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In this episode of The Sustainable Tech Podcast, I chat with Khurram Virani, co-founder and CTO of Lighthouse Labs, Canada’s leading coding bootcamp and tech career accelerator. We dive into Khurram's inspiring journey from living on a couch in Vancouver to building an educational powerhouse. We discuss the evolution of tech education, Lighthouse’s unique curriculum, and the impact they’ve had in making tech careers accessible. Khurram also shares fascinating insights about using AI for personalized learning and the challenges of starting up with multiple co-founders. Don’t miss this episode if you're curious about coding bootcamps, tech education, or the impact of technology on learning!
LinkedIn Profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kvirani/
Chapters:
0:00 - Introduction
1:20 - Meet Khurram Virani, CTO of Lighthouse Labs
3:05 - The Early Days: Starting Lighthouse Labs in Vancouver
5:55 - Why Vancouver? The Vision Behind the Move
7:45 - Building a Startup From Scratch: The Challenges
10:10 - Developing the Curriculum for a Coding Bootcamp
12:35 - Community-Driven Education at Lighthouse Labs
14:20 - From Consulting to Building an Education Product
16:00 - The Evolving Tech Stack at Lighthouse Labs
17:50 - Trends in Tech Education and Employment
19:40 - Why Cybersecurity is Booming
21:35 - How AI is Shaping Education
24:00 - Using AI to Personalize Learning at Lighthouse Labs
26:30 - Making Tech Education Accessible: Equity and Impact
29:15 - The Mission and Vision of Lighthouse Labs
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Khurram: I see AI as
democratizing personalization.
Raphaël: Yeah.
Khurram: Whereas the internet
democratized knowledge, you could
find the information you needed.
It was, you had to do a lot
of the legwork, it wasn't
personalized to your, what you
were exactly trying to understand.
Raphaël: Yeah.
Mm
Khurram: helps you personalize
all of that information and
knowledge and service, right?
And so if I think about what requires
a lot of personalization very high on
that list, is learning and education.
Right, like that is probably
the epitome of something where
we think about personalization.
Personalized learning has always been
a north star for us, and it's where
we've really leveraged the community,
the mentors that I was talking about
earlier, to be able to personalize
the learning for the individual versus
just lectures and content, for example,
which aren't very personalizable.
Raphaël: that makes sense.
Khurram: Um, so I do see AI and we've
leveraged AI quite a bit internally
Raphaël: Oh, cool.
Khurram: for exactly that.
How do students get help way faster than
they could before and in a different way?
How do they personalize what
they're consuming within our
learning management system?
And you know internally we've even
been leveraging AI operationally,
uh, generative AI that is, to
help us iterate on curriculum.
I talked about our curriculum being code.
Well, we all know AI can work
quite well with text and code.
And so we actually have things like a
curriculum healing bot that monitors
for student feedback and then adjusts
and suggests changes to curriculum based
on feedback in a learning management
system to existing activities or
lessons in the LMS as GitHub pull
requests that can then be reviewed by
humans such as myself to be merged in.
So it allows us to again, yeah, that
flywheel effect is just fantastic.
Raphaël: Hey folks, and welcome
to this latest episode of
the sustainable tech podcast.
I'm your host Raph and today we are
going to be talking to Khurram Virani
co-founder and CTO of lighthouse labs.
Canada's largest tech career
accelerator based in Vancouver, BC.
I've known Khurram for
quite a few years now.
We met probably for the
first time, many years ago.
But didn't chat too much.
And then in the past few years we started
chatting a lot more and hanging out and
we're always talking a lot about tech.
Like that's what we connected over is
frameworks and how to organize code, how
to teach people, how to code how to make
software development more accessible to
people but it's been very much about code.
'cause that's a lot of what I do.
And that's where our interests
intersected a lot I really wanted to
dig into lighthouse labs and Khurram's
journey to building this thing.
I've actually hired a couple of
people from my house labs in the past.
And so I already had a sense of how the
organization operates to some extent.
But I really wanted to
get into the meat of it.
What drives the people behind it?
And how it all started.
So I hope you enjoy the episode.
I learned a lot from it
and it was just a fun chat.
Here's my interview with Khurram
Hi Khurram.
How are you?
