💡Issue #56: The Importance Of VC & Operation Roles
Daniel Shi discusses the importance of VC and operation roles, how to nail international expansion, and the future of Fintech
💬 Welcome to issue #56 of Between the Lines
Good morning & happy Thursday. August. Is it really August? It’s really August. This summer has flown.
Anyhow, as usual, we’ve got a killer interview for you from a Claremont alumnus and everything else you need to get your weekly dose of Between the Lines. VC and operator turned angel investor Daniel Shi shares how VC and operation roles complement each other and why you should care about faster feedback loops in your career. 👇
~ Josh & Miles
👤 Community Spotlight: Daniel Shi
Daniel Shi is a Claremont graduate who spent time at Tencent and Amex Ventures investing in gaming, e-commerce, and Fintech before spending six years as an operator at Remitly, an international payments company, from early stage until IPO. Now, he’s an angel investor and advisor for numerous startups and funds out of his private investment company — South Quad.
After spending a few years in VC and strategic investing at Tencent and Amex after your MBA, what compelled you to shift careers and join the payments startup Remitly?
After business school, I worked in VC for a couple of years, and I would constantly hear the old adage of “go get an operating job first.” Especially if you’re early in your career in VC, a lot of what you’ll hear is to go get some operating experience. At the time, I truthfully didn’t heed the advice, or I should say that I didn’t appreciate the weight of the advice. And I just thought, “Hey, you know what, I should be able to make it in VC. I just need to work hard enough and long enough. It’ll be fine.”
But during my fourth year in VC, as an associate at Amex, it dawned on me that it was going to be a grind to be able to make Partner or find out if I was even a good investor. If you’re an early investor, it can take over a decade for a company you invested in to get to a respectable valuation, let alone exit. And even before that, you still have to sort through all of the sourcing, investing, and (worst of all) the politics of getting an investment even made. I didn’t realize it, but what I was really looking for at that time was just faster feedback loops. (And this is a consistent piece of advice I have been giving to folks early in their careers now, that in the early days, try to find jobs where you can learn more through faster feedback loops).
Fortunately, when you’re an associate at a VC firm, inevitably, opportunities come your way because you are spending so much time with so many entrepreneurial people. Remitly was probably the first one that I took seriously. They had a culture that just really resonated with me.
I was blessed to be at a dinner where I was sitting next to one of the co-founders, Josh Hug, and he invited me up to Seattle to interview. There was something about the culture that I really liked and that resonated with me. As I mentioned, I was looking for faster feedback loops, which was entirely what going to a startup like Remitly was all about. Remitly, at that point, was a Series B company (we raised our Series C a few months after I joined) and had already found product-market fit and a proven growth strategy that we were investing in. The team was excellent, and the founders had worked hard to craft a wonderful customer-centric culture that valued learning and being data-driven. When those things come into place — you just learn way faster.👇
🤝 Pardon the Introduction: Kevin Guardia
Kevin is a Claremont alumnus who, after spending the early part of his career in corporate finance, caught the startup bug at the onset of COVID. After starting up his own health insurance company and placing 3rd in Columbia Business School’s pitch competition, he realized that the company didn’t have enough to garner the needed funding. Not wanting to leave the startup ecosystem, Kevin quit his day job and part-timed for startups running their fundraising, operations, accounting, and finance functions until finding a more permanent home at Volantio as Director of Finance. However, Kevin is currently looking for new roles in finance and operations at other startups. If you want to learn more or think Kevin could be a fit with your team, send him a note.
I am generally interested in finance and operations roles in the healthcare and fintech spaces but am open to working with any early-stage startup in the seed – series D category or as an advisor at an accelerator or incubator.
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Brad Johnston
After graduating from Pitzer in the late ’90s, Brad Johnston spent the next decade+ working as a Product and Marketing Manager for companies like Toshiba and VIZIO. In 2015, he left VIZIO and spent his life’s savings to start Tanoshi as the CEO and co-founder.
