Thank you everyone for tuning into another episode of the Embit podcast, and I'm your host, Seamus Madan. I started this podcast at fifteen years old in December 2020 to bring personal finance education to the next generation. Now I am sixteen years old and the podcast has evolved to interviewing entrepreneurs BCs, GPs, and founders of public companies, all of which are designed to delve into insights that have not been shared elsewhere for the next generation of those interested in business.
Recently, I ventured into the VC space as a venture fellow at blitzscaling ventures which is backed by the co founder of LinkedIn. And I am interviewing those farther along in their journey to learn more on everything that I and the audience is curious about. If any of the above sounds interesting to you, make sure to subscribe to the podcast and share it with a friend. And now back to the show.
So today, Ariel Shamus joins the podcast, and he is the founder and CEO of Microverse, an online school that helps anyone become a high paid software developer. The best part is it costs $0 until you're employed. Microverse has raised over $17,000,000 and was part of the Y Combinator 2019 batch.
Now thousands of people from over a hundred companies apply to join Microverse every month and hundreds of remotely employed alumni from Colombia to Nigeria are making 3 to 10 x their previous salary working for companies like Microsoft, VMware, Huawei, and Globant. Before Mike Revers, Ariel was the co founder and CEO of Torastai, a mobile app, planning trips, and discovering new things to do while traveling.
He grew the app to over a million users in a 180 plus different countries before selling it to lonely planet in 2013. After the sale, Ariel worked as a senior product manager of lonely planet's website with over a 150,000,000 unique visitors per year. So first off, thank you, Ariel, for taking the time to join the podcast. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me here. I appreciate you taking the time.
So let's start off with how you first developed and act for founding and building companies and then your experience as a software engineer. Yeah. So I think I've been wanting and actually starting businesses since I was probably four years old. My mom always reminds me of that time that I decided to start a little like candy shop at the door of my best friend's house And she used to take me to the wholesale store at the age of four.
I went by myself, chose the the cheapest candy, the unit cost, and then I brought that to my friend's house. I'm sending, like, selling that to the people in the neighborhood. Of course, like, the old ladies were, like, buying from us because we were cute, not because we had the best candy. But I think that was showing what was about to come.
And I've been, like, doing anything you can imagine from working at a pizza store when I was 6, having my, like, online courses, not online, like, digital skilled courses when I was 10, I said, like, teaching, even teachers of my school, my elementary school, how to use a word and how to use sell. So I've been doing little pieces my entire life. And I think when I was young, I thought that it was about making money. I think money was the success indicator.
And then with time, I realized that it had nothing to do with money that it had to do with bringing people together to do really cool things that you couldn't do alone. Right? I think it is a joy that I get from seeing things happening at scale, and I think that scale part is what also got me so interested in engineering. I think I'm naturally very interested in technology on anything that can help us, like, automate things in efficiency and productivity.
But as I've been getting older, then I realized that none of that really matters. At the end of the day, those things are not the ones that make us feel the happiest that it's about enjoying the present moment and doing things because we're enjoying them today. But there is a side of my brain that is always very attractive to this systematic way of doing things, building and crackings, like, complex problems and systems.
And I think the combination of engineering to be able to, like, track really comfort problems at scale with the best side of things that allows you to then attract capital so they can attract people so they can solve, like, larger problems, then get complimented with my own live story as an immigrant from Latin America who initially came to Europe with his parents, then I eventually moved to the US I spent some time teaching in Africa. I spent 1 year living in Asia.
And if all this probably, I got to see how different reality looks for different people in different parts of the world.
And as someone who comes from a more in the privileged background, we then had so many amazing opportunities in his life, and I feel so grateful for that and how lucky you got in my life, I started realizing that I could apply all these scalable way of thinking from engineering when this really powerful side of the business allows you to then invest a really complex and ambitious project to then have a positive, impact in the lives of people that
haven't had as many opportunities that I as I've had in my life so that you can apply these really solve problems in the world that will make the world a better place. And I think that defines in a very, like, high level how I think about the world in my life today. Gotcha. And you made a really good point on how software engineers are very good at problem solving. And that's something I've noticed, especially with software engineers, I've seen a lot of them turn into founders.
