Holberton doubles down on its Machine Learning program

Posted on by Julien Barbier

While developing the tools and programs for education in the 21st century, we constantly challenge ourselves to look into the future of our society as well as the future of the job market. We are now at the beginning of the 4th industrial revolution, which is the convergence of many disruptive technologies. One of them is Machine Learning.

Machine learning has been able to revolutionize so many fields, ranging from medicine to social media, to food, to security. And this trend has accelerated with COVID-19. While yesterday, every company had to become a digital company to survive, tomorrow they will have to become machine learning companies. Already, on LinkedIn alone, you can find more than 60,000 machine learning jobs open in the US. Many are companies that you would expect to find, like Twitter or Tik Tok, but more and more non-traditional tech companies are investing in machine learning and recruiting machine learning engineers: even companies like McDonald’s. According to LinkedIn, machine learning has created one of the biggest employment opportunities of 2021. Machine learning hiring since 2019 is up by 32%.

But while many alternative educational institutions, both online and offline, have done a great job at opening the doors to programming, 99% of machine learning hires have a bachelor’s degree or higher. The field of machine learning is still not accessible to most aspirants, and it suffers from a huge lack of diversity that has already sparked many ethical controversies. The machine-learning community needs more diversity in the field. They are creating our future and we want that future to reflect the values and attitudes of everyone.

Very early on, we introduced a machine learning curriculum to our Holberton School students. Since then, we have constantly improved our curriculum and tools in order to offer the best machine learning education possible. The initial version of our curriculum was led by Alexa Orrico and our community of advisors from Silicon Valley and beyond.

Machine learning is not as easy as learning a new programming language. To learn machine learning to a depth of understanding required by industry, students need to study mathematics, programming, and machine learning itself, which is actually itself a collection of many sub-categories. Learning everything at the same time was a big challenge for our first students, and from that experience and thanks to their feedback, we now have improved both the program and the tools for both partners and students.

Starting a few weeks ago, a new Machine Learning & Mathematics team joined us to build on the great curriculum Alexa started, and better support machine learning students at Holberton.

Today, I’d like to officially welcome the new Machine Learning & Mathematics team: Florian Bolgar, Fares Nadjar, Myriam Azzouz, Oumaima Merhbene. The team will be led by Mohamed Amine Ben Amor.

Oleksandra Fedorova from Google and Greggory Renard from xBrain and The Frontier Development Lab (an applied research accelerator based at NASA ARC and the SETI Institute), will act as working advisors to make sure the curriculum is of the highest quality and meets industry needs.

In addition, and because machine learning is by far the hardest Holberton School specialization, we are now offering more support and more live sessions to our Holberton Schools students. For each project:

  • At mid project, we have a live session of up to 3 hours focusing on theory, Mathematics and resources
  • At the end of the project, PLD will become:
    • Live coding session of up to two hours
    • Live support on Slack for any questions during the rest of the PLD days

Because our partners’ schools spans over many time zones, we have also doubled all these live sessions:

  • One for the EMEA
  • One for the Americas

Finally, we will also organize regular events (fireside chat most of the time) with machine learning professionals from around the world.

Please find a few words about the new ML & Math team:

Mohamed Amine Ben Amor – team ML lead

Amine owns a PhD in Mathematics. He used to be the director of the Mathematics department of the Tunisian campus of the University Paris Dauphine for almost 5 years and is now both assistant master at France National Education as well as campus director of Holberton Tunis. 

Before that, Amine was an entrepreneur for 6 years, using Mathematics to help companies.

Amine has 10 publications in ML and Mathematics under his belt, and 2 more to be released this year.

Amine is a former student from Ecole Polytechnique. One of the best engineering schools in the world. He also has several distinctions.

Florian Bolgar – Senior

Florian owns a PhD in Astrophysics. He has been teaching Mathematics since 2013 and is currently working as ML expert in France. He also is also fluent in Python and Django and has been doing freelance work as a software engineer since early 2019.

Florian owns a “few” degrees from the best French universities:

  • PhD in Astrophysics from University Pierre et Marie Curie
  • Master in Physics from École Normale Supérieure (one of the best university in the world)
  • Master in Astrophysics from University Paris Diderot
  • Aggregation in Mathematics from École Normale Supérieure
  • Bachelor in Physics from École Normale Supérieure

Fares Nadjar – Senior

Fares has a triple competency as actuary (an actuary is a professional using probability and statistics in the fields of finance and insurance), data scientist, and software engineer.

