Noob School - Episode 98: Cracking the Code with Peter Barth

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

Today on Noob School, we're joined by Peter Barth of Flatiron School - an organization which teaches people of all walks of life to master the art of coding, from software design to cybersecurity engineering. Tune in to learn more about what Flatiron School has to offer, as well as a look into the life of Peter, from key experiences in the sales world, to the story of how he got to know the Wolf of Wall Street himself - Jordan Belfort. Check out what the Noob School website has to offer: SchoolForNoobs.com I'm going to be sharing my secrets on all my social channels, but if you want them all at your fingertips, start with my book, Sales for Noobs: https://amzn.to/3tiaxsL Subscribe to our newsletter today: https://bit.ly/3Ned5kL #noobschool #salestraining #sales #training #entrepreneur #salestips #salesadvice

New School. All right, well, welcome back to Noob School. Today I've got a good friend and one of Greenville's best businessmen that I know, Peter Barth. Thanks, John. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. It took us a while. It did.

There's all this, all this travel you got around the world. So we got it done today. We did. That's good. Well, Peter's done a lot. Okay, we're going to back up at the beginning here in a minute, but for the moment, Peter owns and runs You have some investors

Or is all yours Actually so I don't own this one You know you're running it So yeah So chief product officer Slavs chief operating officer And it's flat iron Flatiron school

So it's the Biggest coding school in the world Depending on how you slice and dice the numbers It's definitely there One of the top couple Yeah so somebody is rolling along In life And they're maybe unhappy with being

A nurse or dental hygienist or construction worker or sales guy or whatever and they have some proclivity for computers they can go to your coding school yep and in what six months how many yes we've got a couple options kind of the if you're going full time so we have an in person a couple campuses around the country and online those are 15 weeks long okay and if you want to do it part-time it's usually in the 40 50 weeks kind of part-time online okay so full-time and then part time is almost a year, but you get a degree in some type of coding. Now, is it Python or what is?

Yes, we actually have four tracks. So software engineering, and we use a number of languages, but Python's the core kind of language we use there. We do product design, we do data science, which covers machine learning and artificial intelligence and kind of all of that field, and then cybersecurity. So those are the four areas, and, yeah, our kind of core is people looking to switch careers. So most of our students have already been in the workforce a couple years, may or may not have a college degree, but realize the career track they're on is not the one they want to stay on. Right.

And we help folks transition. Right, right. Well, I've met a few of them, and boy, they're just, they're so much happier to have taken action to change their lives. And you give them a way to do that fairly quickly. Yeah. And do you still have that guarantee where if they don't have a job of some level that they don't have to pay for it?

We don't, mostly because it's just rome. regulatory strings that popped up over the year around the field. But it basically works out to that. So over 90% of the graduates of the program find employed right away. Within the first year, they're all making more money than they were prior to the program. So it's got a really nice ROI. It's a quick way to transition careers. And usually you're making more than the cost of the program in the first year.

Right. And so what is it about running a coding school that you have specific, knowledge about that makes you so good at it because you've done it like two or three times now with different schools. It's a really good question and I've thought about this one quite a bit but you know I'm not the smartest guy in the world you know I think you meet lots of founders and some of them are really hard workers and some of them are you know geniuses and I'm really passionate about this space so kind of got into it in the beginning with I have five kids and kind of we've homeschooled our kids and seen how they're all different and and how we've

kind of traditional education may not be the right fit for some of them. And so I really got hooked. And it wasn't, honestly, it wasn't the fight for me. I'm a college dropout. So as we're starting to think through that for my kids and then also thinking about what I was doing as business then was incubating young startup companies and investing in them. And they had this need for talent. And the universities weren't really producing what they needed. So kind of solving both sides of that equation was like, all right, I know the business side of this human capital need. and I know the student side, I've got this firsthand experience with my own kids. It's not a fit.

So how do we marry the two things together? And so honestly, I think we got lucky early that the process worked. But then we learned a lot. And I think we learned a lot from being one very kind of scrappy and close to the action. So the Iron Yard was the first business. We scaled a ton. So we ended up in 25 different campuses. And a lot of kind of tier two and tier three markets where I personally was very

close to action. And my co-founders, we were in the cities and working with the actual students. We didn't kind of get very far away. And so that firsthand knowledge and kind of being able to iterate, what's working. And it's kind of a unique thing in that you get to observe life change in your customer. Like people ask why I still do it a number of times. And I said, that's the thing. Like it's a scalable, repeatable business. And I get to observe life change in my customer. It's not small. It's not like I'm entertaining them. We literally help people change their life. Right. And so I think the fact that, like, that has been something that I've been successful with was able to repeat and then have just stayed really passionate about.

So now for 15 years I've been doing that and tinkering on it. And I'm thinking this business, it's really a human service business. It's not a technology product. We're teaching technology. Yeah. But it's really about, like, keeping the focus on who's your customer, what's their experience, how do they actually get the job? And so that's what I've done for the last 15 years. I've just done it for 15 years, got better at.

So the key areas, I'm trying to understand me, you have to understand how your website works, how you attract and convert people to customers. Sure. And then there's, I guess, getting and maintaining some level of excellence with the teachers. Yeah. So the interesting thing I think about my business

that most people wouldn't think about is, and traditional education is not this way, but I have two customers. So we charge students for education. Yeah. But my ultimate customer, is an employer. If they will hire the people coming out of the product, and if they hire the people coming out of the product, it makes my primary customer who pays money really happy. And so we have to strike that balance. And so what we've done, and like the model makes this work where it doesn't in traditional kind of four-year university is technology changes really quickly.

We have to constantly adapt the curriculum to match what the employer wants to hire. And in a normal university, that's years, like the process to build a new curriculum and get it approved and get it out into the program. for the kids who are going through a four-year program. So it may be eight years by the time you notice change before you got graduates coming down on that. And we change every time. So three-month-long cohorts, every cohort might be slightly different than the last one. And so what we do is we spend a lot of time with employers and what do you actually need? What are you seeing with our current graduates that you don't like?

