💼 Issue #11: Your Story Starts Here
❗Announcing Storyboard, a jobs board and talent marketplace for the Claremont community ❗
💬 Welcome to issue #11 of Between the Lines
Wow. Coming off a weekend where I watched my younger brother get married. Talk about surreal. Feeling grateful for family time and a tiny bit of normalcy! Hope you all enjoyed the long weekend.
Now, remember that article we published last week where we showed that companies that hire more Claremont alumni outperform their peers? Well, it gets better. Today, we’re excited to introduce Storyboard - a continuously updating jobs board and talent marketplace for the Claremont community. Explore over 400 Claremont-founded companies from early-stage to IPO and over 5,000 open full-time and internship positions. You don’t need to set up a profile to scope out the companies and open positions, but if you take two minutes to fill out a profile and connect your LinkedIn, you can opt into some awesome features like a weekly newsfeed of customized positions and roles based on your interests, and even do so anonymously if you’re trying to be stealth about that next move! 👀 We’re even giving away a $100 Amazon gift card at random to one of the first 100 folks to sign up. Yes, I’ll write that again. You could get paid $100 for spending two minutes doing what would be better for your career anyway. 😉
Scroll on to read a short essay I wrote on how consequential the networks you build earlier in your career can be to professional outcomes, and how to make the best use of this tool. Let’s do this!
Much love, Miles
⚠️ Storyboard Announcement: Connecting Claremont Employers & Talent
by Miles Bird
The Claremont mafia is here to stay and is recruiting for over 5,000 open positions. If you're in the Claremont community, take a few minutes to fill out your profile here and receive a personalized email on open positions that are relevant to your career interests, at companies where you'll already have an unfair advantage. To make this fun, we’ll be giving away a $100 gift card at random to one of the first 100 sign-ups.
In the grand scheme of things, you'll only have a handful of jobs across your entire career. If you spent an average of four years in each position, (the national average), and assuming you work for 40 years, that’s just ten jobs over the course of your career. If each job were weighted evenly, the skills you develop and the networks you build at each would comprise a not-insignificant 10% contribution to your entire career trajectory.
In reality, though, jobs and the networks you build earlier on in your career will have an outsized impact on how the rest of your career unfolds. We are likely all familiar with the concept of compound interest, but I’d argue that careers and professional networks operate similarly. Put another way, your first, second, and third job could comprise 50%, or even more, of the relative 'impact' on your remaining career trajectory, and these initial skills and networks are the ‘principal’ upon which you’ll collect, both literally and figuratively, for the rest of your life. I'm not talking about career earnings, as it's been shown that we earn most of our income at the very tail-end of our careers, but I'm talking about something a little less quantifiable but perhaps more consequential. I’m talking about the mental models you develop to solve problems early on. The honing-in of your aperture as you define a professional focus over your 40-year or so career arc. And most importantly, this 'network principal’ helps build the professional network that builds You, Inc. These early networks and skills determine how you spend your time when you are in those high-earning years.
Case in point - for many people, the most consequential personal and professional network they'll ever be a part of is the alumni community of their alma mater. College is this interesting halfway house between childhood and adulthood, personal and professional, and from a network principal perspective, it can be your most consequential professional. How you spend your four years and who you spend them with can have a tremendous impact on the rest of your life. Your internships, arguably mini-career experiments, will inform which direction you take a larger swing at when you graduate. And this group of people in your tribe can include everyone from your maid of honor, your future co-founder, your first angel check investor, and everything in between.
If you’re a current student or recent graduate reading this, it's difficult to convey just how consequential this community can be for you personally and professionally, and how that will increasingly grow over time, particularly if you nurture and cultivate your network. It's 2021, and I'm nearly ten years out from my graduation from CMC in 2013. The community of my alma mater, even ten years on, has had an outsized impact on literally every single professional stepping stone. Let me show you how Claremont has compounded my career:
Summer 2013: I graduated from CMC. I then spent three months in the Philippines working for CMC parent Jim Ayala, who I met at an Athenaeum presentation on campus.
Fall 2013 - Winter 2015: I joined a startup, the Kairos Society, the world's largest organization of student founders, as one of their first employees. I got involved with Kairos after attending their annual conference in New York during my senior year at Claremont which I attended because of a travel grant I received from CMC's Kravis Leadership Institute.
Spring 2016 - Spring 2018: I joined venture capital firm Correlation Ventures. I wrote in our very first BTL post how I was connected to the team by my freshman year dormmate at Claremont, Prashant Fonseka.
Fall 2018 - Fall 2019: I joined Prashant and CMC alum Pat Gallagher at Tuesday Capital and continued on my career as an early-stage venture capital investor.
Winter 2020 - Summer 2020: I joined portfolio company Meter, whose founder I initially met through my friend Andrew Barr, who I met through my Claremont classmate Drew Oetting. CMCers Andrew Jordan and Kevin Burke were also part of the Meter team.
Summer 2020 - Today: I’m investing and advising startups, including many Claremont-founded companies like Agvend, Living Carbon, Hiki, and others.