He owns a:

  • Master in Computer Science and Intelligent Systems from University Paris Dauphine
  • Master in Actuary from University Paris Dauphine
  • Bachelor in Mathematic and Computer Science 

Myriam Azzouz – Tutor

Myriam just graduated From Paris Dauphine PSL university where she earned:

  • A Master in Artificial Intelligence, Systems and Data. This master is co-accredited by 

University Paris Dauphine, École Normale Supérieure of Paris and Mines ParisTech

  • A Master in Big Data
  • A Bachelor in Applied Mathematics

Myriam was mentored by Professor Tristan Cazenave. 

Myriam applied her skills in ML as a Machine Learning Engineer Intern in different companies, including Criteo, Equinor, Sagemcom. During her last internship in London (UK) she built an automated pipeline and deployed models to help people and companies extract insights from their data. 

Myriam is also volunteering, helping kids to better learn and love Mathematics.

Oumaima Merhbene – Tutor

Oumaima also graduated From Paris Dauphine PSL university where she earned:

  • A Master in Artificial Intelligence, Systems and Data. This master is co-accredited by 

University Paris Dauphine, École Normale Supérieure of Paris and Mines ParisTech

  • A Master in Big Data
  • A Bachelor in Applied Mathematics

She spent her last 6 months at the LAMSADE research laboratory (Decision Support, Operational Research, Business Intelligence, Decision Theory and Artificial Intelligence) at CNRS / Paris-Dauphine where she was supervised by both Tristan Cazenave and Florian Sikora. During this internship, she used a combination of Monte Carlo Tree Search and Deep Learning Techniques to solve graph optimisation problems. Her publication will be soon released at the Monte Carlo Search workshop. 

She also had a 3-month internship at the Pasteur Institute research laboratory, where she worked on predicting new drug-disease associations using Neural Networks (autoencoder) to identify potential new usages for existing drugs. 

About Tristan Cazenave

Tristan Cazenave is one of the most famous Machine Learning specialists. He wrote 225 papers on Machine Learning. With Bruno Bouzy, Tristan Cazenave invented the best approach to Computer Go. In 2005, He wrote a Monte-Carlo based Phantom Go program competitive with human Go players. An improved version won gold medals at the 2007, 2008 and 2009 computer Olympiads.

About Florian Sikora

Florian Sikora is interested in “Hard Problems”. He is working on Graph theory and Machine Learning solving methods on them. He wrote several softwares and several research papers. He is also Associate Professor at The Paris Dauphine University (1st French university).

Oleksandra Fedorova – advisor

Oleksandra is an ML software engineer at Google, in Sunnyvale (CA) where she works on the Dialogflow project (Natural Language Processing made easy for developers).

Previously Sasha attended school 42 in Silicon Valley where she was also an AI technical coordinator, after which she worked in different startups applying her skill as ML and full-stack software engineer before joining Google.

Gregory Renard – senior advisor

Greg is a star in the world of ML. He is an investor and an advisor at Holberton, Inc, and had talked to students many times in the past. His resume is super impressive:

  • Chief AI officer and head of applied Machine Learning and Deep Learning at xBrain (think Siri for cars) in Menlo Park (CA), since 10+ years
  • He is also on the committee and ML lead at the Frontier Development Lab, co-created by the NASA and the SETI, since 2016
  • Greg is an AI advisor for the French and Belgium governments

Recently, Greg also volunteered with the office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, where he – with the help of two other Machine Learning specialists – trained an NLP hybrid model in order to help the administration to look for relevant information in the research papers and on the web. Daily, they are issuing a quantitative report and periodically a qualitative report of the publications on the COVID-19 cure. They automated semantic collection and analysis of nearly 5 million VIDOC-19 related items per day (representing more than 1 To raw data text per 3 weeks).

