🌞 Earlywork Seed Round Announcement
We've raised $1.5M to build the fast-track business school for the tech industry
Howdy folks!
Today, we just announced in the Sydney Morning Herald that Earlywork has closed $1.5M in seed funding to build the fast-track business school for the tech industry 🚀
We’re excited to welcome No Brand as our lead investor, with support from Jelix Ventures, Archangel Ventures, Ultraviolet Ventures, Dave Shein, Jay Simons, Paul Robson, Dave O’Mahony, Sam Rahmanian, Dave Shepherd & Albert Patajo.
But things could’ve gone very differently.
12 months ago, we had shut down a paid Earlywork community experiment, had almost no revenue and were deep in user research mode at King St WeWork (RIP), soul-searching on what direction to go.
And in January, when we were just kicking off the Academy, our runway was dwindling.
We pondered whether the first few weeks of traction were enough to get a seed raise off the ground.
After advice from several peers, we cancelled our raise plans, because candidly, we felt we were raising from a position of weakness, and doing so in a shit market.
Instead, we went laser-focused on the Academy and cut other priorities.
To stay alive, we needed to prove repeatable fellow acquisition, consistent placement outcomes, strong commercial appetite from companies hiring sales talent, and healthy cohort economics.
And do all that at a time when even salespeople were being laid off…
4 months into our big bet launching Australia’s first tech bootcamp with a refund-backed job guarantee, we hit profitability and an annualised run rate of $1M+.
We were like holy shit, things are actually working!!
But for a team of just 4 people at the time, we were feeling stretched to our limits. It was all hands on deck in the present and not much time for the future.
We were faced with a difficult crossroads at that point.
a) Hunker down and slowly grow the school in a tough market, keeping a lean team laser-focused on short-term outcomes
b) Attempt to raise investor funding for a business model outside the conventional B2B SaaS profile, in order to give us the bandwidth to chase our longer-term ambitions faster
We knew there were incredible opportunities beyond just sales & Australia, but we sensed that going at it alone wasn’t the pace that matched our ambition.
So a couple of months back, we made the call to embark on our first proper fundraising process going outbound to investors (good chance to put the sales skills to practice 😉).
And we’re out the other side in one piece!
There’s a lot of glorification around this stuff, but ultimately, a fundraise is not the outcome or the trophy. It’s a tool that a business can use to pursue bigger outcomes, faster.
With that in mind, I thought I’d give y’all a peek behind the curtain and show you how we presented our thesis on education and our plans for the future, including some real snippets from our investor pitch deck 👀
Our core thesis: universities are failing students on employability because their incentive structure is broken
On the one hand, students are spending more than ever on tertiary education, with 3M students racking up over $74B in debt.
But on the other, the skills gap in our tech industry is wider than ever.
We believe that stems from a fundamental misalignment between what students want (a good job) and what universities are primarily assessed on (research).
For QS, the world’s leading university ranking system, just 10% of scoring comes from employer reputation, with no direct metric around student employment.
That’s why you end up with 59% of business graduates who don’t think their degree is “important” for their current job, and 54% of employers don’t see these degrees as important either (Graduate Outcomes Survey 2022)
Despite this, universities get paid regardless of employment outcomes.
This fundamental misalignment impacts students at every stage of the education journey
Ineffective Degree Selection, where students enrol in fields of study that don’t correspond to labour force supply.
Irrelevant Educators, with courses and instructors that are years behind what the tech industry needs.
Insufficient Career Support, where graduates end up without relevant employment because they’ve never been taught how to find a job.
So for tech employers, there’s no reliable signal for entry-level talent, especially for non-technical roles
For technical roles, companies often use some form of asynchronous assessments to evaluate practical skills.
But for non-technical roles, which are ~58% of tech company headcount (Think & Grow), there’s no reliable equivalent heuristic
In sales, for instance, we’ve literally had hiring managers tell us “I’d rather hire 9 Account Executives than 1 Sales Development Representative.”
Because there are no alternatives, employers are stuck relying on these university degrees as a filter.
This creates two problems for them:
An Untrained Applicant Pool of graduates who lack the skills they need, meaning companies need to train them from scratch.
Companies Miss Out On Hidden Talent from diverse work and education backgrounds who already have the fundamentals skills, because hiring managers don’t know how to source and filter them.
So, we launched Earlywork Academy, Australia’s first tech bootcamp with a job guarantee, starting with tech sales
We’re taking photographers, retail workers, rope technicians, physios, property managers and automotive glaziers into the world of tech sales.
The first wave of tech bootcamps prioritised the roles candidates actively desired most, but we take a fundamentally different thesis.
We will prioritise roles where the data shows a talent shortage, because our model is built around an employment outcome incentive.
