The Pomp Podcast - #266: Ruben Harris on The Future of Education and Training

Episode Date: April 10, 2020

Ruben Harris is the Co-host of the Breaking Into Startups podcast, he is also the CEO of Career Karma, an organization that matches people who want to learn to code with the right support circle and coding boot camp for their needs. In this conversation, Anthony and Ruben discuss the current unemployment numbers, what part of the workforce is most affected, how individuals can gain new skills, what the job prospects in technology look like, how education will change in the future, and what people who are laid off can do now to position themselves for success. =============================== BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. Visit try.blockfi.com/get-50/?ref=pomp50 to get started with BlockFi today and earn up to $50 in BTC when you create an interest account and make a deposit of $250 or more. =============================== TaxBit is a refund-maximizing, cryptocurrency tax software you can depend on. Visit taxbit.com/invite/pomp and receive 10% off your tax plan today by signing up for a free trial. ===============================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Ruben Harris is the co-host of the Breaking Into Startups podcast. He is also the CEO of Career Karma, an organization that matches people who want to learn to code with the right support circle and coding bootcamp for their needs. In this conversation, we discuss the current unemployment numbers, what part of the workforce is most affected, how individuals can gain new skills, what the job prospects in technology look like, how education will change in the future, and what people who are laid off can do now to position themselves for success.

I really enjoyed this conversation and learned a ton from Ruben during it. Before we get into the episode though, I want to quickly talk about our two sponsors. The first is BlockFi. As you guys know, I'm a huge fan of the company. I'm an investor and a user. BlockFi has three products, You can deposit crypto and receive a US dollar loan. You can deposit crypto and earn interest in an interest-bearing account, or you can buy and sell crypto on their cryptocurrency exchange. You can go to BlockFi.com slash Pomp and learn more. BlockFi.com slash Pomp.

It's awesome. You can earn up to 8.6% APY in their interest-bearing accounts, and I highly suggest you check it out. BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Our second sponsor is Taxbit. They make paying taxes super easy for cryptocurrency users. TaxBit automates your cryptocurrency taxes, enabling you to effortlessly track, calculate, and report your transactions. You can easily connect your exchanges to securely sync your transactions and run them through TaxBit's tax engine.

Generate your completed tax forms with a single click. The company is founded by tax attorneys and CPAs. TaxBit is the most trusted cryptocurrency tax solution. Get 10% off your tax plan today with a free trial by going to taxbit.com slash invite slash Pomp. Again, taxbit.com slash invite slash Pomp. All right, now let's get into this episode with Ruben. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions

and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got Ruben here with me. I've known Ruben for a while and I'm super excited about this because I think, one, he's got a great understanding of a whole bunch of stuff that's going on. And then two, he's working on some things that could be potential solutions for all of you sitting at home listening to this might need to get re-skilled so uh thanks so much for jumping on and doing this thank you for having

me on the show man it's been a minute absolutely well you're in san francisco right san francisco we met in la um you've traveled a lot of places we've traveled a lot of places but here we are again absolutely so maybe let's just run through your background real quick and then kind of what you guys are building today um and then we'll jump into kind of the more macro environment stuff yeah so i'm the co-founder ceo of career karma uh which is a marketplace that helps people get high paying jobs in tech in less than a year so when people download our app they get matched to the job training program that's best for them and they get coaching to not just start the program uh stay in the program but also find a job after that um anybody can

upload their projects uh we finished white combinator so we're connected to over 4 000 companies so we can send it to the top recruiters and even in a coven 19 era where some companies aren't hiring uh there are companies that are hiring so we can always connect them not just to to the recruiters but also individuals themselves um before this i worked at three different startups um at alt school which is personalized education honor uh building out two-sided marketplaces for nurses um and then also hustle which is a political technology text message company um and then i was an investment banker for three years my co-founders are boot camp graduates um we met in atlanta as well um and then we started a podcast in 2016 called breaking

at the startups that you joined as well um and and and it was it was it was highly highly acclaimed um and and we essentially built this reputation um of not just running a company to help people get jobs but uh we are the product we we we this is the product we wish that we had when we were breaking the tight you know so when you and i met you know i had bought a one-way ticket to san francisco i knew nobody three weeks later i found a job i wrote a story about it called breaking the start. It was Balaji Sreenivasan who talks about COVID. He reached out to me, Mark Andreessen talked about it. So that's how I started developing a big reputation through that blog. And so personal brand has been key for us. And we make sure that everybody in the community that now has over