In addition to Holberton’s staff, Coderise, our partner in Colombia also has recruited ML specialists who will be available to help students in Colombia:

  • Mario Morales, Senior Research Scientist and MsC and Associate Faculty in Columbia University
  • Robrecht Jurriaans, CTO at Bomberbot and MSc in Artificial Intelligence from University of Amsterdam 
  • Cristian Garcia, Software Developer (Machine Learning) at Quansight

Machine learning has so much potential, and it’s so important to create more ways for students to learn about it. I am beyond excited to have such an awesome team joining us to continue improving our ML program. In combination with our OS of Education, our Holberton School partners have also been able to offer the ML specialization as a stand-alone to developers around the world, but also, universities are now able to offer our ML projects to their students. With this new tool under their belt, our students will be able to create a better future for everyone. I can’t wait to see what they will create!

Holberton School is partnering with Actual group to open new campuses in France!

Posted on by Alexandra Jouis

Holberton School is continuing to expand its operations in France! 

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve signed a new partnership with Actual group to open more schools in France. The first one will open in June in Laval, followed by a second in Toulouse in September 2021. 

With more than 30 years of experience, 300 agencies, 1,450 employees, and 650 million euros in revenue, the Actual group is one of the most successful French staffing and recruiting agencies. We’re very excited to join forces with an important player in the field of employment. 

The Actual group will help to place students on the labor market, while Holberton School will ensure technical excellence amongst the students.


The Actual group has joined forces with Holberton School to set up an innovative
12-to-18-month training course on digital and web technologies.

More and more companies are starting their transformation and accelerating their digitization. To meet this exponential need, it’s become vital to train more people for digital professions, which have become popular and rare on the French job market.  

“Actual group aims to provide employment opportunities for those in research so that they can provide highly valued skills to companies,” said Samuel Tual, Chairman of the Actual group. “Quite naturally, it seemed logical to us to explore the digital sector. Today, these professions are struggling due to a lack of skills.”

The Actual group already has schools and training offers that specialize in three-way employee-actual-employer relations, covering time-sharing, portage, and temping. This partnership will complete their offer, allowing them to focus on digital, tech, and web and to train the highly-skilled digital talent that the French economy needs.

[French] Interview of Samuel Tual, Chairman of the Actual group

“I’m very pleased with this initiative,” said Samuel Tual, Chairman of the Actual group. “By enabling people to train for tomorrow’s skills, we’ll help companies of all sizes to meet the enormous challenge of digital transformation. Beyond training and educational content, it’s about access to employment.”

With the Actual group, Holberton School’s students will be well-trained and well-supported so that they can quickly find a job after their studies. 

The school will begin welcoming its first cohort of students in June 2021 in Laval.

Stay tuned!

Holberton cleared of fraud allegations in California

Posted on by Sylvain Kalache

Holberton is delighted to announce that the California Attorney General has struck down ‘fraud’ allegations against our San Francisco campus and resolved all other outstanding matters of dispute, including claims of misleading advertising. California was the only market in which Holberton faced any regulatory challenges.

With this now behind us, we are excited to move forward with our original mission of providing affordable and accessible education to prospective software engineers around the world.

For the past four years we have focused on educating thousands of students to Silicon Valley levels of software engineering proficiency no matter their background, education, credentials or income. More than a third of our students are the first in their family to access post-secondary education, 20% of them are women, and they come from all walks of life: high-school graduates, former cashiers, cooks and artists.

The company has refrained from speaking publicly about the California dispute pending this resolution in order to not prejudice the legal process. Now that the matter is behind us, we feel it necessary to clarify for our students and partners and other interested parties exactly what was alleged and what was decided.

The California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education (BPPE) brought 15 complaints against Holberton School San Francisco in recent months. The most serious complaints were that the San Francisco campus had used misleading advertisement and ‘fraudulently’ obtained its license.

These were the result of a misunderstanding of communications from the BPPE. The bureau’s parent agency, the California Consumer Affairs Department, subsequently found the BPPE’s communications to Holberton were “vague,” as we will further discuss below. 

TIMELINE

In April 2016, Holberton applied for a license to operate in California. Holberton’s model included Income Share Agreements, or ISAs, which allow students to pursue an education with no upfront costs and pay only after they are earning at least $40,000 per year, or $3,333 in any one month. They pay no interest and if students don’t find employment paying $40,000 or more, they pay nothing.

In March 2018, as Holberton’s application process with the BPPE was still pending, the BPPE sent a detailed questionnaire to Holberton asking for more information about its use of ISAs. Holberton completed the questionnaire and received an email from BPPE saying that the company’s “response is acceptable.” 

