DEV.F, tech-powered accessible education

People in LATAM currently resort to low-quality tier universities, both private and public. These universities are ineffective because they drag students into debt without resulting in high quality employment (or in no employment at all). According to a study by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), there will be around 1.25 million vacant positions for software developers and IT professionals in Latin America by 2025. 

We created in-person and online learning that’s fast and low cost; resulting in high quality employment. We removed infrastructure that is pervasive in traditional education and doesn’t generate value in today’s digital economy. 

By training people without access to quality education in technology and digital skills, we have managed to provide them with access to social mobility.

Consequently, our Vision is to positively impact over 1 million people in the region in this meaningful way over the course of the following 5 years.

Access to quality education in LATAM is perhaps the hardest problem we encounter as a region. People currently resort to low-quality tier universities, both private and public. In Mexico we call them universidades patito or mickey mouse degrees (because they can't be taken seriously in the employment results they generate). According to a World Bank report, these kinds of universities have seen explosive growth in LATAM in the last decade. These universities are ineffective because they drag students into debt without resulting in high quality employment (or in no employment at all). 

Thus, few people are able to secure a spot in the top quality higher education institutions in the region. They either can’t afford top private universities because of their high tuition costs, or they can’t get into top public universities because of limited space (example: in UNAM, Mexico’s largest and top public university, 1/10 who apply are able to get in).

On the other hand, LATAM economies lack the digital talent that’s necessary for these times of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. According to a study by the IDB, there will be around 1.25 million vacant positions for software developers and IT professionals in LATAM by 2025. 

We are building a solution for remote and  in-person learning and education that’s fast and low cost and which results in high quality employment. We remove useless infrastructure that is pervasive in traditional education and doesn’t necessarily generate value in today’s digital economy, for example real estate, full time professors, libraries and other education-related fixed costs and expenses. Instead of investing in these white elephants and generating these fixed liabilities, we use technology to measure and track each of our students’ learning curve so that we can use this granular data to offer them personalized content and the most superb education experience that leads to a high quality job opportunity. We think this makes sense in the era of fastest technology changes the world has ever seen, thus requiring that millions in today’s workforce go through processes of upskilling and reskilling. In today’s digital economy, Airbnb owns no rooms and Uber owns no cars, thus DEV.F owns no physical campus, only an AI-based software platform we call Campus©.

DEV.F is based in Mexico City. We are a regional company focusing in LATAM: we currently run schools in 30 locations in 10 countries (Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panamá, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina)  

Within the groups we are targeting, the most representative with around 2/3 of our total alumni (close to 5,000) are college students from both private and public universities (mainly living in cities both large [population 2M+] and small [population <1M]) who are concerned with their near-term professional future, and also recently graduated young professionals aged 23-35 years old. One characteristic most people in this group share is that they want to earn a higher salary, so they are interested in developing skills that will make them more competitive in the current job market.

Our main way of engaging with this group has been monitoring closely their experience in our courses through polls, interviews, and even by hiring some of them (as part-time instructors and as full-time employees – 100% of our Tech Team are either/both instructors and alumni). The main reason our solution addresses their needs is that our education programs have been designed and polished to result in high quality employment opportunities.

The problem we are addressing –the lack of access to education that results in quality employment opportunities– is one of the main pillars of why workers nowadays need to be equipped with technological and digital literacy skills to keep up with the changing job market. A particular group which needs these skills is our target group of college students and recent graduates looking to gain upward social mobility. Our solution is to leverage our ability to offer low-cost high-quality education using technology so that these groups can rapidly learn the skills necessary to advance their professional careers.

We scale in a unique way in this complex education sector by using layers of technology and data processing to be able to generate value for our community of students. Using Campus© and our technology tools, we obtain and analyze granular data on each of our students so that we can understand how they learn, their soft skills (highly valuable in the job market), their technical strengths and weaknesses (we will cater more courses or content to improve on the weaker areas), their professional development (jobs they take and positions they then leave), and will continue to use this data well after their graduation so that they will remain engaged in our community of alumni. We are also building technology into our operations so that we can continue to scale smoothly and to reach a wider audience throughout LATAM.

Our One-click Nomadic School operating model allows us to set up a new school location with a click, promote our education programs there digitally, and once enough students sign up, a team of instructors from HQ goes to the new location for a month to teach the first class. These Senseis also train the next generation of local instructors and select a person to become the local Community Lead, who is our operations liaison for DEV.F. This has allowed us to open new school locations for less than $1,000 USD and is what drives our unique ability to offer the lowest cost education programs with a very high quality.