We should see more of different backgrounds, different skills. And we constantly are tuning that dial. And so that's the thing that we've done really well is make sure the product we're producing is really hireable in the market, in the market and if it is we know the kind of core paying customer will be happy because that's what they they kind of care about what they're learning they really want the outcome they want the different career right yeah so that's the part we focus on yeah okay okay we'll we'll come back and flesh out flat iron some more but let's let's back up

the beginning I don't I don't remember you told me but don't remember where you grew up oh good question so a little bit everywhere so my dad was a pastor and then really a church planter so we moved every couple years and started a new church a church a church church planter. That's what it's called. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I literally start new churches. So I spent most of my childhood, third grade through 12th grade in central Florida. Okay. Number of different cities, primarily a city called Newport Ritchie, which is just north of Clearwater or Tampa. But born in Chicago, lived in Knoxville, Tennessee, Jackson, Mississippi, and a bunch of other places, mostly south. You were homeschooled, right? I wasn't. I went to public school. My kids are homeschooled, yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So, yeah, when I people ask where I from, usually I say Newport, Richie, Florida. Okay. And then, you are a super smart guy I'm sure of that when you were in public school in central Florida did you find yourself learning anything yes for sure I learned lots

and I think you know talked before about this but I think we have a little some similarities and I was an athlete in high school and so I played all the sports and that was kind of my full-time thing in high school was sports I got good grades

and it came fairly easy. I didn't spend much time studying. I wasn't the best students by any mean. I think I have some mild dyslexia, specifically writing papers and literature were not strong places for me. But I made it work, and, you know, I got good grades and was able to get into a good college.

But that wasn't, high school wasn't really about the academics for me, but I definitely learned lots. And the places I personally kind of attached to were really problem-solving, and so that for me was math and science. So you knew you had some proclivity toward that early on. Okay. Well, that makes sense.

And then you, what was your best sport? Basketball. Basketball. Oh, man. Too short for it, but you should have been on our team. We needed you. That's cool. That's cool.

So you went from Port Ritchie, Newport Ritchie, Newport, Richie, Florida to Vanderbilt. Yeah. And how did you pick? That's a great thing. school, obviously. How did you pick Randy? Yeah, so this is like the basketball dreams bursting. I was decent in high school, you know, good for, you know, my school. And I had a vision of my head of playing Division I basketball. Nobody was recruiting me for Division I had some offers for D2 and D3.

And my dad really wanted me to go to a good school, you know, so we did the Ivy League tour and Duke and Vanderbilt and a number of other schools like that. And so in my mind, Vanderbilt kind of was the straddle was like it was the good school that dad was going to be happy with and it was in the SEC and I thought maybe I could walk onto this team they're kind of you know lower in the bottom half of the new division and the team was I was never going to make that team I was in the practice squad with the girls team yeah but that's what sold me on Vanderbilt I like Nashville and I thought I might be able to play basketball which was never going to happen well you um I know that you didn't have any trouble with your courses there but you did decide you didn't want to

go to school there anymore. Yeah. Was that after how long? Pretty much right away. And so, my caveat this, I loved Vanderbilt. You did love that. Like, I loved the people, the environment. I just wasn't really interested in school at that time.

Yeah. And I didn't know what I wanted to do. Yeah. Right? Because everything had been sports until that point. Yeah. And so when the sports bubble popped, you know, I joined the fraternity and did intramural sports.

And school was just kind of, you know, it's, some of my classes were interesting. And so I started as a physics major and realized pretty quick that, like, I was going to have to be all in, you know, calculus three in advanced physics. And I just wasn't that serious about it. So I ended up switching to the school of engineering and got into a computer science track, which I enjoyed. But I really didn't. I was in an 8 a.m. German class. And it was just like, it was like, there's no way I'm doing this. So it was pretty quick.

I didn't actually drop out to my sophomore year. But for the most part, I stopped going to class after the first semester. No, that's all. What's interesting about the, we'll back up to high school for just a second. You know, I think both of us had, you know, a wading towards sports in high school. And, you know, in retrospect, I'm not, you know, crying about it, but in retrospect, it would have been smarter if I, if I was smart enough to know, that's not the most important thing. Yeah. I mean, imagine what you could have learned with four years of nothing to do but learn things.

Sure. In high school and then go to college and learn something. So, you know, it works out, but I think people should smarten up about learning sooner. Yeah. Give them a big jump. Yeah. Although I would say about sports, and we talk about a lot in my family with our kids, is the thing that I, it's one, we did a lot of gaming too, not video gaming at that point. We didn't have most video games, we had a little bit, but we've been a lot of board games and cards in my family as well.

But between sports and playing games, one, we really focused on competition. and knowing if I really wanted to win, I had to figure out all the rules. You have to figure out how close you can get to this line and work around this thing. And the rule says that, but can you interpret it a different way and actually win the game with a different strategy?

And that was true in sports, you know, this team of mostly shorter guys, how are we going to beat the different team and have to play, you know, run a gun or whatever. But having that frame of mind constantly figuring out how to win was definitely learning. And then it definitely helped me as an entrepreneur,

which I recognize when I'm with other people thinking about starting new things is like I tend to think, I think this is true with most entrepreneurs tend to think about the problem and how to win a little bit differently. And honestly, I trace that back to sports. Well, good point. I take back everything I said. Because I know, you know, we had a public company every quarter. It was like, okay, that quarter's over. New quarter.

We got a new game. How are we going to do it? And, you know, it was like a game. It was. Yeah. All right, take it back. All right, so you went, I know you went home to New Jersey, New York. New York.

Yeah. And you didn't know what you're going to do when you dropped out, so you started working at a golf club. Yeah. And at this golf club, you met Jordan Belfort. Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street. That's right. Holy cow. Yeah.

And you were playing golf with him? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so, yeah, interesting. So, you grew up in Central Florida. My parents moved to Long Island. Literally dropped me off Vanderbilt and the moving truck. the first time I go home is, you know, it's not my home.

