EYL #174 How to Build a Billion Dollar Business with Ruben Harris

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So this year we wanted to highlight tech entrepreneurs and especially if you know, it's always a good when we can do black tech entrepreneurs. So this is what we're going to do today. And Rubyn Harris, somebody that was introduced to me probably over a year year ago. Shout out to my man Jason, Jason Lewis. So he actually was telling me about you. Then he actually introduced me to Sharen and then she introduced me to you, and here we are now. So Ruben Young entrepreneur CEO of

Career Karma. So, Career Karma is a company that actually matches candidates up with jobs in the in the tech industry, correct job training programs in the tech industry. So just closed the series B right, forty million dollars.

you gotta highlight because it's so great. So I just before we even start the episode. Word of mouth is always the best form of marketing and doing a good job by people. It's always the best for marketing because you never know who knows who. And that was a way that you know, all of this gets connected, is that you know, he actually goes through the job training program and it's really really excited about it, feels good about it, and then connects to dots.

business because a lot of artists don't understand. They signed up to a lot of bad deals. They don't understand what's going on. And so I found a course online where I was able to teach myself financial modeling, kind of like Uile University. Became an investment banker and that worked out very well, very quickly, the tech worlds started taking over the technology the finance world, and one of our buddies, he quit the investment banking became a software engineer.

When I was in investment banking, I met one of my co founders, Archermeister, and his twin brother, and none of us knew how to code, and Atlanta Tech Village had popped up across the street, and we're like, what's this tech thing that's happening, and everybody kept talking about Silicon Valley. There was a company called bit pay across the street at the same time that coinbase was starting early.

So we saw crypto very very early days, and we were like, if we want to start a company, like you said, if you want to start a billion dollar company, it has to have tech at his core. But none of us knew how to code. And that guy that quit the bank and became a self engineer, he did it in three months. He went to something called a boot camp, which is a job training program, and so that boot camp had a guy named Jack Altman who runs a company called Lattus today, who was also investment banker.

He did the boot camp and he was a self engineer and his brother was Sam Altman, who was the president of y Combinator at the time, which we'll talk about in a second. And that's when we learned that there's these accelerators that will train you to be entrepreneurs, and there's these boot camp instead will train you even if you didn't go to college to get six figures and then teach you how to build billion dollar companies.

And the two things were all paused here that Y Combinator says, if you want to start a billion dollar company, you have to write code, you have to talk to users. So my co founders decided they're going to be the right code guys, and now it's going to be the top to users guys, which is the CEO and the person that sells. So that's where it started.

a club of all the other Y Comminator company. So there's over two thousand y Combinator company. So I can email any CEO in the network and we're fam and we look out for each other. And essentially they help you raise money, which is how I was able to learn how to raise all this money. And then you're able to get mentors that help you execute after you raise money, to build and solve problems that you've set out to do.

So Archer he decided to go to a fintech marketplace called Funding Circle, so he went there Early Team Or he was an auto trader at the time, which is a car marketplace. And then he wanted to get into augmented reality, so he went to Blipper. And then I went to an education company called alt School, and then a healthcare company called Honor, and then a political company called Hustle, and so we all spent time during that period learning our skills. So I focused on sales, they

focused on self engineering. My brother also went to a boot camp. He became a software engineer at a healthcare company. And we did that for about three years, and then we organized a bunch of events in the city of San Francisco that I learned about to build my network, and then we eventually started the company.

I noticed that they people kept saying there's no black people in tech. So and a lot of the events were like world boring. So I did a big party at a club in San Francisco called Infusion Lo. It was kind of like the event that you and I met in Oakland. And I made sure that instead of having celebrities, we had founders and CEOs and one of the people that was there was Michael Sabel, who is

now the CEO of a combinator that started Twitch. It was a beautiful event and when Michael met us, he pretty much was like, hey, you guys, just start a company. Let us know. And at the time we actually started up.

doing it like that. He was like, I said no. He said, well you're not ready yet, so check it out. I quit my job to go full time. We applied to y combinator, got rejected. That might what's going on? He said, start a company then, so he says, so he says, he says either CEO right, I said yeah, he said go raise, So so I set out to raise one hundred and fifty thousand. I ended up raising

three hundred thousand in two weeks. And then I applied to why Combinator again and then got in and then eventually had about half a million before we when we were going through the cohors.

for a company. They're not looking to see if you actually know how to code or know how to sell. They're looking to see, like who are you and how can you solve problems for me at this company?