In DEV.F our main aim is to offer education that results in quality employment more widely available. We have developed technology that helps us remove unnecessary infrastructure so that we can bring down the price of our education programs, making them much more accessible. An average student can gain access to a job paying between $750-$1,250 USD a month (a high standard in LATAM) paying $750 USD (even less when we use externally funded scholarships) for our courses.

Campus© (our proprietary software platform) is currently in production and being used by an increasing number of our students. We offer four learning paths: 1) Software development and computer science, 2) Data science, AI, and Machine Learning, 3) UX and UI design, and 4) Digital marketing.

Features of the platform include lectures, videos, katas (exercises) which we use to track granular data on our students’ learning progress. We also use AI and this data to rank the students’ motivation and proactivity (soft skills also matter a lot today in employability). 

We also developed Campus Community Edition©, a community online platform to help people build digital skills. We are creating and aggregating the right content in diverse formats (videos, lectures, conferences) and helping build study groups around LATAM. Through this tool we also seek to help students connect around different activities and knowledge areas. This is our attempt of taking physical campus life to the online and digital realm, where students can engage socially beyond the not-so-accessible university campus.

We recently were recognized as the top technology school in LATAM by the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB) (amongst nearly 60 other schools from the region) and won a grant worth over $1.3 million USD to offer scholarships for vulnerable groups throughout the region, thus further opening access to quality technology education in LATAM. 

DEV.F is present in 10 countries throughout LATAM and nearly 5,000 students have gone through our education programs. 

We were selected as one of 9 startup companies in Latin America for the Google Launchpad Accelerator for its last batch which ran from September through December 2019. Additionally, it is worth mentioning that in 2017 we were the first school in LATAM to receive a scholarship grant from Facebook and then the grant was repeated in 2018 (totaling more than 300 scholarships). 

We won the Redbox prize in Mexico for the nation’s most innovative young company.

Most importantly, 80% of our alumni find employment opportunities 3 months after finishing the advanced courses and increase their salaries 164% on average (we measured this data when running the scholarship program with Facebook) and end up working at companies such as Uber, Google, Amazon (in the USA), Rappi, etc.

See more:

https://devf.la

https://campus.devf.la

We found this logical framework interesting because we are committed to our mission of getting people in LATAM out of poverty by connecting them with quality job opportunities. We understand that this cause can sound poetic, so the framework helps envision the path to getting there. 

It is important for us to be in close contact with the tech industry so that we can stay on top of the technology tools they are using so that we can integrate them into our curriculum. We must also understand the socioeconomic realities in the different Latin American countries and cities (are they rural or urban? etc.). The most important outputs of the framework would be the number of enrolled students in the different programs and measure the quality of their experience so that we could get to the short-term outcomes. These would include getting people to acquire new tech skills and gaining access to networks of people with whom they can eventually work or build interesting projects. A medium term outcome could be to help our students find a first job in tech or increase their salaries up to 2.5x compared to their previous salary. Achieving this would take us to a long-term outcome of opening a whole family access to social mobility through a higher income, which would thus result in a virtuous cycle. 

We have proved how this happens in real life: we’ll use the story of Angelo as an example.

Angelo enrolled in DEV.F when he worked as a plumber. There, he learned relevant skills, particularly Javascript, and connected with one of DEV.F’s students, who invited him to work in her company, which was Angelo’s first job in tech. After a year working with her and participating in tech communities, he grew even more knowledgeable and connected. Thus he moved to another job in Mexican growing startup Grin, which is a Y-Combinator alumnus. Today, Angelo helps his family and last month he told us that today he lives in a big house with a garden, a dog, and a socioeconomic situation that he did not even know existed before.

DEV.F has so far served its base of nearly 5,000 alumni. We recently raised a round of seed capital and the main goal of this investment is to reach 100,000 alumni in the next 2.5 years and 1 million alumni in the next 5 years. In other words, our vision as an organization is to positively impact the lives of over 1 million people in LATAM by opening them access through our education programs to high quality employment opportunities. All of this in the course of 5 years.

We spent the first years validating our courses based on hackathon principles and on the philosophy of hacker culture (using technology to solve everyday problems and learning by doing). We then opened our first school location outside of Mexico City, in Guadalajara. We thus learned how to run multiple school locations using internal technology tools. We then continued to expand to other cities and countries, up to a point where we opened two new school locations per month in 2019.

What follows now is to continue to open new school locations while we continue to grow the reach of our online courses, which we piloted this year because of the coronavirus crisis. We started our first online student batch in March 2020 and we have now had 750 students go through our online courses.

