Ruben Harris is the co-founder and CEO of Career Karma. The company assists people looking to break into tech by connecting them with coding boot camps and mentors and offering a live audio room where students and graduates can meet one another.
Garry Tan and the Initialized Capital team invested $40 million in Career Karma. The startup earns money by charging boot camps a fee for every student it places with them.
It’s a matchmaker.
As coding bootcamps grow in popularity, Career Karma is a matchmaker for students looking for training programs that fit their skill level and goals. Through live audio rooms and group study sessions, its community helps find suitable programs – it even placed coders with companies such as Stitch Fix and Tesla! Career Karma’s revenue model relies on fees charged to schools for successful matches, enabling it to compete against tech giants such as Coursera and Udacity by offering expanded program offerings.
Ruben Harris and twin brothers Artur and Timur Meyster founded Career Karma from their experience breaking into tech from outside Silicon Valley. They launched a podcast series entitled Career Karma in 2014 as an outlet to share advice with others seeking similar paths; it has since expanded into a successful ed-tech platform valued at $40 Million.
Harris, Career Karma’s CEO, emphasizes its primary mission is helping people acquire new skills and find better employment. However, Career Karma goes beyond job placement by offering coaching and mentoring services – something he feels could make all the difference during these economic uncertainty and job volatility.
Harris hopes Career Karma’s recent fundraising will enable it to increase its content offering, helping people transition from learning to employment. Career Karma could then serve as the gateway for all job-related training courses like online courses, coding boot camps, and other opportunities to further their careers.
Career Karma’s strategy may have proven successful, yet there have been challenges associated with its implementation. Some content from Career Karma took time to gain traction on search engines – particularly posts related to Python, which took 18 months before appearing in search results.
It’s a community.
Communities are groups of people with similar interests or goals, offering support and advice and connecting with like-minded people who all want the same thing. For instance, those looking into technology might benefit from joining one that offers tips and advice to make informed choices or helps find a coding boot camp to meet their needs.
Career Karma, an ed-tech startup that helps prospective students select and attend the most suitable coding boot camp, recently raised $40 Million in Series B funding and plans to expand into higher education and enterprise. This new funding will expand its community and further develop its matching tool for students.
Ruben Harris and Artur Meyer, co-founders of this app, began their careers without college degrees. Both outsiders found success through hard work and determination. They met one another at a coding boot camp before staying together in a co-working space as partners – an inspiring story for anyone attempting to break into tech.
Career Karma stands apart from its counterparts by not charging upfront fees to students. Instead, Career Karma makes money by charging boot camps an administration fee when placing students into one of their programs – this fee varies between $10-50,000 depending on which boot camp it’s placed into.
Career Karma offers more than just its matching tool; its community helps students maintain contact with other alumni and career coaching services. Their goal is to support coding professionals across various career paths, from entry-level jobs to management positions – over 100,000 people have found employment through Career Karma!
Career Karma stands out as an innovative content-first brand with an exceptional grasp of search engine optimization (SEO). Their content strategy generates high-quality organic traffic; for example, an article explaining how to use Python’s float function went viral and gained thousands of retweets. Career Karma’s strategy has paid dividends – millions in revenues have been generated due to it!
It’s a tool.
Career Karma, an alumnus of Y Combinator, connects people with boot camps, mentors, and communities that will give them a leg up into tech. Additionally, this startup assists coders network among themselves after graduating from their program and helps them find employment after it. Co-founder Ruben Harris joined us on Decoder to discuss Career Karma’s recent funding round and their plans to use it to expand their community.
Harris, Artur, and Timur Meyster launched Career Karma in 2018 upon realizing the challenges many non-traditional backgrounds experience when trying to break into tech. After struggling to find resources supporting their entry, the trio wanted to create something to aid others. After starting a podcast about their journey, listeners reached out for advice about starting tech careers of their own; this served as the impetus behind Career Karma which Harris and Meyster launched later that same year.
Since launching their site, Harris and her team have successfully connected tens of thousands of individuals with suitable training programs and mentorship opportunities. Through an algorithm designed by the team, students’ chances of success at various boot camps are assessed, connecting them with coaches and peers in their community. Harris plans on expanding this service beyond simply matching students with coding schools into an all-encompassing mentoring model, including coaching services after graduation.
Career Karma plans to use its new funding to add a live audio room to its website and app for students, alumni, coaches, and community members to network and seek advice from others within the community. They also plan on including an interactive directory of coding schools and training programs that users can engage with directly.
Career Karma’s content meets these criteria and ranks highly on search engines like Google. Converting strangers into visitors and leads takes time; maintaining momentum over the long haul requires having a plan that ensures continued publication when results may seem slow.
It’s a platform.
Career Karma is a startup that helps individuals break into the tech industry. Their platform matches workers with coding boot camps and connects them with mentor communities for mentoring support. Furthermore, Career Karma hosts live audio rooms and community events to assist users during the coding boot camp experience. Career Karma has raised over $10 Million from investors such as Garry Tan and Kim-Mai Cutler.
Ruben Harris and two friends founded Breaking into Startups as a podcast in 2014. After quickly gaining popularity among listeners, listener messages requesting advice on breaking into tech drove the founders to develop an app with assistance from the Y Combinator accelerator. At first, catering only to software development boot camps such as App Academy and Lambda School programs for entry-level programming skills training programs such as App Academy or Lambda School programs – though they have since expanded their services to cover other job training programs.
As the Covid-19 pandemic has caused millions to leave their jobs, Career Karma has seen it as an opportunity to transform its platform into an authority on job training programs. Many micro-credentials offer short, immersive courses to help workers acquire new skills for future-ready employment; thousands have already connected with these courses through its platform.
Harris and his co-founders are striving to turn Career Karma into a “core habit” for users, with daily users making Career Karma part of their routines. Harris hopes the platform will become the go-to place where individuals can discover which skills they require for their careers and which schools provide it best; its matchmaking feature has proven immensely popular among students looking for their ideal coding bootcamp matchmaker quiz feature has already proven incredibly popular with students.
This platform also provides students with a community of mentors to guide and encourage them as they advance through their boot camp experience. These mentors help keep students on track by offering focused advice, encouragement, and peer support throughout their journey – particularly beneficial for student parents without sufficient social capital to complete their education and secure high-paying employment that will provide for their families.