In the same email, the BPPE asked that Holberton “provide a new enrollment agreement and catalog that does not reference income sharing agreements,” noting that BPPE “will not approve an application that contains ISA/DTA in the application.”

The BPPE did not say that such a financing mechanism is forbidden, nor is there state or federal legislation restricting the use of ISAs in California. Holberton understood the BPPE communication only to mean that the reference to ISAs should not be included in the school catalog or enrollment agreement and that, while it may be considered as a tuition financing tool, it should not be included in the licensing application.

Holberton immediately complied with the BPPE request and, in July 2018, the BPPE granted Holberton School San Francisco a license to operate in California.

On January, 25, 2020, however, Holberton received a letter from the BPPE claiming that Holberton School San Francisco had fraudulently obtained its license because it continued to offer ISAs after removing reference to ISAs from its licensing application. 

The letter contained notification of an emergency action regarding Holberton’s San Francisco campus that, if confirmed, would have required Holberton to cease operations and stop enrollment.

At a hearing on the matter on February 4, 2020, the BPPE’s parent agency, the California Department of Consumer Affairs, determined that the evidence against Holberton School San Francisco did not support the need for emergency action, and Hoberton was allowed to continue to operate in the state.

With regard to the charge of ‘fraud,’ Holberton explained that it had not understood the BPPE to have banned ISAs and that it had never received an explicit request for Holberton School San Francisco to stop using ISAs. Below is the text of the email at the heart of the misunderstanding. Note, the reference to the ‘institution’s response’ regards Holberton’s answers to the BPPE questionnaire about Holberton’s use of ISAs:

Good Morning! The institution’s response is acceptable. Please provide a new enrollment agreement and catalog that does not reference income sharing agreements and/or deferred tuition agreements. The Bureau will not approve an application that contains ISA/DTA in the application.

Any questions, please feel free to ask.

Sincerely,

A subsequent review of these communications by the California Department of Consumer Affairs, and then by the California Attorney General’s office, clarified the misunderstanding and the fraud allegations were stricken by the Attorney General, along with thirteen other minor causes for discipline brought by the BPPE.

The two remaining BPPE complaints are now moot as we eventually obtained the license to operate and withdrew the Career Track program that was at issue. Nonetheless, for the sake of clarity and transparency, we detail them below.

  1. OPERATING WITHOUT A LICENSE

The BPPE charged that Holberton School San Francisco operated for two years without a license, pending BPPE’s approval of its licensing application. 

However, Holberton took numerous affirmative steps to obtain a license to accept paying students by:  (1) attending the BPPE’s August 12, 2015 Licensing Workshop; (2) requesting information regarding the application process and licensure requirements; (3) submitting our approval application six months in advance of our scheduled opening; (4) hiring a BPPE application & compliance specialist with more than 30 years experience to ensure the quality and accuracy of our application and compliance with California’s laws; (5) promptly and diligently addressing all of the BPPE’s questions during the application process. 

Holberton enrolled its first San Francisco cohort in January 2016 and submitted its application to the BPPE in April 2016. The school’s first cohort was offered education completely free, in which case a license to operate is not needed. When Holberton realized that it wouldn’t obtain its license in time to enroll its paying cohort in October 2016, it decided to proceed because the BPPE had a well-established and publicly announced policy to allow institutions that were making progress towards approval (i.e., that had submitted applications) to begin operations pending receipt of a license. 

For example, DCA spokesman Russ Heimerich’s January 2014 statement to the press indicated that the BPPE did not plan to pursue disciplinary action against any coding institution operating without a license as long as an application was in process. This is in recognition of the fact that schools need to make substantial investments before accepting paying students and that sitting idle while waiting for the licensing process to be completed would create an unsustainable financial burden for the schools.

The BPPE was aware of Holberton’s operation during the application process, as acknowledged in a communication to Holberton School San Francisco on April 12, 2016. The BPPE didn’t take disciplinary action at that time because Holberton was actively taking steps towards obtaining the license. The BPPE confirmed receipt of Holberton’s application on April 27, 2016. 

Holberton obtained its license in July 2018, more than two years after applying, and subsequently attended a Compliance Workshop held by the BPPE on October 11, 2018.

Nonetheless, the BPPE reversed course in January 2020, seeking to discipline the school for allegedly having operated prior to receiving its license.

