's sportance to do though,
Speaker 4: but you keep those people close, right, You're still talk
Speaker 4: to them, checking with them every quarter. So like we
Speaker 4: just raised this round, so of course all the investors
Speaker 4: are gonna start handing you up. Make sure you check
Speaker 4: in with them every quarter even now, talking about what's
Speaker 4: gonna come next, and tell them what you're gonna do.
Speaker 4: And then just make sure that every time you catch
Speaker 4: up with them, don't tell them everything that's going on
Speaker 4: with your business, but make sure you're telling them that
Speaker 4: you make your progress. So you create the fomo, right,
Speaker 4: and I've done this four times now, you know the
Speaker 4: next one is going.
Speaker 3: To be big.
Speaker 5: So so the last one was forty, right exactly. So
Speaker 5: the forty obviously, I mean maybe it was a goal
Speaker 5: that was the number that you wanted to reach. I
Speaker 5: started off at wanting to raise thirty, by the way,
Speaker 5: wanted to raise thirty. So you have stages of development.
Speaker 5: So obviously you started out his career advice service. So
Speaker 5: let's talk about the career. Is the pathways that you
Speaker 5: have in terms of development and are you allocating the
Speaker 5: amount that you need for each stage? Is that how
Speaker 5: it's working?
Speaker 4: A good question, but I was going to ask answer
Speaker 4: his question about how it's allocating fits that's perfect. We
Speaker 4: currently have seven different career paths. See if I remember
Speaker 4: all of them, software engineering, sales, design, data science, data analytics, cybersecurity,
Speaker 4: product management. I think maybe even more marketing as well.
Speaker 4: So we're always launching new things, new things for people.
Speaker 4: You asked about the biggest challenges right now. So the
Speaker 4: majority of the capital is going towards hiring, right going
Speaker 4: back to this is an employees market. Uh, you need
Speaker 4: to be competitive in the market. Tech people get paid
Speaker 4: very well, So I got to make sure more people
Speaker 4: are paid very well and they have their benefits and
Speaker 4: they have their other things as well. And since you're
Speaker 4: attracting really really talented people, shout out to our VP
Speaker 4: of People, Jessica Lamb, you have to make sure that
Speaker 4: like their competency modeling is done so they have internal
Speaker 4: career paths, they know what they need to do or
Speaker 4: to get rewarded, and things like that. So, now that
Speaker 4: we have three million people a month coming to us,
Speaker 4: it's very important for us to invest in data. We
Speaker 4: actually want to grow to fifty million people a moth
Speaker 4: organically in the next two years. So our data needs
Speaker 4: are going to have to not just segment users by
Speaker 4: level of intent, like how bad do you want this? High? Medium,
Speaker 4: low intent? What interest do you have? What struggles are
Speaker 4: you dealing with? Good credit, bad credit? Do you have money,
Speaker 4: you do not have money? Have you tried learning how
Speaker 4: to code?
Speaker 1: Have you not?
Speaker 4: Once you segment everybody, then you need to design specific
Speaker 4: pathways for everybody. The example that I gave him was,
Speaker 4: if you're on Amazon, your homepage is going to be
Speaker 4: different than my homepage because we have different interests, right
Speaker 4: and same thing if we have different interests and careers,
Speaker 4: got to make sure that your flows are unique to
Speaker 4: who you are. And so we got to invest in that.
Speaker 4: And then once we've invested in design and data, then
Speaker 4: we got to start investing into product.
Speaker 3: So yeah, so what's the scalable model like going forward
Speaker 3: to actually get to that billion dollar level for you
Speaker 3: is just continue the path that you want right now.
Speaker 4: Continuing the path that we're on gets us to the
Speaker 4: billion dollar level. But we don't want to be a
Speaker 4: billion dollar company. We want to be a ten or
Speaker 4: one hundred billion dollar company, right.
Speaker 3: So eventually going public, Yes, So what's the what's the
Speaker 3: what's the all? Right, what's the pathway for you to
Speaker 3: go public?
Speaker 4: You got to get to a hundred million a year,
Speaker 4: one hundred million a year, hundred million a year.