80,000 people is able to build a personal brand as well. I mean, we're currently positioning ourselves to be the number one destination for career advice on the internet. Yeah. What's really cool about, I think your story, um, and, and, uh, Timor and, and, uh, your co-founders is basically that you guys did everything that people now are starting to realize, like, this is the path, but there was no playbook for you, right? Like you, you bought the one way ticket. Um, and you guys all had careers before wanting to get into technology. Um, that, uh, blog posts that you wrote the whole idea of like, Hey, create content. If you don't actually have the connections, like those people will find you. You did that. Right. And then, um, the podcast, like one,

you guys were early in podcasts right it was before i kind of like really took off and then two was uh if i remember correctly as you guys were starting the podcast what would happen is people would basically reach out and say hey man thanks so much for the content but can you help me do x can you introduce me to somebody can you get me in you know an interview at this company etc and so it's almost like you built the distribution in the audience before you ever had a product right that's exactly right um and and it's actually even before technology you know is it we learned it through experience uh because um i i went to a really small school um in tennessee and nobody i was trying to break into investment banking because that's what everybody

was trying to do at the time and so i wrote a blog telling people that i don't qualify i got into investment banking after sending out 900 emails got thousands of people coming through and essentially like once we got into banking we found one of our buddies he left and became an engineer at a bootcamp called Flatiron School. And Jack Altman, who now is the CEO of Lattice and the brother of Sam Altman from Y Combinator, he was a bootcamp grad and was like, what is this bootcamp thing? And so like, just through osmosis and learning it ourselves, we're able to figure it out. So yeah, that's, that's, yeah. Well, and I think the other lesson, right, if people kind of look at the story, both individually, and then what you guys have built is it's all about the

propensity for action, right? It's just the fact that you guys would just start things and do things and and there was never a let's sit back and play chess let's try to like you know plan out move seven eight nine and ten it's like hey here's where we are we generally know where we want to go let's what's the next what's the next move right what's the next move on the board and and you guys have navigated this really really well into what you're doing today um let's talk about uh what's going on in the world because there's absolute chaos going on um what's kind of your take on all this and and what are you paying attention to right now yeah so you know There's about 10 million people, 10 million Americans that have lost jobs in the last two weeks, which we personally believe is a vast undercount because it doesn't include like gig economy workers, freelancers, and more.

Also, some states have even stopped reporting their daily unemployment claims at the request of our current administration, which is kind of scary. But what I like to think deeply about is who are these people, right? So it's concentrated mostly in the service sector. And I think it's super important to focus on women because women are 60% of hotel workers, 53% of bar staff, 70% of clothing store workers. But on the positive side, if you think deeper, if you look at history, it can point us to where things are going in the labor market. Personally, I think even though the federal government or federal reserve is predicting 47 million Americans unemployed over the next few months because of corona, we're looking at the largest reallocation of labor since World War II. And in World War II, something to keep in mind is that the female labor force grew by 6.5 million during the war, which in my opinion is probably the single most important economic event of our lifetime. And so, when I see the spike in downloads inside of Career Commons, which we're getting about 15,000 to 20,000 downloads per month, it's majority women that are mothers that are coming through the platform. And it's super, super interesting to think about. And so I've seen you tweet this out. Since we are quarantined, not having time is not an excuse. Yes, it's difficult because we've got kids at home and things like that, but we all have the ability to take advantage of this moment to reflect, to reassess what to do with our time, apply it to a new skill set that will be relevant in the future. Yes, companies are laying people off. Yes, people are having hiring freezes. Some of them are hiring in categories that we will talk about later related to anti-fragility. But if you really, I'm not Nostradamus, but I can probably bet that there will be more technology in the future.

And if there is more technology in the future, you're probably going to need to be able to speak the language of tech and engineering and things like that. And so I think there's a huge, huge, huge opportunity to think about how to take advantage of these moments. But people are suffering and it's going to require more than skill sets because, yeah. Yeah. And part of this, I think, right, is, look, it's already bad, right? 10 million Americans in two weeks is bad. It's likely to get worse, right? And, you know, I keep kind of hammering on this point, the economy is not going to recover until we get out of our homes, right? It's just, that's how it works. You can't spend money, can't have jobs, can't have businesses running, we're all sitting at home. So that has to be balanced with the virus, right? We've had the health crisis. And so there's not a black and white solution. It's not, okay, turn back on the economy, forget the health piece, right? And it's not shut the economy off 100%

and only worry about the health piece. So we've got to navigate that. But what ends up happening here is now we have millions of people, tens of millions probably at the end of this, that are sitting at home unemployed. And part of that is there will be stress financially. there will be challenges, there will be things where people need assistance, relief, etc.

But also, there will be a group of people who retrain their skills, they switch careers, right? They use this as an opportunity, whether they wanted to do that already or not, they see the opportunity. And so I guess that's really where I want to focus on like, what can people do, right? Part of what you guys do is actually help people find the right roles, and kind of training and skill sets. But also I think that there's this element of like the mindset first, you have to switch your mindset because really what ends up happening is if you don't switch your mindset, you're not going to stick it out. Like you, like Ruben can be the best coach in the world. If I just don't want to do it, I'm not going to finish. Right.

That's exactly right. So I love that you brought up that point because we tell people that most barriers in life are psychological, not technical. You know, most people don't finish what they start. And as you're going through this process, I tell people, a certificate or a degree is not going to get you a job, and neither is learning how to code, right? The way that you communicate, the way that you tell your story, the way that you brand yourself personally, the projects that you build, the way that you work with other people, pair programming, how you handle the whiteboarding interviews, things like that, all of that type of stuff matters. And so what I would say is, part of the reason why when people download our app,

The first thing that they do is share their career goal and their current level of experience with us in a three-minute profile called Fast Track at the bottom of the app. It's because we can't coach you if we don't understand what your current level is. Once they do that, then the app will match them with the right individuals that will help them get to where they want to go. But even then, a lot of people drop out if they don't have guidance. So we created a system called the 21-Day CK Challenge that you all can look at on Twitter where people are tweeting all the time. And during that, those 21 days, which are five minutes a day check-ins through the app, they get put into a group called a squad. That's an accountability system. That's a daily reminder that where they can self-organize their own study groups to make sure that they start and finish the program or encourage themselves through this process. I think the thing I really like about what you're bringing up here that a lot of people don't think about is that most people during this process, especially if they've been shocked by an unemployment situation, they experience self-doubt. And we call that self-doubt imposter syndrome.

