Lionheart founder Juan Lionheart
About 40 percent of 2021 high school graduates ages 16 to 24 did not attend college or university, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Ultimately, many fail to experience the benefits of early career resources such as college job fairs.
Founder and CEO Juan Lionheart is looking to bridge this socioeconomic gap with his Raleigh startup. heart of lion. It’s a talent recruitment and training platform that connects companies looking to hire with people from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds who are at the start of their careers.
Juan knows firsthand how socioeconomic limitations can hold you back.
“I started Lionheart to enable human potential,” he said. “My experience growing up poor with my mom in LA made me realize that socioeconomic factors are the primary barriers to people reaching their full potential.”
He said the platform helps these people get their foot in the door and helps de-risk businesses.
Lionheart offers three-month paid technology apprenticeships on a month-to-month basis. It’s a two-sided marketplace that matches people with companies based on their industry of interest, skill set and time zone.
Companies can “bid” (at a minimum of $15 an hour) on who they want to hire to do remote, project-based, and part-time work.
At first, apprentices work no more than five to 10 hours per week. As they take on more projects, they level up on the platform, and so does their monthly pay. The idea is that a company will eventually want to hire the apprentice full-time, and Lionheart will take a commission from the exit fee, Juan said.
After working in the tech space for six to eight years, Juan launched Lionheart in 2021. A year later, about 500 people have signed up and 30 trainees have come forward so far.
The company recently fully relocated to Raleigh from Los Angeles.
Unlike the massive job platforms LinkedIn and Monster, Lionheart focuses more on workforce development than match-making. The platform is popular among minorities, specifically blacks and Latinos, and most participants are between the ages of 24 and 26.
“I’m more interested in helping these people get the skills they need,” Juan said.
In weekly sessions, learners collaborate with each other to learn about digital marketing. This includes content marketing, marketing strategy, search engine optimization and social media strategy, with some of the topics curated by Juan and his team.
Juan modeled Cor de León Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which notes that community plays a critical role in enabling human potential. Therefore, the platform’s primary focus for learning is collaboration, not educational courses.
Juan said that they do discuss core ideas or topics such as customer or user acquisition, revenue and retention, but all other skills are learned through the power of community.
“If you have a healthy community, you develop great relationships,” he said. “You don’t want to fall behind. You want to keep improving.”
Aside from the sense of community, people are drawn to the platform because of Juan’s background as a founder. Growing up as an immigrant from Ecuador in Inglewood, California, and experiencing a difficult childhood, he can connect with the members of Lionheart on a personal level.
As a teenager, Juan used video games as an escape, keeping him away from drugs and gangs. His first hero was Squall Leonhart, the protagonist of Final Fantasy VIII. (As you might have guessed, Squall inspired both the name of Juan’s startup and his own last name, which he will soon officially make his legal last name.)
“Squall Leonhart’s story and the progression of the character surprised me because it paralleled mine so much,” Juan said. “Lionheart at its core is about bravery, that one can re-learn and change their socio-economic realities for their families and themselves.”
Currently, the Lionheart team consists of Juan and a few engineers who are contractors.
By 2023, Juan said the company needs to raise funds to finish the platform’s backend and Stripe integration. They can’t move forward without it.
But once they raise a round of funding, he’s confident in their ability to scale the company and grow the team because of their past experience working on growth and product.
Juan said he believes technology is increasingly digitizing this global information-based economy, and is becoming a differentiator in our society.
“I think our humanity solves the biggest problems,” he said, “we have to unlock the potential of individuals from humble beginnings like we did before with gender and race.”
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