 Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2018. Brought to you by Cisco. Okay, welcome back everyone. Live here in Silicon Valley at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. We're here for Cisco's DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Lauren Cooney. Our next guest is Sylvan Kolechi, who's the co-founder of Hulberton School. In the news today for big venture funding, eight and a half million dollars, congratulations. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thanks for coming on. We've had many conversations with some of the folks you work with at your place there. Really great mission. Cloud Now Awards have been on, Open Source Summit. You guys have a very special mission, certainly recognized with some good funding. Congratulations, but take a minute to explain the mission of your school. Yeah, so the mission of the school is to provide high-quality education to the most. I think that's something that is very tough in the US for American people, is that there is high-quality education, and Ivy League are obviously doing a great job, but the issue with that is that it's limited to an elite, but a fraction of American people can access high-quality education. And so when you look at the student debt, 1.43 a dollar, something is wrong with that, right? Yeah. And so we want to be a part of the solution, and that's why we created Holberton School. And the interesting thing, too, about it is that, what I like about your mission, too, is that you're very transparent about what you do. But a lot of the jobs are skills that not a lot of people have, so it's a first-time skill. So as people look to hire, say, a data scientist or someone in AI or someone in machine learning or anything in tech, for instance, no one really has that many years of experience. So there's an opportunity to level up for someone who might not have gone to a fancy school. Exactly, so today there is more than half a million unfilled jobs that require tech skills in the US, right? And according to the previous White House CTO, it's going to grow to 1.4 million in the next decade, right? And universities are only going to train 400,000, so there is a gap of a million skilled people within the next 10 years for software engineering type of job, right? So Michael from there with Julianne Barbier, who used to be head of marketing and community, and I used to work for LinkedIn, would interview a lot of people who wanted to work for LinkedIn, and one of the issues we saw is that a lot of colleges' candidates would not be ready to take on a job. They were not trading. You could see they were smart on the new things, but you would need to train them for six months or a year to get them ready to take on a job. What makes you different? What are you guys doing that's working? Can you explain the model? Yeah, so in a regular education, we bring you the knowledge, right? Through a lecture, teacher will lecture you, right? And two weeks down the road, we give you the exam to see if you memorize, you know, like the solution, kind of, right? At Holberton, we flip the education. We give students the exam through a project, and they have to go acquire the knowledge, learn the tool that they need to solve the thing, right? Which is pretty much what we do in the workplace, right? Like my manager, I think he would come to me and say, hey, Sylvain, you need to build this, you need to fix that, right? And then I'm paid to like find the best solution, right? So we train our students the same way, right? And our students come from all walks of life. Right out of high school, some started college, didn't finish. Some used to be barista, poker player, guitar player, artist, teacher, all over the place, right? They come with no software engineering knowledge, and we train them from zero to, for two things. First one, to learn the craft. That's in demand, today's software engineering, so that they can find a job, you know, after graduation. And second, to learn how to learn, to develop problem solving skills, critical thinking, so that they can continue to grow even after graduation and continue to learn and adapt, right? Is there a requirement? The requirement is that you have to be over 18 years old. That's it. That's it. And what is the cost? So the cost is none, until you find a job, right? Until you find a job, and then what happens? So when one happens, if you find a job that's over $40,000 per year, then you contribute back to the school with a percentage of your salary. So we align the school's success with students' success. And the financial contribution that students make to the school is used to finance the next generation of students. So that's like an organic circle where the more students are successful, the more we can train other students. You're investing in the outcome of the student. Exactly, we are investing in our students while they are at the school, but obviously we are like investing in their success. That's the only way for us to succeed. Well, you're certainly optimized for success because you're motivated to do it right. So this is interesting. We are, and we are, and when we say, we eat like the whole Burton staff, but also the whole Burton community, which is composed of more than 150 mentors who are professional in the tech industry. And they are here for two things. To guide students to enter the tech industry, they come to the school, share their experience, what's like to work for a startup, what's like to work for a big company, what's like to be a woman in tech, right? And also they guide us on the curriculum, right? To make sure that what is being told is like all the way through the event. And that works, students find job in Silicon Valley companies, including Tesla, Apple, NASA, LinkedIn, you name it. So they are competing with Ivy League type of talent, but they are definitely not the type of demographic that usually works. And they actually might win too because they have the street smarts and they get the hands-on skills. Okay, so quick question. So is it a for-profit or a non-profit? It's a for-profit. Okay, so it's for-profit, but it's got a mission-driven initiative tied to a profit objective. So you just raise some funding. How did that go? Is that use of funds going to be to expand scope or student body? I'm sure there's some constraints in terms of how much you can handle in terms of student body, locations around the world. What is there an expansion strategy? Obviously you got some funding. What are you going to do with that? So we are San Francisco Bay School. We started two years ago with our first cohort of Saudi students. And the location we had, we could train a hundred students a