And it's a feeling where you are fully qualified to do the work, but you trick yourself and you tell yourself that you don't belong. And so the whole reason why CareerCom is not just a matching platform to boot camps, but a LinkedIn for the invisible workforce and the social network is because you need community in order to make it through. That's part of the biggest values of schools and why only 5 to 50 percent of people complete the 100 million online courses that people have taken on the Internet in the last seven years. Yeah, it's really crazy, too, because I think part of especially when you talk about technical. Right. So let's say that I just had a, you know, let's use a kind of an egregious example. So I'm a bartender. My bar is now shut down by government mandate. The owner comes to me and says, hey, you are unemployed now. I literally can't pay you. So I go, I get my unemployment claim in. Now I'm waiting and trying to figure out when is this going to end?

And so I start thinking about a career. A lot of people, I think the first question that they would ask themselves, if you said, well, why don't you go be a computer scientist is I don't understand how to code. I'm not technical. That's really hard, right? Like the mental barrier of just what is that is so big. Whereas I think what you guys are really trying to do is say, look, there's millions of other people who figured this out, right? There's no reason why you can't, but what you need is you need persistence. You need discipline. You need people to tell you, you can do it and kind of you guys provide not only here's where you should go get the training, but here's the support system that goes into that. And it seems to me like that support system may

actually be more important in some ways than simply, hey, put this line of code here, put this line of code there, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think on top of that, if you think about it, to your point, people are aware that tech is where the jobs are or where they're going to be. But most people aren't aware of the roles in tech, the skills that are required to get those roles and if you think about a coding boot camp like if you're if you're even if you're Don Draper you're in New York if you're Don Draper from Mad Men you made the best marketing and you reach the audience that wants to learn how to code your coding boot camp is not going to resonate if those people don't even know what code is all right and so what we tell them is like

we created this community you can see on the home page you see questions all the time and discussions of people asking questions in the beginner section about what is code what is a boot camp what is and then other people answering it, which creates trust, credibility, creates the network effect, and we get bigger and bigger and bigger and stronger and stronger as more and more people make it through. So yes, the support system, the trust of people helping people is absolutely the biggest key. Yeah. And I guess really right now, as we're seeing the unemployment numbers continue to accelerate, what do you think is likely? So you talked a little bit about women are going to be disproportionately affected by this because they're the ones who have the service

and hospitality uh type um occupations are there other things that you're looking at um or paying attention to in the unemployment numbers or just that alone is is kind of the big takeaway and then it becomes okay there's a problem let's go try to solve it i think a few things like so first i think that like historically we think about like the education and labor piece as separate like think about there's a department of labor department of education when i think they're actually both interconnected right there's a reason why companies have like dedicated university recruiting programs right but that's only a limited portion of the world and even if all tech companies have dropped their college degree requirement it's very difficult for them to

identify talent that didn't go to a college background right so um when i think about education and the virus, you know, education has changed more in the last two weeks than last 200 years. There's 3.5 billion people on lockdown. The school closures have now affected 1.4 billion people and forced 900 colleges to go online. And they were already struggling to keep in touch with the curriculum to help them get jobs. And college has not historically been outcomes driven. I'm not saying college is not valuable because I'm a college graduate. I learned a lot from college. You get to open up your mind and a bunch of other things, but it's not focused on getting jobs. So what I think is going to happen is students are now questioning the cost of tuition.

I think our education system is going to really start focusing on becoming outcomes driven, where the only reason why people are going to your program, whether it's college, a boot camp or self-taught, is to get a job. There will be some people that want to do it just for shits and giggles, which is great, but for the most part, people want to get money. And so if that's the case, then the things that people were giving people a lot of heat about before this run, income share agreements or deferred tuition model or a money-back guarantee model, if they don't get a job, are going to come back and vote. You're still going to have people that are going to have opinions on both sides, but there's enough people that have gotten jobs through an outcomes-driven model where I think it's going to accelerate. If you point to history as well, I think that it's going to be inevitable for government to step in and help on the education side. So if I was an educator right now, I would probably be doing everything that I could to focus on outcomes. And the only outcome that matters is getting people jobs and your completion rates. And so I think that's important. The other thing that is important to understand is that it's not enough to give people a free education. Because in my opinion, I think income share agreements, money back guarantees, all that type of stuff is a temporary solution. I actually think the cost of education is going to go down to zero, like it is in most of the world. Right. That's another conversation. I think that even if you have your education at zero, like we said earlier, there's parents, there's people that have rent to pay. Right. So even if I could go to school for free, I got to pay bills. And so you're starting to see a lot of job training programs and boot camps like Thinkful, for example, that just got acquired by check for $100 million or $800 million with the earnouts, whatever. they're providing a living stipend where they'll pay you $1,500 a month through the program

if you've been affected by corona they'll give you a laptop so you can go through the program there's different scholarships and things like that because it's not enough to just have access to training you need additional support sometimes and so I think I think those are the main things that I'm thinking about and I don't I also think what we're going to see is Clay Christensen rest in peace. He actually already said that half of the colleges were going to go away. And I think that this is going to accept this whole COVID-19 situation is going to accelerate that trend. I don't think all colleges are going to disappear. But when you see institutions like Stanford that have billion-dollar assignments doing hiring freezes and tuition costs and things like that,

