

How I would create a couple of million jobs--for $53B - jasonmcalacanis
http://launch.is/blog/a-new-new-deal-adult-technical-education-or-the-jarvis-deal.html

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eudaimos
My most important takeaway from this is that you're starting to publicize the
conversation from the entrepreneurial elite.

When the first recession dip happened in the millennium and we were lamenting
the manufacturing industry, I was preaching the same thing to my wife and
liberal friends, that it's about retraining and that's where our tax dollars
should go rather than subsidies and tariffs. Unfortunately, especially with
government spending, the devil is in the details and the follow up accounting.
Look at all of the money that was pissed away to corrupt contractors in Iraq
with nothing to show for it.

From a purely technology industry perspective, the implementation details that
need to be solved are with Placement. Every job posting for startups has
"Rockstar Developer" in them. The people you're training won't be able to get
a sniff from entrepreneurs who need to maximize each dollar spent on a new
employee and they are not willing to train people up while building their
team. I'd say they could freelance, but that market is drying up as the cost
of living in the US has out priced many developers here against Eastern Asia
and Eastern Europe. This won't change until people start to realize the true
cost of a Repeat-Quality-Check loop that happens with cheap dev.

Finally, you have to solve the no-skin = no-value human penchant for not
caring too much about things we get for free.

I think if you combine the arguments above, you can get to a solution where
Government takes tax dollars to Subsidize Placement of Individuals who Qualify
by paying their own way for Retraining with a Government Qualified Student
Loan. Place them within Larger Companies (banks, established Tech Giants like
MS) who can absorb their nascent skill set while getting a Subsidy for (like
you said) the first X months while the person is employed. To make it work,
repurpose some bureaucrats from different areas of the government in order to
qualify and follow up (this is an absolute MUST). MS can complain about not
getting enough H1-B's to come in from India, and be presented with this
counterargument of "why don't you hire the people from our program?"

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lrau
Why not spend 1/10th of the money and instead of paying people to train create
online training classes. Thus basically we could train people over and over
again for the cost of bandwidth. Didn't we hit the age of the internet?

I am sure we could video the class once, and for the same price or less buy
them each a netbook/chromebook cheap get them internet access - and trained
up, and could have advanced classes, so that people could get better.

The only issue I see is that although we would have people trained up, that
does not create jobs. But its a good first step..

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
We are doing that at Mahalo now, but that requires a really motivated person
obviously.

We've identified a spectrum of learning that runs from quick how to videos on
one end all the way to the University of Pheonix on the other end.

In between there is very little, but what's there are companies worth 100s of
millions to billions:

a) lynda.com ($50m in revenue), b) rosetta stone
<http://www.google.com/finance?q=rossetta+stone> c) wiley (makers of 'for
dummies')
[http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AJW.A&hl=en](http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AJW.A&hl=en)

There are a half-dozen milestones I can see... Mahalo has half of them:

1\. individual videos that teach you something you want to know right now.

i.e. how do i make a lightsaber effect in photoshop?
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSSb5l6hHnY>

how can i augment breasts in photoshop
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCAYwqaUoIc>

2\. a course that teaches you broadly about how to learn a program, that's
available on Mahalo.com (or maybe a paid iPad app?).

i.e. learn photoshop <http://www.mahalo.com/learn-adobe-photoshop-
introduction/>

3\. a course on Mahalo.com (or an iPad app maybe) that teaches you how to
solve a specific longer, more complicated task

i.e. how to make a movie poster [http://www.mahalo.com/photoshop-video-
tutorial-how-to-make-a...](http://www.mahalo.com/photoshop-video-tutorial-how-
to-make-a-movie-poster/)

4\. A course that you attend for one to three days for $99-299 on a topic

we haven't done this and don't have plans for it.

i.e. Master Adobe After Effects, Master SEO, Master Social Media or Master
Google Analytics & paid traffic (StumbleUpon, Google Adsense, FAcebook ad
network).

5\. A certification/degree that takes four months full-time where you learn
3-5 pieces of software around a specific skill (i.e. publishing, advertising
buying/selling, seo/social media, graphic design, html/webdesign, ecommerce).
This would be soup to nuts followed by a four month on-site mentorship where
the company gets paid $1k a month to take you on.

6\. A college where you go for two to four years for $20k a year that feels
more like a job.

I'm not sure if Mahalo will do 4 through six... maybe after we get 1-3 right.
:-)

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travisfischer
Great article Jason. Interesting thoughts to ponder. Here is my perspective as
a web developer.

What you are creating for $53B is not a couple of a million jobs but a couple
of million "start-up ready" employees. Frankly these employees are not that
valuable and would be out performed by the couple of million already start-up
ready and much cheaper to hire college graduates that are going to have an
increasingly hard time finding a good job out of college. Also, are there
really that many entry level start up jobs that need to be filled? I think
that people who currently have the skill set you are describing are already
having a hard time finding a job. The "talent drought" is only for highly
trained, highly talented, technical people that have years of practice,
experience and professional training as well as the in built drive that lead
them to get those skills in the first place. Even a fresh out of school
completely green CS grad has usually dedicated thousands and thousands of
hours mastering their technical skills before and during their academic
career.

Anyways, I do think you bring up some really great points and I do think some
kind of reform is needed. Using tax dollars for valuable high quality
vocational education is a great idea. Figuring out how to structure that
vocational education to be efficient and effective is another whole problem to
figure out.

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
Good feedback.

1\. I think that folks graduating college don't have a lot of tech talent or
what employers consider tangible skills.

2\. I think many companies would rather have someone with 10 years on the job
and a refreshed/refined skill set.

3\. This is just a back-of-the-envelope thought bomb.... $53b is nothing, but
the truth is the government does not deploy capital in an intelligent manner.

4\. Only greed and vision-based entrepreneurs can execute on this plan. So,
I'd just give 'education loans' to founders, like we did with Tesla and Fisker
to do electric cars.

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jpadvo
This is a really inspiring article. Jason, I don't know if you're able to
comment on this or not, but do you have any kind of vocational education
projects brewing?

> Oh wait, venture capitalists think social media is a better investment than
> education.

I fully agree that education is a much more socially valuable investment than
social media. But it seems the reason VCs go for social media kinds of things
is because those are more likely to be profitable.

Any thoughts on how to change that?

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
VCs will flock to education when someone demonstrates it can generate tens of
millions or 100s of millions a year in revenue with a solid margin.

Rosetta Stone and Lynda are very solid companies that are worth $250-500M
right now.

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bl4k
very naive assumptions about what it costs and what it takes to train the
unemployed (which isn't the problem to begin with, but that is a separate
issue)

put simply, if it only took 3 months and $4k to train people to be ready for
startup tech jobs, then everybody would already be doing it

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
CORRECTION: My cost is $20,000 in the piece. Please re-read the piece. In it I
state:

\-- four months of f/t training with a $200k teacher. \-- 20 students per for
months, so 80 students a year / $200k \-- i added 20% for admin so it's $240k
/ 80 students \-- add $1-2k per student for space \-- four months onsite at
$1k a month = 4k per student

that's around $10k per person

i say later in the piece double it.... so $20k a student.

now, not every student is ready for this type of training. but where does a
boot camp like this exist?