And for example, some of the heads of the most successful companies in the world are engineers. So how does being a software engineer help and being founder? I think when we talk about starting companies, at least in this context, we're talking about, like, tech startups, right, and I think for tech startups, which is definitely not the only way of doing business, the unfair advantage, right, the thing that allows you to attract venture capital it is the capacity to scale.
And that's where software engineering, like, shines because you invest a little bit more time upfront to then enable a lot of growth and scalability in the long term. Right? So you could start by doing things manually then you have to continue doing things manually. And eventually, that doesn't scale, but even this in the software side of things, then at some point, you are much more efficient than anything that can be done in a manual way.
And I think that we are living in very interesting time from every single industry, every single business, has to adapt, or adopt certain software engineering side to be able to compete, to be able to be competitive with with the other companies in the it. So, like, engineers have the advantage of not adjusting to the market to be competitive.
They are the ones who can only think about doing things in a way that definition is scalable, and that gives you a very early advantage compared to people who don't have that background. Got it. And when you were let's go all the way back to when you were building tourist eye. What was tourist eye? And why did you decide to build it? I think every entrepreneurial story is different for sure.
Some people are looking to make money with my current company and trying to have a very positive impact at scale in the world. That company had a very different and, I guess, we're motivation behind. I wanted to work with a very specific co founder. He had been my classmates in college.
He was, like, like, you, someone very different following a very untraditional path that, like, doing things in a way that you could tell, they were thinking differently, and that's always been very attractive to me. And I decided, okay. This is a person that I would love to build something with.
And at the in our last year of college, he had been to Chicago for a year doing his master's degree and It was like 2009, the 1st few years of of Apple or like the not Apple, the iPhone devices and Android, and he came back with an Android device, and an app that we had built a very early prototype to help people travel around the world. And it wasn't the idea that I was the most passionate about even though I loved traveling, but it was his idea. He wanted to work in Madan.
I wanted to work with him, and I said, let's just do it. And what we did for around 4 years was building the first one of the first for short apps in the world that offered offline maps. And nowadays, offline apps are a very common feature of Google Maps and those types of apps. But back then, that was not a possibility. Which means that if you had to travel to other parts of the world, you didn't have maps because you didn't have data on your phone.
So we were building this app for people that wanted to travel internationally, an app that helped them plan their trips, but most importantly, an app that helped them have all the information they needed including maps, completely offline so that they could experience those places having all the information at hand. And we build an amazing product.
So we became a really strong team when it came to, like, mobile app development in the very, very early days of Apple store optimization, we really gonna adapt. We grew to more than a million users over the span of few years with very little capital, no spending or marketing whatsoever.
But we never managed to make it a true sustainable business because we were too far away from the monetization points, right, There's a lot of money in travel, but the money is on the flights, on the hotels, on the activities, and we were selling a small tool right, that was just a very tiny fraction of the traveling spending. And it was really hard to pretend that companies were gonna book hotels through you instead of going directly to Booking the thumb. Right? So it was hard to monetize it.
And after a few years, we realized, okay, let's make sure that we can leverage the team that we built, all the technology that we built, the community, but not necessarily in a way that allows us to be independent, let Suvie's by partnering up with another company that has a much stronger business side so that we can continue doing what we love while at the same time doing it in a sustainable way and we found our home after that in lonely planet.
And you mentioned how you started growing touristy with very little capital. Now we see a lot of we have a lot of listeners in the audience who are currently bootstrapping their business. What are some of the ways that a founder can grow their business? Successfully with a lot of users like you did over at Toristai, without spending a bunch on marketing or having a lot of capital.
Yeah. I think that starting like, the very early days starting to build a business or to grow business by paying for your growth. It's a bad idea. You're probably gonna be like, tricking yourself into believing that you have built something that people really want because we are downloading but it's just that you're pushing it in their face. And, yeah, people, it doesn't cost much.
