I'm Kristen O'Brien, Managing Editor at NFX, and this is the NFX podcast. The new American dream is afoot. Young people in the US are drowning in education debt reinforced by laws, regulations, and government backed financing of the current system. But is that machine serving the future we want?
It often takes people outside the walls of a system to question it, with a perspective earned by dropping out of college, setting his own path, and now building a successful company and movement to change our country. Austin Allred, co founder and CEO of Lambda School sees our past present and future in ways few others to.
In this episode, James Currier, and Austin break down the psychology of traditional college, they talk about how the new American dream is based on permissionless learning and they discuss the 2 trends Austin is watching closely. This is the NFX podcast. What are you seeing clearly? Pete, everyone around you thinks you're crazy for thinking. I've now surrounded myself with people who think similarly, broadly speaking. So it's a little bit harder to be contrarian in the circles that I run-in.
But broadly speaking, I think the average person grossly underestimates the importance of incentives. And I think America is kind of drunk on the idea of a university being the only possible path to higher education and to jobs and job training and skills achievement. And, you know, it's really only an American phenomena. Outside of the US. There's a bifurcation of skills training and university and all this other stuff, but we've kind of fallen into a single model in the United States.
I think that's pretty broken. Got it. And so for you to question the dominance of this, you know, secondary school, university, college, approach we have, you think that a lot of people kind of feel that that's an odd way to look at it. Yeah. I mean, I think the average person, you know, when they hear me talking about college would kind of comes away saying, well, what's so bad about college? Like, isn't it a good thing? And I don't have, like, a particular qualm with college Pete se.
Would I have a problem with is the high cost of college. And also, I think an aspect that's very underestimated is the long amount of time Like, spending 4 plus years in a university setting, I think we undervalue or underweight the opportunity cost of those 4 years. If you're only looking at income as the correct proxy, I don't know anybody who would elect to hire someone who's a fresh grad versus someone who has 4 years of experience in the field that they're in.
So I think we kind of consider that time sunk cost when we shouldn't. Right. And so does this relate at all to your own personal experience? I mean, you did 2 semesters of college at BYU, and then you're out. I mean, was there something you saw clearly there that made you bail? Yeah. My college experience was very unique. I mean, I went to a great school far as all their rankings and whatever else go, you know, not the Ivy League, but in the top 50. It was very difficult to get into.
And it was also among the cheapest schools in the country because BYU is kind of backed by the Mormon church. So my tuition was only, you know, a couple $1000 a semester. Which I didn't realize how cheap that was at the time. I felt it was incredibly expensive.
So I felt like, you know, net for my time and my money, I would be better served opting out and going elsewhere, which both in a religious community and within my family was don't wanna say blasphemy in a literal sense, but not far from it.
And so the notion that one would opt out of that seems crazy But to me, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that, like, there is no other way to obtain knowledge that within the four walls of a university where I think we're pretty close minded as far as that goes. No. I agree.
You know, look, we've got, one of our more popular essays we wrote was called your life on network effects, and we talk about this, which is that there's this momentum of all the people around you who love you and support you. Who if when you go against what they think you should do, which is, of course, go to college because that's the thing we've all been trained to think here in the US.
It becomes really difficult conversations between you very personal, very hard emotional conversation between you and all the nodes of the network around you sort of guide you to norm you down into like you're saying, those must have been some hard conversations to be that much of a contrary, and particularly when you had achieved the gold ring of getting into BYU. Yeah. I mean, the hard thing is your family is legitimately concerned for you. And you understand that. Right?
It's not they think you are misguided and you're going off the right path and you are putting yourself in a place of danger. But all the same, it's still hard to look at everybody that surrounding you that is doing and recommending a path and say, actually, I'm going to do something different that's very much Unproven and unguaranteed. Although now it's funny because now in my networks that I'm surrounded in, I spend more time with college dropouts than I spend with college graduates.
