📝 Issue #57: Rules For Career Success
Jonathan Rosenberg’s advice for leaders on communication, culture, hiring, decision making, innovation, and humility
💬 Welcome to issue #57 of Between the Lines
Good morning & happy Thursday. Based on recent travel reports and all the OOO emails we’ve received, chances are you’re reading this on vacation or while stuck at the airport. Here’s to hoping it’s the former. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In other news, this week, former SVP of Product at Google and current Alphabet advisor Jonathan Rosenberg shares advice he gleaned from his front-row seat to the last 25 years in Silicon Valley. Also, if you’re a startup founder with some itches to scratch in cybersecurity, be sure to read Yoichi’s info below. 👇
~ Josh & Miles
📢 👥 Community Voices: Rules For Career Success
Author: Jonathan Rosenberg
Jonathan Rosenberg is a Claremont graduate, former Senior Vice President of Products at Google, and a current advisor to Alphabet Inc.'s management team and board. He is also the co-author of the New York Times bestseller How Google Works and the Trillion Dollar Coach, which reached number 1 on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. This article was transcribed from Rosenberg’s speech at CMC’s Athenaeum in 2010 and lightly edited for print.
When I first arrived at Claremont in 1979, it was immediately clear that all of my classmates were extremely smart and eager to learn. Inevitably, college wasn't all that easy for me. Nevertheless, by 1983, I was excited to graduate and go out into the real world. I hoped life in the real world would be easier because I figured the average business person wouldn't be as smart as my classmates at Claremont, and I wouldn't be graded on the same curve. Just before graduation, however, one of my professors said to me, “Jonathan, the best way to keep learning after you leave school is to surround yourself with the smartest people you can find”. Well, this was an anathema to my plan of taking life easy and benefiting from the stupid people in the business world.
Fortunately, for that one brief moment, I decided to internalize advice and listen to my professor. After business school, I went to where I thought the smartest people in the world would be — Silicon Valley. It turns out my professor was somewhat omniscient.
Throughout my career, I ended up surrounding myself with some really, really smart people. In fact, early in my career, I went to see Steve Jobs speak, and my reaction was pretty predictable: “Yikes! I'll never be that good. I'm not that smart.” So, I thought about my professor's advice, and I went to go work for Apple.
A few years later, I met Milo Medin, and he was sharing how you could take the IEEE802.14 spec and Ethernet and make the Internet work really fast over cable modems. He even sketched it all out on a whiteboard for me. Again, my reaction was unsurprising: “I’m not that smart. Maybe I should go to work for At Home.” So, shortly after meeting Milo, I went to work for At Home.
Then, in 1998 I met Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Larry spoke about how the search would be the most monetizable moment on the internet and how in 10 years, we could digitize all of humanity's knowledge. “I’m not that smart. I should go to work for Google.” So, I eventually went to work for Google.
In hindsight, there's, fortunately, an important difference between Claremont and the real world. When I was at Claremont, I had to compete with the smartest people. But, in the real world, you don't have to compete with Steve Jobs, Milo Medin, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin. You don't have to beat them, you can join them. I think that realization alone can guarantee success. Find the smartest people, hook in, and hang on. With that in mind, here’s my best piece of career advice for you all:
“Find the smartest people. You don’t have to beat them. You can join them, observe them, and learn from them. Take what you can learn and help them. This is something that you ALL are uniquely qualified to do.”
What follows are my observations on what makes people successful, gleaned from my front-row seat to the last 25 years of change in Silicon Valley.👇
🤝 Pardon the Introduction: Free Cybersecurity Consulting
Yoichi Sagawa is a Claremont alumnus and a principal architect at AT&T Cybersecurity. He delivers various consulting services in defensive and offensive security domains, specializing in security operations and architecture, cloud security, and network and application penetration testing. Yoichi has also led the engineering teams at two startups and is keenly interested in helping startup teams identify and manage their information security needs. He believes that addressing security concerns during the startup stage is critical to establishing a company’s security posture and that punting on security issues is no longer acceptable even for the smallest companies. You can read more on Yoichi’s thoughts regarding startup security on the AT&T Cybersecurity Blog.
He is currently offering free information security consulting to Claremont founders with the goal of mutual education. His eventual desire is to establish himself as a trusted advisor to VCs and startups as an expert on startup security. If you are running a software startup, need guidance and resources for security, or need help getting started and looking to discuss security, reach out to Yoichi on LinkedIn or via email.
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Scott McFarlane
Back in 1977, while still living in the Claremont dorm rooms, Scott McFarlane helped his Claremont roommate, Augie Nieto, found and build Lifecycle, which later sold and became Life Fitness. After spending over six years at Life Fitness, Scott spent the next decade-plus in a variety of President, COO, and VP roles before becoming the founder and CEO of Avalara.
