Lack of diversity - plus the fact that by the year 2020, there will be 1 million more jobs than workers in the Software Development industry - is what drove today’s guest, Liliana Monge and Gregorio Rojas, to bootstrap their way into co-founding Sabio: one of the premier Software Engineering teaching programs in the nation, led by some of the best coding bootcamp instructors in the industry. It was both Liliana’s commitment to diversity as a social entrepreneur and Gregorio’s tiredness of being the only Latino in his tech team - after 15 plus years laboring for such companies as PC Mall, Fox Media and SFW - that crystalized Sabio’s mission; which is to increase the number of women and people of color in the tech workforce. Based in Los Angeles but available online to anyone, Sabio’s 12 week training program has proven to be so successful, that it carries a 95% job placement rate for its graduates, of which 80 to 85% find employment within 6 weeks, at an average starting salary income of $50 to $60 thousand dollars. That is pretty impressive, considering that these are just starting salaries that can lead to 6 figure salaries within 3 to 5 years. And yet, as Liliana and Gregorio have expressed, “colleges and universities continue to theorize, write white papers till the cows come home, talk code all day, while the majority of Computer Science and Software Engineering college graduates have to be continuously re-trained to correctly code at the mainstream level.” Add to that the existing $1.3 trillion student loan debt crisis, which has proven to be a deterrent to quality-of-life post graduation, and you can see why Sabio is considered a true fiscal bargain with instant quality-of-life benefits. This was a great talk with Liliana and Gregorio about a much under-discussed yet crucial topic, and one in which we covered lots of ground, including: how, like Gregorio, it is possible to go from someone who’s terrible at math and could barely check email to developing software within a couple of years; how Sabio expands opportunities for Latinos, women and other minorities, including adults who may be working other jobs and would like a switch of career; bootstrapping Sabio while keeping their day job; what makes Sabio’s instructional path so effective and at enabling a person to absorb a full on entry level developer position in 16 to 20 weeks, and so much more...