[jere]

The "gambit" is offering $70,000 worth of grants with the ultimate goal being, hopefully, to recruit the graduates.

If I'm understanding correctly, the people that would go to Hacker School aren't necessarily ready for a job at Etsy (the goal being "turn people with a passion for programming into professional engineers").

So it could fail in several ways and the money would go to waste (at least from the perspective of hiring). Now, I would imagine $70,000 isn't much to a company like Etsy, but "gambit" is still an appropriate way to put it.