🤝 Issue #48: Finding Your Crew
Playco's unicorn founder, autonomous taxis, and the intersection of design thinking, coaching, and community
💬 Welcome to issue #48 of Between the Lines
The labor market, the employer market, and especially people’s careers have certainly been shaken up over these past couple of years — and even the past couple of months!
Careers have become more fluid and more complex. In light of these work and career changes and uncertainties, Claremont alumnus Mollie Amkraut shares how the pandemic and her long career exploration journey led her to start her own coaching and career startup Crew — a company at the intersection of design thinking, coaching, and community. 👇
~ Josh & Miles
👤 Community Spotlight: Mollie Amkraut
A career nerd since her days as a student career coach at CMC, Mollie discovered design thinking during her time at IDEO and became convinced of its applicability for careers. This prompted her to launch Crew, the career design platform that combines design, coaching, and peer groups to help people lead fulfilling careers. Mollie started her career as a CPA at EY, has an MBA from London Business School, and spent four years at IDEO as a venture designer. When not nerding out on career design, Mollie can be found giving tours on 18th-century French art at the Wallace Collection in London, where she lives with her husband, Christoph, and Goldendoodle, Cali.
For those who are unfamiliar, can you share some more background on what Crew is?
Crew is a career design platform for mid-career professionals. Today we run group coaching programs that use the design thinking process to help people gain clarity on their next career move. Customers get matched into crews (groups of 5–8) who meet bi-weekly with their coach for guidance, feedback, and accountability. In the future, customers will use our platform to manage their career health, connect with hyper-relevant professional peers, and access a marketplace of coaching programs and career courses. Careers are being reshaped, and we’re building the infrastructure for the modern career.
Why do you think now is the right time to build a career design company? Will people have less need for virtual career support in a post-covid, post-isolation world?
Careers are becoming more fluid and more complex. As the frequency of job changing and freelancing increases, demand from individuals for guidance and community in navigating modern careers is growing. At the same time, corporations are hungry for ways to better support their people’s career goals as they seek to stem the Great Resignation and improve their talent value proposition.
Covid has accelerated many of these trends, but the changing shape of careers and emphasis on career wellbeing has been growing steadily for several years. Gen Z and Millennials now change jobs every 2.2 years on average. By 2030, over 50% of Americans will be freelancing. Web3 is nascent but already contributing in the shift to distributed work. Virtual has made it easier for busy professionals to get the guidance and support they need from wherever they are.👇
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Michael Maxwell Carter
Michael Carter is a Pomona alumnus and the CEO and Co-Founder of Playco - the world’s first instant-play gaming company. He was also the Co-Founder of Game Closure, a company focused on building post-app store technology. Game Closure created the HTML5-based game EverWing, available on Facebook's Instant Games platform. Carter also sits on the Board of Directors of Rakuten Games, StartX, and WorkCo. Prior to founding Playco, Michael drafted the initial technical proposal and led the naming discussion for HTML5 WebSocket, a computer communication protocol used by over 2 billion devices daily including all major mobile and desktop browsers.
Just last year, Carter and his Co-Founder Justin Waldron (Co-Founder of Zyga) raised a $100M Series A round and Playco reached a unicorn valuation. The round was led by technology investor Josh Buckley and Sequoia Capital Global Entities. Will Smith’s investment firm Dreamers VC, venture firms Sozo Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, the Makers Fund, the Angel Fund, and Digital Garage also participated. Playco also just launched Playpass — their one-stop platform to create and launch community games.
💼 Who’s Hiring?:
Speakeasy is building Zero Ops APIs. They’re on a mission to make the API lifecycle developer first. Today, developers have to orchestrate API changes by hand which means for every change this means updating infrastructure and hand-rolling changes to docs, SDKs, gateways, auth, billing, etc – this list is endless! Speakeasy takes the heavy lifting out of providing a great API experience by integrating directly into your gitops and propagating changes. Simply annotate your API, hit git push and we’ll take care of the rest! Speakeasy was co-founded by HMC alumnus Sagar Batchu who was previously the Director of Engineering at LiveRamp. He was the first engineering hire in London and built both dev tooling and data infrastructure teams, growing the London office to 50+ developers. Now, Sagar is looking to bring in some Claremont engineering talent to scale his own company.