It's the same thing for entrepreneurs after you've learned the game.

even have to code. You could literally just be like what problem do I want to solve and just make an MVP, which is a minimum viable product and just like try it, and when you're in there, they give you the money to continue running it because what you're doing during those three months is trying to make it grow as fast as possible so you look as best

as possible. So when you present on something called demo Day, which is the end of it, you literally have the biggest investors in the world that you're presenting to and billions of dollars change hands.

sisters started. I was like, what would happen if the world knew that there's these job chain programs that exist that help millions or billions of people gets money, but more importantly, skills that allow them to build solutions to problems for their own family, but eventually start their own companies where they're not dependent on anybody else.

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are aware of the opportunities that exist. What we realize is that even if you expose people to these career paths like we did on the podcast, some people will take the initiative that are like super driven and have the psychological confidence to do it. But most people need a community of people behind them to help them. And so we wanted to make sure that people have peers, coaches, and mentors to make sure that they don't just start a program, but they finish it and then once they're

done with the training. There's a lot of people that are extremely intelligent, have the best degrees in the world, have gone to the best training programs that still struggle in the job search. Why because they don't know how to communicate, They don't know how to tell their story, and so we need to help them with that. So we have this network of companies. We have love of audio rooms in our community to be able to connect

people directly to companies. And so the short answer is, were the easiest way to find a job training program online that is now growing to become the world's largest community career transitioners on the internet that will eventually become the world's largest staff in front.

at companies that I knew that were investors. But I didn't just focus on the traditional angel investors or traditional entrepreneurs. I reached out to people that I know that were accomplished that will cut a check as well. One of the people I met at Atlanta Tech Village was a guy named Paul Judge from Greenwood Yeah, the show, Yeah Judge. Paul Judge cut a check very early. Arlin Hamilton from Backstage cut a check very early. Michael Cybele cut a

check very early. And what I was able to do as I was able to be like pretty much within the first few days, say fifty percent of the round is full with people that I already knew, and then I use that and being like, hey, look there's only a week left. Are you in? Right? And I got the rock stars here, I want you? Are you in and out? And that kind of like created this whole fomo type of thing. But a lot of the stuff that I learned through investment banking around putting together a

presentation really helped me a lot. If for anybody who's putting together pictures, could I get this question a lot, go to Sequoia Business Plans, check it out and they explain the flow. Sequoia is one of the biggest venture capital firms. For the people that don't know what a venture capital firm is, it's people that give you money

to start companies, kind of like Shark Team. So saqoya business plans and then watch this video called Thing Big, Start Small by Jim Getz that really broke down how to tell my vision or our vision for what we want to do.

all your material material. You got to be tight. You got to have your deck, your data room, your financial model is everything like really really clean.

hy Combinator is the most known for this. But essentially they bet on you and what they'll do is they'll create hype. So what's interesting about why Combinator is every cohort so they do a summer batch, and a winner batch has two to three companies that go public. So the whole world knows that Y Combinator is so good at picking companies and being selective on who applies that there will be multiple billion dollar companies and each batch.

So what they do is they create a huge event where all the biggest investors come and essentially create a lot of fomo as well. So what a lot of investors will try to do will try to get to the founders early year before demo day, and we're encouraged to like wait until demo days so that you can present and then have the highest valuation, which is important so you're not diluting yourself which means giving away too much ownership.

or not. From evaluation perspective, markets are crazy, like especially right now. The market valuation right now is way higher than it was when I was going through a combinator. But just to understand, like quick and dirty evaluation stuff, usually it's a function of ten x of your revenue. So like if you're i don't know, making ten million a year, ten x is like one hundred million dollars valuation. But usually y C companies aren't at that stage. That's

actually a later stage. Usually a lot of people are pre revenue, have some traction, but not a ton of traction. I think when we were when we were at in White Company. Just so people have perspective, I'll just give the number. We're at thirteen thousand a month. Just that was a long time ago. And yeah wait wait, way back, way back, way back, so long ago. And what's interesting is that you know it's not just about your revenue traction, so you're usually you want to be why Commeday encourages

you to make sure you have monthly revenue growth. The only difference between startups and like everything else is growth and momentum. So you want to be growing ten to twenty percent monthly from a revenue perspective. Not everybody is doing that, but like you want to just have that number in your head because you know compounding is key. But you're not just going to be evaluated on revenue.