  1. CAREER TRACK

The second remaining BPPE complaint against Holberton regards Holberton’s Career Track program, allowing students to complete the Holberton program through on-the-job learning. 

In late 2018, Holberton began offering “Career Track” as part of its curriculum in response to requests from students who wanted to launch their careers before graduating. Given the many students who come to Holberton from disadvantaged backgrounds, the company understood the desire by some students to earn money before the end of the 18-month program. In response, it created the Career Track to enable those students to earn their certificate rather than having to quit the program in order to work, lose the benefit of Holberton’s alumni network and forfeit free lifetime access to Holberton’s complete curriculum. 

Holberton provided notice of this curriculum change to the BPPE, which expressly acknowledged the change without comment in June 2019. 

In February 2020, however, the BPPE claimed that Holberton had not followed the correct process to modify its curriculum and add the Career Track program. The BPPE requested that Holberton stop offering the Career Track. After receiving the BPPE notice, Holberton immediately stopped offering Career Track to their California students and refunded associated fees.

We regret having had to stop the Career Track program in California, which had proven extremely successful.

CONCLUSION

We are sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our students and community. We are heartened by the Attorney General’s conclusion after reviewing the evidence we provided in response to the various complaints. We remain committed to complying with the laws and regulations of each market in which we operate. 

We learned valuable lessons in California and hope to continue discussions with the BPPE and other regulators in hopes of making private education more accessible to financially disadvantaged students everywhere.

We are happy to have resolved these issues in California. We continue to believe strongly that Holberton’s vocational education solution provides value to all students eager to participate in the global tech economy around the world. Holberton’s employment-focused education can help address the world’s critical shortage of software engineers while making the tech world more inclusive. We look forward to continuing our core mission of democratizing access to world-class engineering education.

Thank you for your support. Join us in closing the global technology talent gap while bringing more deserving people into the knowledge economy.

UNESCO talk: life-long learning in the 4th industrial revolution

Posted on by Alexandra Jouis
Sylvain Kalache at UNESCO annual International Youth Conference in Jamaica

Our co-founder, Sylvain Kalache, was invited to speak with the audience during the UNESCO annual International Youth Conference in Jamaica, joining an audience from the US, Germany, Russia, Jamaica, and Mexico. Other great speakers included Saadia Sánchez, UNESCO Cluster Office for the Caribbean; Hon Alando Terrylonge, Jamaica Minister of State, Ministry of Culture Gender Entertainment and Sport; Everton Hannam, Secretary-General, Jamaica National Commission for UNESCO.

During this conference, he shared tips on becoming an efficient learner in the 4th industrial revolution. 

“The 4th industrial revolution is different from the past industrial revolutions because the pace of change is happening at an exponential rate. And while our world drastically evolved, our education system has not. A key element for all of us is to become lifelong learners, and most of the knowledge you need is available at your fingertips.” – Sylvain Kalache, co-founder of Holberton School.

Sylvain argues that access to knowledge is no longer an issue for many learners. Students have access to peers, instructors, libraries, and obviously the largest source of information that ever existed: the Internet. An ocean of knowledge is now accessible at our fingertips, which completely flips our world and education! Memorizing information shall no longer be the focus. With the right guidance, students can be teaching themselves; but this is not an easy task. It is a challenge to come up with the proper search engine request, and then filter the results to understand what is right, wrong, or incomplete. Fake news is an excellent illustration of the challenge.

The world of today and tomorrow requires a different set of skills to be professionally successful. Sylvain reviewed the skills that learners shall focus on: 

  • Problem-solving;
  • Critical thinking;
  • Creativity;
  • Professional communication; 
  • People skills.

These skills can be developed with progressive education-based programs where students learn by integrated multi-level projects, action-oriented tasks, collaborating, and working on projects in groups.

The audience loved the presentation, which was summarized with a proverb that our co-founder thought translated very well to education: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” 

The same applies to education: become a Lifelong Learner!

Full recording of this event:

Full recording of Sylvain’s speech, here.

Thank you again, Jamaica Federation of Unesco Clubs, Centers and Associations, for having Holberton at your annual conference.