There's not even a bedroom in the house. You know, I slept on the couch in the basement when I was home from school. But yeah, so when I came home from school the first year, it was like, well, what are you going to do for the summer? And I had worked at some golf courses in high school. And so I'll go do that. I'll go, you know, caddy or work in the bag room or something. And so the north shore along is a lot of money and the clubs are very expensive and exclusive. And so I kind of worked my way through the clubs and kind of ended up at one of the lower end clubs that had a bunch of

interesting characters or some kind of mafia guys that were there and it was just kind of weird kind of odds and ends kind of guys at the club and I worked in the bag room and the course would close at like 7 o'clock on weeknights and Jordan who I didn't know anything about professionally he was just most of the club

was 65 or older and Jordan was 35 and he'd come out at 630 and want to get around in I'm like we close in 30 minutes but what happened is often we'd play nine together You know, either I'd set him up and we'd talk before and after or he'd ask if I'd come with him and keep the course over for another hour so he could get his rounded. So I got to know this guy who was, you know, honestly, on a personal level, we had similarities. He was an athlete and was competitive.

And so I'd know from that context. So as we would, you know, talk and not just Jordan with some other guys at the club as well. You know, I'd say, I'm not really interested in school. But he happened to, and actually another guy at the club named Tom, who were both in the stockbroker's. world and said, you know what, you don't need a bachelor's degree to be a stockbroker. And I'm like, what? How's that possible? And then I don't know, you should go visit our buddy who runs a stockbroker's firm. So I did. And yeah, they were like validated. Oh, you can get a job here. It's a sales job. And you're going to come in. You're going to make a bunch of cold calls.

But if you're sharp and you can pass the exams, you can move up and be a broker pretty quick. And that was kind of, I was like already mentally checked out of school. So they're, all right, I'm in. Let's do it. And start, you know, started as a stockbroker, which really was. a cold calling job. Yeah. Yeah. So he was, was, was Jordan already out of the biz? He was. Okay. So, so he was, it was a bunch of the guys I ended up working with worked with Jordan at a previous fund. So they always told stories about it. And then I knew him personally. But he wasn't running the fund I was at. But yeah, it was still an interesting environment. And I was there for a short period of time once I kind of realized that they were really were kind of high pressure sales. Yeah.

I moved to Morgan Stanley. But I spent the first six months at a, um, at a, um, two. Duke and company. Unbelievable. Duke. Duke. Duke. Yes. Okay.

So you did that. Then Morgan Stanley. Yeah. How did you, I don't know, how did you get from there to Greenville? Yeah. So, what did I miss? Yeah, no, it's a good question. So I was working in Long Island.

I got married. My wife was year ahead of me at Vandy and she finished. So we got married, but we're kind of a part in the first year while she finished up school. And then when she graduated, we decided to move to Nashville, which where we were. had gone to school. And so I transferred to Morgan Stanley from New York to Nashville. And it was completely different. In New York, it was over the phone. There was a lot of money. And it was kind of fast-paced. And in Nashville, it was taking senior citizens out to lunch and pitching a mutual fund. And I was like, this is not sports anymore. There's no competition. This is like not what I'm doing.

So, yeah, that was a short stint at Morgan Stanley in Nashville. And at that point, I quit. And I don't remember what I did immediately. We ended up moving pretty quick. My wife had done kind of her first kind of internship out of college there at a marketing firm. And she got a job doing PR and event planning at a large law firm in Indianapolis. So we moved and I actually went to retail. So I just like, I don't know what I want to do.

And I walked to Lowe's, you know, first day from my apartment and said, you're hiring? And they said, sure. So I started in commercial sales selling the contractors at the Lowe's and kind of quickly moved up and ended up as kind of one of two assistant store managers running the Lowe's. And that was a fun, having to be the right place, the right time, is the very first big box Lowe store. So the first big outside Lone and Garden, I helped like build it all from scratch as the very first Lowe's concept in South Indianapolis. So, yeah, I learned a lot about, you know, the kind of consistent thing there was like work, I did well at the stock workers thing because I worked hard. And again, it was like competition. It was a room full of 400 guys all seeing who could put their name higher on the board.

And I liked that. And then Lowe's was like it was pretty quick to move up. Again, kind of a little bit of a competitive environment. And so those things were attractive, but I knew I didn't want to do either one long term. But anyways. So we ended up in Indianapolis. Greenville comes later, but we had our first child. And he was sick.

Later on, we found celiac disease instead of my wife. So the first couple years was tough. and my parents had moved back to South Florida. And so we said, well, we'll come move by you for some support. So we ended up in South Florida for a year, which was just kind of retired New Yorkers. It was the reason why we didn't live in New York. So then my mother-in-law lived here, and my uncle lives just at the border, kind of by Landrum. And so we thought we'd moved to Charlotte, but visited Greenville and fell in love with Main Street and moved here 17 years ago now.

That's unbelievable. Yeah, it's random. They'd never even heard of it before. That's unbelievable. That's so great. so great for our city that people like you will just see it and say, I think I'd, certainly, I mean, I'm a little biased, but if I looked here and I looked at Charlotte, I think I'd much rather be here. Oh, yeah. There isn't even a downtown Charlotte you want to walk in.

It was very clear at that point. Like, we came on, we visited a whole bunch of houses in Charlotte and then came here for lunch. And it was like super clear after spending two days in Charlotte looking around. Like, this is the place you want to live. Like, this has got all the stuff we're looking for. in a city and the people are friendly and proud of their city. Honestly, that's one of the things that I think stood out the most was like the sense of pride by the average Greenvilleian.

It was just like Greenville is on the move. It's a cool place. I was like, I want to be part of that. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you are. So not to back up too much, but those two sales jobs you had, the one at Lowe's and then the one before in New York or New Jersey, wherever it was. What positive did you take from those that the noobs might want to hear?

Yeah, so I think for sure at the brokerage firm, the very first sales experience, I mean, had done a little like door-to-door stuff in high school, you know, selling candy bars or whatever, but first real sales, and it was a tough business. I got a, you know, didn't sit. I had a desk like what you had with no chair. You didn't get a chair until you had opened 10 qualified leads. You had to stand and call. Yeah, stand and call.

So 12 hours a day, we worked all the time zones. And literally they would just bring you a stack of cards down in Bradstreet. leads and the goal was to get some man on the phone and you know acknowledge or confirm that they had at least $100,000 in liquid assets in a brokerage fund somewhere and that they'd be willing to have you send some information for them and if you get 10 of those a day you'd hand them off to account opener and and so anyways I got good about figuring out you hear lots of nose I mean I would call 350 people a day it was a lot of phone calls for 12 hours and you'd get out of 350 you get 10 yeses And that was the goal.