Khurram: Hey, Raph, I'm good.
Thanks for asking.
Raphaël: Awesome.
So I'm just gonna dive right into it.
Uh, and I just kind of want to know, how
you started Lighthouse Labs and like
what led you to the point where you
were like, yeah, let's do this thing.
Khurram: Yeah, that's a great question.
So Lighthouse Labs was started by
myself and a few others out in Vancouver
initially, 11 years ago now, in 2013.
Yeah, and I'd moved just
specifically for that reason from
Toronto to Vancouver living on a
couch for the first three months.
And so it was a wild
time in terms of startup.
It's a, you know, it's not funded by big
VCs or angels or anything like that, so
it's very bootstrapped and continues to
feel like a startup, even 11 years in.
Um, but at its heart, Lighthouse
Labs is more of an education
company than a tech company, right?
It's tech education,
Raphaël: Mm hmm.
Khurram: people to enter into technology
by going through a very quick and
short amount of bootcamp like education
whether it's three months or six months.
Um, and so that they can actually
be technical professionals like
software developers, data scientists,
or cyber security, professionals.
And the impetus for it was
actually many years before then.
I guess maybe I need to give you
a little bit of what my journey, a
little bit to actually fully answer the
question of how Lighthouse came about.
Raphaël: Yeah.
Khurram: I've been a technologist and
an educator for most of my life since
I was probably around 10 years old.
Raphaël: Oh, cool.
Khurram: And so this kind of goes back
to Pakistan where I was born and grew up.
But of course at the time it was my
parents that made that decision of
let's bring a computer into the house.
And when I was getting really,
really involved with it, let's
ask him to volunteer at the local
library to teach adults how to
use MS DOS and Windows and all
Raphaël: I love it.
Khurram: So this is going back
into the early mid 90s, you
know, dealing with 386 or 486.
I don't know if the audience is going
to be able to relate to these words.
Pre pentium, if that
means anything to anybody.
Uh, you know, pretty much
pre internet for me anyway.
And it was a kind of falling backward
into my passion of tech and education.
Without realizing it, and that followed
me through all the way to today,
where I, even in high school and other
schooling, would always put my hand up
to help build curriculum for computer
science, or teach the computer science
programs, or TA, or what have you.
Um, and so that was like a big part
of, you know, what I saw myself getting
into in my later stages in life.
I guess I always thought I would be
a part time instructor at a career
college or something later in life as
a retirement thing, but coding boot
camps happened and I actually had the
opportunity to work as a consultant for
one of the first ones in Canada, the first
one for in Canada, out east in Toronto
and I helped build their curriculum,
was their lead instructor, taught with
them for a few cohorts and realized
how I'd want to do things a little bit
differently and have more control over the
experience for students and the outcomes.
And took a step back from them and started
my own while moving out west to Vancouver.
But then quickly also a year later
expanding it out to the East Coast.
Raphaël: All right.
And
Khurram: of Canada.
Raphaël: Nice.
Yeah, that's epic.
And so why Vancouver?
Why did you move from Toronto?
Khurram: I found that Vancouver's
tech community was more nascent.
Raphaël: Okay.
Khurram: Toronto already
had a similar offering.
Vancouver's was, it seemed ripe
for There's a need here that hasn't
really been accomplished yet, but
also with the goal of going back.
Also, personally, I wanted to
move out, my wife and I wanted to
move out to the West Coast anyway.
So it was a little bit of a selfish
decision, and honestly, I had to strong
arm my other co founders because they were
also asking the same question, why are we
not doing this in a bigger market first?
Um, but we did move out to
Toronto within a year as well,
a year and a half of starting.
Raphaël: And how did you
meet your co founders?
Khurram: Uh, actually, so one of them,
uh, Josh Borts, I've been, I've had other
startups with I had a software agency,
even actually while we started Lighthouse
Labs, we were operating another business
together to provide software consultancy
to startups and mid sized companies, and
we had clients like, Fasken on the law
side, and TD on the banking side, and some
healthcare companies as well, so it was
going pretty well, but I was also getting
in A little bit tired of doing consulting
and not having a product or something
that was our own that was longer term.
But when I broached the idea with him
a little bit after kind of doing a
little bit of that part time teaching
with the other bootcamp, he liked the
idea but didn't want to move out west.
