3. Helped us walk through simple math of how Lambda gets to $100mm/yr revenue (4,000 students/yr making $75k/yr = $25k/student = $100mm run rate at 17% for 2 yrs) 4. Helped us model if/when raising money was smart from a financial standpoint (we didn’t need to raise)
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5. Told us to hire when we didn’t want to but desperately needed to (most YC startups are told to avoid hiring until after YC; we were 7 people by demo day) 6. Helped us understand YC’s application flow and process, where and why YC batches break, etc. (Lambda is similar to YC)
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7. Helped us avoid raising more money than we needed or at ridiculously high valuations when we could have done either/both 8. A lot more stuff I can’t talk about yet
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Obviously all the advice is context specific, which is why I don’t agree when people say, “All the info YC can give you is out there.” Overall the combination of helping you focus on the right things and helping you expand your vision is incredible, and not something I could do
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#1 is great -- optimizing for more iterations/at-bats can be truly game-changing.
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Seriously revolutionary. A competitor ended up having had 40 students after two years. We’ll have had at least 1,500 by then. Learning to do Lambda at scale is completely different than 20 ppl at a time. Funnily enough it’s actually better there because then you can specialize.
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I once saw a talk (by
@SeanEllis iirc) on running growth teams. I may be misstating it, but the speaker suggested using "# of experiments/time period" as a KPI. I always thought that was good advice for startups in general. The more tests you do w/customers, the faster you learn. -
I think that’s a great metric. Lambda employees will tell you that whenever we have an idea on something to try we try to figure out how to launch an MVP of it in thirty minutes or less. Most experiments don’t work, but if a test only takes 30 mins we have almst infinite swings
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1. “Trials” - an easy way to interview a handful of students and if you like one contract it for n months. That was landing page + calendly -> Slack then manual work 2. Inviting outside engineers to capstone defenses. We invited 4 engineers, 2 hired students (!), now scaling
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1. Failed so far, but we’re tweaking and spinning up again.
@natfriedman was our first guinea pig, we botched some things on our end, and we can now fix. We also botched another apprenticeship with a company when all the students got hired. Trying again soon, with tweaks. -
I felt *really* dumb about those two failed experiments, especially since both were with very smart folks whose time and attention is baluable, but now we know how to fix, so I have to swallow my pride and we go again.
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Here’s a version of that talk from a few years ago (https://www.dropbox.com/s/szbtrbxw2z4lomf/Part%201%20-%20Growth%20Leader%20Roundtable%20-%20Growth%20Process.pdf?dl=0 …). Such a great way to get the team focused on learning. Cc
@lpolovets@SeanEllisThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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