Lambda School looks like a charity from the outside, but we’re really more like a hedge fund. We bet that smart, hardworking people are fundamentally undervalued, and we can apply some cash and leverage to fix that, taking a cut.
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market opp is undervaluing / lack of commiserate opportunity for top level 22-28(ish) talent. mgmt consulting firms let those people do 98% of compelling work, package it with a savvy, resumed 40/50-something, and charge a monster markup. that said, done well, a win-win-win.
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The best phrase I ever heard about management consulting: without loss of generality Kellogg’s can’t employ 130 IQ 22 year olds on boring logistics so McKinsey outsources validation to Harvard then charges Kellogg’s $300 an hour and pays employee a third.
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Kellogg’s gets out of this “We don’t have to entirely break our career ladder or pay scale in middle America but we do get a SQL/Excel workhorse that we would have great difficulty hiring otherwise.”
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Any profitable labor intensive business by nature arbitrages human capital. Their profits come from their ability to pay their human capital less than what they charge for the value their human capital creates.
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It seems like what
@LambdaSchool does is identify underinvested human capital, not undervalued human capital. The distinction is important – future potential vs current capability. -
That is a smart and important distinction, though worth noting that Bain et al's most successful arbitrage is heavily training undergrads with zero business background, so perhaps less dissimilar than you think
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Fair, companies that invest in training and teaching are definitely also nurturing human capital. The two are by no means mutually exclusive as well. The distinction is perhaps clearer when applied to the "savvy, resumed 40/50-something" you mentioned earlier.
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Agreed. Assuredly a spectrum, however I'm not sure folks appreciate that Music and English majors with no knowledge of Excel are sought out with equal vigor as Math and Econ majors, precisely because they intend to train heavily from raw (business) clay.
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Agreed, it's good to recognize that human capital is multifaceted and layered. Everything from traditional academic education to technical knowhow, business savvy, and the glue of the soft intangible skills...
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