You're going to be evaluated on who's your team. Do not apply to wh acommindator unless you have somebody that's technical. I'm not technical. My co founders are technical. We knew that if they decided they weren't going to be technical, I had to be technical. And the reason why is because you don't want to be outsourcing your culture other people. That gets expensive and it's just you don't have control

about what's going on. So be evaluating your team outside of technicals are going to be like, have you experienced this problem before? So, like, if you're helping people get good credit, like, have you had bad credit before? And have you gotten out of it? So are you personally invested in this? There's a difference between a job, a career, and a calling. This is a calling to me because I've been through it before. Right, So have you done this before? Who is your investor so far? Right? What

does your software look like? And many other things. And so essentially, when you think about valuation, another way to think about it is is there one percent chance likelihood of achieving this valuation and all the other factors are like, it can increase that percentage chance of reaching the valuation makes sense, And so whenever you're raising money from investors, they're actually going to be investing to own a piece

of your company. So the more money that you raise, if it's a low valuation, then like you actually like lose more of your company. But usually you can think about you're probably going to be giving up about twenty percent of your company in the beginning.

you know we tell you we don't. One of my mentors said, don't tip billions to out trillions, right to create these like ten hundred billion dollar company, I think very very big. And if you're not thinking like that, don't invest, don't raise money from venture capital. You could just start a lifestyle business and you can do friends and family stuff. It's not for everybody, so mhm.

So and there's some people that have applied seven times right drop Dropbox is a good example of a company that got rejected the first time as well. And there's a lot of people that give up if they get rejected, which is I think is a very important thing to understand even in career navigation as well.

at most, like a million dollar checks. So you have seed funds and pre seed funds, but also take advantage of the diversity funds that are out there, take advantage of the funds that are focused on women in tech, take advantage of the impact funds.

lot of money. We're focused on solving problems that are for them. My SoCs hicky of needs. What you all are doing with EIL with financial literacy is like one of the most important issues out here for our people, and people will fund that type of stuff all day long.

And the same thing with us, like career navigation, career development, like if if we don't help our people get tech skills, like we're gonna continue to be digital cout pickers forever because we're driving all this value for everybody else's platforms that we're not creating our own. And the jobs that we have like at warehouses or in retail companies, they're going to be taken over by robots and what are you going to do after that?

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to give money. But then like you ran out of people that you know, you can leverage crowd funding things like angelist and refunder and stuff like that, so that you can raise money from doctors and lawyers that want to invest into attack companies. That's usually going to be what you call a friends and family around, maybe music executives,

athletes or stuff like that. Then you have your pre seed round that you might have an institutional investor, which will include somebody's like funds that I was telling you about before, Like one of ours is like unshackled A ventures. They they invest in immigrants, so that's like a really good one. Then you're in cap or Capital kp or Capital is like an impact investor. But they also invested in like uh Twiliyo for example, and Uber and many other things like that, so that they have big hits

that they've that they've done very well. And then after that you'll do like your seed round, then Series A, Series B, all the way till you go public. Going back to what you said about evaluation, if you want to build a billion dollar company, usually when you're raising your Series A, you're going to be in the two million dollars a year range.

you're actually making money as well. And two million a year is like the baseline for the A. Then you want to remember these these five numbers, triple triple double double double. Right, So so if you go your next year, you want to be shooting for six million, the year after that, eighteen million, the after that, thirty six seventy two, and then this one has some flexibility because then it's one hundred and forty four. But like at one hundred

million a year, then you're a billion dollar company. That's probably when you're going to go public.

But there's others like if I have the community side of things, there's like dual Lingo, which is public, right, and they have a big community piece where there's like over five hundred million monthly at the viewsers, but the very small percentage of them that they monetize. Right. You have Zilo as well, which is a marketplace, and many

other things like that. And so to your point, you know, depending on which company that you're trying to evaluate compare yourself against, you want to be have an understanding if not just public companies, but also private companies as well. Oh gotcha.