Fintech project built by Holberton School Lebanon’s Students

Posted on by Joelle Chebli

Opened in March 2020, Holberton School Lebanon is offering to students with prior knowledge in programming to specialize in Machine Learning, Web React, or Blockchain & Cryptocurrencies via our Specialization programs. The school, which has strong connections to local companies, gives students the opportunity to connect with industry professionals to use their tech skills for project collaboration.

Beirut’s startup Cedar Oxygen has offered two Holberton School Lebanon students, Rana El Khoury and Mohsen Abdelaal, the opportunity to work on a Fintech platform: a P2P FX platform to match the Supply and Demand of Dollars.

beirut lebanon student holberton school
Rana El Khoury and Mohsen Abdelaal, Holberton Lebanon Machine Learning students

The objective of this platform is to:

  1. Facilitate access to fresh dollars to address industrialists’ financing needs;
  2. Offer a transparent supply/demand backed FX rate to the industrialists;
  3. Engage the Lebanese diaspora through a remittance platform to support the actual economy in Lebanon.

While Rana previously had some knowledge and skills in programming, she believes that Holberton School helped her brush up on these skills and filled the gaps in her knowledge. 

On the other hand, Mohsen is an Electrical Engineer who is passionate about software programming and is determined to become a successful software engineer; to him, what really matters is how to write clean and efficient code.

For both of them, the Holberton School opportunity became possible thanks to the support of the Lebanese International Finance Executives (LIFE), which provided them with a scholarship that covers the full costs of the program.

Rana and Mohsen were both interested in this project because they felt that they could help their country to solve a major economic crisis. 

After 2 months of work, the project was shipped: Cedar Oxygen’s internal algorithm now calculates the provided FX Rate. The Corporate and the Lebanese diaspora can directly access the platform through Cedar Oxygen’s website, using a unique login and submitting  FX needs to buy or sell US dollars. 

Mohsen found the project challenging since he needed to meet the client’s requirements while delivering excellence on the technical side. This gave him tremendous experience and allowed him to enhance his soft skills. He says “Always work hard, practice, and dream big to reach and achieve your goals in life.” 

Cedar Oxygen was delighted by the work done by Rana and Mohsen and offered them both a full-time opportunity upon their successful graduation.

To know more about Cedar Oxygen P2P FX platform project, visit this website.

The Future of Holberton

Posted on by Sylvain Kalache

Holberton’s mission is to provide high-quality education for the many. With Holberton School, we provide employment-focused education to help address the world’s critical shortage of software engineers while making the tech world more inclusive. 

We started Holberton School in 2016 with a campus in San Francisco. Our methodology, curriculum, and platform – developed in close cooperation with Silicon Valley experts – trained students who were in turn hired by some of the world’s best tech companies such as Apple, Tesla, and LinkedIn. Wanting to make our education more widely accessible, we began expanding in 2018 by opening additional campuses. Holberton School today has a network of campuses that spans five continents across the globe.

This expansion was made possible by working with amazing local partners who operate the campuses and deeply understand their markets’ unique needs. By leveraging our Silicon-Valley grade education, they have provided their local economies with highly-skilled software engineers while democratizing access to the tech industry for their local population. They are changing, for the better, many lives.

While Holberton Inc. started as a school, our focus is now to empower our partners to provide the best experience to their students by continuously improving our platform and curriculum. To better achieve this mission, Holberton Inc. is exiting the operation of Holberton School campuses as a business. Therefore we have decided not to reopen our San Francisco campus, which closed in March because of the COVID-19 pandemic and CA regulations preventing us from enrolling remote students.

Holberton Inc. will remain in San Francisco; we will continue to build our curriculum and platform by working with industry experts based in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs. We will continue to act as a gateway between Silicon Valley and all the local tech ecosystems our partners are building. We believe this is the best formula for serving Holberton School’s international community.

While the decision to close the San Francisco campus was not an easy one, we are excited to focus our efforts on further developing the ‘operating system of education’ and supporting current and future partners in delivering high-quality education to students worldwide.

Montevideo Campus Inaugurated by Uruguay’s Minister of Labor and the Subsecretary of Education

Posted on by Sylvain Kalache

Holberton School Uruguay, alongside Fundación Zonamerica, hosted a ceremony to celebrate the inauguration of its Montevideo campus in Jacksonville – which welcomed its first cohort in September.

