Henry

Martin Borchardt wasn't looking to start an education company. While building Nubi, a cross-border payment platform, he hit a wall that would change everything: he couldn't find enough qualified developers to hire. In Latin America, the talent pool for software engineering was critically shallow. Most talented young people were still chasing traditional careers—law, journalism, business—not coding. Martin saw both a massive problem and an opportunity.

His first attempt missed the mark. He created a loan company that would help people afford engineering degrees. They gave out 26 loans before the model collapsed under Argentina's crushing inflation rates, poor scalability, and capital intensity. The lesson stung, but it pushed Martin toward a radically different approach: the income-sharing agreement (ISA) model pioneered by Lambda School in the US.

The pivot was elegant in its simplicity. Students learned web development for free. Once they got a job, they paid 15% of their income back to Henry until hitting a $4,000 cap. No upfront cost meant zero friction for applicants. No student employment meant no revenue for Henry—their incentives were perfectly aligned.

Martin launched with a Wix website and a Typeform application form. He posted about it four or five times on his personal Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, added some Instagram ads, and waited. On day one: 100 applicants. The growth continued sustainably—roughly 100 new applicants per day, then accelerating to 20% monthly growth. Word of mouth became the dominant force. Once early students got jobs (and Henry was relentless about job placement—over 90% of employed students were introduced directly by the company), they told friends and family. The flywheel started spinning.

The loan model failed because it ignored local economic reality and didn't scale. The ISA model worked because it was risk-free for students and capital-efficient for the company. The speed of launch—a basic website and survey—proved Martin's philosophy: validate fast, gather real feedback, iterate. "My advice," he said, "is to build your business idea as fast as possible and launch it to market so as to test your assumptions."

COVID-19 inadvertently helped. While travel and tourism companies cut hiring, tech companies doubled down on digitization. Remote-first education became an advantage, not a limitation. By late 2020, Henry's main challenge wasn't customer acquisition—it was handling the growing flood of applicants with limited resources.

Y Combinator accepted Henry in Summer 2020, investing $300K and validating the model at scale. The 30-day program helped Martin optimize KPIs and connect with 2,000+ investors. By 2025, he aimed to have trained 100,000 developers across Latin America. The company was exploring adjacent opportunities—a data science career path—while perfecting web development instruction. What started as a hiring frustration had become a movement to reshape Latin American tech talent.