What what what's your career goal? What's your number one problem? And what's your timeline?

that don't scale. It is like one of the most important concepts to understand because it gets you in the trench just to know what's going on. It's like what you guys are doing now through doing all these interviews and talking to people. It's like when we started the podcast, I knew the pain points that people felt consistently in addition to my own personal pain points going through it, So then I knew what the MVP was supposed to

look like. Right, And what you do is, let's say that I don't want to coach something and I want to do a paper wireframe. I could literally draw up mockups of what it would look like in an app and be like, hey, would you use this and try it? And then you will be watching him to see how he's using it, where he gets stuck, where he's confused, and then you can like iterate on it. And then once you have an understanding of like how it works, then you start coding stuff up.

of people coming to you and all these things. But you know what's cool about having audio rooms is like, I'm going to be on an audio room today with Arlen Hamilton talking to over a thousand people in our room, and they can always feel like they can talk to me.

of like signal. Put them in a telegram group, and then we would help them, would monitor them, were like, okay, apply to this school, apply to that school, get in and out. And then once we understood what the motion was, we actually cloned telegram and then we put profiles on top of it, and then we eventually like turned it into the basics of what we had in the beginning before it became a marketplace in all each other stuff.

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forty five percent more applications than non sponsored jobs. Don't wait any longer, speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get us seventy five dollars sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed dot com, slash pod Katz thirteen. Just go to Indeed dot com slash pod Katz thirteen right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need.

so how you're going to make money though? Right? So what we learn is that there's thousands of schools, not just in the US but globally, and they spend billions of dollars a year to get enrollments. Look at where we are right now. You probably heard about the Great resignation. Have over ten million open jobs, four million people quitting jobs. And why are they quitting their jobs? Because they don't want to go back to the jobs that are in the factories that don't allow them to work from home

and take advantage of remote work and be with their kids. Right. They want to get these type jobs. And what's happening is the colleges. Historically, when you have recessionary behavior, which we had we're entering into year three of COVID, you would see actually college enrollment going up because people want to go back to school in order to get a job that pays well. The problem is, just like people

don't trust higher education no more. They don't want to pay fifty thousand a year to go to college if there's no guarantee of a job anywhere. To be very clear, I'm not saying I'm anti college, but college is starting to recognize that they need to innovate because they don't want their enrollments to stop keep dropping. So what they're doing is not just launching shorter, faster and cheaper models that train you to get a job in three to twelve months like Trilogy and things like that and My

Homies at to You and My Homies at Chair. They're spending a lot of money to attract students not just on Google and Facebook, but also through virtual events and stuff like that. This is an interesting stat that Shama says. I don't know if it's still the same, but he says, like forty cents of every VC dollar raised goes to Google and Facebook, and that's paid advertising to attract users. And similar to and the reason why people do this because there's so many apps that are out there in

order to get users get seen. You know, zero to one says just you know, it says essentially like when you build a product. I'm messing up the quote, but essentially like building the product is not enough. You have to actually get it out to people. And a lot of people think building a good product loaners will gets

you where you want to go. And the last thing that I'm going to say here is just that colleges and boot camps started spending a lot of money in order to attract users, and so we decided, in order to make money, we would charge for every enrollment in the beginning to prove that it worked. So we charged about ten percent of the tuition.

do other schools pay? And like some schools pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year. That's how we discovered this market. And now that we're going to high education, we're realizing that it's not just par enrollment. You want to do a per introduction. So now we've moved to a per introduction model, so we can do like really

interesting things like dynamic pricing. So if you're interested in a data science program, you might be interested in an economics degree or a math degreer statistics degree, So we can charge different schools different prices based off of what the individuals can study.

So when people come to career come or if you go to career combat Complash apply, you'll say what career path you're interested in, or if you don't know, and let's say that you do say that what you're interested in. Will recommend about three to five schools to you that are best for your desired timeline, and then you'll start talking to them. To those schools, you're usually not going to make a decision about what school you want to go to in the beginning, because you're not going to

make a left tain decision that fast. Then you're going to start talking to people in our community that actually attended the schools, so that you're not just hearing people just I mean, if I want to go to Rashade's Cold School, of course you're going to say you're the best, but you want to talk to people that actually went through it. And so usually it takes people about a month in order to make a decision about where they

want to go. And then if you're doing something full time, it'll take you three to six months to get a job. If you're doing something part time in six to twelve months, and if you do something self paces twelve to twenty four months. So but to your point, in our platform, we do have some like quizzes to like help you,

like personality tests to understand what you're interested in. We do have a mini boot camp where if you want to build a clone of YouTube, we've done that as well, so you can do it and that will automatically get you accepted into different schools. But we never want to be a school. So being a school is not how you create a monopoly in education.

is the internal directory for YC. And Gary calls career karma y Combinator for the people where why combinator bets on first time founders and career karma bets on people for the first time. So not only do we want to say that again slows down that.

after the program, and even after you're employed. If you ever want to do something like start a company, we could help you get connected to that or change company. We can help you do that through our audio rooms. So yes, so I'll just.

like this real focus on reskilling hasn't happened yet. In my opinion, something that the CEO of Check says, Dan Rosen's like I'm gonna give him shout out. He says, bet on the inevitable. My opinion is going to be inevitable for government to get involved to help its citizens reskill.