year, right? That's good, but in the grand scheme of thing it's not a lot, right? The prototype. Yeah, the prototype, exactly. So now that we have these students working for NVIDIA, Dropbox, Apple, and the Google of the world, we're like, okay, now we need to scale up. And we move to a new location that's seven times bigger, where we'll be able to train 500 students per year, which, because it's a two-year program, will be a campus of a thousand students, right? And to give you an idea of the scale, the largest university for CS students in the U.S. is training 700 students per year. So we are quickly coming up as one of the largest trainers of computer science students. What's the curriculum? Is it mostly computer science? Is it mostly tech? I mean, obviously you have, I say anyone who could come in, but you do have a women in tech and you have an underrepresented minority kind of component, which is great. But it's open to anyone. It's open to anyone over 18. The application process is blind and fully automated. So there is no human selection. No discrimination of any kind. No discrimination. And yes. How do you cut people off? Is it random? Like a... It's not random. Not random. I mean, if you have, say, a hundred, five hundred spots and you have a thousand applicants. So you sort it? Is it like the lottery? I mean, is it? No, so there is only 3% of students who start the application process who make it. Okay, got it. So there is a selection criteria. There is a selection criteria. It's hard to get in. It's mostly based on motivation and talent. And by talent, we made this ability to thrive in this type of environment where you learn by doing and you learn by collaborating with your peers, which is something that not everybody, you know, is suited to. So you identify success criteria which you think might be aligned with the culture of the curriculum? Yeah, we believe that grit is a big element in people's success. And I think there is a lot of American people with grit, but they're born in the wrong zip code. They didn't have the right family. You know, we could support them. And to us, we don't want to select people because of their past, but we want to select people because of who they are. Ultimately, the application process is doing this for us. In terms of numbers, so far it brought 35% women, 50% of our students are non-white, and the age goes anywhere from 17 to 56. So it's like a very diverse crowd of students who make this community really amazing. Yeah, coming from someone who paid for their own college and then had to pay it all back, I would have loved to have this around when I was going through school. You still pay the pack. You want it up front for free. So what percentage of the salary is it? I mean, can you talk about numbers or is it, I mean, because that's always, some people want to know the math in advance. Absolutely, absolutely. So it's 17% of your income for the first three years of employment. If you find a job, that's over 40,000. So if you don't find a job, then you don't pay anything. And direct deposit, probably mostly, do they have to be obligated to pay you? Do they usually do direct deposit? Yeah, we partner with like a third party that's taking care of this. And it's basically like a monthly deposit. So it's automated for the student? Yeah, it's automated. And do you do partnerships in any way? So like, women that are re-entering the workforce or things along those lines, there's a lot of different programs out there that support, you know? Absolutely, so we are partnering with a lot of organizations. We want to inspire underrepresented demographic to believe that they can become software engineers. They can be part of that, right? And so we partner, one of them is Cloud Now, with Jocelyn, which- I have won an award, yeah. Okay, and she was on theCUBE. And we cover their events. Yeah, and so with Jocelyn, we worked on fundraising for women, for Living Staitons, from Google Accenture and Scality. And yeah, we were able to help more students who get in the program. And also one thing that we are doing is that we have a Board of Trustees where actually Jocelyn is sitting. We have also the singer, Grammy Award winner, Nio, who help us to make sure that we are doing everything we can to communicate to this minority, right? And as Nio says, like the kid in the hood will come up with like a different set of problem and different set of ideas on how to build product and solve issues. And not only having a diverse workforce is socially good, but it also makes sense business-wise because your customer base is diverse by definition, right? So- You need to have the algorithms that... See, the algorithms are being written by only a small percentage of the population. They're inherently biased. So we need to have that diversity. And plus diversity brings more unique perspectives. It might slow things down a bit, but you're going to get a much more broader representation. It is. And we heard that with Mark Zuckerberg in front of Senate yesterday, you know. The question is like, there's biases in there. Who's writing the algorithms? Yeah, it's become even worse with AI and machine learning, where if you feed intelligence a data set that's biased or discriminative, then the AI will behave like with discrimination. And they're hidden biased, so people might not even know that they're biased. It's built in. So it's terrible. Like the average number of women in the tech industry in the valley is 12%. So we really... And it's also bad for ethnicity, but also I would say non-visual diversity, right? Like what zip code, what background, what like academic background you come from. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a group think mentality. Oh, we have to harbor. Oh, you're instantly funded. Exactly. I mean, that was the old way. The new way is a new generation. You're doing amazing work. We applaud your mission and success. We think this is the model. In fact, I'm even more aggressive than think you should get tax deductions for contributing your time to the school and the students should get a tax deduction off the payment. This is a very scalable model. Congratulations. You should propose that. Get my old Zuckerbergs in Washington, D.C. Send some text messages. Hey, while you're there, change the regulation. Hey, thanks for coming on. Thank you very much. Holdbergsonschool.com. Check it out. Great mission. Changing the education paradigm, bringing a new paradigm for learning, really filling the gap on the jobs front across the world. Mr. Keefe, of course, doing our part sharing it with you. Back with more live coverage here at Cisco DevNet Create at the Computer History Museum. We'll be right back.