Idea
Put a Facebook-style engineering bootcamp inside old-school companies
Facebook runs an internal 8-9 week developer bootcamp that turns finance people into Facebook engineers. Shaan's idea: a service company that goes into legacy enterprises (Visa, PwC) and installs that bootcamp, training their teams to work like Facebook's, a people-heavy but high-margin business.
“I think that would be a way to do it, is to go to big old school companies and say, look, we put the Facebook boot camp inside Visa and we will train you, train up some people here, and we'll train them like the Facebook people trade Facebook. And that would be, I think, a dope business.”
Steal thisPackage an elite company's internal upskilling bootcamp as a service for legacy enterprises.
Tactic
Your tuition bought a network you've never tapped: cold-email the alumni
Prompted by Plaid selling to Visa for $6.5B (founder is a Duke undergrad), Shaan argues that almost no one taps the real value they paid college for - a free intro and foot in the door with any successful person from that school.
“I paid all this money to go to school and I don't care what school you went to. Like, I think Duke's got a pretty big alumni network that's doing things, but really any school, I guarantee if you're listening to this, you've not tapped into the value you paid for, which was to get the stamp and get basically a free intro, a free foot in the door. With anybody who's successful and from that school.”
Steal thisTreat your alma mater as a free intro engine - cold-email successful alumni; the shared school is your foot in the door.