🤢 Issue #49: Pink Makes Her Puke
Sandy Lerner - the Cisco and Urban Decay founder and CGU graduate
💬 Welcome to issue #49 of Between the Lines
It’s been over 37 years now since Claremont graduate Sandy Lerner and Leonard Bosack founded Cisco Systems together back in their living room and computer labs. Quite a lot has changed in the past four decades, but Cisco has still remained one of the largest and most prominent technology companies in the world.
Find out more about Sandy Lerner’s journey from cattle ranching in the Sierras to founding Cisco and Urban Decay. ⬇️
~ Josh & Miles
📊 6th Street Stats: Pink Makes Her Puke
Authors: Josh Tatum & Miles Bird
By the time you are reading this article, dear reader, you've already benefited numerous times from her work, creativity, and persistence. You may even owe her partial credit for your current appearance. To help you understand to whom, precisely, you should direct your thanks - meet Sandy Lerner for yourself.
Among many remarkable accomplishments, CGU graduate Sandy Lerner is the co-founder of Cisco Systems and Urban Decay. Through her ingenuity at Cisco, she helped create the first-ever commercially viable routers that allowed computers to speak to one another through networks — she essentially envisioned and built the plumbing of the internet as we know it. On top of that, her second act, Urban Decay, helped create a counter-culture cosmetic business that shook up the cosmetics industry, de-stigmatized unisex nail polish and captured the attention of athletes, rock stars, celebrities, and everyday consumers like me and you. Her philanthropy has also contributed to land conservation efforts, animal welfare projects, and even Jane Austen collections. She's one of myriad jaw-dropping Claremont female founders making the world a better place through massive business-building in the technology sector.
While I've never had a chance to meet her personally, few people seem as admirable and inspiring as Sandy Lerner from afar. She is the epitome of a determined and persistent problem solver, and she's continuously taken action when she sees something that doesn't sit right with her. Who is she?
An Early Start
Everybody starts somewhere, and unsurprisingly, Lerner didn’t suddenly wake up one morning with the keys to unlock the internet and network routing. A northern California native, Sandy spent much of her early years at her aunt’s home in the California Sierras and Clipper Gap ranch. With her early entrepreneurship on full display, rumor has it that Sandy bought her first steer at the age of nine and sold it a few years later with enough profit to buy two more. With the pickle of college tuition on the horizon, she continued growing her cattle business until she owned over 30 heads, which eventually paid for her education and Political Science/IR degree at California State. A traditional four-year college degree didn’t sit quite right with Sandy either, and she breezed through her bachelor’s degree in only two years.
Next came Claremont and CGU. Initially planning on pursuing academia and fascinated by comparative political studies, Sandy Lerner went to CGU to receive her master’s degree. After realizing that there was little financial gain in political science and academia, she shifted focus. She developed a love for computer labs when few others did. In short order, she became lab manager and spent most of her time working with computers, using quantitative data analysis for her research. According to Sandy, back then, “People left you alone [in the labs] because they thought you were weird, and nobody knew anything about what you were doing.” Little did those people know what their “weird” computer lab manager would go on to accomplish.
Flash forward, and in 1977 she graduated from CGU with her master’s in econometrics and a newfound love for computers. This love led her to pursue a hat trick in California schooling, and she headed north to Stanford to pursue a graduate degree in statistics and computer science. This is where Cisco began.👇
💼 Who’s Hiring?:
Kaycee Lai is a Pomona graduate and the founder and CEO of Promethium. Promethium is a next-generation collaborative analytics platform for business users and data teams. They just recently announced the closing of their $26M Series A led by Insight Partners and Zetta Ventures. Fun Fact: the investment from Zetta was led by legendary HMC board member Jocelyn Goldfein). Kaycee and Promethium’s mission is to help every company enable their employees to be data-driven by removing friction at every step in data and analytics. The company was also just recognized by SIIA as the Best Data Tools and Platforms of 2022, and they’re looking to hire some experienced Claremont PM talent.