I think that is a major harbinger about what's going to happen with the rest of higher education. and if I was going to say just in one sentence I think whoever's listening to this should start thinking about the education system and the labor system as interconnected and to start thinking deeper about places outside of college because LinkedIn only has like 600 million people and there's about 8 billion people in the world and we're gonna reach 10 billion by 2050. Yeah what's really crazy to me I think so there's two pieces in there that kind of immediately one stoked my anger and the other, you know, I think it's a great point. The first is the universities are a complete sham in one way, which is most of them are actually asset management firms that have a

school, right? And what I mean by that is they've got a billion plus dollar endowments that it has a very, very advantageous tax structure to it. But then you see this quote unquote rainy day fund or this thing that is supposed to be there for the education for the students for the teachers etc all of a sudden when we do have that rainy day they say you know what we're not going to hire more people we're going to freeze raises we're going to get rid of our vendors and then we know that that's going to lead to them firing the cafeteria staff or the janitorial service workers etc and so what happens is like why do you have that 30 billion dollar endowment right and now there's some that actually will step in and they'll use it the right way and do the right

thing. But I think it's just exposing kind of the incentive structure, right? And kind of what it's actually there for and what it's not for. So I think that's the first thing. But then the second thing you said that's really interesting is you said earlier that there's been more innovation in education the last two weeks, the last 200 years, right? And I think that that's very tied into this idea of outcomes-based education, which I think most people today would admit college has 50% education benefits, 50% social benefits, right? And part of this comes down to how can we actually get people the education benefit, or I'm sorry, the social benefit, right? The things that help you learn from other people, open your mind, mentally kind of mature your brain,

all that kind of stuff, without requiring you to pay $50,000 a year, take on a bunch of debt, and also move somewhere to go do it, right? It just feels like those two things, where it's previously been thought to be incompatible with each other over time is actually going to be figured out and this may be the catalyst that does that. Yeah I think it's a very exciting time you see the growth of things like Khan Academy, OutSchool and a bunch of other things like that that are what I think Khan Academy I saw an article that said they normally get like 18 million downloads a month I think it's like three or four times and they said because of corona is that's that number is about to increase by seven or eight times which makes their their

bill their like server bill like tens of millions of dollars or 20 over 20 million dollars a year which is insane but it's awesome that people are excited and like as uh one of my uh good venture capital friends uh jamara uh herrera at cowboy she said ed tech is sexy again um which always should have been and never went out of style but like education is key uh work is is also key to occup identity like occupational identity and something else that we didn't cover about this that i think is important to understand is that uh that i think deeply about is i think our labor market has now entered into um free agency equivalent of the sports world right if you think about the sports world if you're like a player you would join the the team in

your hometown um you will go to the school that you went to in your hometown and you play with that team forever and just win a bunch of rings right but then free agency came around and then like if you're lebron you're in cleveland you're in miami you're in la and you just you just went everywhere right and i think what we're entering into which people were talking about this before corona with the fourth industrial revolution is um lifelong learning where people don't stay at one company forever they don't stay at one school forever they go from company company to company and school to school to school people like reed hoffman talk about this with um alliances and tours of duty um and how you know whatever you want to be in the future you're going to spend

a little bit of time from here to here to here so if there's no loyalty to a school or a company and no loyalty to um yeah no loyalty to a school company and the cost of education has gone down then what becomes valuable is your network of people that are going through this process with you during work and your identity is not always tied to your role for some people it used to be like i'm a doctor i'm a lawyer i work for this big firm king and spalding if i'm a lawyer like that's dope but like now it's like i'm pop right you know i'm i'm ruben like i'm like whoever you are that's what makes you cool and then when people say your name what do they think like before, I thought Facebook pages, Snapchat, right? Now I think Facebook pages, Snapchat, Bitcoin,

mega podcast, megastar, right? So when people say your name, what do people think? I think that matters when people Google your name, what pops up. And so I think as these people that are leaving work or considering a change, start reflecting on what they should do in the labor market, or if there's entrepreneurs that are focused on helping these people, these are the things that you should be thinking about in my opinion yeah and part of this i think is a mental shift like um you mentioned bellagio earlier he was talking about like look there's this shift underway from like the industrial revolution right to now we're entering like the information revolution right and he laid out a whole bunch of things uh everything from like internet