Speaker 3: You can't go public without making a hundred million a year.
Speaker 3: You can, but that you just want to go make
Speaker 3: a hundred million because you could You could even go
Speaker 3: to spack route, right, Yeah, you can go spack route.
Speaker 4: You could go spack Roup. I'm not rushing it, right Like,
Speaker 4: I'm like, I'm blessed to We're blessed to have investors
Speaker 4: which we'll talk about in a second, that have very
Speaker 4: deep pockets that are that can invest in us all
Speaker 4: the way to IPO. So that's that's a really cool
Speaker 4: position to be in. And and we want to make
Speaker 4: sure that we have a strong foundation. Right, there's a
Speaker 4: lot of stuff that's like not real out here, A
Speaker 4: lot of people that's just all headlines. I don't want
Speaker 4: to be all headlines. I actually want to be helping people.
Speaker 4: I actually want people getting jobs like your boy that
Speaker 4: made this whole podcast happen. We're creating a movement, right,
Speaker 4: there are real people on the ground that are doing
Speaker 4: their thing, that are now leaders out here, like one
Speaker 4: of our other investors, the Winklevoss Twins stuff, the first
Speaker 4: they're out here. I heard of them, Yeah you might
Speaker 4: hear yeah, the first. The first person that we placed
Speaker 4: in career Coms a guy named Jeric Warren at Gemini.
Speaker 4: He got a job making one hundred forty five thousand
Speaker 4: black man, single dad. He's the one who connected to me,
Speaker 4: to them and like I didn't even ask him, he
Speaker 4: volunteered it. Keisha Lake who we got at stitch Fixed
Speaker 4: now she stitch Fixed CEO Katrina Lake is a billionaire.
Speaker 4: She also became an investor in a company. So it's
Speaker 4: just like through people like actually looking out for people.
Speaker 3: You do so.
Speaker 4: But to answer your question about how you go beyond
Speaker 4: a billion to ten hundred billion, you have to understand
Speaker 4: the market, the total adjustable market. What we're doing, we'll
Speaker 4: get us to a billion dollar company, but in order
Speaker 4: to really start getting into the bigger scale, right, if
Speaker 4: I want to be ten billion dollar company, I have
Speaker 4: to make like a billion a year, right, and then
Speaker 4: ten billion a year to be one hundred billion dollar company.
Speaker 4: So how do you do that the enterprise? So a
Speaker 4: lot of investors really like investing into SaaS companies, so
Speaker 4: software as the service companies and recurring revenue contracts. So
Speaker 4: if you go to careercom dot com, slash company, slash jobs,
Speaker 4: you'll see all of our open roles. I'm actively hiring
Speaker 4: a head of finance and a head of business development
Speaker 4: that will both report to me, and that head of
Speaker 4: business development is going to be the individual rule that
Speaker 4: I work with with my co founders and the team
Speaker 4: to take over the entire fortune one thousand and help
Speaker 4: them attract, or chain and upscale their workforces by offering
Speaker 4: career Comma as a benefit to them. A good way
Speaker 4: to think about it is, think about all these gig
Speaker 4: economy companies with millions of workers that drive but don't
Speaker 4: want to be in those jobs forever. We can offer
Speaker 4: career Comma as a benefit. The company pays for it,
Speaker 4: and then they get jobs at the end. Huge all
Speaker 4: users for career Comma. It's free for the company. Actually,
Speaker 4: the school still pay us boom right. A lot of
Speaker 4: really interesting things like that.
Speaker 5: So the marketing right because I'm thinking like social media
Speaker 5: obviously is a big marketing place, and is the marketing
Speaker 5: kind of word of mouth? And then the product that
Speaker 5: you're actually giving is the marketing plan because I'm thinking
Speaker 5: like even for like if we did an SEO when
Speaker 5: I'm put in career comma, if I put the wrong letter,
Speaker 5: it might give me credit Comma. So like, how does
Speaker 5: the marketing go? How you go about it?