I said I wanted to move out west and so
that was a little bit of a contention.
And then we agreed that we
would need more co founders.
So actually initially we started
off with six co founders.
Which, in hindsight, was
a pretty big mistake.
Um, that would be my first advice to
anybody looking to start something, is
maybe don't have so many co founders.
Raphaël: Yep.
What do you think is the ideal number?
What's the perfect number of co founders?
Khurram: I'd say three is probably ideal.
Two is also great.
And, you know, people worry about
even numbers and tiebreakers.
Honestly, there's so
many ways around that.
Uh, and it rarely is gonna be an issue.
If you're gonna have contention,
it'll be with more people, so likely
my guess is three is more contentious
than two, is more contentious than
one, right, in terms of difference
of opinions and values and so on.
Raphaël: Yeah.
Nice.
What were your, like, tangible steps?
Like, how did you first actually
start building this thing?
did you just go out and find a
space and say, all right, let's
shove some students in here and
Khurram: So we all moved.
There was, there was actually like
five of us that, four and a half if
you will, that moved from Toronto.
We were all East Coast based.
Not a single one of us lived in Vancouver.
My, my co founders to this day make
fun of me that I forced them to
move to Vancouver, some of them.
Or to start a business in Vancouver,
and I had never visited Vancouver
Raphaël: that's so funny,
Khurram: how are you going there and
moving there without at least visiting it?
I find, you know, Google Maps
Street View is good enough, but, um,
Raphaël: yeah,
Khurram: it's Canada.
but it was, a bunch of them came here
earlier, went to a lot of meetups.
There was, this type of company, this
type of school, needs a lot of inroads
and conversation because of it, especially
at the time, progressive, different.
Change in model approach to education.
You need a lot of conversation with
especially employers to get the word
out, but also get their buy in as
the early employers for our grads.
And then of course in that process, meet
with people who are looking to enter tech,
who are maybe also going to those meetups.
So it was a lot, every week we
would go to five to six meetups.
Sometimes double down on meetups
every night and then of course, a
lot of meetings that would follow
from there that were one on ones,
very much in person in the Gastown
and Yaletown area of Vancouver.
Raphaël: And how did you
develop your curriculum?
Khurram: Yeah, so, um, although
we had a lot of co founders, I
was the only one focused on the
product side of things at the time.
Everybody else was focused on, sales,
marketing and those kind of initiatives,
admissions, et cetera, whereas I was
focused on building the curriculum.
Of course, I had some inspiration
or already had my preconceived
ideas from having done it before
Raphaël: mm hmm,
Khurram: and having taught a lot before.
So I brought a lot of
those values into it.
One of those values, for example,
being community driven education,
where a big emphasis for how we did
things, very different than anybody
else even in the US that was doing
this, was around bringing community
into the school instead of you join the
community after you graduate the school.
When you come to Lighthouse Labs, you
are already part of the tech community.
Because there's so much of the tech
community already involved not just
inception, but in its operation.
Raphaël: yeah, I have to say
As someone, you know, I didn't
do any of your programs, but I
hired someone from your programs.
This was in 2015.
And I felt like Lighthouse
Labs had this like, draw to it.
Like, I just felt like people were like,
Oh yeah, let's go check out like the
stuff that the students are building.
And I would meet other people
from like the tech sector who were
Khurram: We were at one point in the
first year only around ten people.
And whenever people would meet
us, they would assume we were
like a hundred person company.
And that is thanks to actually my co
founder, Jeremy Shackey, who is our
head of marketing, CEO and all of that.
And he's just a brilliant
growth hacker marketer.
Especially with how we
did the first two years.
Where even companies like Telus, et
cetera, just assumed that Lighthouse
Labs was like 50 to 100 people
and had been around for a long
time just in the way that we did
our marketing and conversations.
But another part of that is, again, that
bringing that community into the company
made the company feel a lot more already
integrated even in its first few months.
Raphaël: Yeah.
That makes a lot of sense.
I'm curious if you can tell me a bit
more about like how, like, okay, so you,
you were saying how you were kind of
sick of consulting, and you wanted like
a product, a thing to call your own.