homeschooling to um you know the the death of kind of mainstream media to social media all this kind of stuff uh but really what ends up happening is many of the people who have recently been laid off are actually the last ones to recognize these shifts right people who work hourly wages who work for small businesses who are in the service or hospitality or travel industry etc they're the last ones to benefit from this stuff in some weird uh almost awkward way because they have been um you know they've lost their jobs in that industrial age type company or role now all of a sudden then they're presented an opportunity to try to make the switch. Now there's short-term pain in there, right? Which is really, I think where people are focused on like, how do we, how do

we bridge that gap? How do we try to solve some of that pain for them? But ultimately what ends up happening is the ones who choose to make that shift, I think will come out, you know, a year, two, three years later and be in a much better position. Right. And I think you guys see that on a daily basis with the people who, who kind of come in and say, look, I want to find training. I want to find a new skill set so that I can go get a job at a technology company and make more money and be in a better position in life. Yeah. I mean, you know, it was interesting. I'm seeing, so now that NBA is canceled, NFL is canceled.

I actually see a lot of professional athletes downloading the career karma app and like really interested in working for like gaming companies. Like, you know, shout out to Delane will play versus I was killing, killing the e-sports game. Michael cyber were like with Twitch or whatever. Like you see a lot of a lot of people that have been laid off from tech companies that are like in a sector that might be travel related that see the opportunity. They got savings saved up. So these aren't just blue collar. You see white collar people as well being like, oh, wow, this is a I've always wanted to do this. Let me figure out how to level up. And I also see employers stepping in as well, which I think is super interesting to understand. There's a great report by Georgetown called College is Just the Beginning, and they talk about how the U.S. spends $1.1 trillion on workforce training every year and how employers are essentially our largest educator.

And so what you're starting to see is there's things called like micro work, where while you're going through a program, they'll give you work to do so you can get some experience while you're going through the program. Obviously, internships and apprenticeships are a very big deal. Adobe did something called Adobe Digital Academy, where they partnered with General Assembly, where they'll pay all of your things, and then they'll hire you at the end, which is very interesting. There's another company called Catalyte that's pretty interesting, that's doing a lot of staffing models, where they'll take the work from the companies and help them learn and then level them up, because a lot of these people are junior talent, and the companies

that are hiring sometimes are looking for senior talent. So there's an on-ramp or some kind of way to standardize that. That's going to be interesting. And you're seeing more and more companies step up in that regard. So I'm excited about that. Yeah. How long do you see on average it takes for someone to get retrained, right? So let's say that yesterday I lost my job and I say, hey, you know what?

Mentally, I'm in the spot. I want to make a change. I know it's going to be hard, but I'm ready to do it. What does that look like? What am I looking at from a time perspective? Yeah. So on average, it's about three to 12 months. So if you're doing it full-time, it'll take you about three to six months.

If you're doing it part-time, it'll be about six to 12 months. Full-time is about six to 12 hours a day. Part-time is about four, yeah, full-time is six to 12 hours a day. Part-time is about four to six hours a day. The days of the week, whether it's five to seven days, really depends on which program that you go to. And again, you can see all these different curriculums at careercomic.com slash schools. But for the most part, it's about three to 12 months.

There are some programs that have 18-month programs as well, but for the most part, that's the average. I am seeing in this type of environment more programs with longer durations just because there are some people that have different learning styles. it might take a little bit longer to capture different concepts um and yeah and the ones that are more concentrated and shorter are usually people that have a prior background or at least some some prior knowledge or they'll give you a prep course but pretty much every job training program that we work with every bookend that we work with assumes you know nothing and they're designed to take you from zero to 100 real quick got it and i guess um are these things where i'm required to like move so let's say i'm living in uh topeka kansas right versus new york city obviously a little bit different um or can i do this stuff remote for the most part yeah so that's

an interesting question we um i think everybody should you should link to this episode of this report but we did a report called the state of the boot camp market 2020 um and you can actually see the concentration of locations for the boot camps most of them are actually in new york and most of the outcomes actually in new york versus san francisco those are the top two places but you can see it across the board. But if you look at the history of boot camps, it started off only in person, pay money up front or alone, very similar to everything else. And it was only full time. Then as more and more people started getting into it, then there started to be the flexibility with the part-time versus full-time. Then some people started doing it online and online started

growing faster than in person and having not just the same outcomes as in person, but even better outcomes than in person. Then we realized that the amount of people that have $10,000 to $15,000 to pay for a bootcamp or front is limited. So then you had innovation with income share agreements and deferred tuition and money back guarantees. And so the short answer is, yes, everybody can do it online remotely, which is a blessing in this day and age.

But what I'll say about it as well that I think is very interesting to understand is it's not just part-time or full-time. You have self-paced courses as well with mentorship. So that's how I think about it. Yeah. You got it. And I guess, do you see people who are good at using the remote learning programs also end up going into remote work jobs? Like, is there a, hey, I either live in a geographic location where it's difficult for me to move for whatever reason, and so I want the remote learning end job, or some people do remote learning, go and actually they want to work in an office. Like, what's the connection there between the program that they're in to get retrained and then where they end up actually getting a job?

