🚀 Taking Off with Avion School
Building a school that teaches Filipinos how to become global software engineers
Wrapping Up with Victor Rivera, Co-Founder & CEO of Avion School
Today, we speak with Victor Rivera, CEO and Co-Founder of Avion School. A college dropout-turned-entrepreneur, Victor has gathered extensive experience working across and scaling different startups in the Philippines, including Lalamove, PayMongo, and WeClean. From these experiences, he noticed a common problem many founders face today: the lack of technical talent. With the boom in startups in the region, there's an increasing need to arm engineers with more practical software development skills. It’s a gap he’s been determined to fill since launch.
Pain Points:
We see two major pain points on 1) upskilling talent and 2) hiring. On the first point, we created Avion School with the knowledge that there is a lot of untapped talent in developing markets that could potentially solve a supply shortage problem of coders for startups in developed markets. Going deeper into the pain point, we think access to talent that can solve and build products is actually very rare, especially here in the Philippines where computer science education is not exactly the most up-to-date. What we’re trying to do is upskill everyone with modern engineering stacks and, beyond that, make it easier for companies to find and hire this talent.
This leads me to the second point. Instead of having to go through the long process of hiring someone, training them, and vetting them through a long recruitment process, we partner directly with companies like Canva, Xendit, and Paymongo to make the matching process much more efficient.
Market Size:
Right now, we’re focused on scaling our product in the Philippines, though we are considering regional expansion down the line. In the Philippines, we estimate that there are ~750,000 technical Filipinos with an IT degree, all below the age of 30. Because the Philippines is also an English-speaking market that is largely service-based, we see a lot of opportunity in being able to push their talent outside to other countries.
In Southeast Asia, that number goes up to ~3 million people with technical talent but who are not trained with modern engineering stacks. We think this market could be leveraged, and expansion will be all about finding those people and upskilling them.
Product:
We’re an online school that aims to teach Filipinos how to be remote engineers. We find the most driven candidates, upskill them with modern engineering stacks (i.e. web development), and help them with career placement afterwards by introducing them to our different partner companies. We’re flexible with payment so our students can either pay PHP 80,000 upfront (US$1,600) or opt to pay us through an income sharing agreement.
Team:
Prior to Avion, I dropped out of college so I started my career into startups earlier than others in my peer group. During college, I was always interning with startups. When I left school, I worked at WeClean and then PayMongo, where I was tapped to run a 30-person team at the age of 21. While the startup wasn’t mine, it gave me an idea of what it was like to scale an early-stage company. It was then that I saw the huge need for technical talent and education. For example, to sell or build a huge company, you’d need to integrate or use an API. But I’d find, throughout my career, that companies couldn’t do that because some wouldn’t know how to or, let alone, know what an API is.
I decided to leave PayMongo to solve that issue through Avion School. Funny enough, the first ever person to apply for the program was my cofounder, John Young, who is a computer science graduate. I told him I’d give him the course for free if he joined the team, and, for the first 5 months, it was just us creating the curriculum and iterating it, based on the needs of our students. We raised pre-seed funding last year, in a round led by Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen, and we’re now 14 people on the team, working on curriculum development and partnerships.
Latest Breakthrough:
The main lesson I learned throughout this entire process is the importance of being connected to the users. We go as far as understanding their personal lives. For the first few students we had, we didn’t just talk about code. We got to know what their interests were and even learned details about their dating lives. It allowed us to connect to them on a much personal level. By getting to know one another, it allowed them to really trust us at a stage where we didn’t have much traction yet. Those who initially believed in our team and our product were the ones who brought in more customers later.
We have now grown to 200+ students, yet we maintain that same level of customer intimacy because it allows us to grow on the acquisition side and build a better product through honest, user feedback.
Recent Shortcomings:
It’s easier to create a business that just works and turns a profit vs. building a business that sustainably scales. It isn’t a matter of growing consistently every month anymore but exponentially. That’s where we are at in our journey.
Founder Wisdom:
Launch fast. Ever since I knew I wanted to start my own venture, I took this notion to heart of building something scrappy, yet quickly. A problem I notice today is that before people decide to start a business, they overcomplicate the process. They start thinking about legalities or reference Facebook, with all its complex features, and assume that their product needs to be just as complete during launch. They forget that Facebook didn’t start out that way.
If you keep thinking like this, you tend to get stuck and paralyzed to the point you can’t execute. Just launch. Even if the product isn’t exactly where you want it to be, find a concept that works, launch it, and keep iterating.
What 3 startups should we know about?
Luis Sia, Edwin Lacierda, Francis Plaza, and Jaime Hing III, Co-Founders @ PayMongo: PayMongo is a Filipino startup backed by Y Combinator that allows around 7K MSMEs to accept all kinds of online payments.
Andrea Cruz and Mikee Villareal, Co-Founders @ MadEats: MadEats is an on-demand cloud kitchen food delivery startup from the Philippines that recently got accepted into Y Combinator.
King Alandy Dy, Jeff Tan, and Rui Aguiar, Co-Founders @ Expedock: Expedock is an AI-powered service that eliminates inefficiencies in logistics by automating manual processes encountered.
EdTech Pulse 🌎
Recap in the West
Keeping up with EdTech dealflow. The private sector is booming and its next mission is to be "everywhere". Pearson wants to be the Netflix for textbooks. Reskilling and learning new skills pave a path forward in LatAm. Foreign investors are getting cold feet on Chinese (Ed)Tech. American educators are feeling the pain from the Chinese tuition crackdown. The new SaaS on the block: "School-as-a-Service". Duolingo's IPO and the EdTech halo effect. EdTech IPOs are gravitating towards the US.
Recap in the East
As China continues to crack down on EdTech, companies are finding a safe haven in children coding. ByteDance pours one out for its EdTech ambitions. On the other hand, India’s doubling down on the private sector. Singapore’s Kydon aims to address the region’s skill gap too. Temasek, SoftBank, General Atlantic, and Tiger Global inject $440m into India’s Unacademy. SoftBank and Accel lead a $650m round (Series E) into India’s Emeritus. Temasek leads a $185m round into India’s UpGrad. What does SoftBank and Temasek have in common? They’re not immune to China’s regulation.
What Else We're Following 👀
A case study on India’s Byju (EdSurge)
EdTech investor Sandeep Aneja on smart homeschooling and the future of education (KRASIA Oasis)
Reddit hits a $10bn valuation as it moves away from being the Wild West for content moderation (NYT)
Amid the latest UN report (hint: it’s grim), Chris Sacca raises $800m for his fund Lowercarbon Capital to ‘keep unf*cking the planet' (TechCrunch)
Lightspeed’s Alex Taussig discusses operating leverage for product- vs. services-oriented marketplaces (Drinking from the Firehose)
Skimpy due diligence, rise in burnouts and less legal opinions reveal the dark side of today’s funding boom (The Information)
Who’s Hiring 👩🏽💼
For this week’s job postings (internships & full-time), please check out our Notion page here!
Hi! 👋 This issue was written by Sofia Cabral, Nick Palermo and Jeffrey Dong. If you have any feedback or inquiries, feel free to email at jeffrey.dong@insead.edu or comment below.
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