I do feel like in some of our like
previous conversations, you do
sort of frame like Lighthouse as,
uh, like it feels like a product.
It is in a way a service, like education
is a service, but I feel like some of you
are thinking about it and the way that
you've described things, even down to the
fact that if I understand correctly, you
have a custom platform that you build for
your students to engage with the material.
Um, so yeah, can you
tell me more about that?
Like how do you think about it?
Education as a product.
How does tech actually fit into that?
Why?
Why build your own platform?
I don't know all of that stuff.
I'm really curious.
Khurram: Yeah, that's a great question.
But from day one, we've seen, despite
being an education company, we also
see ourselves as a tech company.
We are constantly working with
technologists that are teaching with us,
that are mentoring with us, and that are
studying with us to become professionals.
And actually, we made the decision early
on to build a lot of the software and the
curriculum in house instead of licensing
or procuring things from external, which
was always an option, and many others
have pursued that, even for curriculum.
Um, we've built almost all our curriculum,
especially in the early days, from
scratch, uh, using proprietary, home
grown, and actually, by the way, mostly
the software that we built was built by
our alumni, with oversight from seniors
like myself, and a lot of how we actually
build our curriculum is very different.
We build it using the
software development mindset.
So we actually write curriculum
as code, for example, where it's
all written in markdown files.
And all stored on GitHub with,
you know, GitHub pull requests
for each change and being tracked.
And we allow our part time
teachers, who are the mentors,
to actually contribute changes.
And it allows our curriculum
to move extremely rapidly.
Instead of, you know, Google Docs
or your traditional WordPress like
content management system where
multiple people can't be contributing
change, version history, all of
these things are problematic we've
kind of really streamlined that.
So thinking about our curriculum
as our product allowed us to
really focus on, well, what does
the authoring workflow look like?
And believe me, we've used other more
common industry standard authoring
tools and they have their advantages.
They're what you see is what you
get type editors, but they're not
good for technologists who want to
move fast and follow best practices
on how you manage content and code.
Raphaël: That's cool.
I'm maybe digging a little too much
into tech things, but I'm kind of
curious, like, what, what is the app?
Like, how's it built?
I assume, I think it's Ruby
on Rails because that's what
you used to focus on, I think.
Khurram: Yeah, we, we
definitely eat our own dog food.
So a lot of the curriculum, of course
it's changed a lot in the past 10 years.
You know, the focus on Ruby is less, the
focus on JavaScript, Node, and React are
way heavier, at least on the web dev side.
We have data scientists that
we graduate that learn Python
and work on data lakes, etc.
And actually we're also hired
at Lighthouse to help build
out our data infrastructure.
Um, but yes, our tech stack,
although it's very Intricate, as
I mentioned, there's some Python
and you know, heavy SQL in there.
On the web application side,
it's a lot of Node, Ruby, Ruby on
Rails, and a lot of React as well.
We even have some Angular in there from
the good old days that we haven't changed
over, old Angular code, I should say.
So it depends on which app we're
talking about, but there is definitely
a heavy reliance on Ruby on Rails.
It's something we still continue
to teach, although a lot less than
we did in our first few years.
Raphaël: Okay.
I'm curious, speaking to that,
how do you see, both like the
evolution of, like, the tools and the
technologies that people are using?
What do students want to learn?
Like, what do you see in the market?
Like, what are people looking for?
Khurram: It's a great question.
I think there's um, definitely it's
a shifting landscape right now.
Um, I don't think it'll be a surprise to
anybody listening, if they're listening
in the same year or thereabouts, that
the market is a little bit, is quite
different than it was even a year ago.
Where there's a lot of questions about
tech, and are there jobs, and what's
happening with all the layoffs, and
if I go to a school, no matter what
length it is is there enough, supply of
jobs out there for me to make a dent.
Raphaël: Yeah.
Khurram: We are seeing, um, of course,
students taking a little bit longer to
be able to, or graduates taking a little
bit longer to be able to find employment.
There are good outcomes, but it does
take more work on our side and on
the student side and more patience
to be able to enter the workforce.
I would say especially.
On the web development side right
now, although it's constantly, every
month is very different, I find we are
seeing an increase in uptick again.
so my prediction is that next year,
starting hopefully in Q1, we're
going to start to see a fairly
big increase in hiring again.