In many and says, you know, some of the smartest people I know dropped out of high school or graduated high school when they were fifteen. And I didn't realize that was an option. I would've done that as well. Thought you legally had to go to school until you're eighteen. Turns out, no, they're in different paths, and I wasn't even open minded enough to have considered that. Yeah. Well, it's interesting you say that these are hard conversations because people do genuinely care for you.
I remember we were starting a homeschool in the k through 12 environment, and the parents said to me, aren't you risking your children's future. Totally. And I thought, my god, like, that's the problem. That's the issue Pete. Is that any deviance from the norm is scary to people, and you've done that. So you did that personally.
And so now you've gone and created this organization Lambda that helps people pay nothing until they get a job, take a shorter amount of time, and they go into probably what'll be a higher paying job. Yep. The high level is let's see how fast we can get you into the most high paying career paths. Those are the things we think about. How can we shorten the time? How can we increase the value that you provide? And what's the right, you know, setup for doing that?
Nice. I was your Twitter feed says that you are building, quote, the American dream as a service. Yeah. Can we talk about that? Yeah. How's the American dream changed in the last 150, 20 years? Well, I think 1st and foremost, a lot of people don't believe in it anymore. A lot of people, for one reason or another, believe that your state in American life is determined by your ancestry or your privilege or your race or your wealth And of course, all those things factor in.
They're all meaningful and they're all real, but I guess my message is and perhaps not to you know, we don't cater to every single person, but for those who are capable and interested in software engineering or data science and, you know, that kind of Like, you literally can create wealth out of nothing. You literally can learn skills without anybody's permission that allow you to do work that is incredibly valuable. I think the permissionless aspect of it is incredibly important to me.
There's nobody that can actually hold you back. There are still resource constraints that are tricky and you have to dance around of time and money and availability and, you know, all those things which are nontrivial. But I think I watch every day, you know, 5 or 10 or a dozen students increase their income by $50,000 a year. Is that the American dream money? Yeah. That's a really good question, actually. I think true definition of the American dream that I would select.
And, of course, it I'm sure it varies based on either which dictionary you're looking at or which set of people you're speaking to. My definition is self determination. And you can call that freedom if you would like, but one's ability to carbs one on path and do what you would prefer to do. For most of our students, frankly, that is constrained by money. It is, you know, a grueling existence just to put food on the table. And it's hard to escape that reality.
You know, if you're making minimum wage, it's really hard to go to something higher. We believe and we see that that is possible, and we watch it, you know, a dozen times a day. And when you say to provide the American dream as a service, to give people that self determination by having the competence, having the skills being relevant, being what people want so that you can work as hard as you want, earn as much as you want, do what you want. Yeah. Effectively.
There's obviously the skills training aspect of Lambda School and the fact that you don't have to put any tuition down Flint. So as long as you have access to the internet, you are eligible to be a Lambda school student. You know, we don't look at your financial means or your credit history or your work history or your grades or we don't really care about any of that in ways that other schools or other institutions might.
And we teach you the skills, but we also help you build Morgan some instances we provide for you a network. You know, you referred to network effects earlier. Those are incredibly powerful. We plug you into an alumni network of thousands of students, we can get your foot in the door at companies that you may not be able to get your foot in the door of on your own, or we help you network into those companies.
Yeah. At the end of the day, we help you set a path for self determination in such a way that, you know, in theory, know, we believe that if you learn to learn and you learn to pick up skills on the fly and solve challenges as you face them, it's pretty freeing. And I think that's what the American dream really is. So it's interesting you talk about this network effect to these alumni group, and we got an essay we wrote about what we call tribal network effects. And we mentioned Lambda in there.
I think it's a great example of a business being built around a travel network effect. Can you tell us well, I mean, first of all, it's selective to get in there. So everyone who gets in feels like they wanna prize. What percentage of people do you accept of the people who apply? Oh, I'd have to look.
