Uploaded August 2021 | Updated September 2026, 32 minutes ago

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Welcome to The Quest Season 2: Episode 26 with Austen Allred: the founder of Lambda School talks about rebooting education by democratizing access to coding lessons for all.

Austen Allred is the founder and CEO of Lambda School, an online coding school that doesn’t charge students tuition until they get hired. Growing up Mormon, Austen worked as a missionary and lived out of a car before applying to Y-Combinator. These experiences taught him about resilience, which kept him laser focused on candidate success through media praise and controversy.

Austen’s mission to democratize education really resonates with me. In this episode, we discuss moving to the Valley, going through Y-Combinator and being caught in the political tensions surrounding free education. We dive into the concepts of ISAs, the future of education and American Dream as a service.

0:00 Intro
8:37 How growth hacking led to Lambda School
14:04 Incentives, income-sharing agreements (ISAs) and loans
23:47 Learning to code and serving Mormon missions in Ukraine
31:59 Finding intrinsic motivation and self-worth
38:43 The ‘Lambda School scam’ controversy
41:37 ‘Why does everybody hate me so much?’ - Capitol Hill horror stories
45:23 Austen’s tips on growth, building hype and scaling
51:26 Being an evangelist and the Amazon experiment

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