AgVend is the leading provider of digital engagement software to serve the producer of tomorrow. Their white-labeled information and commerce portals are designed to strengthen the relationship between the ag distribution channel and their grower customers. Co-Founded in 2017 by Claremont alumnus Alexander Reichert, Agvend operates a distributed organization model with local coverage in all major US and Canadian ag regions. Today, they count the most innovative national, cooperative, and independent ag retailers as their partners, and they’re looking for some Claremont folks to join the team (agricultural experience isn’t required nor is location):
Argonautic Ventures is an investment firm run by former and current operators that are passionate about building resilient and scalable businesses. They understand founders and work closely with them to serve as an extension of their team as they maneuver the venture landscape. The culture of Argonautic is rooted in entrepreneurialism and they operate with the same level of focus as the founders they build with. Claremont alumnus Viken Douzdjian is the Managing Partner, and he is hiring an Investment Associate to work closely alongside him in their new Seattle office. Want to get in touch with Viken? Shoot us a note or apply here.
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 financings 💸
Echodyne, founded by CTO Tom Driscoll (HMC), is a radar platform company that designs and delivers innovative, high-performance, compact, solid-state, MESA radars. These commercially priced radars are primarily used by defense and government agencies, autonomous developers, and security integrators. The company just finished a $135M round led by Bill Gates and Baillie Gifford. GeekWire has more.
Continual is the leading operational AI platform for the modern data stack. With it, users can build predictive models that never stop improving without complex engineering. Tristan Zajonc is a Pomona alumnus and the Founder of Continual which just raised a $14M Series A, led by Innovation Endeavors. TechCrunch has more.
Kinside is a modern child care benefit for today’s working parents and makes the process easier by not only providing a marketplace of verified carers but also helping parents tap into their flexible spending accounts (FSA) and other benefits to afford care. Kinside is co-founded by Shadiah Sigala (PO), a serial entrepreneur and former co-founder of unicorn Honeybook. Kinside just finished its $12M Series A in a round led entirely by mothers. TechCrunch has more.
Michael Arrington is a CMC alumnus and the founder of TechCrunch, CrunchBase, and Arrington Capital. Arrington Capital, which has more than $1.6B AUM, has partnered with the Moonbeam Foundation for a new $100M growth fund for Polkadot’s EVM-compatible Moonbeam parachain.
Everything else you need to know….📖
Apparently, the exceptional handling of the new Mazda CX-50 is largely due to HMC alumnus and Vehicle Development Engineer Dave Coleman.
Dee Dee Chan - CMC alumnus, CIO at Park Lane Capital Holdings, and Director of Seal of Love Charitable Foundation - talks about collaborative giving as the future of philanthropy, why there’s a new energy in the space, and how we can leverage tech to get more people giving.
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🍽️ BTL Snacks:
🇳🇬 First Solo Woman Nigeria Fund….. Pomona alumnus Maya Horgan is the first solo woman to have ever raised a tech fund in Nigeria and the youngest person to launch a tech fund in Sub-Saharan Africa. Horgan is the founder of venture capital firm Ingressive Capital, a $10M fund that has backed a number of promising start-ups in Sub- Saharan Africa. She shared with GC a bit about her journey from a trailer park in Minnesota to VC investing in Nigeria.
✈️ Crypto-Based Rewards For Travel….. FlyCoin, Co-Founded by HMC alumni Josh Jones & Tom Hsieh, is a cryptocurrency-based travel rewards technology company, that just announced its partnership with BitGo, the industry's gold standard for custody and security solutions. This partnership comes on the heels of Flycoin's $33M Seed funding earlier this year. Last month, the company also announced major crypto heavyweights Lisa Nestor and Rena Shah as strategic members of their advisory team.
🌳 Genetically-Engineered Trees > Carbon Capture….. Living Carbon, a public benefit company founded by CMC alumnus Maddie Hall, enhances natural solutions in plants to improve carbon capture. They recently demonstrated that photosynthesis-enhanced trees can capture more carbon out of the atmosphere. These trees have a faster growth rate and accumulate 53% more biomass, which means they do more of what trees do best: sequester carbon to prevent extra greenhouse gas emissions from circulating in the atmosphere.
📜 The All-Knowing AllSearch For Litigators….. Casetext, the leading provider of A.I.-powered legal technology for lawyers, just announced the launch of AllSearch, a concept-based document search tool that helps litigators quickly search legal documents. Built on neural nets, AllSearch goes beyond literal keywords to capture the concepts within a document. Casetext is founded by Pitzer alumnus Jake Heller and the company closed a $25M Series C round earlier this year.
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