It's funny that the number of applications you get is kind of a vanity metric because, like, in all schools, including Sanford and Harvard, a whole lot of people apply that were never actually serious about attending. But if you look at, you know, of the percentage of applications who actually enrolls, it's kind of 2 or 3%. That doesn't mean we're rejecting 97 or 98%. But I would guess of the people who, you know, are eligible and whatever Beller, I guess it's somewhere around 10%.
Mhmm. Yep. Even for the people who are eligible, they feel like, hey. Wow. You know, there was a high bar to get in here. I got in. I'm in something that's worthy. Mhmm. And that sort of kicks off these tribal network effects. Yeah. I think there are a couple layers to that and both are very important. The first is the shared experience. Right? You are surrounded by other Pete. And I feel this way about my combinator, which I went through.
You know, I've never really had that experience within a school setting, but I do feel that way about know, my y combinator cohort and my y combinator batch my y combinator group, but you are working together with a bunch of people toward a shared mission and you're helping each other along the way. So we start a new cohort every month. And this cohorts can be, you know, relatively big. They can be cohorts of 7 the year 80.
And then they were broken down into smaller and smaller groups until you kind of have a pod of seven or eight people, and people will move in and out of pods or whatever Beller, but that group of 7 or Pete people, you know, you become very, very close with them, and then you become somewhat close, you know, if you'd take one click out and with the next forty people and you become a little bit close with the people in your cohort of eighty people.
And then, you know, broadly speaking, you begin to feel affinity with anybody who has the name Lambda School attached them because you're on a shared mission. You're on a journey together. And I think that's incredibly important. And then the other element of it that I think is also important is the school's incentives of, you know, the staff and instructors are entirely aligned with the incentives of the student. So, you know, if our students don't get hired, we lose our jobs. Right?
You know, our goals are the same. We need you to get hired. We need you to get a high paying job, and we're going to do everything in our power to make that happen. That's pretty unique to, you know, certainly to my university experience, but imagine to the average school know, your outcomes are not usually tied to one another in a way that they are within Lambda School. Right. The job placement department at a university is a group of six people.
They're kinda divorced from the teachers and from the administration. And Yeah. They've got a binder of job listings. They may help you, like, provide your resume, but you know, 1st of all, we're working with the companies even when we're building the curriculum saying, you know, what do you want? What do you need? Where are students doing Beller? Where are they falling short? What do we need to adjust?
All the way down through, you know, a sales team that's reaching out to hundreds of companies a week saying, you know, can we get a Lambda School Grad in there and give him a shot? So the entire school, we're laser focused on one thing, and that is helping you get hired, which is not true at the average educational institution. And, you know, some have different goals, and that's fine. But our purpose in life is to help you start your career. Right.
And one of the things that helps build up the reputation and the alignment is quality. Right? Sending out quality alums. The people who hire them say amazing things about them, the next Lambda school person that comes needs to be equally good, and then it builds on itself so that there's this fitness signaling. You want the brand Lambda to signal fitness out there and and Secondary education is largely about that at this Flint, isn't it? I mean, the Berkeley CS grad says 98% of what I learned.
I needed to know to do my job. I learned on the job. Only learned 2% of it actually during my 4 years of getting my CS degree at Berkeley. And so there's been this disconnect, but Berkeley signals high status. Berkeley signals fitness to learn. Fitness to do the job. Yeah. I mean, the way you look at universities right now is kind of 90% based on what their selection criteria is and 10% what the you know, the course content is.
So, you know, just as an example for that, you'll notice that everybody is hyperparanoid about what school their children will be able to get Flint. To the point that there's scandal and cheating and lying and fraud and all sorts of stuff getting into the school, but, you know, you'll note that you've never heard somebody say, well, I don't want my son or daughter to get into Berkeley because they won't be able to handle Berkeley once they're in. That's just not a topic of conversation.