For when wgo back to in-person learning, together with the IDB Lab we will work to open 15 new school locations during the next two years. Most of these locations will be opened outside of the major LATAM cities, so that the technology wave reaches small and mid-sized cities where it usually takes much longer to arrive.

This is how we plan to reach 100,000 alumni by 2022 and then 1 million alumni by 2025. By achieving this, we will literally create the biggest pool of technical talent that LATAM needs for this time and those who join the pool will do so earning competitive salaries that will lead them to upward social mobility.

The main external risk we find is the political and financial instability of the region, which could significantly limit or even stop DEV.F from executing our model in some of the countries in LATAM where we planned to grow our reach and activities.

There are also important technical and operational challenges to overcome as an organization. Growing our school location base to 15 new cities and getting to a point where around 2,260 students, many from vulnerable backgrounds, are attending our programs will require a very capable team armed with the right tools, processes and knowledge base. We will also need to have functioning technology tools in place, such as Campus©, along with well trained instructors who can provide our superior education experience without sacrificing quality.

The third barrier we identify is that as more and more students go through our programs, we will need to keep up with the industry’s demands for technical talent, always striving to identify positions which represent opportunities for quality employment for our alumni. This will mean having to constantly adapt to the needs of evolving companies and new technologies.

For the first challenge of political and financial regional instability, we have gradually developed a network of partnerships with local, state and national governments, especially in Mexico but also increasingly in other countries we have a presence in (example: Colombia). We have also diversified our risk by expanding our operations to several countries, which means that if we are blocked in one country, we will still have several more to continue working in.

In the case of the technical and operational challenge, we have a clear plan for hiring more software engineers for our Tech Team to continue to improve our internal technological tools, as well as our learning platforms. We have also created a growth program for all of our instructors to continue growing and polishing their technical teaching skills.

As for the challenge of keeping up with the industry, DEV.F has proved to be a worthy partner for leading companies in the tech sector and for the startup and innovation ecosystem in LATAM. We have achieved this by partnering with tech communities such as Google Developer Groups and Facebook DevCircles, by organizing events such as hackathons with various organizations, and by collaborating closely with leading tech companies. We are also working to improve our capabilities for effectively matching our alumni with employment opportunities, by having created a dedicated team focused on this matter and also in many cases using data-driven technology to do so.

18 people full-time.

A network of over 150 part-time instructors (which we call Senseis) and Community Leads (our local DEV.F representatives) in cities throughout LATAM. These people have full-time jobs outside of DEV.F, but their role is activated when enough students enroll for courses in their location.

It’s important to start out talking about our background in hackathons and tech communities. We have been engaged in them since the early 2010s when nobody knew what a hackathon was in Mexico. We were amazed by what we each gained through immersing ourselves in these events. Sharing a concern for the disadvantaged and inequitable state of education in Latin America, we wanted to make the hackathon as a learning experience available to more people and give them skills to find good jobs and improve their lives.

We all have expertise in running hackathons and leading communities. Enrique co-founded  Androidtitlan, the world’s largest Spanish-speaking community of Android developers. Elias was the director of StartupBus in Mexico and Manuel directed AngelHack in Mexico City. We developed a great friendship and when we had the idea to start DEV.F we pitched our idea to Google (they sponsored our events in communities). They decided to support us by paying all of DEV.F’s expenses for the first 6 months when we did not have any money to start our project. 

As a team, we have experience in working in Silicon Valley, South Korea and Israel. Our management team includes academic experience in London School of Economics, MIT, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Tel Aviv University and working experience in relevant companies in Latin America. Besides that, everyone in the team is a hackathon lover. We love Latin America and believe that this region needs proactive people to make the changes our countries need. 

We have partnered in the past with companies like Google, The Open Data institute (ODI) in London, and different government initiatives in LATAM, such as Ruta N in Medellín, Colombia and the Office of the President in Mexico.

Last year we co-created the curriculum for “Aprende” by Facebook, in tandem with the Tecnológico de Monterrey (the most prestigious private university in Mexico) which is a free online set of resources for digital literacy. We also ran a series of events in collaboration with Google, called “Crece con Google”, which consisted of massive inspirational technology talks and workshops in various cities throughout Mexico.

We are co-designing a digital skills program for Sonora’s NGO HOVER in which our company will participate with Harvard University and CeroUno (another tech school) to develop digital talent in the north of Mexico.

However, our most important partnership right now is the one we have talked a lot about in the application. The partnership in which the IDB Lab recognized us as the best technology school in the region, in which we will impact more than 50,000 people through an ambitious program. We are focusing on vulnerable people in cities that are “forgotten” by the tech wave in LATAM. 

The way we charge for our services is straightforward: we offer courses and we charge tuition fees. 

