The application is one form. We respond yes-or-no within 48 hours. There is no interview, no take-home, and no admissions theatre — just a small set of questions about your existing Rust experience to make sure the cohort will be useful to you.
cohort_07 · 23 of 32 seats remaining · 4 mentor / 19 singleFree audit track for current students, open-source maintainers under-funded by their projects, and underrepresented groups. By application only.
The standard cohort track. Twelve weeks, twenty-four live sessions, both office hours, three artifact projects with peer + instructor review.
Everything in single, plus a private 60-minute weekly call with Vela for code review on your three artifact PRs. Capped at twelve seats per cohort.
We need to know what your existing Rust looks like. The questions below are not gatekeeping — we are checking that the cohort will be useful to you. We have rejected exactly 18 applicants across six cohorts; in every case, we recommended a free path forward.
If you are coming from rustc, the rust-lang Discord, the Rust Foundation slack, or have a referral from a previous graduate — please mention that in the notes. It speeds things up.
If by end of week 02 the cohort isn't for you — for any reason — email vela@yourbusiness.com for a full refund. No questionnaire, no exit interview, no shaming.
After week 02, we don't refund. Honesty: by then, the live sessions and the artifact PRs we've spent time reviewing have real cost, and the seat we held for you cannot be filled.
We reserve four full audit seats per cohort and a small pool of sliding-scale tuition (anywhere from $300 to full $1,200) for: current students, open-source maintainers, underrepresented groups in tech, applicants outside G20 economies.
The scholarship form is the same as the regular application. Mention "scholarship" in the notes and pick "audit" or write what you can pay.
Three cohorts per year, starting january, may, and september. Each runs 12 weeks with a 4-week break before the next cohort opens.
Cohort_07 starts jan 13 · 2026 — currently enrolling. Cohort_08 starts may 18 · 2026, opens for enrollment on apr 06. Cohort_09 starts sep 14 · 2026, opens aug 03.
Yes — we have invoiced employers for all six cohorts to date. Email billing@yourbusiness.com with your company's PO process and we'll generate an invoice with W-9 and EIN inside 24 hours. Stripe and ACH both work. Most engineers expense this under "professional development."
Yes — single tier is $1,200 in one shot or 3× $420 (= $1,260, a small surcharge for processing); mentor tier is $1,800 in one shot or 3× $620 (= $1,860). Plans charge on enrollment, week 04, and week 08. No interest, no credit check.
Tuesday + Thursday, 5:00pm Pacific. That's 8pm Eastern, midnight UTC, 9am+1 Tokyo, 4am+1 Sydney. About half of cohort participants attend asynchronously via the recordings; the office hours rotate through morning + evening Pacific windows to give every time zone a viable live touchpoint.
No — we cover everything we need from scratch. But familiarity with tokio, serde, anyhow, and thiserror is roughly the level we expect. If you've never used any of those, the cohort will be hard for you.
Any laptop running macOS, Linux, or WSL2 with at least 16GB of RAM and 30GB of free disk. The ESP32-C3 dev board for phase 03 is shipped to you free during week 08 — we cover international shipping. We support every country except those under U.S. export restriction.
Yes — a printable PDF "Your Business cohort_07 graduate" certificate. Honestly, no graduate has ever told us this mattered to them. The thing that matters is the three artifacts on your GitHub and the cohort Slack relationships. The certificate is decoration.
You're fine. Recordings post within 12 hours, captioned and indexed. Maybe half the cohort attends every live session; the rest watch the next morning. The artifacts are what count, and the artifacts have soft deadlines (week 04, 08, 12).
If you're on the mentor tier — yes, every PR, with line-level comments, before each weekly 1:1. If you're on the single tier, Vela reviews artifact submissions at three checkpoint dates and gives ~30-line written feedback per artifact. Peer review (cohort partners) covers the in-between work.