Austen Allred is the co-founder and CEO of Lambda School. A native of Springville, Utah, Austen’s start-up journey began in 2017 with him living in his two-door Civic while participating in Y Combinator, a San Francisco-based seed accelerator. This experience became the foundation of Lambda School’s rapid growth. 

Before founding Lambda School, Austen was the co-founder of media platform GrassWire. He co-authored the growth hacking textbook Secret Sauce, which became a best-seller and provided him the personal seed money to build Lambda.

Austen’s disruptive ideas on the future of education, the labor market disconnect, and the opportunity of providing opportunity at-scale have been featured in: The Harvard Business Review, The Economist, WIRED, Fast Company, TechCrunch, The New York Times, among others. Austen is fluent in Russian and currently lives in San Francisco with his wife and two kids. You can find him on Twitter @Austen.

As Lambda School’s Chief People Officer, Mark is responsible for building the People Team and establishing the culture, process, and resources of a rapidly growing remote organization. An expert in optimizing distributed teams, Mark is especially focused on building an efficient, global team that can scale successfully.

Mark joins Lambda School with 20+ years of experience as a startup executive and advisor on company culture and remote work. Mark is the former CEO of a leadership development consultancy, and holds a PhD in education from The University of British Columbia. He lives in Austin, Texas with his family. You can follow Mark on Medium @markfrein70.

As Lambda School’s Chief Technology Officer, Namrata Ganatra is building the technology necessary to scale Lambda School for future growth. She holds a Bachelors in computer science and information technology from the University of Mumbai, and attended programs at Harvard Business School online and Stanford University Graduate School of Business. 

Namrata joins Lambda School after leading the engineering and product teams at Coinbase, PayPal, Facebook and Microsoft, among others. Namrata regularly speaks on women in tech, diversity, and talent, as well as cryptocurrency and the changing tech industry. She sits on the Forbes Technology Council and is technology advisor to several startups in the Bay Area.

Namrata is also the founder of Ashia Foundation, a nonprofit with a mission to educate and empower women of all ages, races, and religions. You can find her on Twitter @namrataganatra.

As Lambda School’s Chief Operating Officer, Molly is focused on building and running the day-to-day operations that support Lambda School and help it scale. Molly joined Lambda School with years of operational experience at start-ups big and small. Most recently, Molly was the Vice President of Operations at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), a philanthropy founded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. Prior to joining CZI, Molly was the Chief Operating Officer at Quip, a start-up that created a modern productivity suite, which sold to Salesforce in August 2016. She previously spent almost five years at Facebook where she helped develop and lead Facebook's long-term mobile strategy, and create the company's “hacker brand”. Earlier in her career, Molly worked at Google, the Council on Foreign Relations, and was an instructor at the NOLS Patagonia and NOLS Alaska.

Caleb Hicks is Lambda School’s VP of Learning and one of Lambda’s earliest team members. He has led the design and implementation of Lambda School’s mastery-based learning model, and has directed and implemented nearly 100 curriculum iterations to respond to the rapidly changing tech industry.  

Previously, Caleb was the Senior Manager of Instructional Design at Apple where he was recruited to create the curriculum for the “Everyone Can Code” program for use in high schools, universities, enterprise training, and Apple Retail around the world. Caleb was also previously the Curriculum Director, Lead Instructor, and iOS Program Director at DevMountain.

Caleb holds a Bachelor of Arts in business and marketing education from Weber State University. He lives in Utah with his wife and four kids. You can find him on Twitter @calebhicks.

VP of Finance Matthew Sullivan an experienced finance, strategy, and operations leader, focused on building the financial architecture for Lambda School to scale. 

Prior to joining Lambda School, Matthew was a VP at Goldman Sachs where he led finance for their co-brand credit card partnership with Apple. He helped lead Goldman Sachs’ acquisition of Final, a Y Combinator credit card technology start-up where he was previously the VP of Finance. Matthew also spent 9 years KKR where he led the valuation team for their Credit division. 

A board member of AnewAmerica Community Corporation, Matthew works to provide training and technical assistance to high need communities in the Bay Area. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in accounting and business administration from the University of St Thomas.

He lives in Oakland with his wife Josie and dog Ralphie. You can find Matthew on Twitter @matt_c_sullivan.

As Lambda School’s Chief Business Officer, Matt is focused on driving partnerships with leading employers, software ecosystems, and public and private organizations to support student outcomes, hiring partner success, and learning effectiveness.

Matt joins Lambda School after many years of business development, platform, and product experience. Most recently, Matt led the Product Partnerships team at Uber. Prior to that he spent 6 years at Facebook as the Head of Product Management for Facebook Games and the Director of Business Development. He is the founder of Graph Ventures.

Matt has a Bachelor of Arts in economics, with a minor in computer science from McGill University and an MBA from Stanford. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Kathryn. You can find him on Twitter @mattwyndowe.

As Lambda School’s General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, Cecilia Ziniti oversees legal, regulatory, compliance, and transactional matters, and helps Lambda School continue to build trust and serve students. Cecilia also regularly participates in education and outreach related to the legal and regulatory status of income share agreements, paving the way for Lambda School to continue to offer a ground-breaking path to income mobility.   

She joins Lambda School after more than a decade of establishing trust in emerging technology brands. She was the first full-time lawyer on Amazon’s Alexa and Echo products, and saw the product from alpha through hypergrowth. Most recently, she led product, legal, and regulatory efforts at the self-driving car technology company, Cruise. Cecilia brings years of expertise in building consumer and partner trust to advance some of the most transformative businesses and technologies of our time at-scale.
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Cecilia holds a BS from Georgetown University, a JD from the University of California-Berkeley, and studied in London. She is passionate about technology and is an Investing member of Portfolio’s FemTech Fund. She lives in California, with her husband and three kids. You can find her on Twitter @CeciliaZin.