Speaker 4: So my co founder Archer, he's a chief Technology officer,
Speaker 4: but also he's in charge of the SEO. For people
Speaker 4: that don't know what SEO is is very important to understand.
Speaker 4: I'm glad that you're bringing it up. It's search engine optimization.
Speaker 4: When we talked about paid marketing to Google and Facebook
Speaker 4: or Instagram or whatever, which we do, that's called sem
Speaker 4: search engine marketing. But SEO is organic traffic, so we
Speaker 4: get millions of dollars for free traffic. And you gave
Speaker 4: the credit card example, if I was in the fintech space,
Speaker 4: you know the fat had keywords. He probably heard of
Speaker 4: the long tail or like just type credit card and Google,
Speaker 4: and that's what's going to pop up. You want to
Speaker 4: find like the real hard to search terms and like
Speaker 4: really be the thing that pops up for all those
Speaker 4: like random things like an answer to a Python or
Speaker 4: a Java script question, and your article pops up. And
Speaker 4: as you start establishing a domain authority, then you eventually
Speaker 4: can take over the the more popular keywords. Our team
Speaker 4: produces about two hundred to seven hundred articles a month
Speaker 4: on SEO. We do podcasts like this, which helps we
Speaker 4: do video. We do all kinds of things like that.
Speaker 4: We put out research reports that are backlinked to dot ors,
Speaker 4: dot govs, which establishes our domain authority, which is why
Speaker 4: we're going to continue to win. But then also we
Speaker 4: leverage programmatic landing pages. So if you put this school
Speaker 4: versus that school, our pages will pop up. Eventually it
Speaker 4: be this company that company. If you type in Google today,
Speaker 4: do it today, how to get a job at Golden
Speaker 4: Sas you'll see, career Komba pops up there. So what
Speaker 4: do you think we're gonna do. We're gonna make listicals
Speaker 4: like top companies that pay for your tuition, career Corama.
Speaker 4: We're gonna dominate that whole thing and every other type
Speaker 4: of ancillary term so that as people are searching it,
Speaker 4: that it gets discovered. The problem with SEO, I would say,
Speaker 4: it's necessarily an entire problem, is that you're only gonna
Speaker 4: attract people that know what to look for. So you
Speaker 4: need paid as well to reach people because, like we're trying,
Speaker 4: you can't spread the gospel to people that know the
Speaker 4: gospel already, right, so you got to like actually be
Speaker 4: out there.
Speaker 5: The person that's typing career is actually thinking about their career.
Speaker 3: Yah.
Speaker 4: And that's why you're doing this, right, Like you're doing
Speaker 4: this to educate people about what's going on. Because the
Speaker 4: people that you're trying to reach, that you really want
Speaker 4: listening to this don't know what to search.
Speaker 3: So what's the like if who's the ideal candidate for
Speaker 3: career karma? Yeah, who should go to careercarma dot com?
Speaker 4: But a great question. So when I try to investors,
Speaker 4: I say it's blue collar workers between the age of
Speaker 4: twenty five and thirty five years old who want to
Speaker 4: get a job in tech. But the really answer is,
Speaker 4: like anybody that wants to make a career transition usually
Speaker 4: twenty one in up. Because I don't want to be
Speaker 4: encouraging people to drop out of high school if they're
Speaker 4: already in high school. Even though this can get you
Speaker 4: a job, and we do have sixteen, seventeen, eighteen year
Speaker 4: olds that have gone through the process and gotten a job.
Speaker 4: Usually it's going to be an adult that's in the
Speaker 4: job that they don't want. They come to us and
Speaker 4: then we match them into something mostly a part time program,
Speaker 4: and they get a job like that. Lenise Powell is
Speaker 4: a very good example here in New York. She's in Brooklyn.
Speaker 4: She was a teacher, she's a mom. She she did
Speaker 4: she did go to college, but she didn't want to
Speaker 4: go back to college and she wanted to go to
Speaker 4: boot camp part time. She joined and then got a
Speaker 4: job making one hundred thousand that a company called news
Speaker 4: Allom and she's doing very well.