Like, they're gonna download it or register, but that doesn't mean that's what that you're truly solving their problem. And I think that finding organic ways of finding initial users is the best way to truly make sure that what you're building is something that truly solves a problem. It's something that people want, like a millionaire would say, And in our case, it was the, like, the Apple Store and the Google App Store. They were, like, our main, like, growth drivers.
But we also remember, there was a time where, the Google Chrome, like, store of the extension store was something that a lot of people were using. So we had an opportunity to partner with Google to place our web app there, and we that drove a lot of users. We we didn't do any product, hunt launch back then because product hunt didn't exist, but I've had a chance to launch a few other things after that.
And I've done I built a very early experience for what I did today at micros called chat code roulette. It was like chat roulette from developers where you could come up together with, like, random people on the internet to build little coding things together. And I got, like, around 20,000 users over 3 days by coordinating the launch. So you have, like, hacker news. They have a product hands.
There are a lot of communities with a lot of early adopters who are excited to try new things, to give you feedback. And I think that leveraging those resources is super important, but you have to you know, it's not a one silver bullet, but at the same time, you're gonna waste a bullet if you launch too early or without planning for that.
It's important to choose the right time to make sure that you really polish your presentation, your pitch, and you're trying to get as many people that you know to vote for your launch very early so that you make it to the top. There there is some science to this, and I think the point is There are very cheap ways of launching things today for the early days, but even that is competitive. So you have to do it well.
Not gonna cost you money, but it's gonna cost you, like, hard work and no matter what you do, you have to put that in. Got it.
And transitioning here into microverse What are some of the lessons that you learn building out tourist, especially with the monetization piece that you are applying to when you're building out micro Well, my my wife would laugh here because after that company, I told her, like, remind me that my next company we are going to charge people from day 1, which is something we didn't do with tourist tie, and we're gonna charge upfront.
And then I went to launch a school that charges $15,000, but only one student's have a high paying job. So we're not getting paid up front and I recently told my wife, remind me when I launched the next company, but not only I have to charge what they want, but I need to charge upfront. Don't let me start another episode. I don't do that.
There are good reasons we do that, but I think that's another mistake that most, like, earlier first time founders make is being afraid of charging for your product because you don't think that it's good enough. Right? And, again, It's very easy to treat yourself with vanity metrics. You have a lot of downloads and one of users. You're not looking at, whether those are actually active users. You're not talking to them. You're not getting a sense of whether you are a vitamin or a pain killer.
You want to be a pain killer. You want to become something that they're desperate to use something that they cannot imagine living without it. And I think that getting people to pay for something is what truly allows you to measure whether that is something that's truly solving a big problem or not. And I think it is important that you get to do that as much as possible. It might feel a little like a hypercritical to be saying this when I don't charge fronts, we do charge $15,000.
The product is really expensive. It's just that students in order to make this affordable to people in emerging and developing countries We only charge once they get a high paying job after the training. But once they get the job, we make it very clear that it's time to pay, and we have a really, really strong record of people paying us back because we take that very seriously.
But not be afraid of saying this cost is much and whatever way you charge, I think it's very important that you do it from day 1. The second thing I would say is, sometimes, I think, especially software engineers, We fall in love to easily with the technology that we're building, with the feature that we're building. We we believe that products.
It's about giving more functionality, and we forget that often the best design is the one that has the that that offers the most simplicity, right, the one that focuses on one problem at a time and that solves it ten times better than anybody else, And I think that's another important thing is with Churista, we started trying to compete by launching a lot of new features and eventually become this you are trying to yourself believing that you are gonna
be winning the market by trying to solve a lot of your problems, but most people only have one big painful problem that they need help with, identify that, even if it's a niche, doing really well, get people to pay for that build something sustainable with that problem, and then you can expand to other problems. But I think not failing to do that and failing to validate that by charging people as a big of a mistake.
And you mentioned how you charge people who are entering into a microverse $15,000 over an extended period of time after they get a job using microverse. Would you mind walking through your business Madan, which is taking advantage of ISAs or income sharing agreements? Yeah. So let me tell you the 2 things that are very different about micros, and then I'll, and I'll tell you why, and then we'll talk about the business Madan. So let me actually start with the why.
