How it all started
Ever since my undergrad studies in UK a few years ago, I’ve already been deeply involved in world of venture capital & tech startups.
Throughout my time working with startup founders and hosting startup/co-founder matching events, deal-sourcing events. One thing became super obvious to me.
I witnessed first-hand how bad the shortage of tech talents were. I saw how founders were literally queuing up to have a chance to speak with the tech people just to pitch them an idea to onboard them as technical co-founders.
On top of that, I met too many people who were either:
- Working for global companies remotely, earning USD while spending in MYR.
- Building their own Software As A Service (Saas) Product and making money from people all over the world, passively
- Getting free equity left and right from impressive startups
- Freelancing from home and choosing which clients they want to work with
One thing they all had in common? They were all software engineers. Few of them didn’t even have a degree in tech.
The Pivot
Because of those realisations and after a ton of consideration and soul-searching, I quit my previous role in Venture Capital to focus fully on learning to code.
I didn’t have much options because I couldn’t afford bootcamps or go to university again. I had to do it all alone in my bedroom, 12 hours a day, for around 8 months. And let me tell you, that wasn’t fun at all.
I’ve given up multiple times in that lonely journey of self-learning in my bedroom. I gave in to my temptations countless times to learn the next “shiny object” that I can find, from digital marketing, to crypto/web3 to design.
You name it, I’ve probably explored learning it before.
Don’t get me wrong, these are all amazing skills to have and they’ve all played a big role in shaping me into the person I am today.
The issue though, was when I ended up dipping my toes in everything just to satisfy my thirst for more knowledge, and ended up not being super good in any one of them.
That, plus how it took an insane amount of motivation to keep learning and not give up, even when it seemed like it wasn’t going anywhere — I’ve questioned myself and felt like I probably wasn’t good enough. I’ve completed hundreds of tutorials online yet when it’s time to build, I felt completely lost. Like I didn’t know where to start. Imposter syndrome starts kicking in.
This viscious loop continued for approximately 8 months.
The Turning Point
After 8 months of full-time, solo back-and-forth self-learning, income-less lifestyle.
A friend of mine, an IT graduate with First Class Honours (not going to name which university) reached out and offered to pay me money to coach him for his technical interview with a global company. I assisted him in his online technical interview (he couldn’t even solve a single one) and solved all the algorithm challenges.
At that point, I realised I wasn’t that bad. I felt good.This realisation gave me a ton of confidence, and I started exploring the route of employment or just doing software projects for clients. My first project got me $3,000 (which was a lot to me at that time tbh, imagine not having income for 8 months), and the next one, $10,000 then one more worth $40,000.
All in the span of 1–2 months. It’s hard to describe how I felt. It was the best feeling ever and the best validation to my skillsets. I was ecstatic, as if I found success in life.
However, reality set in. How was I going to deliver on these projects all alone? It’s simple not possible. So I started hiring, and guess what? It was almost impossible to hire.
Good tech talents are getting hired all over the world. I’ve desperately interviewed over 100+ university graduates who were looking for a role and probably less 10% actually had the skillsets to deliver. And that’s when it dawned on me. I thought my friend was an exception, but little did I know that this was in fact, an industry-wide issue. The world is lacking good developers.
With whatever talents or connection I scraped together, I hired some junior developers. It was a major hustle, learning to project manage them for the first time, and training them up on the job. That got me thinking. Why was I paying someone to train them? Shouldn’t the 3–4 year university programme that’s worth up to 6 figures be enough to train students up for entry-level positions?
Long story short, after a ton of planning, thinking and networking with tech leaders in the industry. I realised university, bootcamps and online courses are not going to solve this problem. In fact, the skills gap (the gap between what’s needed in the real world and what graduates know) will only widen with time, and current options will not be able to cater to it.
And whoever owns the pipeline to talents, wins the game.
That’s when I took the bold decision to venture into education.
My thought process was simple: Students are struggling to pay back university debt and struggling to get hired, yet employers are struggling so much to hire good talents.
This was when I realised how broken the system is. There is a massive, growing tech talent-skill mismatch in the world right now and most schools are not held accountable to help their students secure jobs.
In the past 2 years, I have personally spent a big chunk of my time looking deeply into the education space, testing multiple approaches to education and iterated from physical coaching to 1-to-1 coaching, to online training to bootcamp-style training to online videos.
After 2 years of exploring and pivoting, I’ve settled for one that makes the most sense, which is the model behind Sigma School. One that takes away all the unnecessary stuff and doubles down on what matters.
- No need for full-time expensive PhD lecturers to teach entry-level skills.
- Doing a real project for 10 hours trumps 100 hours listening in the lecture hall.
- Students are not lacking learning materials. They’re lacking accountability, motivation & support.
Introducing Sigma School
Sigma School is my attempt at changing the way education is done. No longer do people learn in classes from a teacher, but ultimately they learn from each other.
Sigma School is the #1 peer-to-peer online coding school where students learn collaboratively with each other on a direct-path to real jobs to suit real company demands.
We have the best team in place with the rights skillsets in Software Engineering to deliver on our promises to our students, investors and partners. We’re also currently working with 20+ hiring partners who strongly support our vision to rethink the way education is done, and we have huge plans for this year and moving forward. It’s just the beginning!
We’ll get there very soon. It’s just a matter of time!
My goal
I have 1 simple goal, which is to provide a scalable and effective alternative to traditional education (in the context of entry-level jobs for students).
I want people from all walks of life to get access to quality tech education, and I’ll make sure they get the shortest-path to monetisation instead of spending years learning, going in debt for tuition fees and sacrificing all the salaries that could have been made just to be in school.
The team at Sigma School is 110% committed to solve this real, growing problem in the industry today.
And we’ll start with you, my fellow students. Give us 1 opportunity to be your partner in your educational journey, and we’ll give you 10x of what we have to ensure your success.
Come join me on this journey!
Let’s disrupt education together. Let us share your risk. We win only if you win. We don’t get paid if you don’t get paid, so let’s win together, my fellow Sigmates :)
deric.yee@gmail.com
dericyee.com
