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"Hi Andrew, we had actually been working too find a sustainable business model since the very beginning. Ultimately we couldn't find one that didn't sacrifice o
by arikr 9y ago
"Hi Andrew, we had actually been working too find a sustainable business model since the very beginning. Ultimately we couldn't find one that didn't sacrifice on our commitment to provide the highest quality program possible while keeping our program open to the most diverse students possible."
What does that mean? It seems like this should've been a profitable business - 3000 graduates @ $10k/piece = $30mm revenue.
- obilgic 9y agorevenue != profitable business
- arikr 9y agoOf course. Though the existence of what seems to be a number of other bootstrapped bootcamps working fine confuses me. Also, pretty sure dev bootcamp was bootstrapped - if they didn't put in outside capital, then either they were profitable from day one or they were running break even. I'd guess they were profitable.
- arikr 9y agoHm, wikipedia lists 40 staff, and 450 students per year. Say 40 * $200,000 = $8mm/yr, plus rent. 450 students/yr ~= $6mm. This back of the envelope would point to them being unprofitable.
- blackoil 9y agoAvg. salary of 200K seems to be very high?
- arikr 9y agoFully loaded cost. See: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Vicarious-raise-so-much-money-40MM-in-March-2014/answer/Michael-Wolfe?srid=p42X https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Vicarious-raise-so-much-money-..., https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-mean-cost-per-year-for-a-software-engineer-in-Silicon-Valley/answer/Michael-Malone?srid=p42X https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-mean-cost-per-year-for-a-s...
- cjbprime 9y agoIt was a ballpark of the cost per employee, not the salary per employee.
- jnmandal 9y agoYou normally do math like this with assumption an employee costs 2x salary.
- arikr 9y agoe.g. Financial aid sponsored by dev bootcamp for some students, or even corporate sponsors for financial aid didn't work? There also seem to be a number of other bootstrapped bootcamps running that are doing fine, so this is confusing.
- brooklyn_ashey 9y agoIt would be helpful to know if they were "doing fine" and what that actually means in numbers, student outcomes, and values of the school.
- bluesnow10 9y agoThis explains it: https://medium.com/@clintmania/in-person-coding-bootcamps-are-terrible-businesses-d4c9f122814 https://medium.com/@clintmania/in-person-coding-bootcamps-ar...
- pryelluw 9y agoOver 5 years thats about 6 million per year. Which sounds like a lot but their business model seems to not be cheap to operate. Question is: Why not sell it?
- foota 9y agoI believe that three thousand was over the last five years. So 6mm. I don't know much about it, but you could eat that up pretty easily it seems. Figure 300 students at a time, ten students an instructor, 100k per instructor, gives 3 million. Then there's rent and support staff.
- goobynight 9y agoRent is certainly huge. These guys are renting prime time space in city centers.
- nether 9y agoI wonder if these posh locations are worth it. I'm sure it attracts some students, and there's some advantage in the proximity to hip startups also in city centers. But students are low income during the program and hardly have a chance to do anything outside the office, given the workload of these bootcamps.
- bluesnow10 9y agoDing.
- jnmandal 9y agoThe support/general overhead wasn't cheap either. When I was there we had a free therapist, mandatory morning yoga, teambuiliding exercises, and stuff like weekly free food, etc.
- taneq 9y agoTranslation: To balance the books we would have had to either raise prices or reduce quality, and we didn't want to do either. Kudos to them for making that kind of hard call rather than compromising on their values.
- busterarm 9y agoFrom my perspective, their values were the only thing that made the company insolvent.
- austenallred 9y agoIt's bonkers that they couldn't make those numbers work. I can't wrap my head around it or make it not work no matter what I do to the numbers.