After all, this is traveling from South America, Europe, the US, Africa, Asia. I got to see the big disconnect between the opportunities that exist in the world and the talent. We have places in the world like the US where there is a huge concentration of opportunities a lot of them don't have enough talent for them to be filled. This is the the thing that goes around very often. It's that the in the US, we have, like, more than 1,000,000 and field jobs in IT right now.
I didn't know that's a while considering that we have 95% of the world's population who don't have access to higher education, a lot of people who have definitely the potential, the talent to use to be in those jobs, to help those companies, to contribute to the global economy of what we disconnected. And, yes, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, that made sense. There were there was no infrastructure. People not as many people spoke English. You didn't have the internet connections.
You didn't have the tools. You didn't have the playbook. For companies and people to know how to come together, even if they were not physically in the same place. That has changed. And the pandemic changed that and accelerated that change completely very fast. Where now we have more companies than ever before hiring remotely.
We have a much higher level of awareness of what it takes to work effectively with people from other countries, other time zones, other cultures, and we have really good tools to facilitate that. So what we do is we focus on providing a world class education and technical education to people who live in markets and countries that have traditionally been underserved and disconnected from the global economy so that they can join companies in the US, companies in Europe working remotely.
So the first thing that we do very differently is that 50% of the training is the technical training, learn how to code, But the other 50%, it's on learning how to work remotely and in a multicultural, multi time zone setting. So when these people join the market, yes, they might be entry level software engineers, but they are already very seasoned, even more, very often, they're more seasoned at remote work.
Than people who already work in those companies who are more senior supplemental engineers, for example. Now the second thing that we do differently, which helps the and the user experience and the outcomes is that we do everything without teachers, without classrooms, the entire experience mimics a real remote job. But this remote job, you're doing it with students from a 140 different countries around the world.
So you are learning how to code at the same time that you're learning how to work with people from other backgrounds, cultures, religions, accents, and whatnot. And that's what gives you an edge when you apply to international remote jobs. And that's where the 3rd differentiation comes in, but it's definitely not the most important one.
It's the share agreements because these people can't afford this expensive education that in Europe, for example, you have free public education that is high quality. In the US, you have it's very expensive to have high quality education, but there is loans. And, yes, it's a pretty missed model in many ways But at least people who want to go through that who are willing to pay that, that other, over many years, they can access these loans. That is not the case in Latin America.
That is not the case in Africa and the Middle East. So we are providing this training, which is not cheap, but we do need this at no upfront cost. Once a student's complete the program and get a job where they make at least a $1000 a month, they start paying us back 15%. So 15% of their salary until they pay a total of $15,000. And on one hand, $1000 a month might not seem like too much in the US, yeah, in the US not that much.
But in India, in Nigeria, in Argentina, this is 2, 3, 4 times the local salary of a software engineer. So the only way we get to charge our students is if they end up in a remote international job after my course.
And we put a $1000 a month threshold because it's when you start going into these types of jobs, but the reality is that the average salary of our one of our grad after going micros with their first job, it's up around $2000 a month, or the salary increase comparing before and after micros, it's around 300%. And that is with more than 50% making 5 to 10 times their previous health. Right? So it is a very life changing experience.
But once you get to that life transformation, you have to pay that and you pay that a huge amount, $15,000. Why? Because education is not a cost. It's an investment. And there's a lot of research that shows that more underprivileged families typically see education as a cost So they tend to minimize the costs where, whereas, like, people who come from our privileged families, they tend to see it as an investment.
So they think about I'm gonna give an exchange from whatever dollar I put it into this. So we try to phrase this or to present this and to align this around an in as an investment. You're gonna be putting in $15,000, but only if you're really having guarantee, then you're gonna be making at least three, four times what you will make locally.
So when you do the math of how much additional income you're gonna earn over your life, as a professional compared to the local education, you end up paying back the income share limit in around 3 years. And after that, it's just free additional earning in your life and it's a huge ROI in that investment. Right? So that is how the model works at a high level. Those are some really wild stats. And I agree. I think in vestment in education is always super important.