Once you're in, you're Flint. And, you know, the average Ivy League grad that you talked to would say, you know, the courses were difficult, but not too challenging. Really, it's the the selection It's the filter on getting in. And I'm interested to see how that evolves over time because that used to be, you know, partially grades, partially SAT, partially character. We're moving away from SAT and testing, which kind of served as a proxy for a general cognitive aptitude test.
Or, you know, skills test of some sort. And that's kind of going away in a lot of universities. So now we're falling back on grades and essay writing, which is a totally different filter. And so I'm really curious to see how that plays out over the next 15, 20 years because we're starting to measure a fundamentally different thing. When determining who gets into which school. Have there been other countries that you've studied that you think have a model for where we're going with all this?
I think Germany has the closest to what I've seen of any education system that makes sense, but it's fundamentally different in the sense that you know, people by the time they're 15 or 16 are kind of, you know, when they graduate their high school, which is at 15 or team, and that's not the perfect analogy.
They're deciding what they want to do, whether it's a trade or whether it's going to research or whether, you know, they're in their multiple optional paths, and they'll start to pick in Ukraine. University was something that you did when you were seventeen a lot of the time. Not when you were in 2021. So use that word university, but it means a bunch of different things depending on where you're at. But the thing that I think is healthy about the German model is, a, I it starts younger.
Like, I think the average American given the right tools and skill set would actually be able to graduate high school at 14, 15, 16, which is probably a little bit of a contrarian belief. And then, importantly, once you're done with the equivalent of high school, it's not one size fits all. It's not everybody to a university, no matter what you wanna do, go study 2 years of generals, and then a little bit of specification.
If you wanna do something else, you're gonna spend another 2 or 3 years, you know, getting a master's or whatever else you're going directly into the path that you want to go, and you're doing so with much less time and much less debt to the extent that, you know, frankly a lot of Germans start their lives 4 years earlier than Americans do. So it's just very, very different. Got it.
And so there's a lot of cultural norms in that network that's reinforcing that behavior know, because I think if you read New York Times articles from the seventies eighties around education, they're identical to what we're talking about today. Particularly through k through 12 and you're addressing the higher ed stuff, but that also is almost identical. I mean, really nothing has changed in 40 years as far as I can tell.
Yeah. It's become more entrenched as laws and regulation and government backed financing operations kind of play into that. So you can't really get a Pell Grant today to go to a trade school. You can only get a Pell Grant to go to a title for approved school, which generally speaking means, you know, 4 year college or a community college. So the assumption is that you know, if you're playing by the government's rules, you will go to a university. Otherwise, you're on your own. Right.
So we woke up with system we had. And everyone says, okay. That's what we've got. Let's make it better. And everyone says, yeah. We should make it better. How do we make it better? Oh, let's get people more loans so that they can afford to go so that everybody can afford to go. Great. And so layer after layer after layer gets built on top of whatever we had at the beginning, metastasizing it, and making it so it's really inflexible and so getting worse.
And then you've got US NewsWorld Report in 1981, gives us this gamification of education where we now have this leaderboard. And then everybody just reads the leaderboard and conforms their lives to it. Yep. And yet so here, we've got a Lambda School breakout. How many graduates do you have per year at this point? Depends on, you know, how you're cutting the air, but call it a couple 1000. 2000. Got it. So about the size of a Harvard undergrad. That's a lot. So congratulations, man.
That's amazing. Bring them together. You put them into cohorts, and you organize them very clearly to talk to each other, connect with each other, think of themselves as a group and you can get up to 2000 after whatever you're doing now 4 years, 3 years you've been doing this. In order for it to really blow up, does it need to not be so synchronized? Been organized.
I mean, we've got things like Udacity and whatnot where people are going in and taking their own education into their own hands rather than sort of being led through the process. How do you think about the self serve versus the Morgan?
Yeah. So I think, you know, if you look at the history of what I'll call online education, you know, somewhere about 12 years ago, there's these things called mooks, a massive open online courses that everybody was extremely excited So that was basically, you know, you're gonna point to camera at a Harvard lecturer, record their entire class, and put it online, homework, and all.