And so what I learned, I learned a number of things there, but one was like, just persistence. Like it would happen, but you have to put in the hours. And I would come in early to catch guys before their secretaries were in.

And, you know, it was all over the phone stuff. But hard work paid off. And, and I say it was fun. So that was like a learning for me. It was like first real professional job. But like having that competitive camaraderie

because there's a bunch of other people trying to do the same thing. And competing was still something I enjoy. So it let me to bring that sports thing into a work environment. Yeah. But that was the thing I learned the most was just hard work. Like if you can work harder than the people around you, especially earlier, you know, it makes a whole lot of difference.

You know, so I was able to move very quickly. And honestly, most of the other guys who started a cold callers were gone in a couple weeks. Yeah. I couldn't do it. It was too much pressure. Yeah. But I had fun with it. It felt like sports again.

Yeah. That's nice. So, I mean, a couple of good lessons there I hear. Number one is there are numbers in every job. Yeah. You might not like it. You got to call 350 to get 10, but that's, that's a ratio. So if you want to get 10 a day, you've got to call 350.

You know, that's a ratio. So I like that. And also, you know, when you look at the big picture of, let's say, a boiler room, you know, a Jordan, Jordan Belfort boiler room, you know, the person or persons who get out in early and get out in front and get a little bit of a lead, everybody knows it. And they just kind of lay down for you. Because they know that, you know, Pete, Pete means business, and we're not going to be able to catch Pete.

Yeah? He's already got three. We haven't even got to work yet. And that's the same with sports and everything else. You know, first, talking about the best player ever Michael Jordan, you know, practice the most. Yeah. You know, it's hard to believe because I think I might have just sat back and go, hey, you know, I'm the king. But I mean, he's still, until the time he quit.

Carter. He was the first one of the gym, Larry Bird, all of them. Yeah. And honestly, that psychology did a bunch, I think, in two. One, it gave me confidence. Like, getting in early and getting, you know, getting a couple leads before everybody else showed up. Just, you know, I was in the lead position, which I wanted to be. I'd always been the captain on the sports team.

And so, like, it made me feel confident in my own abilities. And then when everybody else walked in, they, like, they had the psychology, I'm already beaten. Yeah. And that was a big deal, especially in that environment, because every day at 4 o'clock in that environment, everybody put the phone downs and the head guy would come out on the floor. It was 400 people without any doors. It was just all open dust. And everybody put their phone down and you'd have to pitch him.

But he'd have a cold caller from the back row come up and he'd have to pitch the lead guy. And honestly, that was usually your last day. Like, they would just end up, like, getting, you know, crucified and kind of a whole room. And that would leave. It wasn't that they got fired. But I just can't handle the pressure of doing that. But honestly, like, feeling like I was winning every day when it was my turn to do that, I was like, I got this.

I can close this guy. And so, like, those little things actually made all the difference for me. Yeah, that's cool. That's cool. What about Lowe's? Yeah, Lowe's was interesting. So, again, it was like, I'd worked some construction in high school, so I generally knew. And I think what it helped me was knowing my customer, because I had worked on a framing crew for a couple summers through high school.

And that's what I was selling. So commercial sales desk is literally the contractors would come in and say, here's my house plans. I need the package, you know, three days. And so I pretty quickly just figured out what they needed and how I could offer what they needed. they weren't the typical those customers. They weren't going to walk down the road and pick the lumber and put it on their own cart. So if I could make it easy for them,

we were in Indianapolis, and Menards and Home Depot were the two main competition. But if I was happy and willing to read their plans, it didn't ask them to do the stuff that some of the older guys, honestly, in those rooms, were saying, hey, no, no, you got to have the inventory list for me. And said, no, I'll build the inventory list for you. That worked.

And then I built relationships, because this was different than the stock workers, those guys would buy over and over again. They were building new houses. So if I could build a good rapport with that guy, he'd want to come back. And then it was easy to hit quota because I had repeat business where I think a lot of, and I don't know what's like today in those businesses, but there was a lot of high turn. You'd get one guy with one package and next month you'd be starting over.

I built kind of a book of business that was willing to come back over and over again and buy. They won't talk to you. Yeah. Yeah. And so then that was easy to kind of hit the quota. and that was recognized. At that point, Lowe's was still kind of a good old boy company, and there was, you know, guys from Charlotte would come in,

or North Wilkesboro would come in to Indianapolis because we were one of the first big stores, and so they'd see. You know, I was hitting my numbers and beaten numbers. I quickly moved through the management positions, and all still in the one retail box. But, like, again, it paid off. Like the hard work paid off.

But I think more there than in the first place was about getting to know my customer, which was really important. Yeah. I love that. And I've heard this, when I'm a customer occasionally, you know, I'm a little picky about the salespeople. You know, I want them to be a certain way. If they're no good, I just don't want to deal with them. So they're kind of either no good, okay, or just perfect.

And the perfect ones always say something like, John, don't worry about it. We got it all covered. You can go play golf now or jazz or whatever you feel like doing. They just say, white glove. Yep, I got you covered. I love to hear that. Even if it's not exactly true. That's right.

If there's a little bit of work I've got to do, I just want to hear it and feel good for just a minute. Yeah. And if they appreciate your business, right? Yeah. That's another big point. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So thankfully Greenville got you 17 years ago, which, my mind is not mistaken.

I don't know, it was 2005, six? Six, yeah. Perfect timing. Perfect timing for the Boone economy. And you were just new to town and you helped launch our next group, which is our kind of public, private, funded technology support nonprofit, right? Did I say it right? Yeah. Yeah, it started as really like a trade group for CEOs of tech companies.

Tech companies. Yeah. And, you know, it was just, I happened to show up at the right place. place of the right time, honestly, was, so the one part we didn't talk about. So in Indianapolis, I did Lowe's for a short period time and taught myself how to code. Like, I continued back. I liked the computer science classes from Vanderbilt, and I knew I didn't want to stay at Lowe's. So, but I ended up, like, taught myself, and I got to know the human resource gal at Lowe's, who said, my husband runs a payroll company, and he needs somebody who can be a developer.