HMC alumnus, Jim Castelaz, is the founder and CTO of Motiv Power Systems. Motiv is a sustainable technology company delivering proven electric trucks, bus chassis, and related charging infrastructure. They’re committed to freeing fleets from fossil fuels and providing fleets a seamless pathway to electrification. The company’s solutions not only offer fleets up to 85% operations and maintenance cost savings but also provide operators and riders a healthier and more comfortable experience without polluting the communities they serve. Join the other four Claremont folks already working at the company!
Make sure to check out the other 5,000+ open jobs at 400+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, make sure to create a profile and enter your preferences to get alerted to new job postings relevant to you, be they the 750+ remote-jobs, 180+ internships, or 30+ part-time positions available. We’ve published research that shows that Claremont-founded companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent outperform — so pay attention Claremonsters!
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 tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.
🗣️ Conversations on the Interwebz:
This week’s top read 🔥
Cruise, co-founded by Daniel Kan (CMC), just received approval to become the first and only company to operate a commercial, driverless ride-hail service in a major U.S. city. With this approval, they’ll start gradually rolling out fared rides, so keep your eyes peeled.
Everything else you need to know….📖
Resilience, a technology-focused biomanufacturing company dedicated to broadening access to complex medicines, recently announced a $625M Series D financing. The company was co-founded by Drew Oetting, a Claremont alumnus and also the founding partner of 8VC. BusinessWire has more.
After spending time at Atlassian and Splunk, Jeff Wu (CMC) left and co-founded Notional Finance. Notional is a decentralized protocol for fixed-rate, fixed-term lending and borrowing of crypto assets on Ethereum, and they just surpassed $500M in loan volume.
Zara just launched its second clothing edition made from captured carbon emissions in partnership with LanzaTech and CEO Jennifer Holmgren (HMC).
After working at PWC, Union Bank, and Amalgamated Bank, Claremont alumnus Pete Hellwig founded Atmos Financial in 2020. Atmos was created to give everyone the opportunity to take real, measurable action on climate change. They’re building a next-generation digital banking solution to rapidly shift capital towards a clean economy for all, and they just recently introduced instant payments.
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🍽️ BTL Snacks:
⚾ A Claremont Double-Play….. Over the course of 2021, VR training company WIN Reality tripled its revenue and customer base, and they just announced a $45M growth equity raise from Spectrum Equity. WIN is a VR sports training and assessment platform that enables athletes to experience game-speed reps and training they could never achieve in real-life. The President of WIN is Branden Windle (a CMC graduate and the former Co-Founder of Tecovas), and PO alumnus Jeremy Tepper helped lead the diligence of the Spectrum investment.
🦴 New Back, No Problem….. The public orthopedics equipment company SI-BONE just won FDA clearance for its iFuse Bedrock Granite implant system for spinal procedures. CMC and CGU graduate Mark Reiley founded SI-BONE (NASDAQ: SIBN) back in 2008, and the company continues to help patients in one of the most under-served and under-treated areas in orthopedics, the sacroiliac (SI) joint.
⚙️ Digitizing The Outdated Industrial Commerce….. Felux, the fastest growing online B2B marketplace and supply chain platform for steel and other metals, just announced a $19M Series A round to digitize commerce for the industrial supply chain. The platform provides much-needed visibility across the entire industrial supply chain, through products and services that allow customers to share inventory through digital channels, and get access to freight and lane pricing in real-time. Pomona alumnus Tom Slade is currently the Head of Product at Felux.
☀️ The Easiest Way To Do Good Everyday….. More and more social impact companies may have continued to start over the last few years, but it is still a relatively unpaved path to follow. Alex Groth (PO), CEO and Co-Founder of Tab for a Cause, shares how companies can incorporate social impact into their business and how he and his Co-Founder have gone about it with their company to raise over $1M for incredible organizations. Tab for a Cause is a better “new tab” page that empowers you to raise money for critical, on-the-ground nonprofit work just by surfing the web.
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