For our remote and in-person courses we offer four learning paths: 1) Software development and computer science, 2) Data science, AI, and Machine Learning, 3) UX and UI design, and 4) Digital marketing. These courses are made of three, one month long modules called White, Red and Black Belts (as in karate) and run in the evenings (we want our students to be able to work while studying with us). We also have our Master in Coding program which runs for 10 months. All of our courses are the best in the region in terms of the price to quality ratio, since we are not in the business of education, but in the business of social mobility.

We also sell B2B courses for different companies who want to re-skill or up-skill their workforce with DEV.F’s hackathon based experience and with the use of Campus©, our tech plattform.

Since we have one of the largest databases of emerging technical talent in the region, we also have our Careers team, which helps our students get connected with quality job opportunities in startups and tech companies. Since we measure data from our students’ learning curve, we are capable of matching students with specific skills to specific job positions. Right now, we are not charging commission fees to the organizations who hire our students but it is something that could become a part of our model.

We charge tuition fees to our students (and companies+organizations pay for scholarship programs). We are currently at 30 schools. We plan to get to at least 50 schools by 2022 as this is already forecasted and funds are committed from the IDB grant to achieve this.

At present, we run up to 12 batches per year at our bigger city schools, but we predict that eventually we could reach this amount of student cohorts in all of our locations, because demand is only increasing because of the current context. Considering 20 students on average per batch (in Mexico City we average around 80 students per batch) paying up to $4,200 USD, we could make $51M USD running 50 schools and if we could eventually reach 100 schools running 24 batches (2 per month) with an increased average of 25 students per cohort we could make $255M USD in revenue.

These numbers only apply to LATAM, if we add in other developing countries, we could grow more.

This resource from the IDB Cities Network – https://www.iadb.org/en/urban-... – shows that there are at least 210 cities in the continent with a population of 300,000 or greater. We are already in 30 of those 210 and have a pipeline of 20 (almost 25%) coming.

It’s worth mentioning that our variable cost model of the Nomadic School, where we only open a school if enough students enroll, allows us to always make a profit in each of our school locations.

We believe that becoming a part of MIT’s international community and networking is an extremely valuable asset that we can leverage as a company as we continue to grow our presence and impact in LATAM. The world-class knowledge and experience of MIT’s mentors and faculty could prove to be very enriching for us a growing Mexican company, we currently have limited access (through Orly) to this network in particular. MIT is an institution that has deeply inspired us in the past and we have even read that it was the cradle of the philosophy that is at the heart of DEV.F’s existence: hacker culture.

We also believe that as an organization, we are currently positioned in a very interesting place that could enable us to generate lots of positive impact in the region through opening widespread access to high quality technology education.

Although we currently have an original and proven business model, we consider that in order to keep growing our business, especially to other potential emerging countries and markets, access to partners in leading global technology ecosystems, such as MIT in the Boston area, could really help us in these growth objectives. Moreover, MIT is a well-reputed leader in innovation and technology, so a partnership with MIT’s world class talent in this area could also be extremely valuable for DEV.F to continue improving and developing our technology platforms and products.

 MIT is also a global thought leader in technology education. Since we are also working with technology education in a different format and context, namely with vulnerable groups in LATAM and using our Nomadic School model, we believe that we can learn a massive amount in a way that provides a different and enriching perspective from partnering with MIT.

The first name who came to mind is Bill Aulet, from the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, because we read his book a few years ago and became his followers. We imagine that we could talk to Bill about our business model, about new business hypotheses that we seek to validate in the near future, and how to make our innovations more sophisticated.

We have also followed the work of Erik Brynjolfsson on the digital economy and the effects of using new technologies to advance and create new businesses. We could speak to him on the matter of large and urgent needs that firms seeking to innovate have in terms to technical and digital talent.

We would also be interested in connecting with teams or associates at the MIT Media Lab, another well known global promoter of innovation and novel technologies and products. We could talk to them about our technology products and how to make them more effective and scalable for our students and new schools throughout the region.

Also open and happy to meet other MIT faculty as well as members of the Solve network that could be connected to technology education and what we’re doing at DEV.F.

It seems like "enabling working-age adults to build the skills and resources they need to access well-paying jobs in a changing market" is exactly what we do, and this is particularly relevant in LATAM, where we have fallen behind in this regard. It sounds like an exact description of what we do and we would be thrilled to have the opportunity to work closely with GM engineers on the scaling of our model. 

This extra funding would allow us to set up a team focused exclusively on optimizing social mobility using technology. This team would help us transform and become more professional in how we monitor and measure the impact we generate. It would be amazing to hire an MIT graduate for this first position in our company.