I say yes and no. So there's two recent episodes of people on Career Karma. There's a black woman that tried to go to college for 10 years. And she went to a boot camp in person in Atlanta and got a job remotely at Stitch Fix making $98,500. When she came to us, she did not know what code was. She didn't even have a laptop in three weeks. We got her accepted into four schools. She started and then she got that job. So that's an example of in person and chose a remote work job. Then we have another guy who did an online boot camp that also received a living stipend. His name is Jarek Warren, and you can find it on the podcast. And he got a job making $145,000. But he started in Modesto in California. He started the program, and then he landed the job in New York, and he moved to New York. And that was going from online to in-person. So I wouldn't say those two things are directly correlated. You definitely see people doing online remote or in person, in person, but it really comes down to what you want for your family and your lifestyle, which is why when you download the app, we ask you from day one, what do you want when you fill out the profile? And then our technology can get an understanding of what your goal is, and then we'll create a blueprint for you and give you the people that can get you there. Got it. And I guess when you throw out numbers like $98,000, $145,000, that seems impossible to people, right? There's some people who say, hey, that's my expectation. And there's other people who say, that would be incredible. But like, how do I go from making $35,000, $40,000 a year to $145,000? That just seems insurmountable. one i guess is just like what do you see kind of on average right as people come out of these schools and then two is um you know kind of what's your advice to the person who's sitting there saying

like it sounds great but it's just not for me i just can't do it yeah so on average we see pay ranges between 70 to 100 000 depending on where you locate it you're located is what i used to say but now because of um remote work i'm not telling people that the fastest growing commute is no commute. So if you land a job somewhere that's paying that, you'll get that money. So I think because of COVID-19, salary adjustments are probably going to change, but we still see people that are getting between $7,000 to $200,000. We'll see how that plays out. The reason why these jobs pay so much money is because the demand is high. It was high before COVID. Just so people know the numbers, since we're talking about this. There was over half a

million open jobs, only 50,000 people graduate in four-year universities. And by 2024, it's supposed to be 1.4 million open jobs and only 400,000 people graduating from four-year universities, which means that over a million people got to get a job from something that's not college, right? Whether that's self-taught bootcamp or whatever. Now the demand is even higher, and we know that the university system is not going to be able to keep up with this type of a demand. And that's not taking shots at universities again, but that demand and supply difference is what keeps the price high, right? So there's still competition. With that said, since there's a lot of layoffs, not just from junior talent, see a lot of tech companies

dropping talent or reducing salaries. And so now as a junior engineer, you're also competing with senior people. And this is the same dynamic I faced when I was leaving college as well. I left college during the financial crisis too. And I was a guy that didn't go to an out of league school, bad GPA, blah, blah, blah, competing with laid off investment bankers to prove that I can do this thing. And so with that said, for the people that are like, oh, no, I can't do this. I just want to encourage you to understand that the reason that you're going to get this job is not because of your coding skills or the certificate or degree that you have. It's being authentically who you are. And this is going to sound super corny. We're all natural

as something that's not natural to everyone else. Think deeply about the problems that you've experienced in your life. This is very entrepreneurial too. Think deeply about the problems you've experienced in your life that a company is currently solving or where you could get some experience or where you can be seen as an esteemed person, where you can be an expert on that subject and then focus on building solutions to those problems while you're going through your bootcamp. You might end up finishing the bootcamp and not wanting to get a job in it, but now you have a skillset that you can apply for yourself or that makes you better at what you really want to do, whether it's a teacher or whatever, which is also a noble profession, right? So it doesn't

hurt to try what we tell people is like if all let's say all million of of pumps listeners right now want to start a coding boot camp today just download the career comma app and if you try to get a job in 2020 and you don't the worst thing that happened is that you learned something and you didn't pay any money uh which is you know knowledge pays the best interest that's what ben frank was right so investing in yourself right take advantage of that yeah and i think part of this I know you've got some thoughts on like kind of the anti-fragility type mindset right and kind of how that can be built but part of this is there's a lot of people if you sit them down and say what are your skills they'll immediately rattle off what they do professionally right

but they actually have other skills and people always ask me you know what do you think I should do I said look I can't tell you because I don't know what you like to do but ultimately there's something that you do whatever it is that other people hate doing that you actually enjoy doing and you probably enjoy it because you're either good at it or you don't need you're not even very good at it but you will become good at it because you naturally will do it in your free time you don't look at it as work etc and people are scared to go after that like like there's like oh that can't be a job right and one of the best examples is like the whole uh uh esports stuff right you brought it up earlier of just like how many parents told their kids you know stop playing

video games you gotta go get a job now those kids making millions of dollars playing video games right i was one of those kids i remember when i was in high school i played a game called kind of strike i wanted to be a pro pro player this was before twitch i was on i was in the cyber athlete amateur league and i would sneak away to play the video game at night now this is big old industry but yeah no that's exactly right you know so i love it and so i guess really um as people are going through this then like how do you think about the anti-fragility uh you know coming out of what looks like it's going to be a pretty bad financial crisis. Yeah. So for the people that aren't,

aren't familiar with the term anti-fragile it comes from the scene to left shout out to my, my, my buddy Kahan. He put me onto that book before all this happened. And so the scene to let's cause about talks about being anti-fragile, which is a category of things that not only gain from chaos, but they need it in order to survive and flourish. I do believe that boot camps are anti-fragile and education does thrive during times like this. And when I reflect on the term anti-fragile, it reminds me of the original Breaking in the Startups post that we wrote.