Whereas this year has been
more on a downward trend.
Raphaël: Yeah.
That makes
Khurram: I would say cyber is our biggest
program in terms of interest and in
terms of Canada's employment demands.
There's thousands of jobs that are
unfilled that are either for cyber
managers or analysts or pen testers,
forensics, those types of things,
digital forensics of course, those
types of roles are very there's
quite a bit of demand for that.
Raphaël: Is that specific to Canada or
is that across like the whole industry?
Khurram: Definitely a whole industry
sort of thing, because a lot of the
Canadian employers end up being service
companies for global markets and the US.
Raphaël: Yeah.
Interesting.
Khurram: Yeah.
Raphaël: I wonder what's prompting
that, I mean, you know, I guess we
see some pretty high profile attacks
that maybe are leading some people to
think like, maybe we should take this
security thing a bit more seriously.
Khurram: Yeah.
You know, we, what's that saying?
Software is eating the world?
Joel Spolsky, I think,
Raphaël: Yeah.
Khurram: from many years ago.
Well, anytime there's software
and even writing a single line
of code, you're introducing
surface area for cyber attacks.
And so I like to think of myself as the
person who's providing those jobs to the
cyber security people because I see myself
more as a coder versus a cyber expert.
And so I always joke with them about
how I'm helping get them employed
by introducing more and more cyber
Raphaël: Yeah.
Khurram: attack vectors.
Raphaël: I love it.
That's
Khurram: But yeah, as the world gets
more and more software, as these non
tech companies employ more and more
tech, well, they have to start thinking
about cyber attacks and security,
especially as data sovereignty.
And data security and these bigger
attacks come to the limelight, right?
Like we don't even necessarily know all
of the attacks that happen and the data
leaks that happen, just the ones that
are reported by the bigger companies.
And so, you know, there's a lot
of opportunity in helping shore
that up and defend as well.
Raphaël: Yep, totally.
What's your take on AI, how that fits into
education, how that fits into software
development, how that fits into, I don't
know, just things in general, but yeah, I
Khurram: Yeah, I think so.
I know there's a lot of camps for AI.
I think I was going to say that actually
in your last question as well, because
AI is obviously another big demand
point from students and employers.
And I am pretty excited about, although
of course, cautiously optimistic, about
a lot of the buzz right now with all
the major companies pushing AI into
all of their platforms and hardware.
But we are seeing a lot of
excitement and demand from
students and employers about it.
I think there's a lot of opportunity.
And the reason I think it really
impacts our sector is because I see
AI as democratizing personalization.
Raphaël: Yeah.
Khurram: Whereas the internet
democratized knowledge, you could
find the information you needed.
It was, you had to do a lot
of the legwork, it wasn't
personalized to your, what you
were exactly trying to understand.
Raphaël: Yeah.
Mm
Khurram: helps you personalize
all of that information and
knowledge and service, right?
And so if I think about what requires
a lot of personalization very high on
that list, is learning and education.
Right, like that is probably
the epitome of something where
we think about personalization.
Personalized learning has always been
a north star for us, and it's where
we've really leveraged the community,
the mentors that I was talking about
earlier, to be able to personalize
the learning for the individual versus
just lectures and content, for example,
which aren't very personalizable.
Raphaël: that makes sense.
Khurram: Um, so I do see AI and we've
leveraged AI quite a bit internally
Raphaël: Oh, cool.
Khurram: for exactly that.
How do students get help way faster than
they could before and in a different way?
How do they personalize what
they're consuming within our
learning management system?
And you know internally we've even
been leveraging AI operationally,
uh, generative AI that is, to
help us iterate on curriculum.
I talked about our curriculum being code.
Well, we all know AI can work
quite well with text and code.
And so we actually have things like a
curriculum healing bot that monitors
for student feedback and then adjusts
and suggests changes to curriculum based
on feedback in a learning management
system to existing activities or
lessons in the LMS as GitHub pull
requests that can then be reviewed by
humans such as myself to be merged in.
So it allows us to again, yeah, that
flywheel effect is just fantastic.
Raphaël: So do, okay, so like a
student submits some feedback and
then this bot responds to the feed,
or like sees that feedback come in.
