Sabio Celebrates its Third Year Anniversary
On July 13, 2013, Sabio held its first Open House on a warm and sunny Saturday afternoon in Downtown LA and met many smart and eager individuals who were interested in a career as software engineers. Three years later, the first individual to arrive at our first Open House is also our first Six Figure Fellow, Kevin R., a Morehouse University alum. We are exceptionally proud of all of his accomplishments and know his future continues to be brilliant and exciting. We set out to transform smart and highly motivated individuals into full-stack software engineers. We now have a winning training method that does just that and much much more.
During these past three years, we established our new home in Culver City at the Antioch University campus. There we created an exclusive program with the University that enables smart and motivated individuals that want to both attend our coding bootcamp and also secure college credits towards a Bachelor’s of Science in Applied Studies. Our classes with Antioch University start quarterly, so there are ample opportunities to begin a career in software engineering.
We also expanded and opened a second office in Newport Beach, California. Our expansion was 100% driven by employer demand. We have a deep and fruitful connection with tech employers and recruiters throughout California, and they made it clear “Orange County needs more software developers.” We responded to this demand and found a great location in Newport Beach for our daily training sessions. In addition, we host weekly JavaScript meetups in Irvine and do community outreach at UC Irvine and Irvine Valley College.
Although our physical expansion has been exciting, one of the things we are exceptionally proud of is our amazing track record of participating in and winning Hackathons. Once again, we focus on Hackathons because our Fellows get an opportunity to develop awesome tech during these intense, but insanely-fun, weekend-long events. We encourage our Fellows to attend as many Hackathons as possible, so that they may learn new technologies, work with new team members, practice and perfect their presentation and managerial skills. All of this pays huge dividends to our Sabio Fellows when they are interviewing for new, more-senior tech roles, and makes them more valuable to their teams. It also creates an avenue for those Fellows who are interested in becoming Tech Entrepreneurs because they receive feedback from others who are in that space, while practicing their own product pitches.
Over these past three years, Sabio Fellows have won over 10 Hackathons throughout the country, including winning drones at the New York City Barclay’s FinTech Hackathon in the Summer of 2015, a $10,000 prize from AT&T during CES in Las Vegas in early 2016, and the grand-daddy of them all a $250,000 Venture Capital Investment from the San Francisco LAUNCH Hackathon to name a few. Most recently, a member of one of our first cohorts, Julia W., teamed up with three Fellows from our most recent graduating cohort, and together, all three of them won 3rd place, and are far along into developing a business via their Bass Face web app, that has Uber integration. The BassFace team is 75% women, which is notable in a field dominated by men. A shortage of women engineers is well documented and almost accepted as standard practice in tech. However, at Sabio, we continue to work to encourage more women to become software engineers. Approximately 40% of our Fellows are women, and we are working hard to make it 50%. These Hackathon wins were matched by wins at Hack 4 LA in 2014, AT&T in Santa Monica in 2015 and 2016, and TechweekLA in both 2014 and 2016. We are having a hard time tracking of all our Hackathon wins and are inspired to create a digital tool to help us ensure we properly account for and celebrate each and every time Sabio Fellows win Hackathons.
Our Fellow’s wins are our wins.
The Sabio Founders’ interests are perfectly aligned with our Fellows, and we know they are the key to our success. Three years ago we sought to create an exceptional developer community in LA that accurately represented the rich cultural fabric of our dynamic region, and we continue to work to fulfill our mission each and every day.
This past weekend, we graduated our 100th Fellow, Ms. Tessa Harp, an intelligent and highly motivated young woman who is joined the 1iota tech team and will deliver value on a daily basis. We are proud of her hard work throughout the bootcamp and know she will carry the Sabio flag to many wonderful places.
Southern California needs this exact type of dynamic, diverse tech talent. We have the privilege of creating and cultivating this awesome talent that will continue to propel our region forward.
