Ironhack’s Miami-based HQ now trains thousands in the U.S.
The idea surfaced from a mismatch. In the wake of the financial crisis in Spain, friends Gonzalo Manrique and Ariel Quiñones saw legions of youth without jobs, while tech companies couldn’t find enough software developers and qualified staff to fill thousands of vacant positions. The two young entrepreneurs decided to help close that gap, developing education programs to train the employees that tech companies needed. Ironhack was conceived, graduating its first students in 2013.
Fast forward a decade, and the venture now counts more than 15,000 graduates, works with 600-plus partner-companies, and operates in 10 cities in Europe and the Americas. It’s raised more than $20 million from investors and employs some 190 people, including about a dozen in Miami, where it keeps its U.S. headquarters. Business is booming, partly because more students are turning to online training and more tech companies are footing the bill for education tailored to their needs, Quiñones says.
In South Florida, the venture has made a splash by teaming with eMerge Americas, the group promoting Miami as a tech hub, to create a $200,000 scholarship fund for students in courses given at the Miami Marlins baseball stadium. Scholarships cover up to $6,500 for Ironhack bootcamps that typically require 10 weeks of fulltime study in such fields as web development, UX/UI design, and data analysis. “For most of our graduates, it’s their first job in tech,” says co-CEO Quiñones.
The success is especially remarkable because the co-founders, who met while pursuing their master’s degrees in business administration at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton school, never worked in education before. Manrique, who hails from Madrid, trained as a civil engineer and long aimed to start his own business. Quiñones, the son of educators from Puerto Rico, studied political science at Harvard and then worked in investment banking. The two learned by doing, with help from the tech community.
Quiñones was the one to see Miami as a strategic hub. He’d visited the city when he was young, and after a decade in the U.S. northeast, yearned for a climate and culture more like his Caribbean homeland. In 2014, he visited and began meeting Miami’s tech advocates, including Manny Medina of eMerge and Brian Breslin of Refresh, and recalls conversations about the need for talent and builders.
“I thought: ‘Why not use Miami as the launchpad for the Americans?’” Quiñones says. In early 2015, he set up in the Pipeline co-working space in Brickell to start Ironhack east of the Atlantic.
Doing business in Miami has been far different than Spain, he says. In Madrid and Barcelona, the team had to spend time explaining the merits of tech training instead of more traditional education. Many people in Spain were not familiar with bootcamps. In the U.S., where bootcamps are common, the focus instead has been on what makes Ironhack different: the curriculum, methodology, and job placement opportunities, requiring the team to develop “a very sharp value proposition,” says Quiñones. “The U.S. market is, without question, the biggest prize in terms of opportunities, but it’s also the most challenging, with the most competition.”
Costs in the U.S. are also significantly higher, from salaries to rents and outlays for lawyers in a nation known for litigation. “In Spain, a lot of business is done on personal relationships and trust. In the U.S., everything needs to be properly documented. You need excellent and specialized legal counsel” from the start, because rivals use the law in their business strategy, sometimes threatening legal action to ward off competitors, Quiñones says.
Since the COVID pandemic, operations have changed on both sides of the Atlantic to feature online classes. Now, at least half of Ironhack’s students study remotely, and Quiñones hopes that soon most tuition will come not from students but from the companies contracting Ironhack to train the staff they need. With custom education, there’s no mismatch for jobs.