And they've been around for a long time. They were the first mainframe in Indianapolis, and then there's the 70s. And it was a special. And it was a special. small shop. You know, there were seven or eight people at the company. And I said, listen, they wouldn't take a flyer on me. And what she said was this guy works hard. Right. So he just told her husband, I don't know if he's any good of coding, but you should give this guy a shot. And that was kind of the mentality of the company was they were all like really hard workers. And so I came in and honestly, they like, they had like a DOS product in a Windows 98 world. And so they were like, listen, if you can do anything, it's better than what we got.

And so it was like a great place for me at that point. It was like I was learning. I kind of had carte blanche. There wasn't a whole big infrastructure. But very quickly, I was able to build some things that made the business better. So I worked my way up very quickly. The company grew, became CTO. And then when we moved to Greenville, I had that position but remotely. So I'd spent a year remote and then Greenville. So I knew, based on a couple things that happened, we had an opportunity to sell the business and the partners didn't want to sell.

They said, hey, we've been at this since the 70s. We're retired in five years. We just want to work. You know, we're making enough money. They were okay. And I said, well, I don't want to do payroll for the rest of my life. So when we got here, I knew I'd want to start a business. Like I had a fun kind of building this business, even though it wasn't the founder.

So I had some free time. I was still like doing this full time, but it wasn't requiring all of my mental capacity. So the next would just had one meeting before I showed up. And so when I came, I met the guys of the chamber and they said, you should come to this group. And I came and the other guys around the table were all, you know, in the weeds, running their own business. And they said, we don't have time to like organize the thing. And I said, well, I do. I'll organize the next meeting.

And about a year later, it was, you know, at the point it was the chamber. They said, well, let's go figure out how to build a building. And I, again, like, had the bandwidth, you know, to go and, like, put the pitch together and, you know, and go over City Hall and, you know, and pitch the city and Bob Hughes and about build the next innovation center. But so, one, I had something to offer to that group. And, two, the group was, like, really open to an outsider, which was unique. It is unique. That they were willing to kind of let me, you know, run with some of that. my no means that I do it by myself.

But I think I had something the group needed, which was time. Yeah. And I was willing to do it. And I'm, again, right place, the right time. But, yeah. I mean, I think Greenville is unique. We're not the only people to do it. But if you come from anywhere and you have something to bring to the table and a positive attitude, you're welcomed.

Yeah. And we want everyone to do well. You know, people are not, you know, out to get each other or one up each other. Yeah. And I've seen people come to town that are kind of like that. They just don't hang around very long. They don't. You know, just kind of like run along.

Yeah. It is really what makes Greenville special. People talk about the waterfall and Main Street and all those things are amazing. Yeah. But the people and the sense of pride and openness and like wanting to accomplish something together is like the really attractive thing. You mentioned Bob Hughes. I mean, Bob is just a, you know, a famous renowned developer. Yeah.

And he'll talk to anybody. Anybody. If you have an idea to make Greenville better or he's just, you know, Completely a gentleman. Yeah. So anyway, he's kind of one of our leaders. So after that, unless I'm mistaken, you had the idea for Iron Yard. Yeah.

Is that right? Yeah. Okay. So Iron Yard, let me give you my definition. Yep. I don't know as much about as you did clearly, but I was one floor down from you in the old Bank of America building, which I think Bob owns now. Yeah. Did.

Yeah. Did, yeah. And you were doing a business plan contest. once a year and you pick the 10 best businesses and you'd bring them all to Greenville and you'd put them through a process kind of like the code school

it was a certain period of time and they would kind of build up their business plan and their launch and their TAM and their minimal viable product and all that stuff and then they would like try to raise money or kind of launch at the end of it and you would let people

invest in these companies which I was able to invest in some of them Yeah. And some of them did well. They did. So you were doing that for like six years? It felt like that. I don't think it was that long. Yeah, I mean, what happened there, so we opened the next Innovation Center, and I was doing the remote CTO thing. And two other guys in the building said, let's start a tech company. So we started actually a, it was a sales product called Intro Mojo that was allowed you to pull a sales dossier on somebody before you met. I remember that. Yeah, Colin Martin and Dan Welshman.

And so anyways, we were working on that product for, I don't know, nine months a year. And right when we were kind of ready to really go to market, I reached out to, we were looking to raise money, and I reached out to Brad Feld, who's kind of a famous startup investor. And I knew he was invested in a competitor. So I knew he wasn't going to invest in us. But Brad also kind of holds himself out as I'm willing to meet with anybody anywhere. So actually what happened was he advertises like one day a month that he'll go to the local bookshop in Boulder, and you can book 15 months.

minutes with him. And so I booked it. And then I emailed him and said, I'll fly there if I need to, but will you take it over the phone? And he said, I'll take it over the phone. So I got Brad on the phone and said, hey, like, you might just give us some advice. Here's where we're at. I know you're invested in this other competitor. And Brad really flipped a table in that meeting. And he said, listen, you have an interesting product at completely the wrong time. Wall Street Journal's getting ready to run a week-long series on privacy around Facebook and it's going to destroy what you're doing. And he says, it's going to destroy the company I'm invested in. And sure enough, that happened. But what Brad said is we've built this thing called tech stars, which at that point in time,

I think only existed in Boston, New York. Actually, New York, I wouldn't even live yet. I think Boston, Seattle and Boulder. And he says, you know, the White House, getting ready to do the startup America thing. And so they've reached out if we would like open source what we're doing. And we already have been, but it's unmanageable. We got like five copycats. And he said, so we've decided we're going to launch this nationwide network. And there's no accelerator like us in the southeast. So you just said, can you help me find, you know, who's the right person, right partner? Should it be Atlanta? Should it be Charlotte? And so we hung up the phone. I said, you know, I'll research it and get back to you, you know, do you the favor. And I went and

talk to Peter Walschman. And Peter said, you should do this. You should be in Greenville. And I'm like, I'm doing this other thing. I can't do that thing. But it kind of sat on my heart for a couple days. And I called Brad. And I said, I think it should be in Greenville. We could reach to both Charlotte and Atlanta and do this thing. So that's how I started the Iron Yard was and it was I copied their model, which was in Boulder, which was to invest in 10 companies at a time and mentor them for three months and then, you know, invest in them and invite other investors to do that. But the interesting that I did with Greenville was because we didn't have a lot of tech investors. I mean, Larry was an early investor and a couple of other guys in town. But there weren't a lot of tech investors

in Greenville at the time. So what I did is I recruited a bunch of folks who would invest in other things. And I said, I don't need you to just believe I'm going to recruit 10 amazing companies. We're going to raise a little bit more money. And I'm also going to go to the Techstars Demo Day in New York and Boulder and Boston. And we're going to invest in some of their class. So I'm going to diversify the opportunity. 10 are going to come to Greenville and probably six or eight that are going to be from other places. And so we did that.