The bullet points above hardly even do this justice, though. They don't consider the countless interactions with so many Claremont alumni who substantially contribute to my career, whether a friend acting as a sounding board for a new career direction, some coaching on comp negotiation, or being an internal champion to close a business deal. Furthermore, in standing up Between the Lines, I've had over 300 conversations with Claremont alumni working in technology spanning five decades of graduation years, from 1960s grads to current students. The alumni who feel grateful that a friend pulled them into semiconductors forty years ago will mirror recent grads who do the same for their peers in crypto and bioinformatics today.
Two patterns are apparent from these conversations. The first is that nearly every alum has stories like mine and can rattle off their own bullet points on the impact that the Claremont community has had on their career. The second is that the alumni who put more into the friendships they built in college, and the professional relationships in the Claremont community they've cultivated post-grad, have gotten more out of it. Both in terms of professional outcomes, as well as in the richness of longstanding friendship and well-being. I could go on, but the point is that the Claremont community has made my career and the careers of so many others. If you're a Claremont student or alum, it will likely make yours too.
This is why we’re so excited to announce the release of Storyboard. The Storyboard is two things. First, it's a dynamic jobs board that continually updates and aggregates professional opportunities within the Claremont Colleges community. If you're thinking about what's next, use its search functionality to quickly search through the hundreds of companies and thousands of open positions at Claremont-founded companies, easily filterable by industry, role, geography, stage, or university affiliation. Second, it's a talent marketplace where working professionals and students can create a profile and connect their LinkedIn to receive a weekly, personalized email for professional opportunities relevant to them within the Claremont network, even if they're not actively searching for a new role and wish to remain anonymous.
We published findings last week that indicate a strong correlation between startup success and companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent. Employers and talent should be paying attention! Humans have been tribal creatures since the dawn of time. Today, we’re are no different in the countless tribes that populate the planet, from Sagehen to Stag, YPO member to cyberpunk fandom, Paypal mafia to McKinsey alum.
The Claremont mafia is here to stay and is recruiting for over 5,000 open positions. If you're in the Claremont community, take a few minutes to fill out your profile here and receive an email on open positions that are relevant to your career interests, at companies where you'll already have an unfair advantage with an insider in a leadership position. To make this fun, we’ll be giving away a $100 gift card at random to one of the first 100 sign-ups. We'll also be rolling out more tools that make it easier for Claremont employers to work with this exceptional community in the coming months and publishing insights on how to better cultivate the Claremont community for wealth and well-being. Stay tuned and keep reading Between the Lines!
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Dr. Stefanie Johnson
by Josh Tatum
Congratulations to CMC graduate Dr. Stefanie Johnson for the launch of her new platform business, Inclusify.com. Inclusify.com is based on her book, Inclusify, and is a Data-Centric Platform for Accelerating Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging in the Workplace. Backed by initial support from Iterate.ai, Inclusify.com offers organizations streamlined solutions for diversity, inclusion, and belonging initiatives.
Read about her new business launch on this GlobalNewsWire article, and check out her bestselling book here!
💼 Who’s Hiring?:
by Josh Tatum
Interested in NFTs and cryptocurrencies? We can’t stop reading about Rally and Claremont alum and CEO, Bremner Morris and think there are some incredibly exciting opportunities there for Claremont grads. Rally is a community-run network that enables creators, artists, celebrities, communities, and brands to launch their own social tokens and NFTs. Rally leverages blockchain technology to offer creator communities a means to create their own economies. They’re hiring and looking for you!
Check out all the other 5,000+ open jobs at 400+ Claremont-founded companies here on our Storyboard!
Sign up for the talent network to start getting updated on jobs/companies in your interest cluster and potentially win a $100 Amazon gift card
Check out the 40+ open jobs at unicorn dev tool leader, LaunchDarkly
Over 650 remote jobs are available
140+ jobs in the Data Science cluster
As always, if any of these roles catch your eye 👀 , apply and mention Between the Lines! Or if you are an employer and are looking to hire top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured!
🗣️ Conversations on the interwebz:
by Josh Tatum
This week’s top read (listen) 🔥
What do you get when you combine Berkshire Hathaway's approach with early-stage venture capital? Altos Ventures. Check out this podcast with HMC venture expert, Ho Nam.
Everything else you need to know….📖
Looking for your next tech startup idea? According to 2x Founder, Sunil Rajaraman (CMC), maybe just pick up a fiction book 🤷♂️
Where is crypto headed? Jesse Pollak (PO), Head of Engineering at Coinbase, has some ideas 💡
A beautiful reminder by CMC venture capitalist, Abie Katz (and Kurt Vonnegut) 🎯
Can’t get enough Between the Lines? Follow and connect with us on Twitter!
🤤 BTL Snacks:
by Josh Tatum
You may not be able to get your favorites snacks at the Claremont dining halls anymore on the weekdays, but hopefully, these juicy tidbits from BTL will satisfy the hunger for now! 🍽️
🎨 How can blockchain and cryptocurrencies put more power back in the hands of creators?….. Find out what Bremner Morris (CMC) and Rally are up to
💵 Did somebody say NFTs?….. Here is what venture capitalist Yohei Nakajima thinks is happening in the NFT space right now
Feedback? We love to hear it. Hit us with an email. 👊🏼