Speaker 3: So you see there's a course or the course is
Speaker 3: for the employer.
Speaker 4: It's a good question. So career KMMA is always free,
Speaker 4: so we will never charge anybody anything. If you want
Speaker 4: to go to school, there are free courses that are
Speaker 4: in career KOMMA. Think about the free courses kind of
Speaker 4: like going to the gym without a personal trainer and
Speaker 4: without a nutritionist and stuff like that. There's plenty of
Speaker 4: open things like that, but most people still need guidance
Speaker 4: and things like that. So most people will sign up
Speaker 4: to a book camp, and a boot camp is going
Speaker 4: to have that option that I told you where you
Speaker 4: don't have to pay anything unless you get a job.
Speaker 4: So a lot of people will do it, will sign
Speaker 4: up if they don't get a job, they don't pay anything.
Speaker 4: If you finish and you get a job that's in
Speaker 4: the range that you're going for, it's usually going to
Speaker 4: be in the seventy to one hundred and fifty thousand
Speaker 4: plus range, and then the tuition will range between ten
Speaker 4: and thirty thousand. So my brother is a good example.
Speaker 4: When he got his jobs one hundred fifty thousand, he
Speaker 4: paid out twenty six And that's how it works.
Speaker 3: Oh, the salary of this comes out of like your paycheck.
Speaker 4: It comes out of your salary.
Speaker 3: Yeah, until it's paid off.
Speaker 5: Until it's paid off. Yeah, pretty official. Okay, So who
Speaker 5: are some of the investors? Obviously you had a series
Speaker 5: of rounds and now we did the forty million. Who
Speaker 5: were some of the people that have invested into the company,
Speaker 5: And more importantly, why we didn't get a call? Who
Speaker 5: are the investors going forward?
Speaker 4: You guys will always get a call we was left
Speaker 4: We was left out.
Speaker 3: Its left out that after the next round, the next.
Speaker 4: Round, Google Ventures, initi last Capital Soft Bank, Bronze Kport.
Speaker 4: So we have over fifty investors. We actually put together
Speaker 4: we actually did something special this round where we were
Speaker 4: like put together video. Most of our investors are women
Speaker 4: and people of color, and it's one thing to like
Speaker 4: write that down, but it's another thing for you all
Speaker 4: to see it. So in December, I asked everybody to
Speaker 4: send short video clips about why they invested in Career
Speaker 4: Karma for reasons deeper than money. And you guys know Nana,
Speaker 4: so shout out. So Nana Little Yeah, but I think
Speaker 4: she told me about you too. Yeah, Nana did like
Speaker 4: all of our videos. So she took all the videos,
Speaker 4: chopped it up and put it together like a Super
Speaker 4: Bowl lab pretty much in this fire and like it
Speaker 4: took off. Baron Davis investors, So that that's right. So
Speaker 4: Baron Davis is an invest.
Speaker 5: Another person that didn't mention it. Okay, you did it up.
Speaker 4: Baron Davis is an invest to so Larry. There's a
Speaker 4: bunch of different athletes and angels, but it was very
Speaker 4: important for us to have people that look like us
Speaker 4: that are investing in the in the platform. John Henry,
Speaker 4: who you guys know.
Speaker 3: John Henry invested and confused. I'm confused. We wasn't involved
Speaker 3: in this.
Speaker 4: It's gonna happen, John, It would have been, it would.
Speaker 3: Have been a good look. He kept us out. Next time, Yeah,
Speaker 3: are you gonna raise any more money? Or yeah, how
Speaker 3: much more you think it'll be big?
Speaker 5: We don't miss the next.
Speaker 4: But we have time, like we have time like like
Speaker 4: with this money, like we have over three years a runway.
Speaker 3: So this money will last you three years at least.
Speaker 4: But I mean the last money also did too.
Speaker 3: You just never know, like what happens, you know, are
Speaker 3: you are you profitable?
Speaker 4: Not right now?