Fundación Zonamerica’s mission is to develop and promote innovative training programs and cultural activities that allow people to learn new skills that will enable them to work for the most prestigious and internationalized companies in Uruguay.

Holberton School Uruguay campus

Uruguay Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, Pablo Mieres, emphasized the role played by Zonamerica and the foundation about training Uruguayans.

“The initiative of creating a Holberton School in Uruguay is a reaffirmation of a fundamental value of the country, which is having people always create innovative ideas. The experience of this establishment in Uruguay is a symbol that shows the way forward in the right direction to follow between training and employment for a wealthy, state-of-the-art country that looks toward the future.”

Uruguay lacks tech talent; while the country graduates 800 software engineers per year, companies need 2,500 of them. Therefore companies have to train internally or hire abroad. The tech sector is adding $1.7B to the economy every year.

“We do not have a digital gap in the sense of infrastructure, since we can count on fiber optics, a submarine cable, a data center, the Ceibal program, which are the base to continue building starting from them. That is why I welcome and congratulate this project because I consider that these types of initiatives, from the public and private sector, have to continue blooming”. Said Carolina Cosse, elected Governor of Montevideo.

The ceremony and campus were video-recorded via drone

The ceremony – that followed all sanitary precautions – was attended by The first lady of Uruguay, Lorena Ponce de León; Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, Pablo Mieres; Fundación Zonamerica President and Vice-President, Alberto Fossati and Orlando Dovat; Executive director of Holberton School in Montevideo, Inés Jakubovski; Elected Mayor of Montevideo, Carolina Cosse; the Subsecretary of Education Ana Ribeiro and the President of the Uruguayan Chamber of information technology (CUTI), Leonardo Loureiro as well as other governmental authorities, foundation leadership, business chambers, companies, and Holberton School students.

Holberton School arrives in Peru!

Posted on by Sylvain Kalache

Welcome Holberton School Peru! While Peru is known for its Machu Picchu’s stunning views – it is also one of Latin America’s fastest-growing startup scenes. In 2018, Peru attracted more impact-investment capital than Mexico, a long-time leader in the region. In 2019 a new record was set for the amount of capital invested into local startups, with a 24% increase compared to 2018. Before the pandemic, Peru already had a deficit of 17,000 software engineers, a number estimated to grow dramatically due to COVID-19 acceleration on digital transformation. 

This acceleration will affect all industries as stated by Juan Carlos Tassara, Edifica Executive Director:

“The real estate, as well as other traditional industries, increasingly need to introduce new technologies to differentiate themselves. Holberton’s proposal prepares the talent that Peru needs in a fast and innovative way, talent that will drive the country’s digital transformation.” 

Holberton School comes to Peru in alliance with social entrepreneurs Valery Vargas and Gabriel Bedoya. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the campus will first open as a remote program providing its education entirely online; facilities will open in Lima as soon as possible.

To help make Holberton’s education financially accessible, multiple ways to finance tuition will be available: upfront payment, monthly payments, loans, or Income Share Agreements. Also, scholarships will be offered. 

“For the first cohort, and because we know how this pandemic has impacted thousands of students that had to stop their careers, we will offer 15 full-tuition scholarships,” says Holberton School Peru Co-founder Valery Vargas.

The school will begin welcoming its first cohort of students in January 2021. Check out the Holberton School Peru campus page to learn more!

How a Foundation turned Tulsa into a startup city

Posted on by Sylvain Kalache

Experimenting, catalyzing, and risk-taking for big goals are essentials for every Silicon Valley entrepreneur; they are also for Ken Levit, Executive Director of the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF) – a philanthropic organization based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The city, long known for being the Oil Capital of the World, is in the process of re-inventing itself to renew the shininess of the early 20th century.

George Kaiser is a Tulsa-native who led the energy family business to be highly successful. But as the city’s pivotal role in the energy industry eroded, dragging its economy along, he created a foundation to give back and help his community with the mission of focusing on early childhood education as a way of interrupting the cycle of poverty and, more broadly, to give equal opportunity to all.

GKFF achieves that mission by focusing on three main pillars: talent, economic opportunities, and city life quality. Levit chose to drive the foundation with a startup mindset “philanthropy can be good at trying new things, having a high-risk tolerance for failing, and if it’s a flop, we can try something else!”.