And you mentioned how in a tech crunch article, how 95% of the people in your program get into jobs that they wanna get into. So how selective is microverse? And what are some of the things that applicants can do to increase their chances of getting admitted into the service. So we receive around 30,000 applicants per month. Out of which we're selecting around 0.5%. Right? And you might think, woah, they are super selective.
And, yes, we look for people who are above average in terms of their communication skills, collaboration skills, logical thinking capacity, but we're not looking for Jesus. Right? We're looking for people who are who have a really high drive and motivation, passion for what they're learning. But on top of that, unfortunately, we have learned that we can't help everybody. Right? We wanna help everybody.
Our vision is that we're gonna be working in this model until the place where every single human being is born doesn't determine their opportunities in life. But we won't get to that tomorrow. Right? So who are the people that we can help today? We're looking for people who have a decent English level because the problem today is in English.
People who can join the program full time because it's a full time program, people who already have a little bit of coding experience, not professional coding experience, but they have been learning on their own, and they realize that they need more support to be able to really accelerate their careers and people who have the financial support to join our program for a year. And if you put all that together in emerging and developing countries, that is probably 0.1% of the population.
Now because we accept people from every country in the world, that is still a massive market. Right? But as we grow, we have to start, like, lifting some of those barriers 1 by 1. And this is, like, product led growth, one marking led growth. Right? You have to start thinking, okay, how do I help people who don't have previous phone experience?
How do I provide cash advance so that people get paid to be in this education program so that they can afford being dedicated full time, and they will pay back once they get a job. How do I offer this as a part time program even though it's gonna take me twice as long to validate the outcomes? How do I offer an English training while they are learning to go. And we have to one step at a time, but those are the main reasons that we have to be very selective. Why?
Not only because that guarantees that people will get to certain outcomes, but also because in a peer to peer learning environment, that's our secret sauce. The quality of the experience is determined by the quality of the peers. And the quality is not defined as the attitude of the peers. No. Unfortunately, it is defined as can they commit and actually deliver 8 to 10 hours of daily work in a highly collaborative and synchronous environment?
And if you don't show up, then your coding partner, your learning partner, your team cannot advance on the project so that you're letting them down. So we had to productize and develop all the systems, all the data, all the software to be able to orchestrate this experience.
You guarantee that everybody has an amazing collaborative experience while at the same time, make sure that we don't simply kick people out if they cannot remain in the experience, but also that we can support them with flexibility for them to come back a little bit later.
And, yes, today, we have a completion rate that is above 65%, which is 10 times higher than the completion rate of online forces and managing to do that with the program that people don't have to pay upfront and with the model that doesn't need features or mentors or people who are coordinating the whole thing every day, that has been our massive problem to crack. I totally agree. Especially your point on the quality of the network.
It's one of the reasons why Ivy Lease can be somewhat super selective. It's because you wanna have that really strong network to be able to communicate with others and make sure it's a really quality place. But when we're talking about motivation and curiousness with the US tech sector. We're seeing highest layoffs since December of 2020 and instituting hiring freezes This could be a negative impact to companies like Madan, but this doesn't seem to affect your company as much.
As you mentioned, you're focused on developing countries. What are some of the things that you're seeing there in speaking of the current economy? That's such a good question because First of all, this market change is just getting started. So it's really hard to predict what's gonna happen, but we can look at some early data and then try to theorize about it. So on the data side of things, we are noticing a small slowdown in hiring pays of companies.
For example, we're noticing a slight decrease in number of companies approaching us because they're interested in hiring it's still too soon, right, and I don't think there's any need to be worried about it, but it is natural. It is expected that when the market does a 180 degree shift, companies who are being smart about their businesses, they're gonna decide, hey. Let's slow things down. Right?
Now the question is whether that's gonna reverse which will happen, but when is it gonna be next quarter? Is it gonna be next year? It's gonna be in 5 years. Now we fortunately, are not seeing any indicator of people being let go of their jobs. And I think even at a macro level, I think it is too soon to say that a lot of companies are doing big layoffs. Yes. Some companies who were in completely unrealistic places when it comes to to spending on pace of growth relative to earnings.
