u/carefree_bomb wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Yep. They all took VC money or otherwise got acquired by larger companies. It was lightening in a bottle that I was lucky enough to be able to ride. Congrats on the success of your own program! I hope you're weathering the times okay.
u/michaelnovati replied ·
+1 this - the fundamental problem with VC funding was that VCs saw high margin transaction - $15K, 12 weeks, massive value creation when people get high paying jobs - and invested in bootcamps to try to scale to thousands of people.
Lambda School/BloomTech is probably the extreme case of this that raised over $100M and scaled to thousands of students in like a year.
The problem was that to meet the VC growth expectations, these schools just hired more humans to scale to meet their targets instead of building the technology to scale that VC normally invest in.
And being a human focused business, these bootcamps failed to recruit the top tier tech talent needed to build that technology who want to work on leading edge stuff, and they failed to multiply the original super dedicated intense founder.
Which brings us to today, where the best bootcamps are smaller, founder-driven programs.