And there are, you know, large scale mooc providers such as Coursera or Udacity or edx that work directly with universities. There are kind of unofficial unaccredited providers such as Udemy or, you know, people can use teachable to create their own I I think what we found in that experiment was the completion rate was just really low. As in, like, 3%. Yeah. Tiny tiny. The analogy I would use is, like, the concept of providing the content was actually not that novel or unique.
In fact, you know, you can get any of that information in the library and have been able to for 200 years. So maybe, you know, having a video recording of somebody explaining it is marginally better, but it's not, you know, 10x better than what happens in, you know, your average school.
What is happening now is I think we are adopting to internet native education which is how do we take, you know, this medium of the internet and how do we morph it around the people instead of just taking what happened in a physical classroom and recording it and putting it up online. There are different ways that you can do that asynchronously or synchronously. The more important question I think is what is the interaction like?
How does a student know where they are versus where they need to go and what's in between those things. How do they get help when they're stuck? Do they feel a part of a community or not? You know, all the rage right now, and I think that the word was coined by the founder of Vabin is cohort based courses. So Yes. It's going to be online and it's going to be available asynchronously, but we're going to reintroduce that element of community, and we're all going to participate and work together.
And so, you know, to analogize that there are a couple different models. I often look at fitness as an example. You know, there is now soulcycle or Paloton or all of these kind of group class experiences that you can take asynchronously, but for some reason, you know, something flips in human mind when we know that we're doing something synchronously with other people, even if it's, you know, you're not in the same room.
And then there are more kind of personalized customization models an example of that would be future fit or noom where, you know, you have a personal trainer who works with you asynchronously they're going to provide you your workout every day. And it's, you know, an Apple Watch app and it's gonna monitor your movements and all of that and give the data back to the instructor who's going to kind of day by day guide you. And those are 2 different models, but they didn't exist even 5 years ago.
And I think they're incredibly fascinating I don't know how it will shake out in the long run, both doing things online synchronously with large groups of people and having a level of customization that would be difficult to impossible to create in an offline world are two trends that I find incredibly interesting. So continuing that thought, what are some of these other things that you find interesting in the educational space.
So cohort based courses, the idea of people being together doing something connectively online. Mhmm. And then the level of personalization, I mean, it's been the promise for, you know, the past 5 years that AI will be able to, you know, work directly with the student and know, you know, what they're missing and what they ought to be doing and help correct them, you know, a little bit has been coming in 5 years for the last 15 years kind of thing.
There's starting to be some really interesting applications. Without saying too much, there are personalized AI based coaches that will look at how you code and tell you how to fix your formatting you know, how to rename your variables or whatever else. Mhmm. And they're still in their infancy. Like if this is self driving cars, this is Now now there are cars that are pointing out when you're veering outside of the Flint. So we're not, you know, level 5 autonomy by any stretch.
You can imagine you know, 10 years down the road, everybody basically having their own private tutor available at all times. That's very cheap. One on one tutoring has been a superior way to learn since forever. There's a study by a gentleman named Bloom.
He calls it the 2 Sigma problem where students who are working one on one with a tutor and working until mastery and then moving on instead of working in a big group will perform 2 standard deviations better than the mean, which means the average student will, in that environment will beat out 98% of students in the average environment. So researchers in academia and pedagogy have known that for some time. It's just incredibly expensive to give everybody their own one on one tutor.
So online environments between cohort based and personalization are kind of making that possible for, you know, a fraction of the price. And we're still in the early days of that, but it's starting to work. We've seen, you know, early, early aspects of it, but it's still early, but it's super interesting. That is interesting. And so, you know, it's interesting. You give us a list of things that you think that schools need to provide. And the last one you mentioned seemed really different.
