🎉 Issue #51: BTL's Birthday
BTL success stories from the Claremont community during the past year
💬 Welcome to issue #51 of Between the Lines
Somehow, it has already been a year since we started Between the Lines. We wanted to share a few of the many exciting success stories in the Claremont ecosystem that have happened because of this newsletter community over the past year. 🥳
~ Josh & Miles
📊 6th Street Stats: Between the Lines Success Stories
Authors: Josh Tatum & Miles Bird
Believe it or not, we have now been running Between the Lines for exactly a year. One year and 50 different newsletter issues. Whether you’ve been reading with us from the very beginning or have recently joined - thank you!
Through Between the Lines, the Claremont community has been able to connect in ways it has never been able to before. Readers have received full-time and internship opportunities, met clients and partners, raised capital, and much more.
There have been many amazing outcomes thanks to our subscribers, and we wanted to highlight a few of them to celebrate the one-year anniversary. Here’s to many more. 🍻👇
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Dan Shapiro
After graduating from HMC in the late 90s, Dan Shapiro spent the first five years of his career as a Lead Program Manager at Microsoft. After his time at Microsoft, he then helped start and run Ontela as the CEO before the company merged with Photobucket. From there, he left for Google to be the CEO of Google Comparison - a Google subsidiary providing comparison shopping for personal finance products. While at Google, Dan decided to launch the bestselling board game in Kickstarter history during his free time with his kids - Robot Turtles.
I got out of the shower, printed out some generic robot clip art, and told my 4-year-old twins that I had a new game for us to play. We started experimenting with the rules. The kids couldn’t get enough of it.
I got so excited about this game that I took a leave of absence from my job at Google and spent the summer working full time to develop it.
Dan eventually left Google, and in 2014 co-founded Glowforge. Glowforge launched with the world’s largest crowdfunding campaign, raising over $27M in pre-orders in 30 days, and has since grown to become one of the most popular creative technologies in homes, classrooms, and businesses across the globe. It’s a beautiful 3D laser printer that sits on your desk and uses a laser to carve and engrave products from raw materials like wood, leather, acrylic – even cardboard and chocolate. The company also recently announced a $43M Series E round led by DFJ Growth. Dan had the following to say in their press release:
We founded Glowforge because we believed in a world of personal creation - where people can create things for themselves. Now, hundreds of thousands of Glowforge users bring that to life with every click of the print button. From craft rooms to schools, workshops to offices, our 3D laser printers are printing millions of incredible creations each month. With this funding, Glowforge has the resources to expand our vision to empower the world to make magical things.
📣 Pardon the Announcement: NOOCI
NOOCI is a for women by women supplements company on a mission to modernize Traditional Chinese Medicine. The founder and CEO, Stephanie Tan, and the Strategy & Finance Lead, Michelle Lee, are CMC alumni. NOOCI is preparing for two separate clinical studies, and they want Claremont friends to be involved.
We know that our products are effective from numerous tests as well as our customers' feedback, but we want to quantify that. So, we are looking to send free products to women aged 18+ who either suffer from nasal allergies or menstrual symptoms to participate in two short before-and-after surveys. For the male readers, this invitation extends to their loved ones as well. Anyone who is interested can email us here with the subject title "NOOCI Clinical Study" and we'll be in touch!
💼 Who’s Hiring?:
Locale is an Austin-based hospitality startup building the next generation of flexible accommodations that combine the best of hotels and residential living. They have partnered with best-in-class real estate owners and developers to drive enhanced cash flow to their residential properties via Locale’s differentiated brand and operating platform. CMC alumnus Chase Gray leads Business Operations and Strategy and is looking to fill multiple roles to support the company’s nationwide expansion. He’s determined to bring other Claremont alumni to their team, so don’t be shy! Feel free to connect with Chase directly via email to learn more about Locale and their other open roles.
The ideal candidate has 8+ years of experience leading teams and driving top-line growth. Revenue management and marketing experience is preferred but not required.
The ideal candidate has 4+ years of content marketing experience, ideally at a hospitality, travel, or consumer-facing company, with excellent writing and editing skills.
