Terry Kim, founder of NGT Academy (NextG T) and creator of Kaizen OS, joins Sunny Ray to discuss leaving a secure Fortune 100 tech career for entrepreneurship. Kim explains how he walked away from dream jobs at Cisco and Arista Networks to build an edtech company that trains people for IT and cybersecurity careers in four to six months instead of four to six years of college. He details NGT Academy's path through Y Combinator, its 18 million dollars raised across three rounds, and the eight year journey to profitability, including a personal high interest loan taken to protect payroll during a rough stretch. Kim also introduces Kaizen OS, an AI native operating system for conscious founders built around a story, systems, and soul framework, and previews Camp Kaizen, a gathering for builders in the redwoods of Northern California. Throughout, he emphasizes character, alignment, and commitment as the real engines of sustainable entrepreneurship, framing his own leap as proof that clarity and conviction matter more than certainty.
A Cisco engineer who quit twice explains building an 18 million dollar edtech startup and a new conscious founder operating system.
You quit Arista in 2016 at the highest point of your IT career. What made that the right moment rather than a reckless one?
I think we all procrastinate on ideas until we get clear on the problem and feel true alignment, the kind where the idea pulls you into work. I felt like a cog in the wheel at these huge companies, even though it was my dream job. I met a co-founder at a conference who told me to just leap, and I realized the job is always there, but the dream project might not wait.
What specific gap did you see between how engineers were trained and what employers needed?
College forces two wasted years of general ed before you even touch your field, and the tech degrees are outdated commodity content stretched over four years. I broke into IT with an eighth grade education and trained 18 to 20 year olds with top secret clearance in four months in the military. I knew we could do that in the civilian world instead of piling on a trillion dollars of student debt.
When did you realize you could take someone with no background and turn them into a working engineer?
I spent three years in the field and two and a half years as an instructor training thousands of airmen at Keesler Air Force Base. It was a sixteen week boot camp that got them battlefield ready to support mission critical network infrastructure before deployment to Afghanistan. That experience proved to me you didn't need years of college, just the right intensive training model.
You raised more than 18 million dollars. What did that teach you about whose money you actually want alongside you?
We tried income share agreements where students trained free and we took ten percent of their income, but it failed because students had no skin in the game. Committed students who pay tuition actually finish. We raised a million dollar preseed through Angel Pad, went through YC in 2018 for a 2.1 million seed, then closed a 15 million Series A that gave us years to find real product market fit.
What's the hardest part of a business whose product is someone else's career change?
It's a brutal consumer business because a career change can take four to twelve months, often for part time learners juggling full time jobs. You need thick skin and real mission alignment to survive the roller coaster. It took us eight years to reach profitability because everything got reinvested into students, staff, and curriculum, but we've now moved over fifty thousand learners through the platform.
How do you turn continuous improvement into something a person can actually run daily?
I use what I call the S3 framework: story, systems, and soul. It starts with working on your character and values, because that becomes the ceiling for the whole organization. Your systems, like your calendar and routines, reveal that character in action, and your soul has to stay aligned so you don't quit when things get hard, which almost happened to me more than once.
What has to be true by the end of this year for Kaizen OS to be a product rather than a promise?
Kaizen OS is still in beta and stealth mode, so the real proof point this year is Camp Kaizen itself, the physical gathering of conscious founders and builders in the redwoods. We believe nature holds the codes for coherence, and if we can bring people into that environment together, it validates the mission behind the software before the product fully launches.
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