A year in review: Hyrise Academy

How it started

Around one year ago, Dominic ended our first-ever Zoom call with these beautiful words:

“Alvaro, I love everything about this. I’m all in.”

The instigator behind that call was Michael Land. Colleagues at the time, we’d been fantasizing about launching something together for a while. We were both passionate about Sales and Edtech, and he’d recommended I chat to Dom and we get him in on the plan. 

It was an easy sell, and a perfect fit.

We all shared the same belief: that anybody can have and deserves a career they love, provided they have access to education and professional opportunities. We wanted to build a program that was laser-focused on getting people into their first tech sales job in the shortest time possible. Accessible for everybody regardless of their background, personalized to each individual, and designed 100% for employability.

One trip to Portugal and many, many hours of curriculum development later, we launched our first MVP into the world in March 2021.

Hyrise (or Headstart, as we were called then), was born!

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How it’s going

Our journey so far has exceeded all our expectations. As with any startup it's been a rollercoaster ride, but here are our highlights for the past 9 months:

• We’ve had 50+ students go through our program, with an average satisfaction of 4.94/5. The reviews speak for themselves.

• 30+ students are already employed and have landed jobs at great companies like Hubspot, Zenloop and Wayflyer. Our average time to job since graduation is 18 days.

• We’ve signed up 40+ hiring partners, including top companies such as Hubspot, Asana and Personio, and empowered 15+ employees from great companies like PwC, Teleclinic and Legartis to perform better by training them on their jobs for faster ramp-up.

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• We have been officially accredited as “Bildungsträger” with AZAV certification. If you are a German, job-seeking resident you can now take our course 100% financed by the government via “Bildungsgutschein”.

• We built our first MVP of a Talent Platform to connect candidates and companies in the most effective way possible.
  

• We were lucky to bring on board three great Business Angels who have been extremely supportive. Thanks Dirk, Felix and Martin. 
  

• We’ve grown our Product and Admissions teams, two pillars to achieve our mission, and now have 5 amazing full-time employees.
  

• We’ve had top sales experts such as Christian Krause, Sam Nelson, Ben Meuthen and Florian Keerl contribute to our program through live events and masterclasses.
  

• Most importantly, we’ve built a beautiful community and had a lot of fun in the process.

Where it’s going

If we can narrow down our year to three key learnings, it’s these:

1. Tech companies’ need for qualified sales talent is even bigger than we expected.
2. There are many people well suited to excel at these roles and lead wonderful careers.
3. We have the capacity to prepare them and connect them to great satisfaction.
   

We have therefore validated our initial hypothesis, and learnt a great deal in the process. Spending time close to the problem we’ve realised, as it’s usually the case, that it’s deeper and more nuanced than we thought. Hence, our plans for the future have also evolved along with it.

Our objective has never been to impact 100s of lives but rather 100.000s. 2022 will be about getting ready to scale. 

• On the companies’ side, we want to help them identify the skills and talent gaps in their organization, with a focus on customer-facing roles. Our objective is to provide them with the talent and skills training necessary to fill in these gaps and achieve their goals.
• On the individuals’ side, we will remain laser-focused on giving people the skills and opportunities necessary to ensure they have access to rewarding careers and are prepared to make the most of them. 
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A big thank you

We are overwhelmed by the number of people and stories we've come across this year. Single mothers struggling to make ends meet and working overtime to get into a new career. People with zero educational background getting the job of their dreams in less than 3 months. And a lot of work from our team behind the scenes to make it all happen.

To everyone that has been involved with Hyrise in this first year, a HUGE, HUGE thank you. We're building a beautiful community of like-minded people that want to improve the status quo.

After this first year, we double down on our belief that everyone can have and deserves a career that they love. And we will work extra hard to make this a reality for as many people as possible.

Onwards!