And that actually gave our group some exposure to these other things coming out of these interesting cities. So what I did is I ran six classes. But like it quickly, you know, there's a lot. a thing between Spartanburg and Greenville. So Spartanburg right away reached out and said, hey, would you move that in Spartanburg? And I said, no. So I went over and spent some time with some leaders of Spartanburg and said, you know, what are you trying to do? And they said, we've got all these college kids and they all leave. And I said, well, that's kind of the same thing I'm doing in Greenville. So if you're in it, let's just create a different focus. So I created a

health care accelerator in Spartanburg and kind of a wide open, mostly consumer product in Greenville. So we ran over three years. We ran six classes, one in each market. And out of that, and out of that. So we ended up with about 100 portfolio companies, so 60 out of our own, and then we invested in some others. And that's where I was like, as these folks were getting invested, they were either having to leave Greenville, because they couldn't find enough engineering talent, or

they were just struggling, say, I can't find the right people or we're having to pay too much. And so that's what we said, well, can we take the same three-month program we do with companies and do it with people and match them up? Like, create the talent our portfolio needs. And that's how the code school got started. So, yeah, so you

You were, you did for three years, 10 companies a year? 20, 10 in each city. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. 20 a year. So 60 total over three years, and you found that you couldn't get enough coding talent for those startups. Yeah, here, yeah. Here.

Yeah. And so you started the coding school, which, what was it called then? It was called Iron Yard? The very first year was called the next big thing. The next big thing. But then we changed, we rebranded it as the Iron Yard. Okay. And that was kind of a, we picked Groch as a tech conference in town and co-working.

It was actually called Co-work. I remember when you had, it was such a movement. It's hard to explain. I wish I had a picture of it. But you had for this Grok conference. And when all these people would get together, it was just this wonderful, just mix of just young, optimistic, smart people. Yeah. They were all into it.

And remember right in front of the building when the fire hydrant broke? Yes. And it was just shooting. Water. It was a crazy moment. It was. Yeah. But yeah, so you found you couldn't do that.

So you started a coding school. Yeah. And fortunately for you, it took off like crazy. Yeah. Unfortunately for me, in Greenville, we weren't doing the, you know, the accelerator. The accelerator anymore. Is there, do you think that could happen again? I mean, you or somebody else could do that again in Greenville?

Yeah, I think so. You know, it was an interesting point in time where it didn't exist very, very, very, in many places around the world. And then it exploded. So it went to there was five accelerators, two, there were 3,000 of them around. So for a while I sat on the board of the Global Accelerator Network,

which is a group we started of kind of this founding group. And it just was everywhere, literally all over the world. So that was too much. There weren't that many companies to fill all the accelerators. And that bubbles kind of popped,

so there's way fewer now. So I think there's an opportunity again, but I think the thing, one of the things I learned in that was the health care, thing I did in Spartanburg was actually way more interesting than just the wide open because it was focused. And so what I was like one of the things I did that I think worked really well there, but, you know,

one of the guys in Spartberg had a relationship with Mayo Clinic. And he said, I can set you up, you know, if you want to go up there. And I said, well, I would love to go. They'd, you know, figured out. So I went up and met with the Ventures team, which is mostly figured out how to commercialize IP that the doctors at Mayo Clinic are coming up with. They do some investing. They manage some of the pension funds.

And so I went to them and asked them what their problems. So this was sales. So it wasn't a sales role, but this was sales. But I went up and I said, you know, what's your challenge? What you're doing? He said, well, we want to do startup stuff. But I don't have time for the thousands of startups who want to come and pilot at Mayo Clinic. And I can't invest them in due diligence.

And I said, well, listen, I'll solve the problem. Everybody comes to you that's early stage. You tell them they need to go to the Iron Yard in South Carolina. And then you guys just come down once a year and mentor some guys in the program. So they would come down twice, see the companies at the beginning, give them its advice, come back at the end of the program, some again. And then they'd take the top one or two and say, you guys are ready. We'll take you back to Rochester.

We'll figure out a pilot. We may invest in you. And it was that huge win because I had Mayo Clinic sending me deal flow. And I was providing a real service for them as I was filtering this funnel that they didn't want to deal with. And so that was like a really interesting win-win. And then I was able to provide a unique because there were other healthcare accelerators, but I had Mayo Clinic coming. And so like I think that model in Greenville will be super interesting to build.

on some of our historic strengths, manufacturing, textiles, like say, hey, we've got an incubator for maybe it's tech companies in manufacturing or robotics. But like one that's specific, that there's a reason if you're the best robotic startup in the country that you want to be in Greenville because of the mentors or access to large-scale companies. I think that would do really well. So something more specific. I mean, could automotive perhaps?

Oh, for sure. I mean, we've got a real nugget there. Yeah. Well, it's interesting from a sales perspective, I mean, I keep hearing some common threads from you because, I mean, you know, for you to go to, you know, get a someone in Spartanburg saying, hey, I've got to contact in the Mayo Clinic. Next thing you know, Pete, is it the Mayo Clinic? You know, dealing, talking to these people because you know that they're a monster. They're the monster in the whole world, you know, in health care. and that you can find some problem

or some opportunity they have that, you know, that you can help solve, they'll gladly give you any... They have so much to give. Yeah. Well, happily give it to you to solve that problem. And you went up there. You didn't just send them an email.

Yeah. Right? You went up there and you found out what their intentions were and what their problems were. And you said, I can solve it for you. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's amazing, particularly with, you know, the keyboard warriors today of salespeople, Well, I sent him an email. Yeah. You know, and they never responded. So I guess there's no interest up at the Mayo Clinic. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, and I think there's, you know, again, like the world's different, but in some ways, you know, much the same. But what I found over and over again in my career and again, like not always in traditional sales roles, but you're always selling, right? No matter what role you're in. But I found if I was ever coming to town and I was going to be there for two days, anybody would take my meeting. If you call and say, hey, would you meet with me in some time in the next three months? You're never getting that meeting. But if I say, I'm going to be in Boulder next Tuesday, I would line up a whole day of meetings.

