The impetus for the post was a few critical threads on Lambda School on Twitter.
I highly doubt any of this would’ve happened if the CEO had not spent a year relentlessly boasting about his company in a way that you’d expect a used car salesman to do. It was (and continues to be) too fantastical in a way that anyone who has worked in startups knows is rarely the case behind the scenes.
When you invite scrutiny upon yourself by being shameless seller in chief it’s your own doing, not because people suddenly decided they wanted to come out of the woodworks and bash your work.
> When you invite scrutiny upon yourself by being shameless seller in chief it’s your own doing, not because people suddenly decided they wanted to come out of the woodworks and bash your work.
Lambda School hasn't been under criticism for literally years because Austen sells too hard. It's because they've done some shady, unethical and outright illegal things.
Their refusal to pay license fees while publicly claiming they did has jeopardized every dollar of revenue they're set to collect. If I were an investor, I'd be pretty mad about that.
Their decision to operate as a high pressure environment has created a string of negative stories on Twitter and Reddit about how pressured students felt.
Their wage disputes with their former educators meant they had to switch to relatively unknown and unverifiable teaching staff, which makes it a lot harder to take them seriously.
The idea that it's LS's presentation that has failed seems like it underestimates the problems at hand.
I highly doubt any of this would’ve happened if the CEO had not spent a year relentlessly boasting about his company in a way that you’d expect a used car salesman to do. It was (and continues to be) too fantastical in a way that anyone who has worked in startups knows is rarely the case behind the scenes.
When you invite scrutiny upon yourself by being shameless seller in chief it’s your own doing, not because people suddenly decided they wanted to come out of the woodworks and bash your work.