And when I thought about the companies that I wanted to work for, I pointed out in the article, and everybody can look this up, I wrote it in 2014, things go in cycles, right? that you just tweeted this too there's there's bull markets and there's bear markets right and if you think about the things that tech has created so far now it's a little bit different but when i wrote the article it was mostly things that are nice to have like you know facebook snapchat like google like i would say some some of those things are starting to become need to have but before it was more like tiktok like entertainment like let's have a good time right um washi talks about making something people want now everybody wants to talk about Make something people need, right? Because when I picked the companies that I wanted to work for, I wanted to focus on companies that are solving problems that are fundamental to life. And I put on the article, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

And if you look at the three companies that I work for so far, they are in education, health care and politics. That is by design. I deliberately chose to go there because I knew that those categories are places where it does not matter what economy is happening. there will be strong economic activity there whether they're making money or not who knows strong growth there or whether they're making money or not um that's another question but we're able to pick a category that's fundamental solving people's problems so when i think about myself or or you're one of your listeners that's thinking about picking anti-fragile categories think about your own maslow's hierarchy of needs if you drew the maslow's hierarchy of needs where at the top is about like belonging and fulfillment and self-actualization and i'm not going to go into that whole thing my mom's a psychologist that's why i think about it a lot

but if you focus on like housing a roof over your head food education you know financing you know like things like that you know what what is an area where you can become the best in the world and then just dive in that direction what i'll say about this too is don't worry about perfection i think our education system has historically focused on us on being perfect and getting the best grades and the perfect sats and if you look at my sats my sats are straight garbage i was the one that was making patterns on my sats because i didn't care about it right but i bring it up because you really want to just focus on being directionally correct just like go in that direction and if you shoot for the moon even if you miss you'll land among the stars and i'm not

here to do the Nassim Taleb podcast, which I hope that you're going to be able to do. But just everybody here listening, look up the term anti-fragile. We all know that black swan events happen if we study economics and COVID-19 is a black swan event. But like Kennedy said, you know, there's the Chinese character for crisis. One stroke is danger, the other one's opportunity, right? So we never want to let a crisis or an opportunity go to waste. So take full advantage for sure and i think part of what you're talking about like being directionally correct there's two things that are really uh key here so the first is one um i always tell people that whenever they get the opportunity to join a company right when you're coming out of school

you either want to one go start a company if you have that risk appetite and that's what you want to do or two is if you're gonna go join a company don't go join the ibms of the world right i think it was adam nash maybe when um or uh the wealth front piece uh they wrote a blog post that was basically like go join the like series a or series b company that most people feel like it's going to be uh the next uber the next airbnb the next facebook the next you know uh twitter whatever because what ends up happening is you get inside it's easy to move around if you're good you'll get more responsibility over time you'll learn from a lot of people and then you are personally uh benefiting from the success of the company so when you go to leave now you're known as oh he was

early at twitter he was early at this she was early here whatever and there's this big reputational boost along with the information and responsibility boost you get by being early in a place that grows really fast ends up being successful that's exactly right i mean sam altman talks about like the value of having a w on your record um and even gary tan he just tweeted something yesterday i'm talking about how the rate of learning is the most valuable startup compensation right the the the only differentiator between the startup and anything else is growth right but it's not just about moving fast it's about your speed of iteration and if you're an individual that has chosen to work at a company that's growing and iterating quickly and your rate of learning

is growing exponentially that knowledge that experience pays off very well and then if you picked right on top of it and you get that w on your record you are essentially not immortal but Like you're like, you're good in the labor force. Like you'll be straight. You're not going to go hungry. So you make your rep. I should title this a how to be a mortal. Before, uh, before we finish up, I want to quickly touch on, um, you mentioned earlier, uh, these living stipends that some of the boot forces, uh,

boot camps are providing for people, uh, and how it kind of ties into a universal basic income, et cetera. So you got a bunch of thoughts there, maybe elaborate on that. yeah so um there's a there's a great um it's gonna sound kind of weird it's a great playboy magazine article that dr martin luther king did uh with um i never thought i would hear that sentence right yeah and uh it's actually an awesome awesome post uh article talking about automation okay um and he talks about how um tech is creating and destroying jobs and if something and black and white will be affected unless something grand and imaginable is done and

career karma is our version of that grand and imaginable thing that's going to help everybody um but the reason why i talk about universal basic income is because it's a concept that uh dr martha king brought up in that piece um our government system has talked about it for a long time not just our government system it's a bipartisan issue um many people have talked about it. But I think yesterday, I was really, really excited to see what Jack Dorsey did with the billion dollar commitment to help solve or kill the virus, right? And not just flatten the curve, but just completely demolish it. So he committed a billion dollars towards this COVID-19 pandemic. But the other thing that I don't think everybody caught that jumped out to me is he also

mentioned he not only just tweeted that he's going to donate he made a google doc that's transparent which i think is awesome leadership you could see where the money's going but he also said that he's gonna after this is done he's gonna focus on um girls education and universal basic income all right um there's the the reason why i like both of those things is it goes back to my point about women labor force in this women period um i love my mama mama's boy um i think that women are the most powerful in the world there's more women than men in the world they're more educated often they mature faster and what's super cool about universal basic income is that goes back to the point about even if you have things that are free or even if you have access