It has the whole curriculum available
and it'll just make suggestions as PRs
that someone can then review or update.
And.
Khurram: Yeah, so we have basically tens
of PRs being merged in a week that are
just a bot created by our curriculum
healing bot that we call ShipWrite,
because we like to use the nautical names.
It does write the ship, you
know, it corrects a lot of the
mistakes, typos, but also adding
more clarity to the instruction
where the feedback is unanimous.
And it allows us to constantly
not worry about making changes
quickly, because then there is the
refinement process that follows very,
very quickly thereafter as well.
Raphaël: Yeah, that's really cool.
I'm just gonna add one little
thing for all of the people
listening who are non technical.
A PR is a pull request, which is when
you submit a change that you want someone
else to, yeah, review and merge into
Khurram: Yeah.
I should have clarified that.
Raphaël: Yeah, that's super cool.
I guess you've got a whole sort of
product development workflow, both
around the curriculum and around the tech
that helps you manage the curriculum.
Are they split or is it, I mean,
in a way, it's like one product.
How do you, yeah, how do you treat that?
Khurram: I would say the main thing
that we look at as our product is what
students and employers interact with.
Raphaël: Yeah, that makes sense.
Khurram: Our end users are people that
go through our program, interact with our
mentors, interact with our curriculum,
yes, and our software, but I would see
the product as what the experience, the
whole experience, not just the content,
Raphaël: Mm hmm.
Khurram: that students go through
in their three to six month
journey to becoming a technologist.
Raphaël: Yeah.
Khurram: There's also the career services
side, of course, which I would call
very much part of the product, right?
Like, after you graduate, after three to
six months, depending on your program,
you're then on the job hunt for three
to six months at least, right, usually?
And we have a very strong career
services team that has been
a big reason for our success.
And their connections with employers and
the white gloving, the coaching and the
connections that they provide to students,
the network that they provide, right?
So that whole experience from, you
know, admissions all the way to
getting a job is the product, right?
It's also a service.
Of course there's services
elements to the product.
And then you can also argue, and I would
agree with you, that the employers also.
Can be viewed as end users
because they are hiring our grads.
So we are constantly in conversation with,
when I say community, also the employers
about how things are going, what trends
they're seeing shifting, what do they
wish we had taught more to our grads
for all three of our major programs.
Raphaël: As an organization, how
do you frame like your mission?
And how do you frame, like, how do
you think about, uh, I guess sort of
like KPIs, like how do you measure
the impact that you're having against
like your desired impact in the world?
If that makes sense.
Khurram: That's a great,
that's a great question.
It's funny you talk
about mission and vision.
It took us, I think, five years to realize
that we really need to think and spend
time and lock ourselves into a room and
come up with the mission and vision,
which honestly wasn't quick and easy.
It sounds like an easy thing, especially
because we had a solution and a product
to begin with on day one, and we had
product market fit right away as well.
Right?
Uh, we were lucky in that way.
But, I'm pretty proud of the
mission and vision that we created.
Took us, I would say, a lot of
conversation, maybe around a half a
year of lots of different meetings
and iteration and workshopping it.
Um, but we did kind of reverse
engineer it from why we started
and we have to really ask ourselves
why we started many years later.
Um, but yeah, I would say our, our
vision is to make technological
change a source of opportunity for
everyone and not just a select few.
Raphaël: I love that.
That's awesome.
Khurram: Our mission to accomplish that
vision is to effectively train individuals
in the necessary skills and technology
and data to succeed in constantly,
in the constantly evolving workforce.
Right?
Raphaël: Cool.
Khurram: So, it really is about
that effective, efficient,
just in time learning,
Raphaël: Mm-Hmm?
Khurram: right through a lot of heavy
mentorship and community integration.
But really the end goal is about
making sure that a large swath of
the population, and not just a select
few who can afford private education,
for example, uh, have access.
So, the next question should
be, well, but you are a private
career college in a way, right?
You have pretty expensive tuition.
We have a lot of value for that tuition.
So how do people then get access to
that who are more equity deserving
but don't necessarily have the funds?
Raphaël: Yeah.
Khurram: And this is
where we're most proud.