So I just flipped that on its head. And I said, listen, I'm just going to say I'm coming to Salt Lake City. And I will go on the plane if I need you for the meetings. And I'll line up and say, I'm going to be there next week. We have these meetings. And then I'd say, you know, would you be willing to open, you know, remote? If not, I will be there. And that's worked over and over again.

Or if I'm going for a conference, I will intentionally book an open day on either side and try to meet with anybody who's interesting when I'm there. But especially in the early days, the online. Iron Yard, I traveled a lot. And I took advantage of that time I was there. I wasn't ever going to the bar or restaurant with my buddies at night. I was meeting new people before the conference, after the conference, you know, and I just tried to leverage that as much as I possible. Because once I had the relationship, I knew I could keep it. Yeah. And that's, I think we were really good in the early days. Iron Yard is discovering what your challenge was. Oh, Dillards is trying to hire a new tech, e-commerce workforce in Little Rock, Arkansas, and they don't have them. Well, that sounds like

Greenville. We got the same challenge about not have enough developers. How can we figure that out? Okay, we'll stand up a code school in Little Rock in partnership with Dillards. And like it was what they wanted to hear. I wasn't trying to sell them something they didn't want. But like I think we had a pretty good. They might provide something in kind like the building or guaranteed a hire seven people or whatever the deal is. There was always something in it for us. Yeah. Yeah. We just designed the win-win. Yeah. When we had a public company, Pete, I used to do it all the time. I would just say, what are the top 10 possible deals for the quarter?

Yeah. And I would contact each one of them and say, hey, I'm going to be in, you know, Little Rock this week. Can I come by and see you and talk about the contract? Yeah. And it works like a charm. Oh, 100%. Yeah.

Yeah. And just, just, you've got to show up. And particularly these days, people just love it. They love if you'll just show up and tell them that they're important and you want to hear what's going on. Yeah. That's good. Okay.

So you did that, and then with the time we have left, I want to get through. I know you sold it, and then you bought it back. And is that right? You bought it back, sold it again? No. What happened? No, no, yeah, I'll help you tell you. So it's an interesting story.

So we grew Iron Nerd really quickly, and we did that because of the investor network had to build around the accelerator. We don't have a big venture fund here, so I had to meet all the angel networks in the southeast to get our companies funded. So when we started a code school here, first we started within the accelerator, for our own portfolio, and then BMW Michelin reached out and said, hey, we got the same problem. We need more technical talent. It's hard to get them here. And so they'd asked, would you come run a BMW one? And I said, no, no, no, we're in a Greenville one together. Like, I'll spin it out of the accelerator,

and we'll run a Greenville one. Well, then our friends in Charleston and Houston and Raleigh all said, you know, hey, we got the same thing. Would you do it here? So at this point in time, there was only a couple guys doing code schools in the world. And they were in New York and San Francisco talking about expanding into New York and San Francisco. And I said, I will do every other city. And we never opened New York or San Francisco. So literally, Salt Lake and San Antonio and Houston and Dallas. And we did all the other kind of tier two cities from a tech perspective. And so anyways, we did that. We scaled very quickly. And it was working. Like students were paying up front. We were getting them jobs. They got ROI. Like it was cash flow. I didn't need venture. We had a bunch of guys

call and say they wanted to invest. But they didn't add anything. And at that point, I didn't really need it. like just taking more money. It was not really interesting. But then what happened was on from the accelerator friends, there's guys in other countries who are in Rome or in Cape Town South Africa and say, we'd like a code school. And I'm like, I had no idea how to do bricks and mortar business on another country. So we happened to have this group call on us, Apollo Education Group, and they owned schools around the world. And I said, all right, this is interesting. You guys are interested in investing in us and really they wanted to buy us. And I said, I want to sell the whole thing. I'm really passionate about the business, but we ended up selling 60% of the business.

And I was excited about that because they were, so Paul education groups, the parent company, University of Phoenix, which we had no interest in, you know, affiliating with. But they were pivoting from that business. Under the Obama administration, that business became really difficult because they wanted transparency on outcomes and there weren't there. And so they bought all these other schools around the world who were really focused on kind of high quality vocational education, which is what we're done. So we took their investment. And, honestly when Hillary Clinton didn't win and Trump won, they were like skewed the diversification. We're going back to printing money in the core business.

So they were sold to private equity acquired them. They were public. They were taken private. And so we were kind of caught up in the mix of that. And so it became really difficult. I tried to buy the business back, but they had kind of entangled the regulatory licenses. And so I was going to have to take over all the assets but not operate for six months. And I was just like, this is dumb.

So let it go. taught out to school, so announced you stayed on for 18 months. We kind of finished teaching all our students. And then we work called. We work had just bought a school called Flatiron School, which is where I'm now. They were pretty small at the time. They were the biggest thing in New York City, but that was it. They were just in New York City.

They had an online program. That was small-ish at the time. So we work, which everyone knows we work became the biggest, like, office workplace in the world pretty quickly. And they bought a small... I coding school in New York City and asked you to come, run it, expand it, whatever. Yeah, they asked me to say, yeah, and really the founder of that business, but he had just been acquired by WeWork, and WeWork, and We Work wanted to put one everywhere. And so Adam called and said, hey, like, I'm supposed to open one of these in every building in the world,

which at that point was like 500 buildings. And I said, well, we did a lot of that, right? We had opened more campuses than anybody else. And so I went up and consulted for a couple weeks, so a co-founder and I went up. And I really fell in love with the team. I'm like, I kind of become a little jaded. I sold it to the public company and it was a big company and I was like, oh, this big company stuff again. But I went and I was like, oh, these are my people and they're doing the thing I'm passionate about.

So I stuck around for six months consulting and I was basically full-time consulting. And then I finally basically said to them, and he's like, I'm advising and there's no way to do the work and we should just stop this. And they were like, no, no, you should just come to it full-time. And so I agree to do that. Because again, at the time, I mean, we work was growing like bananas. And I said, listen, this is like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If you want to do something in education and you've got 700 buildings around the world to do something with, like this is going to happen again.