By partnering with Foundry College, Tulsa expects to provide talent that the U.S. economy needs. Their program management curriculum prepares students to accept one of the 22 million jobs that should be created by 2027. At the same time, the college Salesforce Administrator program targets the 400k jobs expected by 2022. Michael Basch, the managing partner at Atento Capital, estimates that students graduating from the Salesforce program will be able to find remote jobs paying up to $65,000 a year. Atento Capital and GKFF partnered to offer both programs for free – each valued at $6,000 – to local students. 

The foundation also partnered with us, Holberton School, a software engineering program training Silicon Valley grade developers. With campuses on five continents, our graduates are getting hired by the world’s top companies like Apple, Tesla, Rappi, and LinkedIn. Students don’t pay their tuition until they find a job. For the Tulsa campus, GKFF is sponsoring a $1,500/month need-based living assistance for students. The unemployment rate in computer-related occupations dropped from 3 percent in January to 2.5 percent in May. The pre-pandemic U.S. economy had 918,000 unfilled IT jobs and included the suspension of H-1B visas. Individuals using these visas had been used to fill many openings in computer-related professions. With these changes, the market for software talent is expected to be hot.

Levit explains that while “the world of economic development is focusing on recruiting companies, by throwing money and tax incentives at them,” they wanted to take a different approach that is about people. On top of upskilling the locals, GKFF is investing in attracting outside talent. The Tulsa Remote program offers to anyone who wants to move and work from Tulsa a $10,000 stipend, a desk in a co-working space, and help to find a home. The results are just astonishing: they received over 20,000 applications with thousands of additional candidates currently in the pipeline. Since the program started in 2018, 250 people have moved to Tulsa with a 95% retention rate, leading to the purchase of 40+ homes. The program attracts high-quality talent and provides an average salary of over $100k. These statistics are not surprising, considering these remote workers are working for top companies like Cisco, ADP, Deloitte, IBM, and Microsoft.

The city itself is starting to attract the interest of leading businesses. Tulsa was among the top two choices for Tesla’s next facility, competing with Austin. A talent pipeline development leader working for Google told Basch that the company would consider opening offices in the city once they could provide 500 software engineers, a goal that he hopes to achieve soon with the help of Tulsa University and Holberton School.

But that’s not it. Levit also wants its fellow neighbors to enjoy life in Tulsa and is looking to have a “culture, stimulation, a rich and vibrant life.” Among many projects, The Gathering Place park, which Basch describes as “Disneyland meets Central Park,” is the most distinctive. A 100-acre green space developed with a half-billion-dollar investment, featuring entertainment for kids and adults.

The pair recognize that there is still a lot to be done and that the city’s economy – still mainly driven by oil, gas, and aerospace – faces significant challenges made worse by the pandemic. But they also believe that it is a turning point for the local economy. COVID-19 has drastically increased the number of companies willing to let their employees work remotely. They are now also considering hiring remotely, where talent can be cheaper than in the megalopolis. Basch thinks that NYC, with Michael Bloomberg, was “the MVP city for 2001 to 2010,” followed by Texas for 2011 to 2020. He believes that Tulsa is strategically placed for the decade to come.

Learn more by listening to Holberton Co-founder Sylvain Kalache interviewing GKFF’s Ken Levit and Michael Basch.

Holberton School is coming to Ecuador!

Posted on by Sylvain Kalache

Holberton School is opening in Ecuador in alliance with BuenTrip Hub, the local incubator for technology startups. Ecuador’s tech scene has been drastically growing in the last few years. The country, which had 70 tech startups in 2018, is now counting 250 of them according to BuenTrip’s Radar Tech Startup study. All are looking for highly-qualified software engineers. The International Labor Organization (ILO) recently reported that e-commerce, software development, and IoT were the top industries for Ecuador’s job creation.

Carmen de la Cerda, director of BuenTrip Hub, says, “Holberton will provide Ecuador students with world-class training. Access to this knowledge and skillset is indispensable because it will empower our local talent, opening doors for them to become technologists and innovators.”

Holberton School Ecuador’s first online cohort will begin in January 2021, synchronizing with the school’s network of campuses located in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. To help make Holberton’s Silicon Valley-grade education financially accessible, tuition can be paid either upfront or in monthly payments. Applications are open to individuals over the age of 18, coming from any educational background. To learn more about Holberton School Ecuador, visit the Ecuador campus page!