to skill sets or companies there's certain things that are required in order to live and so universal basic income for the people that don't know is essentially money given to you by the government so that you can have your basic necessities covered. Alaska currently has this in place. Native American tribes also have this in place. My buddy, Michael Tubbs, who's the mayor of Stockton, has run an experiment for universal basic income. Y Combinator has run an experiment on universal basic income. I like what Give Directly, which is a nonprofit that's done related to this it's really really exciting but imagine a world where all your basic needs are taken care of like you don't have to worry about rent food or clothes if you don't have to worry

about rent food or clothes how would you use your time right and so i think i think time is a good concept um it kind of like leads me to a whole nother place because um we think deeply about like how would he how would we exchange value if money didn't exist um i think um there's a really good movie called in time bro it's one of my favorite movies you know about that movie it's a good one of my favorite movies you know and for the people that don't know about it it's a movie where money doesn't exist and the rich people got nothing but time and the poor people are always running out of it right so how do we take our time sitting at home quarantine to invest it and create more time in the in the future time is literally money and i think that universal basic income can

give us more time to not just focus on ourselves but to uh to make the world a better place i mean i'm really excited about that concept so that movie's got justin timberlake in it uh so anything with justin timberlake is supposedly uh good i don't know but on top of that uh the whole concept but the rich people got nothing but time, right? The poor people running out is when they run out of time, they die, right? And it's one of those movies where the first time I ever watched it,

a lot of it was over my head. I just didn't understand what was going on. You know, it was entertaining, but whatever. Watched a second time a couple of months later and I was like, wait a minute. And I started to see some of the underlying themes, right? What they were trying to really say, time is money, all this stuff.

By about the third time I watched it, I remember saying like, holy shit, This is probably one of the most prophetic movies ever in that it really hammers home core concepts for life that if you can understand those concepts and apply them in your life, it'll change the way you think about your time, what you do for a living, et cetera. And it's all kind of masked as this like, I don't know, weird like Justin Timberlake movie, right? Exactly, exactly. And then, like, to put a bow on it and how, like, universal basic income can create time, it's not something that currently exists for everybody right now. And who knows if the government approves it. They've already approved a stimulus.

But living stipends currently do exist. and everybody that does download the career come out can be eligible to receive a living stipend and more and more people are doing this and it can range between a thousand to four thousand dollars even people that are disabled i think the government already has something called like vocational rehabilitation programs where they'll pay for your education and things like that but take full advantage of living stipends just google it um and there probably will be something that exists the other thing that's interesting too is outplacement services as well where if you get laid off a company will pay for your your training um and then take advantage of the living stipend

and then you're in a pretty interesting place so yeah i love it man um all right this is uh super helpful there's a lot of people i mean literally millions of people sitting at home right now who uh who are wondering what they should be doing uh any last pieces of advice for them just as they're sitting there wondering you know what do i do i think the last piece of advice that i would say is um uh listen to more episodes on pomp's podcast because i think it's super important to to understand what's happening in the world because it's changing so fast and you know we've known each other for a long time for good reason like we we we're aligned and we understand how things work and and there's you're always making sure that you're not just benefiting yourself

you're helping others um i encourage them to find other podcasts as well that educate them to sign up to different newsletters, watch some YouTube videos, check out the Breaking Stars podcast as well. Take some time to spend time with your family, with the babies as well. And to realize that your occupational identity is not tied to what you do and try to think about what your purpose is, because I think this is a great opportunity to do that. Yeah. One, I appreciate the kind words but uh i think that if uh somebody asked me who uh who's helped more people uh at silicon valley you guys done a fantastic job of doing that so uh i will i'll link to everything i can and then hopefully people will take advantage of what you guys have built i think

it's uh super important uh where can they find you uh you online twitter anywhere else yeah twitter is the main place um ruben harris r-u-b-e-n-h-a-r-r-i-s same thing on instagram I was on Afrotech Live today, so sometimes I do some things on Instagram. I have a Snapchat, but I don't really use it, but those are the main places. If you want to send me an email, it's Ruben at CareerComba.com. Especially, please, please, please email me if you have a clear COVID-19 offering that you want to provide to people, to workers that are transitioning. Think deeply about what could you do for millions of people that are transitioning careers? and if you have something to support them let me know because i can blow that up and get them to a

lot of people and make sure that some things can happen for them awesome you spend more time on twitter or instagram now twitter for sure i actually have like uh block limiters on my instagram for like 10 minutes a day um because it's literally like what is it scrolling is the new smoking what this ah i like that i like that well it's a bad thing but yeah it makes sense But I do scroll a lot on Twitter. That's my guilty pleasure. But it's also like I got to know what's going on. So ever since COVID, I've just been glued to it. I had a blocker on Twitter too, but I took it off because I got to know what's going on. I love it, man. Well, listen, I appreciate you taking the time to do this. You guys are building something awesome. So hopefully some people go take advantage of it. And I hope people learn from this. Thank you, man. Likewise. Hey everyone, Pop here. If you like this episode of Off The Chain and want to help us take crypto

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