The ideal candidate has 4+ years of people experience at a startup or high-growth company, loves using data to make people-centric decisions, and can manage the entire employee lifecycle.
Stephanie Simon is a Scripps alumna who has been with Y Combinator for ~6 years and is their Head of Admissions. She’s hiring a Product Engineer on the Admissions team to help YC build tools for picking the next YC batch. Admissions is a five-person team that builds and manages the startup selection process at Y Combinator. It's a highly selective, high-impact, cross-functional group of engineers and operators who also make investment decisions.
In 2017, Pomona alumnus Laszlo Bock helped co-found Humu – a behavioral change technology startup passionate about building a product that empowers people to improve themselves and their teams. Their approach applies decades of research to help anyone grow into a better leader, manager, or teammate. The results? Higher productivity, better retention, more innovative, inclusive workplaces, and—most importantly—greater happiness. Learn more about their mission and their job openings 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:
Some notable Claremont awards 🏆
Congrats to the Gretel.ai team and co-founder Laszlo Bock (PO) on their recent AI Breakthrough Award for Best Machine Learning Platform. Gretel is the developer stack for synthetic data, and they raised a $50M Series B from Anthos Capital, Section 32, Greylock, and Moonshots Capital last fall.
QuSecure, founded by CMC alumnus Skip Sanzeri, has developed the most advanced quantum resilient technology that secures your enterprise from cyber attacks. The Globee Awards, organizers of the world’s premier business awards programs and business ranking lists, has named QuSecure as a winner in the Annual 2022 Disruptor Company Awards program.
Everything else you need to know….📖
Ashwin Navin (CMC), the CEO and co-founder of SambaTV, shares how SambaTV has become a global leader in television and advertising. He also talks about their recent partnership with Disney.
Daniel Kan and Cruise just launched the first paid rides in their new AVs. If you’re in SF, be one of the first to experience the magic of a driverless ride — sign up here.
Yohei Nakajima is a CMC alumnus and the GP and Founder of Untapped Capital - an early-stage venture firm. He’s also the artist and Founder behind PixelBeasts - a web3 and NFT community. He recently spoke at NFT.NYC and shared a list of 132 exciting startups in the web3 space.
Can’t get enough of Between the Lines? Follow and connect with us on Twitter!
🍽️ BTL Snacks:
🐄 From Farm to Fork….. Ever.Ag is broadening their on-farm dairy solutions with the acquisition of Cainthus. Founded in 2016, Cainthus is a computer vision company that turns visual information into actionable insights for farmers. Its proprietary technology passively tracks key farm management practices that impact nutrition, health, behavior, environment, and the mental well-being of livestock. The company was co-founded by PO alumnus Josh Daniel who served as their CTO early on.
🌍 3 Ways a Map Helps Reduce Emissions….. Almost ten years ago, Peter Harding (PO) founded Kelvin AI. Kelvin AI is a software development company enabling industrial customers to simply and quickly scale control applications that create sustainable business value. It’s a next-generation industrial automation software for carbon reduction and collaborative control. With Kelvin Maps, customers can find, fix, and prevent carbon emissions with a map of their operations process leveraging collaborative control, automation, and artificial intelligence.
🍏 What Should I Eat?….. Healthie, a software company that offers EHR, coaching, and engagement tools to digital health companies, has chosen Edamam, a leading provider of nutrition data and solutions, to power the food and nutrition data for the food logging and meal planning portion of its platform. PO graduate Victor Penev founded Edamam over 13 years ago. They deliver real-time nutrition analysis and diet recommendations via APIs using a proprietary semantic technology platform.
💻 11 Tech-Related Details About Remote-Work….. HMC alumnus Ray Grainger advises, along with other technology leaders, on 11 tech-related details to consider when switching your business to full-time remote work. Ray is the former founder of Mavenlink and now the CEO of Kantata. Kantata is a purpose-built cloud software helping over 2,000 professional services organizations in more than 100 countries focus on and optimize their most important asset: their people.
Feedback? We love to hear it. Hit us with an email. 👊🏼