Like, yes, they are having to readjust. I think that's gonna be, like, short term readjustments. Like, unfortunately, some companies won adjusting enough, and there will be some corrections over the next year and a half. But for the most parts, the underlying trend is one where the entire world is moving to online or digital. Right? And we're just getting started there. So from a macro and long term point of view, This is just getting started, and there are way too many infill jobs to be filled.
In that sense, our population is in a very advantageous position because they are way cheaper. Than a software engineer in a developed country. Right? Sure. Maybe a software engineer in the West Coast of the US makes a junior developer makes, like, a 120 k, let's say, a 100 k a year.
Whereas in Nigeria, an entry level developer probably makes $400 a month, let's say, 5000 a year, 5000 compared to a 100,000, right, in the middle there's a huge arbitrage opportunities where companies get access to much more diversity and much wider talent pool where they can be really selective And maybe they pay half. They pay 50 k a year. They save, or, you know, very often even less, like, 30 k a year.
They can hire 3 people from the coast of 1 in in the West Coast, and these people are incredibly liking grateful for those jobs. They're gonna be working really hard. They're gonna be staying those companies longer. They're gonna be bringing more diversity to the company. And then those people because they're cheaper to the company are worthless likely to be let go when it comes to deciding. Who do I let go?
This hyper and productive committed person in Nigeria could cost me 1 third of the cost of this other person, well, probably not right, because I'll have to go 3 of these people to make up for 1 here.
Again, this is a spectrum of companies, not every company is hiring smart university, but we are seeing that the companies who are being very intentional about hiring diversity and globally they're always likely a template of people who come from the cheaper places because for whether we want it or not, it is what makes the most sense from a purely financial point of view.
Totally. And as I mentioned just a little bit earlier, Lambda, which is another online coding education service takes advantage of a similar business model using ISAs. And it's raised over a $122,000,000 in capital. How do you plan to scale quickly with less capital to deploy and beat Lambda in developing countries? You can use capital in many ways. Right? You can use it to grow super fast. You can use it to invest a lot in product.
You can use it to have a massive cushion so that things go south, you will have time to readjust. In our case, still racing. It's more than 20. At this point, more than $20,000,000, like, it gave us a lot of capital to invest in a lot of productizing things quite early, and we decided to be a little bit more cultures on the speed of growth. Right? So when you decide to grow your school by the 10 x rate every year, Sure. A lot of investors, we're very excited about that.
Of course, we all love to seek growth, but then it means you're making a lot of compromise. You're spending, you're burning money faster relative to your revenue, 2, especially in a model where you don't get paid until much later, And secondly, you start making a lot of compromises in how you productize your operations. Right? You start realizing, okay. We don't have time to do software for this. So let's do this with humans. Let's try attendance with the teacher assistants.
By the way, I'm I'm talking in the app contract. I don't know which one of these things Lambda has or hasn't done. I talked to to Austin, for example, and, you know, I have a massive respect for everything they've done and I think they've they've got so many few things, right, and I think, awesome capacity to to attract interest. It's super power that he has, but I've noticed that relative to every other school, we have been paying attention on saying, hey. Let's throw a 3, 400% every year.
Investors are still very interested in. It's not just about investors. We wanna get to a million students by the end of 2030. So unless we grow fast, we wanna get there. But let's go at a pace that allows us to from the very early days and in a very systematic intentional way, productize things. So for example, we have had integrations with the Zoom API for over almost 3 years now.
Where we track not just attendance, but also neutrality, participation rates, quality of the Internet connection, we use all of that to provide corrective feedback based on that feedback, we then rearrange and reshuffle working groups every week. We get students out of the school in the school. All of that is, like, done with software. So now we can still again three, four times this year without having to add people to the team, which means our margins go up our team suffer less than this.
And even when the market changes, we're less likely to have to suddenly readjust because you are growing too fast. We are being much more deliberate in that sense, and then we have the peer to peer model. This is where when I talk to any founder or any team member of any school, and I share how we have been able to scale and productize fields for them. They're like, What? We tried, and we couldn't figure it out. It was really messy. We end up giving up.