The first ones were all skills. And the last thing you mentioned was, are they part of a community? Why is that Morgan? Given that this AI is gonna have a one to one relationship and teach you faster and give you 2 Sigma deviation from the norm given, you know, that, you know, that zero marginal cost to get the content why is it important to feel like you're part of a community? Do you know yet?
I think the founder of Paloton, and this is somewhat related to gaining skills, but also somewhat not has done a really good job of pointing out our and this is not necessarily just an American phenomenon, but it is perhaps a modern phenomenon in that people are feeling a lack of community more broadly. And he even specifically points out, you know, look at the decline of religion and look at what religion used to provide that is fundamental to a human need.
And how can we provide that sense of community, that sense of helping people, that sense of you know, something being greater than oneself. And, I mean, he very explicitly crafted Paloton to recreate that experiment to the extent that you know, they studied ancient texts and how candles used to set the mood and they built the lighting in their studios accordingly.
So whether it's related to the knowledge acquisition or not, I do think there is something to the element that where communities are are where we want to go. If you want people to gain skill acquisition, the number one problem is making them show up. And so if you're a part of a community working together toward a shared goal. You're going to spend more time. You're going to show up, and that, you know, it's problem 1 to be solved for education.
Hey. You know, I saw a a 2 that, you put out what it takes to make a startup successful as misunderstood and underestimated by basically everyone who has never worked inside 1. What do you think makes startup successful that most people misunderstand or that they underestimate? I think the average person who's never worked in a startup will grossly underestimate the level of pain that sort of goes through the amount of change, the amount of brokenness, the amount of shifts that take place.
I think what really enables a startup to be successful is getting a company out of its own way. I think the most important thing for any company to do is to figure out exactly what the customer wants. And when I say exactly, I mean, exactly exactly in a way that often the customer will not even recognize and then getting everything else out of the way so that you can serve that need. And I look around, there's so many ways to be distracted as a company.
In any given time, as you start to scale, you know, you've got hiring problems, you'll have people problems, you'll be in the press You will get sued at some point. There are so many little things that just come at you from every angle and poly retention in every possible direction. And the job of a startup is just remain aligned and fight through all of that and continue to fix the problem for the customer, which is a hundred times easier to say than it is to do. Got it.
And when you say exactly, do you mean down to the word on the email, or do you mean exactly meaning the distilled essence of the core of what they want? Yeah. I mean, both. Probably Morgan the latter, but and one of the difficult aspects of it is I mean, when we started Lambda School, what everybody would tell you is that they wanted a reputable school. They wanted reviews. They wanted social proof. They wanted you to be written about in the news.
But, you know, as I talked to folks, what you kind of could suss out is what they're really wanting was just to eliminate the risk. They're afraid that it wasn't going to work, and they were going to be on the hook. So, you know, that's one of the reasons we created the income share agreement and made it as popular as it is. Students wouldn't have ever told us, hey. You should use an income share agreement. They didn't even know what that was.
They had a problem, and they thought their problem was lack of money. You have to get to know them well enough to recognize that the problem was actually risk, and being unable to take risk. And so you had to find a way to enable them to take risk without suffering the downside, and then everything starts to work. And I think, you know, if you look at the great creators over time, they can identify what people want more than the people themselves can. That's very, very difficult to do.
And I wouldn't profess to be an expert in that by any stretch, but to the extent that you can, that becomes kind of the most important thing that happens within your company. Got it. Yeah. You happen to do it right this time. Right? You happen to figure out what they really wanted this time. I mean, one aspect of it. I think we're still figuring out other things along the way. So how did you get to know your users well enough? Was there a that you could tell other startup founders.
Because remember, our audience here is other startup founders like you and me. I mean, the classic Y Combinator advice, which is basically work on your product and talk to your users is very true. So the way we discovered this is we would teach free classes kind of as lead gen kind of as a way for people who are curious about the school, but not ready to commit to get exposure. And so we have thousands and thousands of people in free classes.
