Formation raises $4M from A16Z to help underrepresented engineers break into top tier companies

Today, I'm excited to announce the official launch of Formation (read about us on TechCrunch!), a new training platform that is helping engineers from underrepresented and nontraditional backgrounds land the most impactful roles in tech. After a year in beta, Formation has raised a $4M seed round led by Connie Chan at Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Designer Fund, Combine, Lachy Groom, Slow Ventures, and engineering leaders from Airbnb, Notion, Rippling and more.

I began my journey to co-founding Formation as a senior engineer struggling to hire great engineers for my own teams at Nextdoor. It was frustrating having roles on my team that couldn’t be filled for months and months, and I knew I had to try something different. Having mentored throughout my life as a piano, math and SAT tutor, I decided to try training engineers to meet my team’s hiring bar by mentoring at a local coding bootcamp. Mentoring new engineers quickly became my life’s passion, and after two and a half years of mentoring on nights and weekends, I left the engineering job I loved to pursue my higher calling of helping others build more meaningful careers.

When we talk about diversity in tech, nothing gets more diverse than the types of ambitious people going through coding bootcamps. Thinking about the wide-ranging problems that technology has the potential to solve, it’s incredibly exciting to see this surge of new talent with so many diverse experiences to bring to the table. However, in my experience mentoring bootcamp students, it became immediately evident that bootcamp grads just weren’t getting access to the same opportunities that students from traditional universities do.

While bootcamps are great for teaching the basics of coding, they generally aren't preparing students to become exceptional software engineers. Classes are often taught by recent alumni who lack real world engineering experience. Many bootcamps have also gotten too big, too fast, churning thousands of students through fixed curriculums without the individualized attention needed to achieve engineering excellence. With my engineering experience at Nextdoor and Facebook, I knew there was a better way to leverage modern technology combined with a network of top tier mentors to build the most effective training platform on the market – and so I did.

Today, I am proud to introduce Formation’s Engineering Fellowship, where we build personalized training plans tailored around each Fellows' unique skills and career ambitions. Every Fellow is supported unconditionally with ongoing mentorship from top tier engineers from Facebook, Gusto, Coinbase and more. Our platform continuously assesses their skills and adapts their roadmap so that every task and mentor hour is guaranteed to move them forward. Over the last year in beta, I’ve had the honor to watch some simply incredible engineers like Justin, Raymond and Diana unleash the next steps of their journey at Formation, consistently landing at dream companies like Facebook, Dropbox, and Lyft.

There are over 400,000 open computing roles in the US, and this is our opportunity to fill it with a more diverse and capable workforce. Thanks to the support of our investors and growing team, we’re excited to support thousands more ambitious engineers by 2022 to build a brighter, more equitable future for the tech industry.