We knew that peer to peer learning was the key to achieve 2 things. 1, this multicultural experience that gives them an edge in the market to students, but 2, It's a way to increase scalability because we don't need to hire more teachers to have more students. And 3, it allows us to lower the cost of education.
And because we can lower the cost of education while also getting to higher, outcomes on this thing side of things, we get to charge more loan cost and higher pricing point means we have more margins, and more margins means that we are less fragile to market genius, that we are more flexible so that we can do things like being the only school in the entire world that is offering an income share of women's in every country in the planet. Right?
Like, other schools like Lambda, for example, are laser focused nowadays in the US. It makes sense. It's a massive market. In our case, everything we do comes from our vision for the world so that we are studying Internationally, but mostly focus in emerging and developing countries. That is our sweet spot. That's where we have designed the entire solution for. And in that sense, like, we don't see Lambda school as a competitor. They don't see us as a competitor.
Yeah. And you made a great point, especially on the amount of hiring that they have to do because I was scrolling through some jobs that they're currently hiring for, and I noticed They're hiring for many instructors, academic assistance, teaching assistance, and stuff that you wouldn't necessarily have to do to keep adding to those costs. Correct. So how does your peer to peer learning work? So this can take a long time, but I wanna describe it on a high level.
We started very early with a very simple assumption, which was content, learning content. It's a community. Let's just take existing content, and let's put a layer of accountability of social accountability around it. I first put 2 students one from Kenya, one from Serbia, and I said, hey. Here is a course that you're gonna complete together. You're gonna meet every day from 9 AM to 5 PM you're gonna be in the same call, and you are gonna go through this course together.
When it's time for learning, you both read individually, you watch individually, you ask each other questions, And then when it's time for building something, you screen share and you do per programming. It worked really well.
I actually have a lot of the recordings of these sessions and had a lot of fun with them, getting to understand how they work together, and suddenly start realizing, when I do this and I get stuck, I have someone else to share my frustration with, and there is a saying that says that the share frustrations are half the frustration and I share joys or twice the joy. When you have something to celebrate, you have someone else to celebrate with.
When you get distracted because there's something going on at home, you have someone to hold your accountable. When you go to bed late and the following morning, if you're late to wake up, you have someone to hold your accountable. Now, at some point, some of these partnerships, instead of, like, having some issues. Oh, we haven't worked together for 2 months, and We are not the most compatible per people for each other. We don't wanna be working together.
Oh, you're the only person who is at that point in the program. So there is no one else in the world with. Okay. What do we do? So eventually, we're able to start solving different problems with different peer to birth structures and with scale. So right now, unless we have thousands of students, we can almost in real time repair you if you have any conflict. And by the way, if you have some collaborative conflicts, We have a lot of steps for you to learn how to solve it.
But at some point, because we are rotating, clearing partners every week or every 2 weeks, then you'll always have to work with someone that you might not like as much for a week or 2, and then you rotate to another partner. Right? But at the same time, we have not just coding partners, because I have learning partners with whom you build the same project, but in parallel, helping each other out.
We have groups group projects where you build 1 larger project with a group of 3, 4, 5, other people, and you split the work and then you merge it. But you also have onboarding mentors who are other students who are more advanced, who are helping you get started on your 1st week in the program. We have a co reviewers and project reviewers who review your code, give you feedback, and then use that feedback to make changes before you can move to the following week.
And there are part time co reviewers their full time careers, their career managers, they're like pulling each other accountable. They are doing the quality assurance of each other's work. And there are a lot of players that then we started, like, bringing into other parts of the program.
So now you have Alan's who are doing mock interviews, or job searches, you have, full time students who are becoming practice session coordinators of the applicants who want to get into the school there are a lot of ways in which you don't need a teacher doing something.
What you need is someone else who has an incentive to help you with something so that you're not alone and someone who will have some guidelines, some training, some accountability, to do a great work, a great job, and helping you in that thing. So for example, co reviewers, even though they are students, they get paid for this, and they keep training for that. They have Robert something you need to follow.