And for the 1st few months, I would just spend all day talking to, you know, these students or these would be students depending on how you're looking at and just asking them like, hey. What can we do for you? What would get you to enroll in the school? What's holding you back? What are you excited about? What are you afraid about? You know, what makes you nervous? What makes you happy?
What makes said and pretty quickly figured out that everyone would tell you that the thing holding them back was access to money. But then if you said, okay. Well, you can take out a loan, that didn't solve problem either. It wasn't actually money. It was actually risk and ability to take risk. You only really find that out by just talking to them in high density and at high bandwidth for a very long time.
So if we look at a five year old today, just entering the school system, what do you think his or her best decisions could be about college in 13 years? What are the frameworks for thinking through this? That's my daughter. She's 5. So I think 1st and foremost, it depends on what they want to do. Right? If they want to become a researcher. Yeah. But how do they learn what they wanna do? I mean, this is one of the big issues.
A lot of people wanna become teachers because all they know is teachers because they were in the school the whole time, or they wanna be a doctor because their mom was doctor. How do you even know what there is to do? Yeah. Exposure to a lot of different things is, you know, I consider myself pretty lucky that, you know, I've lived in a bunch of different countries.
And when even when we were kids, you know, I don't come from a wealthy background, but basically all of my parents' money that they had kind of dumped into experiences and travel for us. And I think that's incredibly important. Just exposure to as much as you can possibly gain exposure to. And, you know, there's still and this is one of my frustrations with the fact that everybody picks what they do when they're 18 and they're stuck in that thing for life.
So step 1 is, you know, getting rid of that concept that you pick when you graduate high school, and that's your thing that you're going to do forever. I just don't think that's realistic because I didn't know that, like, a lot of the people I'm surrounded by now, product managers and software engineers and data scientists, I didn't even know that was a thing when I graduated high school. You know, my dad was an accountant, so I knew that accountants existed.
I knew that doctors and lawyers and teachers existed. That kind of is it. There's a whole world of different careers and different paths, some of which I just didn't know about, and some of which didn't even exist Pete. So back to the five year old today, how should she be thinking about what college is like in 13 years or non college? I mean, I don't even think about it in terms of, like, call it or not.
I think about it in terms of, like, you know, explore as much as you can and find that thing that you love that, for some reason, people are willing to pay you to do and the valuable to the world and then work backwards from whatever that thing is. You know, so I have no idea what my daughter will do. I get nervous all the time because I know that if I had done what my parents thought I should do because of their exposure to the job market, I would have studied the wrong thing.
So perhaps counterintuitively, my guard is always up about taking advice from your parents on career path because they're looking at the job market the way it was you know, 20 years ago, whereas you need to be looking at the way it will be 20 years from now, which is not impossible to predict. So, you know, I think some aspect of finding what you're passionate about getting in the middle of it in any way you can, and then figuring out what's valuable within that is a pretty solid Pete. To go.
I don't know. I could be totally wrong when I consider myself lucky that I stumbled into a lot of stuff that I stumbled into. And, you know, it's easy to imagine with a couple different twists or plot trends in my life. I could be doing something totally different. That's pretty wild. Well, Austin, it is a real pleasure to spend time with you, my friend. Very clear why you've got such a great cult following on Twitter and around Lambda School. You're a remarkable guy. No. Really? I it.
I love the thinking you're doing and, you know, giving the world such a great option and such, you know, in terms of how people move forward, you know, as part of pursuing the American dream, whether it's self determination or if it's money or if it's status or whatever, people are here to do, you know, you're creating another option that didn't really exist before in a country that has become very homogeneous, and it's thinking about how life is to be lived. So thanks for that.
Yeah. Anytime. Alright, Manuel. It's great to talk to you. You've been listening to the NFX podcast. You can rate and review this show on Apple podcast and you can subscribe to the NFX podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information on building iconic technology companies, visitnfx.com.