Avalara is a cloud-based platform that provides tax compliance software and automated solutions. Scott has been the founder and CEO for over 18 years and helped the company raise over $340M before the company IPO’d in June of 2018 with a $1.4B valuation. After just four years of being a public company, Scott and the team recently announced an $8.4B deal with Vista Equity that will take Avalara private once again. Yahoo Finance has more on the recent deal. Congrats to Scott and the Avalara team!
💼 Who’s Hiring?:
Labor Solutions, co-founded by Claremont alumnus and CEO Elena Fanjul-Debnam, provides consumer brands with big data about human rights supply chain risks by providing suppliers with human resources technology to engage, connect, and educate workers at scale.
Elena co-founded Labor Solutions in 2013 while working at Workplace Options, and in January 2020, Labor Solutions became an independent entity serving over 1.5 million workers in 25 countries (and counting). Though primarily based in Indonesia, Singapore, and India, they’re currently hiring for several remote positions worldwide. Shoot us a note if you’re interested in applying:
Founded by Claremont alumnus Daniel Ross, Headway is a mental healthcare system provider that aims to help address treatable mental health conditions in the US. They’re making mental healthcare more accessible to everyone by building the first software-enabled network of therapists who accept health insurance, making it easy for therapists to grow their practices and possible for patients to find quality care they can afford. After launching in 2019, Headway is now powering over 175,000 appointments monthly. They’ve raised over $100M in funding from a16z, Accel, GV, and Thrive, and they’re currently looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join their team:
Check out the other ~5,000 open jobs at 400+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, create a profile and enter your preferences to get alerted to new job postings relevant to you, be they the 1,000+ remote jobs, 100+ internships, or 40+ part-time positions available. We’ve published research that shows that Claremont-founded companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent outperform — so pay attention, Claremonsters!
If any of these roles catch your eye 👀 , apply and mention Between the Lines. Or, if you are an employer looking to hire tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.
🗣️ Conversations on the Interwebz:
This week’s top listen 🔥
On their sixth episode of the Startup of You Podcast, Reid Hoffman and Claremont drop-out and Village Global founding partner, Ben Casnocha, share tips and frameworks for taking smarter risks in your career. They discuss how to overcome your natural bias to avoid risks and look for hidden opportunities in unexpected environments.
Everything else you need to know….📖
Claremont alumnus Ho Nam shares a great thread on how VCs can have a tremendous influence on building great companies. He’s been the managing director at Altos Ventures for over 26 years.
Claremont alumnus and CEO/founder of Umba Saima, Iris Nevins, shares why and how she got started in tech after her teaching career, as well as advice for others trying to make the transitions into tech jobs.
Thanks to Matterport’s digital twins, there’s a new way for customers to interact with online businesses. Matterport, co-founded by Claremont alumnus Michael Beebe in 2011, is helping lead the digital transformation of the built world.
Co-founder of Cardea Bio and Claremont alumnus, Kiana Aran, has become just the 2nd woman ever since 1960 to receive the Rutgers’ Engineer Medal of Excellence award for her achievements in bio-integrated electronics. Cardea Bio is the world’s only mass producer of biocompatible semiconductors, the BPU (Biosignal Processing Unit).
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🍽️ BTL Snacks:
🗣️ Fear Of Public Speaking….. Yoodli, a startup building an artificial intelligence platform to help people communicate more effectively, announced that it has raised $6M in a seed round co-led by Madrona Venture Group and Cercano Management (formerly Vulcan Capital). Yoodli was founded by Claremont alumnus Varun Puri and is already being used by thousands of professional speakers, coaches, students, and corporate professionals to get data-driven insights on their speaking presentations.
🌿 Greenest Of Green Thumbs….. Green Thumb Industries Inc. navigated an uncertain economic environment and beat Wall Street estimates with its eighth quarterly profit in a row while hitting a $2.&B market cap. Q2 marked the largest quarter in U.S. history with about $6.6B in legal cannabis sales, and Green Thumb eyes more growth as Rhode Island and Connecticut launch adult-use sales later this year. Green Thumb is a public national cannabis consumer packaged goods company and retailer founded by Claremont alumnus and CEO Ben Kovler.
❄️️ Crypto Winter Cleanse….. “The climate now definitely has a negative on us or any of the other issuers in the market that have crypto-adjacent or crypto products, but we just try to use this opportunity to keep our heads down and build,” Valkyrie CEO and Claremont alumnus Leah Wald told Blockworks in an interview. Valkyrie launched its bitcoin futures ETF (BTF) last October and its venture arm, led by Lluis Pedragosa, last month as they continue to build out their offerings and relationships with institutions during the bear market and crypto winter.
🦠 Parasite DNA Study….. According to the American Society for Microbiology, Claremont professor Danae Schulz’s lab is the first to report using CUT&RUN (cleavage under targets and release using nuclease), a chromatin profiling strategy used to analyze DNA-protein interactions, on African trypanosomes. The Schulz lab focuses on understanding how gene regulatory proteins called bromodomain proteins interact with the DNA as parasites transition from the blood to the insect.
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