And if they're not doing a good job because the other food and careers are politicians of the work, they get feedback. If not, they get expelled from their job. Right? They get fired. You can build all of this with a combination of humans and technology to orchestrate the whole thing without needing to have staff member because when you have to hire, you have to hire and you have to train people from the outside It is really hard to predict that.
But when you have students, and let's say we have a 100 students, we know that 10% traditionally are have the skills to be code reviewers. We know that if we add a 100 students right now, for the next class next month, I can have 10 code reviews. And I know that 10 code reviewers can support 200 which means the next class, I can bring 200 students, and that means the next I can break, like, 400 students. So and I can already forecast. I can predict. I can train.
I can build everything for that instead of depending on the market and as we able to find people on time to be able to support the given growth. Got it. And so props to you on nurturing that online engaged community because that can be very difficult, especially I noticed that my school sometimes when we went remote through Zoom, it was very difficult to keep people engaged through those things. So to be able to do that when it's all self engaged is pretty important.
To wrap it up here, what are some of your takeaways on microverse and where the audience can learn more about you and your startup? So to learn more about micros, the simplest way is going to our website micros.org. And I Not that active, but, like, in the sense that I don't publish as much, but I do read a lot on Twitter. So Ariel Shamus It's my my Twitter handler. Same on LinkedIn. I only accept connections with people that I already know. But people can follow.
I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn, and I publish somehow I live there. So that is a great way to to follow what we are doing and some of the updates on my journey as an entrepreneur. Now on the takeaways side of things, I'm gonna change completely from scalability and changing the world and all of that. To something that I think is much simpler and much more important.
Like, building a company especially a high growth startup that is trying to do something very ambitious, it's gonna be by far the the hardest thing that you do in your life. When you are doing something really hard and when the odds are against you, you will be tempted to give up often. Right? And unless you're doing something that you love, it's gonna be really easy to give up.
So many people go into business trying to achieve something in the long term, trying to make money, trying to take a company public, trying to even change the world for better, and that's good. But it's not gonna work out unless what you're doing today is something that you love. And I always share this story because to me, it's very close to my heart, but also to how I life.
And from these first two students who joined Microsoft, Kevin, from Kenya, and Saba from Sarah, Kevin, got a job offer from Microsoft at the end of the program. And the day he got the job offer, and she's still working there. He told me Ariel, my mom wants to talk to you. And I said, okay. Why not? I was wood scrubbed. I was doing everything.
I said, Yeah. Sure. And I jumped in a Zoom call, and I found his mom smiling at me, you know, this massive smile, she tells me I I still have a screenshot of this. Like, Ariel, I am so proud of my song, but I'm also so grateful to you. I can describe how that made me feel. Right? Because in those moments, I don't care if we have a million students in the program.
A hundred students or just Kevin, I know that what I did today put a smile in someone's mom's face, and that is priceless, and that is reason enough to keep one more day. Now I get experience like this almost every Madan, a new job offer it where the comment is like, you change my life forever, and not just my life, and my family lives.
And I think that it's so important that we define success not by a possible future that very often it's unlikely likely to change a little different, but for a known thing that you know you can have today, that's the only thing you can count on. I agree. I think that's a really cool story, especially there are a lot way too many founders that we see, which is why 90% of companies fail. There's a whole other thing with product market fit stuff like that.
But we see a lot of founders that either chase money or when they're building out their business, they just hate doing it, but wanna get to the money aspect of it. And I think when you're doing it like that, you increase the odds that are against you.
So over here at Embit, I actually love what I'm doing, which is why I'm perfectly fine doing late hours in spending a lot of time promoting the content and building it out and focusing on distribution and the product because it's what I love to do and I find it really engaging. But for someone who's not interested at all, it's super easy for them to burn out and just give out. Absolutely. Yeah. So, well, I appreciate you taking the time to hop on the podcast today.
That wraps it up for today's episode. If you enjoy the podcast, make sure to drop a 5 star view down below. And thank you, Ariel, for taking the time to hop on. It was a pleasure. Thank you, Shamus. It was a pleasure for me too. Appreciate it.