Speaker 3: So talk about that because that's something that people don't
Speaker 3: fully understand either, like a lot of these companies aren't
Speaker 3: profitable or even just became profitable, like even companies that's
Speaker 3: looking on the stock market, major companies that just might
Speaker 3: be probable. Yeah, and people don't fully understand it, like
Speaker 3: how could a company like over you know, at least
Speaker 3: a couple of years ago not be profitable when it's
Speaker 3: one of the biggest companies in the world. And these
Speaker 3: guys are billionaires and like, but talk about that, like
Speaker 3: how you don't necessarily have to be profitable. Yeah, talk
Speaker 3: about because, like I said, people don't understand that it's.
Speaker 4: Important for you to understand your path to profitability. Right,
Speaker 4: similar to like how we knew what we had to
Speaker 4: do in order to get profitable and we did it.
Speaker 4: And now that we have capital, revenue, and customers and
Speaker 4: workers coming to us, we can invest into our growth. So,
Speaker 4: going back to what I said at the beginning, the
Speaker 4: main difference between starts and everything else is growth. And
Speaker 4: these tech companies that you're seeing that are public or
Speaker 4: private are attacking legacy industries that have been around for
Speaker 4: hundreds of years, fifty years, blah blah blah. So the
Speaker 4: way to dominate is by moving faster than they can
Speaker 4: ever move, and that usually requires capital. And like some
Speaker 4: people will go from two hundred to one thousand people
Speaker 4: in a year, it's a lot in addition to executing
Speaker 4: and shipping products and doing all kinds of stuff. And
Speaker 4: so it really just depends on who's backing you so
Speaker 4: and whether you're actually solving the problem that you said
Speaker 4: that you are going to solve, and if you if
Speaker 4: you're demonstrating those things, and you're telling the right story
Speaker 4: and you're actually executing behind the story, you'll be able
Speaker 4: to raise it. You'll be able to raise the money
Speaker 4: that you need, or be able to stay relevant. What
Speaker 4: I'll say is it's very important to choose your investors wisely,
Speaker 4: because some people will cause you to grow too fast
Speaker 4: to where you run yourself into the ground. So we've
Speaker 4: been blessed to where you know, I don't have no
Speaker 4: problem none of our board members, none of our investors, period.
Speaker 4: They all got our back, and they definitely pushed us,
Speaker 4: and they ask us questions and they hold us accountable,
Speaker 4: but they don't force us to like run ourselves into
Speaker 4: the ground. And so I say that just because like
Speaker 4: there are strings to capital that are good.
Speaker 5: In Bed, you spoke about board members, and so most
Speaker 5: people we probably I don't think we've ever had that
Speaker 5: conversation the process of actually choosing them and actually the
Speaker 5: power that they have. Like people probably watch Succession or
Speaker 5: Billions and they're like, oh, that's the board they're gonna
Speaker 5: they're gonna vote them out. What's that process like and
Speaker 5: choosing them, because you're actually choosing the people. Correct, Yes, Second,
Speaker 5: and ultimately through the board can fire you. The board
Speaker 5: can fire you.
Speaker 4: Whenever you're raising money, you want to be mindful of economics,
Speaker 4: which we talked about a little bit on valuation and dilution,
Speaker 4: but also control. And the control is like board. If
Speaker 4: you lose control of board, you lose everything. We didn't
Speaker 4: have a board until our Series A, which I don't
Speaker 4: think anybody really needs a board, and so there because
Speaker 4: now you're actually really making money and you need that
Speaker 4: type of guidance. Think about let's talk about the good
Speaker 4: parts of a board. The good parts of a board
Speaker 4: is like you want to have people on your board
Speaker 4: that you would never be able to hire that can
Speaker 4: help you. So for example, Gary Tan he runs in
Speaker 4: Initial Last Capital that's an over two hundred million dollar portfolio.