The last five years, it took us a
while to convince not just employers
of, look, people can go through this
kind of very short, intense program
and come out, not just technologists,
but also people that can contribute
from week one, month one of their job.
As an, as an employee, but it took a
while for, of course, government to start
seeing Lighthouse Labs as a very impactful
player in the tech ecosystem, not just
in Vancouver, not just in Toronto, but
we had satellite locations before going
fully remote, of course, uh, during COVID,
we had satellite locations in Victoria
and Ottawa, Halifax, Calgary, et cetera.
And, you know, once we had that
presence and that footprint, we
started conversing with government and.
I'm pretty proud of what, uh, Jeremy,
my co founder, and many others in the
company, have been able to accomplish
with our government partnerships.
I think even universities and colleges
that have been established here in Canada
are, they not only know about Lighthouse,
but they see us as very good channels
into, and good partners for going into
big government grants and proposals.
So as an example, most recently we just
finished a near, just north of 20 million.
Um, we were given that money to work with
various different partners, universities,
we worked with hundreds of different
community partners in Canada to give
equity deserving groups, BIPOC, LGBTQ,
Indigenous First Nations, women in
tech, access to our education or similar
education to enter the technology field
without having to pay those dollars.
So a lot of that, most of that money
was, wage subsidies and tuition subsidies
to be able to actually get access.
And so, when you look at our vision
from that perspective, and a lot of many
other government partnerships that we've
done for soldiers, for black youth, etc.
It's been actually amazing.
That's been the most
rewarding part of this.
Is the individual stories, as well as the
impact to equity deserving groups that
we've been able to do, despite being a
for profit private education company.
Raphaël: Well, yeah, thanks for,
for sharing all of that and,
uh, yeah, it's, uh, it's time
for you to share that product.
What product have you brought
us on this small tech podcast?
Khurram: Yeah, so actually, funny
enough that you ask, I've, for the
last few weeks, only discovered
this product very recently.
It's a mobile app that I use
on my Android, I'm pretty
sure they have an iOS app.
It's called Yuka.
Have you heard of Yuka?
Raphaël: Yuka?
Khurram: Y U K A
Raphaël: I think someone,
someone has told me about that.
Khurram: You might have seen my
post, because I actually like it
so much, and I rarely ever do this.
A, I post it on threads, okay?
And I posted about a mobile
app that everybody should try,
like, when was the last time I
did either of those two things?
It's pretty rare, but I
was so excited about it.
So what this does is, it's
been around for 10 plus years.
Um, it only fell on my radar
recently, but it allows you to scan
any basically consumable product.
So anything you really see at a
grocery store, I'm always out with
my phone now with the app open.
And I'm scanning products to see
what their score out of 100 is
in terms of health impact to me.
What are the chemical additives?
What's the sugar level like?
And it gives it a score like,
oh, this is a 38 out of 100.
Here's other products that are
similar to this ramen that are
better for your health, right?
So I love, I love using that.
It's really changed how I shop.
Raphaël: Yeah.
I feel like I could definitely see
myself using something like that.
That'd be really
Khurram: And a really cool
founder story as well.
I think there's two founders and
they've come a long way and they have
a really cool blog as well as a lot of
health related, like how to be a better
eater, for the most part,
Raphaël: That's awesome.
Sweet.
Cool.
Thanks, Kram.
It's been, uh,
Khurram: I hope I didn't, uh, I hope I
didn't talk my ear off or talk too fast.
Raphaël: No, this is great.
No, no, no.
This is, this is awesome.
And I feel like I, it was fun.
Like, it's always fun to, to, to
learn about what, uh, what people
do, but it's also like interesting.
For me to speak to
people who I already know
Folks.
That was my interview with Khurram Virani.
Co-founder and CTO of lighthouse labs.
Everything from, crashing on a couch
for his first three months in Vancouver
and how to develop curricula and how
to bring tech education to people
who haven't had access to it before.
I really loved learning about his journey.
It's always fun for me too.
Learn about these things From people
that I know, but whose journey I
don't really know in that much depth.
So I thought it was awesome.
I care very, very deeply about expanding
access to technology and getting more
and more people building tech that serves
their own needs their own purposes.
I think that's really important.
So I think lighthouse is
doing something awesome.
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