So I said, this is interesting. I want to open a floor in every building in the world and do something with alternative education. So anyways, we did that, spent two years, we work went up and came down real quick. We bought private equity in and spun flat in school out. So that's where it is today. A private equity group owns it. I'm part of the senior leadership team. and kind of, you know, run all the operations.

How many locations do you have now? So we're mostly online now. So we were at 14 locations after rolling out of WeWork. Okay. And then during COVID contracted. So it's still a big campus in New York City, one campus in Denver. But those are the two physical. And then most of our thousands of students that are online, either in a full-time

or part-time capacity. And do you find that it works as well online as in person, depending on the student. Good question. So actually, we're just pouring through these numbers that are interesting. So full time online, which is all for us is synchronous. So it's eight hours a day on Zoom with a teacher, is very close to graduation rates for on campus.

So on campus we'd see north of 90% graduation rates online and maybe 85 plus graduation. So very close, not much difference. A self-paced program that takes longer and you're working another job. as lower graduation rates. Now, once you graduate, all the people get jobs at the same rate. But I think that's true generally is like a less intense course, a less immersive course tends to see more, you know, drop out over time. Okay. So online is not the thing. It's really the intensity. Okay. Interesting.

Just out of the left field a little bit, but I've thought about, you know, there's a lot of people that want to go into a different career and it might not be a coding, it might be sales, of doing some kind of sales school. Yeah. Where it's like a boot camp kind of thing. And I have a class where people come once a week and it's all online and teaching, but I thought about making it more, basically copying what you've done. Yeah. Do you think that would be effective?

Yeah. There's actually a couple programs. None of them are like really large scale. But you know, we could definitely talk shop there. But there's a couple folks that are doing it. They look a little different. Yeah. It's way more.

Like what we think compared to traditional ed, what I do at Flatiron School is all hands-on. It's all project-based. We're building products. But it's still kind of theoretical product. So we're building a real thing, but it's not for a customer. We're not trying to commercialize it. The sales boot camps are actually interesting is the way to get the practice there is you actually have to pick up the phone and make the phone call. Right.

And so I think there's an interesting model that are to partner with companies who are willing to have junior people come in. And the boot camp actually be making real phone calls all day long. but like with active mentorship and guidance. I think there's an interesting model there for sure. Yeah. We'll talk about that. Maybe over a juice. Yeah.

One thing about you that I noticed, when I talk to salespeople or people that want to go into sales, I say you're going to end up, if you stay in sales, you're going to end up one of the three places. You could stay a salesperson, and I know plenty of people that have stayed in it and they make piles of money. Yeah. And they basically don't have a boss. They control their own destiny, and they're just, they don't have to manage people, they're just salespeople. Then the other people become professional managers, and they're VP's sales, and they're very good at that, too. They also make a lot of money.

And there's people who decide to do their own thing, like you've done. And you can tell just in the conversation that, I mean, you're definitely an entrepreneur, and you're smart and pewter science and a lot of other ways, but you're a salesman, too. Yeah. And without that sales skill, you probably never would have gotten that Mayo Clinic deal or most of the, you're not. Bob Hughes, none of that stuff probably would have happened if you weren't willing to go in there and mix it up. 100%. I think people overlook that too often that they think there's like there is a middle management layer that's maybe less of that sales. Although I think anybody who's really effective at the layer is really good at sales because whether you're selling a customer, you're selling your employees. Like there's always something to sell, right?

The company's growing. The company's struggling. There's a new initiative. You've got to convince people to do what you want them to do, which is sales. Sometimes it's for dollars. Sometimes it's for their time. But, like, I don't think there's a day of what I do that doesn't involve sales. Me either. Well, listen, three questions for you, and then we'll be done. All right.

I know you like to read. Your favorite all-time book. Ah. So it's interesting. I mean, I do read a lot. I tend to read more in kind of the sci-fi fantasy world than kind of business books. I feel like I live the business stuff all day long with people. So my favorite book, boy, that's a tough one.

I would probably say Project Hill Mary by Andy Weir, who's the guy did the movie Martian, Matt Damon. But that author was written a book called Project Here Millie. It may come out in the last two years, but it's about space. And it's a really well-done book. But I mean, yeah, I read multiple books a month, but they tend to be for fun. Project Hail Mary. Okay, I'll have to read that. That's your favorite.

your favorite band. Ooh. This is good. So I think if I just from picking band, I would probably, one of two and they're very different. It's a Nirvana, which kind of, you know, my high school years was that. So like for me, music has a lot to do with like what I remember at the time I listened to the music. So Nirvana or M&M.

And Eminem is more like I just enjoy listening to the music. the music and the beat on a regular basis. Nirvana has a lot of memories associated with, you know, high school and college kind of years. But it's funny if you ask me like song, it wouldn't be from either one of those. I'd actually pick like David Allen Coe, you never call me by my name or Charlie Daniels, everyone down to Georgia. But again, like those specifically are attached to, you know, specific memories. But very diverse, you know. Definitely. Okay. And favorite word? Boy, I would say enjoy. Oh. And that. And, you know, and that's,

And it's, you know, the reason why I think enjoy is because it's a more active version of, like, fun. I think you have to, like, choose to enjoy something. Right. And so I'm all about, like, kind of living in the moment. Like, planning is really important. But if you're always living in the future, you're missing out, I think, on a lot of life. But there's different than being the receiver of, like, it's fun just because it happened to be wandering the environment. But, like, I'm choosing to enjoy something.

And so I'd pick and joy. I like it. Okay. Okay, last question. Is there anything that you want to promote today? Not really. So, I mean, at Flat-Arts School, I think, is an amazing product. So if you're looking to change your life and get into data science or artificial intelligence, Flatiron School is great. But now I'm not, I'm not, there's nothing of it. At the moment that I've a new business trying to launch or anything like that.

Well, this has been just fascinating. I did not know about the Wolf of Wall Street connection and some of the other. I didn't know what a great salesperson you were either. I just thought you were just a computer genius, but I'm glad to know more about you and thanks for being here today. Thanks for having me. Okay, thanks. All right.