Why because every politician measures themselves on getting jobs for their different cities and countries and whatever, and so you're already starting to see different workforce boards get involved with laptop programs or skill programs or Wi Fi hot spots. And in my opinion, the student loan bubble will pop at some point and the cost of education will go down and will be primarily funded by government, philanthropy and employers.

big enough. So let me give you an example. Let's say that you want to build an app for people that like to play polo. That world is small, right, The people that want to play polo, but the people that ride horses is probably bigger than that. I don't know if that's a billion dollar company or the people that play sports in general. Outside sports in general is

much bigger, so that TAM is a lot larger. But you know there's riches and niches, right, So you can start with the people that play polo if you're a polo player, because if you lock that down, then that allows you to take over the outside sports right, exactly exactly. And I was in Argentina and I found out about Ladelfina and all these other things like that and so similar. The reason why I bring this up is because the.

of the stuff. Why do we focus on boot camps, because boot camps are the the the the fastest growing post their education market model that traditional education players are copying. And now you know, fast far to today, everybody's copying it. Nobody knew the pandemic was going to hit. The pandemic just proved us right, and now you know, with the main player, we're sixteen times bigger than everybody else because of that. Going back to the piece about monopoly, be

careful about monopoly. In the book it talks about it talks about if you want to build a company that dominates a market, you want to figure out a software solution that can be a layer across across these things. So think about, like my father's a physician, so he if you're going to build a hospital, you can't build a hospital that heals the entire world. One hospital that heals the world, because it's so complex, right, there's just so many different versions of cancer. You're not gonna do

that with one hospital. But you can build a platform that heals the world by connecting to every type of healthcare clinic and healthcare institution that serves people with various needs all over the world. Soon And so if I want to help a billion people through careercom which is our mission. We want to connect the world's talent to us next opportunity. Then I can't do it by starting the school. As much as I love education, my sister's a teacher, I want to build a school, but I can't.

That's not how I'm gonna I want to see this in my life. So I want to help a billion people in my lifestyle. The only way I could do that is through software and connecting to the schools, connecting to companies, and connecting to the people.

does that mean. It means that historically, when people go to school, they either pay for it out of pocket, they take out a loan, or they get government funding or they get a scholarship. There are two things called income share agreements and deferred tuition. So income share agreements in defer tuition are a promised where it says, hit Troy, I promise I'm going to get you a job. If you don't get a job through my training, you don't

have to pay me anything. But if you do get a job that's in the lane that you want to be in, then the tuition comes out of your new salary up to whatever maximum did I tell you, right? And what's cool about that is like literally you can try any type of education that you want to. If you don't get a job, you don't pay anything. And so most of people that come to career CROMA they

do either an income share agreement or defer tuition option. Okay, Now, the employer thing is very interesting because it also fits into the great resignation stuff. Employees have the power and contractors have the power these days.

join the company. Since people aren't just going to school for four years and being there forever, companies are actually starting to get involved to make sure that they're funding your ongoing training so you don't have to pay for it. And so you see like Amazon paying seven hundred million for warehouse workers so that they can get their tuition paid for. You see PwC putting three billion towards this. You see at and T putting a billion towards this,

may Sye's Walmart. All these people are starting to get involved because everybody's going digital target Look at targets like digital numbers going crazy, Domino's digital numbers are going crazy. It's not just tech companies.

And there's another really cool organization called one ten dot org that was started by kenchin Out, former CEO of American Express, also a black dude, which we got a shout out, and he's also on the board and Guild Education, which is the pioneer in education as a benefit Give had that shout out to Rachel and they're doing really amazing things on the enterprise side.

And like you said, each round, I guess it dilutes the ownership, right.