In our community data, sales has the biggest mismatch between company demand and candidate supply of any entry-level tech role.
Junior sales roles alone make up ~24,000 tech roles in Australia and they’re growing at 9% per year.
And as tech workforce needs change over the coming years, we’ll be acutely guided by where hiring pains emerge.
Our incentive structure means we design programs centred around the #1 most important student outcome, employability
A refund-backed job guarantee isn’t easy, but nearly a year in, we believe it’s at the root of the graduate outcomes we’ve achieved.
As a refresher, our fellows pay a small refundable deposit upfront, and the rest of the program price is only paid once they land a role.
If they don’t land a tech job offer within 6 months of graduating, we offer to continue coaching them or refund their deposit, something no other bootcamp in Australia does.
We do this because:
It allows us to attract higher quality fellows who wouldn’t have considered investing in training for roles like these, or even have the means to.
It ensures we train them to land and thrive in a job, by teaching them the functional skills companies need, and how to ace applications and interviews.
It builds employer trust in hiring our fellows because they know our graduates have met a selective talent bar in the traits they screen for themselves.
And in the years to come, our model necessarily adapts to workforce needs changing, as our financial success is directly dependent on employment outcomes.
The results so far
As we come to the end of our Academy’s first calendar here, here’s a lil’ 🎵 Academy Wrapped 🎵 for ya:
7 cohorts run with 150+ graduates, including our first 13 graduates in Singapore!
Nearly 100 fellows have now landed roles in tech/sales through the academy so far
Every single graduate in our first 2 cohorts actively looking for a tech sales role landed a job within 6 months of graduating
45% average salary uplift for graduates:
$66k average total package before
$96k average total package after
31% of graduates never went to university
37% of graduates were career switchers who were 25+
35% of graduates had no prior study or work-related experience in business/tech
30+ paid partner companies using our Academy to hire vetted, pre-trained sales talent that performs better & stays longer, including:
Overseas scaleups like Deel, HiBob, Yotpo, Monday.com, Podium, & Pax8
Local Aussie startups like Shippit, Eftsure, Zipline, Instant, Safewill, Visory, Payble, BuildPass, Factory, Sektor, Andzen & Subi
Named Startup Daily’s Best New Idea
Named a Finder Innovation Awards finalist for Best Social Impact Innovation & Most Innovative Team
Earlywork Academy will be the fast-track business school for the tech industry
With a new wave of support behind us, we're going harder in our vision to build the fastest, fairest pathway to begin a career in tech.
We see an opportunity to grow across 3 key pillars:
Geographic Expansion, bringing our model to fast-growing tech hubs across new regions, starting with Singapore.
Horizontal Expansion, with a focus on other commercial roles in tech like customer success, where no reliable credentials exist today.
Vertical Expansion, helping our partners onboard & train existing early-career commercial talent, and over time, junior talent growing into more senior roles.
In doing so, we envision Earlywork Academy as the default credential for the next generation of business talent in tech, because we don’t believe a 3-year university business degree is anywhere remotely close to solving this.
Ultimately, we want to help close the education-careers gap in the tech industry worldwide.
We’re building a better business school and we’re just getting started.
For Earlywork, it’s early days.
Shoutouts 🎤
In the highs and lows of the Earlyjourney so far, an unwavering constant has been a community of incredible supporters around us.
As young founders running our first end-to-end fundraising process in a down market, the advice and introductions we got from several of you along the way made a massive difference.
There are too many folks to name, but I wanted to take the moment to spotlight a few epic individual contributions
Albert Patajo for his incredibly thoughtful, detailed guidance on investor narrative, pitching process & financial modelling
Joumana Elomar for her creative, swift and enthusiastic support in the visual storytelling of our investment opportunity
James Tynan for his open, empathetic advice on how to position our opportunity to investors, and navigate tough investor conversations
Abhi Maran, Sachin Shah, Hunter Watkin, Max Marchione, Pasha Rayan & Will Fan for their candid, incisive feedback on our fundraising strategy, narrative & materials
So how can you get involved?
Now, what would a newsletter by a sales bootcamp be without a bit of selling? 😉
🚀 Land your first tech role by applying for Earlywork Academy
💼 Hire better junior sales talent, faster, by signing up as an Academy partner
🌞Interested in joining the team? New roles coming soon; message us :)
If you’ve got a mate who comes to mind for one of these 3 buckets, share this with ‘em!
And if you think you can help in a different way, we’re all ears; message me on LinkedIn!
If you’re new here, welcome!
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Ciao for now,
Team Earlywork (Dan, Jono, Marina, Ryan, Ben & Maddy)
Congratulations Dan and team, and so excited for what you will continue to build!! You all inspire me every time I hear about what you’re up to.