Tanoshi is a computer company closing the education gap and technology divide between the affluent and poor through their 10-inch tablets. It was founded to develop educational, safe, and fun consumer electronic products for today’s digital native kids. As they seek to do tech for good, Brad and the team have turned $250K of raised capital into $4M in revenue and sold more than 17,000 computers to date. Brad was recently featured on Million Stories, sharing his mission and entrepreneurial journey below.
💼 Who’s Hiring?:
Dan Shapiro (HMC) is the co-founder and CEO of Glowforge, a 3D laser printer manufacturer based in Seattle. Glowforge is a user-friendly 3D printer that sits on your desk. The company’s printers utilize software and sensors, laser cutter, and engraver technology to cut, engrave, and shape designs from various materials, enabling users to print and decorate any materials. Glowforge also had one of the largest crowdfunding campaigns in history.
Early this year, the company reported more than $100M in revenue for 2021 and announced a $43M Series E investment led by DFJ Growth. If you’re interested in joining this remote-first company, feel free to check out their open positions:
GridMatrix is a San Francisco-based startup co-founded by Pomona alumnus Nicholas D’Andre, with his former Apple engineering and operations colleagues in January 2021. Its mission is to evolve the existing transportation infrastructure for the demands of the next 50 years. GridMatrix’s cloud platform for traffic analytics combines edge sensor data with cloud-based data sources to eliminate urban traffic congestion, accidents, and emissions.
The company also just raised a $3.5M Seed round and is now partnering with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey as part of a pilot program to identify and measure the root causes of CO2 Emissions along the George Washington Bridge Corridor:
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 read 🔥
Congratulations to Claremont alumnus Sana Javeri Kadri. A year after graduating from Pomona, Kadri founded Diaspora Co. - a high-quality, sustainably-focused spice business based out of Oakland. After five years of bootstrapping the company, she just raised $2.1M. Forbes has more.
Everything else you need to know….📖
Claremont alumnus and Senior Director of Engineering at Coinbase, Jesse Pollak, joins Untold Stories to talk about the gravity of decentralization, public key infrastructure, and building in bear markets. He currently leads efforts to build, support, and integrate protocols into Coinbase products, and he’s also a former co-founder of Clef (acquired by Twilio in 2017).
Backed by Binance and Coinfund, Wincast is an interactive NFT platform that allows people to bid on and own their favorite sports moments as they’re happening. Claremont alumnus and founder of Wincast, Noah Kline, shares what he values in NFTs.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender, Claremont alumnus and former On Deck Climate Tech Fellow, shares how she’s engaging with other carbon removal enthusiasts and introducing a new audience to the idea of removing CO2 from the atmosphere — with humor. Siobhan is also the co-founder of Thanks a Ton — a startup for crowdsourcing carbon dioxide removal.
Can’t get enough of Between the Lines? Follow and connect with us on Twitter!
🍽️ BTL Snacks:
🌐 The New Networking & Computing Architectures….. AvicenaTech Corp., the leader in microLED-based chip-to-chip interconnects, announced $25M in Series A funding from Samsung Catalyst Fund to drive the development of products based on Avicena’s breakthrough photonic I/O solution. Avicena was co-founded by Claremont alumnus Bardia Pezeshki. They develop ultra-low energy optical links based on mircoLEDs — a fundamental building block in the evolution of new networking and computing architectures that will reduce the energy impact on our planet.
👓 A Better Metaverse….. The metaverse remains ambiguous to many, and the metaverse experiences still require expensive equipment confined to a relatively small crowd of VR and tech enthusiasts. MeetKai, founded by Claremont alumnus James Kaplan, is a Conversational AI company with an up-and-coming metaverse alternative working to improve adoption through productivity and accessibility. Its metaverse claims to be rooted in reality, with real-life experiences and real impacts like deepening personal connections or shopping for real products.
🌎 Putting The Cool In Climate Action….. Patagonia vests and khakis ain’t gonna cut it, says Claremont alumnus and investor Taj Eldridge. Eldridge is an investor, advisor, and board member for numerous climate startups and VC funds. He’s also a Partner at the fund of funds Include Ventures, where he invests in diverse and overlooked climate entrepreneurs. “We’ve made climate investing cool,” Eldridge told ImpactAlpha. “We’ve made it to where it is just about as cool as being in web3.”
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