Everybody's telling me, yo, you got to keep eighteen to twenty four months of reserves of reserves because because nobody's cutting checks, so we had to get scrappy and we got profitable, and we were profitable for five months. So when I raised money at the end of twenty twenty, I still had a million in the bank out of the one point five that are raised, and I have forty five people working for the company, so you have leverage. Right,

They're like, oh, it's capital efficient. Well, that said, you'll also get the flip side where some investors be like, oh, you too capital efficient because you're not investing in your growth and he's supposed to not be profitable. So it

really depends on who you're talking to. But we've always been like that same thing with this With this round, when we raised the Series B, we only spent three million out of the ten million that we raised, and we had about one hundred fifty people working for the company at the time.

And then just make sure that every time you catch up with them, don't tell them everything that's going on with your business, but make sure you're telling them that you make your progress. So you create the fomo, right, and I've done this four times now, you know the next one is going.

You asked about the biggest challenges right now. So the majority of the capital is going towards hiring, right going back to this is an employees market. Uh, you need to be competitive in the market. Tech people get paid very well, So I got to make sure more people are paid very well and they have their benefits and

they have their other things as well. And since you're attracting really really talented people, shout out to our VP of People, Jessica Lamb, you have to make sure that like their competency modeling is done so they have internal career paths, they know what they need to do or to get rewarded, and things like that. So, now that we have three million people a month coming to us, it's very important for us to invest in data. We actually want to grow to fifty million people a moth

organically in the next two years. So our data needs are going to have to not just segment users by level of intent, like how bad do you want this? High? Medium, low intent? What interest do you have? What struggles are you dealing with? Good credit, bad credit? Do you have money, you do not have money? Have you tried learning how to code?

to be all headlines. I actually want to be helping people. I actually want people getting jobs like your boy that made this whole podcast happen. We're creating a movement, right, there are real people on the ground that are doing their thing, that are now leaders out here, like one of our other investors, the Winklevoss Twins stuff, the first they're out here. I heard of them, Yeah you might hear yeah, the first. The first person that we placed in career Coms a guy named Jeric Warren at Gemini.

He got a job making one hundred forty five thousand black man, single dad. He's the one who connected to me, to them and like I didn't even ask him, he volunteered it. Keisha Lake who we got at stitch Fixed now she stitch Fixed CEO Katrina Lake is a billionaire. She also became an investor in a company. So it's just like through people like actually looking out for people.

So how do you do that the enterprise? So a lot of investors really like investing into SaaS companies, so software as the service companies and recurring revenue contracts. So if you go to careercom dot com, slash company, slash jobs,

you'll see all of our open roles. I'm actively hiring a head of finance and a head of business development that will both report to me, and that head of business development is going to be the individual rule that I work with with my co founders and the team to take over the entire fortune one thousand and help them attract, or chain and upscale their workforces by offering

career Comma as a benefit to them. A good way to think about it is, think about all these gig economy companies with millions of workers that drive but don't want to be in those jobs forever. We can offer career Comma as a benefit. The company pays for it, and then they get jobs at the end. Huge all users for career Comma. It's free for the company. Actually, the school still pay us boom right. A lot of really interesting things like that.

get millions of dollars for free traffic. And you gave the credit card example, if I was in the fintech space, you know the fat had keywords. He probably heard of the long tail or like just type credit card and Google, and that's what's going to pop up. You want to find like the real hard to search terms and like really be the thing that pops up for all those like random things like an answer to a Python or

a Java script question, and your article pops up. And as you start establishing a domain authority, then you eventually can take over the the more popular keywords. Our team produces about two hundred to seven hundred articles a month on SEO. We do podcasts like this, which helps we do video. We do all kinds of things like that. We put out research reports that are backlinked to dot ors, dot govs, which establishes our domain authority, which is why

we're going to continue to win. But then also we leverage programmatic landing pages. So if you put this school versus that school, our pages will pop up. Eventually it be this company that company. If you type in Google today, do it today, how to get a job at Golden Sas you'll see, career Komba pops up there. So what do you think we're gonna do. We're gonna make listicals like top companies that pay for your tuition, career Corama.