Speaker 4: It includes Instacar and Rippling. He was first checking coinbase,
Speaker 4: for example, one hundred billion dollar outcome, and he really
Speaker 4: has seen this many many times before and he's able
Speaker 4: to guide us on what we got to do. One
Speaker 4: of his LPs Topped Your Capital Partners, which is people
Speaker 4: that give him money to start fun They invested in
Speaker 4: our Series B around so they've seen not only what
Speaker 4: he's seen, but also from investing in other companies they're
Speaker 4: able to give you that OG knowledge. I think wild
Speaker 4: love from million dollars worth of game, he said, or
Speaker 4: Gilly one of them said, and OG is someone that
Speaker 4: offers you game, right, So you want people that are
Speaker 4: offering you game and giving you guidance and keeping you focused,
Speaker 4: because what happens when you start winning is you get
Speaker 4: all kinds of opportunities that are presented to you, and
Speaker 4: you can do all kinds of things. And it's up
Speaker 4: to you to decide whether you want to stay focused
Speaker 4: on your path or get distracted. And ultimately, most of
Speaker 4: the time, the right decision is to stay focused on
Speaker 4: what you're currently doing because of compounds.
Speaker 3: There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you guys
Speaker 3: quoting it a classic man exactly, very informative episode. What
Speaker 3: would you like to tell the people like, you know,
Speaker 3: social media, what you have going on that they can
Speaker 3: look forward to. How they can you know, enroll into
Speaker 3: the credit car program? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Yeah, So if you guys want to sign up to
Speaker 4: Career Comers, go to Career Comer.
Speaker 3: It's all good.
Speaker 4: If you guys want to go to Career Comma, if
Speaker 4: you guys want to get a job in tech. Go
Speaker 4: to careercoma dot com slash apply download the app. If
Speaker 4: you want to speak with someone because you're a little nervous,
Speaker 4: just go to career coming dot com slash events. We
Speaker 4: have a big event going on today. If you want
Speaker 4: to send me an email, it's just Ruben rub In
Speaker 4: at careercom dot com. I'm on Twitter and Instagram, Rubin Harris.
Speaker 4: Are you b n H A R R R s.
Speaker 4: Pay attention to what these guys are doing, especially e
Speaker 4: y L University. I'm actually very excited about what you
Speaker 4: guys are doing there. The reason why is because you know,
Speaker 4: it's not just boot camps that are teaching. It's not
Speaker 4: just corporations that are teaching. It's not just colleges and
Speaker 4: posting that's that's teaching. It's individuals that are teaching. You
Speaker 4: guys are using a platform for it. There's a guy
Speaker 4: like Lenny Ratchinskis that's growing. There's a really good article
Speaker 4: that came out in the Wall Street Journal about teachers
Speaker 4: in career that are making or four million of years
Speaker 4: just by teaching. I think the biggest educator will be
Speaker 4: the individual, and this whole podcast is an education platform.
Speaker 4: So make sure you hit subscribe tapping. We also have
Speaker 4: a podcast called Breaking the Startups that has a lot
Speaker 4: of stories that you alhould check out. And that's it,
Speaker 4: and we'll be part of you guys. We'll do some
Speaker 4: collaborative in personal events. We're talking about it right now,
Speaker 4: so stay tuned for that.
Speaker 5: Stay tuned, stay tuned. Yes, Troy House, Yeah, well, shout
Speaker 5: out to the Alan and Jamaica. Shoutut to Alan Cuba,
Speaker 5: Yes as well. I know you, Yes, sir, I always
Speaker 5: got a show. Love to the fan. Yes, and shout
Speaker 5: to everybody that's part of the ey L University. Shout
Speaker 5: to all our Patreon members. We got over twelve thousand
Speaker 5: people in eyl University. That's big, that's big, that's a movement,
Speaker 5: something we're really proud of. So shout out to all
Speaker 5: our earners and shout to everybody that's supporting the merch.
Speaker 5: We got new something on the way.
Speaker 4: So about the cops on right now.
Speaker 5: I don't worry about it. Man, Your alumni now send
Speaker 5: your care packs. So we appreciate you all.
Speaker 4: Love us, love, love us, love all.
Speaker 3: Right, thank you for rocking us. To see you next week.
Speaker 4: Peace, peace out.
Speaker 3: My graduates.
Speaker 2: From my school being force back drop bag drop Mike
Speaker 2: drotagdrop droft.
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