We're gonna dominate that whole thing and every other type of ancillary term so that as people are searching it, that it gets discovered. The problem with SEO, I would say, it's necessarily an entire problem, is that you're only gonna attract people that know what to look for. So you need paid as well to reach people because, like we're trying, you can't spread the gospel to people that know the gospel already, right, so you got to like actually be out there.

already in high school. Even though this can get you a job, and we do have sixteen, seventeen, eighteen year olds that have gone through the process and gotten a job. Usually it's going to be an adult that's in the job that they don't want. They come to us and then we match them into something mostly a part time program, and they get a job like that. Lenise Powell is a very good example here in New York. She's in Brooklyn.

She was a teacher, she's a mom. She she did she did go to college, but she didn't want to go back to college and she wanted to go to boot camp part time. She joined and then got a job making one hundred thousand that a company called news Allom and she's doing very well.

and things like that. So most people will sign up to a book camp, and a boot camp is going to have that option that I told you where you don't have to pay anything unless you get a job. So a lot of people will do it, will sign up if they don't get a job, they don't pay anything. If you finish and you get a job that's in the range that you're going for, it's usually going to be in the seventy to one hundred and fifty thousand plus range, and then the tuition will range between ten

and thirty thousand. So my brother is a good example. When he got his jobs one hundred fifty thousand, he paid out twenty six And that's how it works.

Karma for reasons deeper than money. And you guys know Nana, so shout out. So Nana Little Yeah, but I think she told me about you too. Yeah, Nana did like all of our videos. So she took all the videos, chopped it up and put it together like a Super Bowl lab pretty much in this fire and like it took off. Baron Davis investors, So that that's right. So Baron Davis is an invest.

one of the biggest companies in the world. And these guys are billionaires and like, but talk about that, like how you don't necessarily have to be profitable. Yeah, talk about because, like I said, people don't understand that it's.

main difference between starts and everything else is growth. And these tech companies that you're seeing that are public or private are attacking legacy industries that have been around for hundreds of years, fifty years, blah blah blah. So the way to dominate is by moving faster than they can ever move, and that usually requires capital. And like some people will go from two hundred to one thousand people in a year, it's a lot in addition to executing

and shipping products and doing all kinds of stuff. And so it really just depends on who's backing you so and whether you're actually solving the problem that you said that you are going to solve, and if you if you're demonstrating those things, and you're telling the right story and you're actually executing behind the story, you'll be able to raise it. You'll be able to raise the money

that you need, or be able to stay relevant. What I'll say is it's very important to choose your investors wisely, because some people will cause you to grow too fast to where you run yourself into the ground. So we've been blessed to where you know, I don't have no problem none of our board members, none of our investors, period. They all got our back, and they definitely pushed us, and they ask us questions and they hold us accountable, but they don't force us to like run ourselves into

the ground. And so I say that just because like there are strings to capital that are good.

and ultimately through the board can fire you. The board can fire you.

parts of a board. The good parts of a board is like you want to have people on your board that you would never be able to hire that can help you. So for example, Gary Tan he runs in Initial Last Capital that's an over two hundred million dollar portfolio. It includes Instacar and Rippling. He was first checking coinbase, for example, one hundred billion dollar outcome, and he really has seen this many many times before and he's able

to guide us on what we got to do. One of his LPs Topped Your Capital Partners, which is people that give him money to start fun They invested in our Series B around so they've seen not only what he's seen, but also from investing in other companies they're

able to give you that OG knowledge. I think wild love from million dollars worth of game, he said, or Gilly one of them said, and OG is someone that offers you game, right, So you want people that are offering you game and giving you guidance and keeping you focused, because what happens when you start winning is you get all kinds of opportunities that are presented to you, and you can do all kinds of things. And it's up to you to decide whether you want to stay focused

on your path or get distracted. And ultimately, most of the time, the right decision is to stay focused on what you're currently doing because of compounds.

y L University. I'm actually very excited about what you guys are doing there. The reason why is because you know, it's not just boot camps that are teaching. It's not just corporations that are teaching. It's not just colleges and posting that's that's teaching. It's individuals that are teaching. You guys are using a platform for it. There's a guy

like Lenny Ratchinskis that's growing. There's a really good article that came out in the Wall Street Journal about teachers in career that are making or four million of years just by teaching. I think the biggest educator will be the individual, and this whole podcast is an education platform. So make sure you hit subscribe tapping. We also have a podcast called Breaking the Startups that has a lot of stories that you alhould check out. And that's it,

and we'll be part of you guys. We'll do some collaborative in personal events. We're talking about it right now, so stay tuned for that.

We got new something on the way.

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