🍎 Issue #61: Claremont's Coach
Director of Investor Relations at Apple talks employee retention, investment banking, and double-dipping at Claremont
💬 Welcome to issue #61 of Between the Lines
Good morning & happy Thursday. At the beginning of this year, Apple became the first-ever U.S. company to reach a $3 trillion market cap. A few years back, Claremont grad and founder Tim Galbraith even wrote about Apple’s dominance since its IPO (over 40 years ago) and the seven investors who missed out on billions by selling their shares too early…
This week Tejas Gala, current Director of Investment Relations for Apple, shares a bit about his journey from double-dipping at Claremont to joining Apple and what has made the company such a special place.
~ Josh & Miles
👤 Community Spotlight: Tejas Gala
Tejas Gala has been working at Apple for eight years in various roles. His current role is the Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Finance; before this, he was in the Sales Finance group. Outside of work, Tejas is passionate about CMC and all things Stags Basketball. He even took a gap year out of work and returned to Claremont for a victory lap that included coaching the Stag’s basketball team.
Many members in the Claremont community are leading their own companies/teams, and talent retention is more important than ever. What has Apple done to get you to stay as long as you have, and what advice would you give to other Claremont leaders that are thinking about retention?
I’m not sure there is anything out-of-the-box that we do. I’ve had great mentors at the company and have had incredibly supportive managers who challenge me with interesting work and provide me autonomy to go take on new work while also providing a space for me to learn and make mistakes. For me, I always try to answer 3 questions when I think about my job and ask the same of my team:
1) Do you feel supported?
2) Do you feel like you’re still learning?
3) Do you feel like you’re being challenged?
If I can answer yes to all three, then I feel like I’m in a good spot.
Every econ student from Claremont says they want to get into investment banking. You’ve done a few stints in the IB world yourself. What perspective do you think we twenty-somethings are not hearing about IB?
Investment banking is an incredible way to start a career. It also is a role that maximizes optionality where you are well compensated, which allows you to move any “career decisions” out a couple of years. I think there is also a bit of this industry being what is talked about a lot on campus too, so there is some of the “FOMO” for students to make sure they don’t get left behind when there is recruiting.
Again, I have a ton of respect for bankers and think that it’s a great way to start your career. However, as an analyst or intern, it’s important to remember that you’re not the one strategically advising CEOs on their financing or M&A options — you’re more than likely building/updating slide decks, spreading comps, and updating high-level financial models for a majority of your time. And you’re working a lot — so I think that if you want to stay in the finance industry (i.e. banking, PE, HF, etc.), it’s probably important to get the experience on how the major players get work done.
As a Claremont student, it’s important that you do your diligence, really think about why it is that you want to do banking, and if you’re honest with the reasoning, then I think it’s a great place to be!👇
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Locke Brown
While still at Claremont, Locke Brown interned at Google and also spent time at an emerging market investment and PE firm in Mongolia. He was an early Bitcoin miner in 2013, and after graduating from Claremont, he joined the trading desk at Bill Gates’ private investment office, BMGI. In 2017, Brown left BMGI and co-founded NuID — a pioneer in trustless authentication and decentralized digital identity. NuID develops software that uses blockchain tech to authenticate individuals and eliminate the need for stored passwords in a centralized database. In 2018, Brown raised a $2.5M Seed round from Jemison Investments and 8VC, and he recently interviewed with Fotis Georgiadis on how NuID’s technology will shake up the tech scene:
So our core innovation/technology, “the NuID protocol”, provides what we call “zero knowledge authentication.” But I should back up for a second and give a tiny bit of context: our goal is to return data ownership to the individual by providing the tools for ordinary people to use cryptography in such a way that is easy and allows them to control their information online. We’re effectively a digital identity company, paving a way for people to have a self-owned — or sovereign — single digital representation of themselves that’s portable from service to service and allows them to control what and with whom anything is shared. Now this comes in many steps but our core tech (or secret sauce) is our approach from the authentication vector. If I could authenticate myself as someone else online, then that digital representation is useless because it can be compromised. So in solving digital identity, we first have to fix the way individuals are authenticated, which is what our core tech accomplishes.
The solution generates user-owned web credentials by converting authentication credentials into public ZKP parameters and persisting them using a blockchain. The solution is so-called “zero-knowledge” because no one, not even NuID, has the ability to see people’s login credentials: they never leave the user’s device. We’ll get into the broader implications of the solution, but people stand to benefit as it creates a portable and user-owned identity platform.
💼 Who’s Hiring?:
Lev, co-founded by Claremont alumnus Sammy Greenwall, is a digital-first commercial mortgage marketplace for capital market advisors. Lev uses AI, automation, and other technology to help borrowers compare and source financing. Its aim is to streamline and modernize the industry’s antiquated, manual lending practices and procedures. Their marketplace has closed over $1B in loans in the last twelve months and features over 5,000 lenders.
Lev also recently secured a $70 million Series B round of financing, bringing them to $110M in funding in two years. Backed by leading firms in fintech, venture, and commercial real estate, they are growing and hiring for several open positions:
In 2014, Claremont alumnus Brian Derfer co-founded Agile Six – a full-spectrum digital services company whose mission is to transform government and private sector relationships. Agile Six works with government agencies to create customized digital solutions that meet the needs of their users. Since their founding, they have helped build the civic tech marketplace and have worked with clients like the Centers for Medicare, Medicaid Services, and the Department of Veterans Affairs to revolutionize their digital services.
Agile Six has quickly grown in size to over 60 employees in 15 different states. If you’re interested to learn more about this fully remote team, check out all their open positions here:
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 financing 💸
EdLight, co-founded by Claremont alumnus Ryan Knight, lets teachers quickly see and give feedback on original student work and uses AI to better read, interpret and digitize handwritten student work. The company recently raised a Pre-Seed round and was selected to join the Google for Startups Accelerator.
This week’s top listen 🎧
Jim Castelaz is a Claremont grad and the CTO/Founder at Motive Power Systems — a leading provider of daily-use, zero-emission vehicles. He discusses the electrification of medium-duty transport fleets and why it makes sense today for fleet managers to switch to EVs progressively.
Everything else you need to know 💡
Congrats to Nicole Alonso on making the leap into entrepreneurship to build Paysail with fellow Claremont alumnus Liam Brennan-Burke. Paysail leverages asset-backed stablecoins to offer an innovative global B2B invoicing solution with immediate access to incoming funds, and Nicole and Liam raised $4M from Uncork Capital, Tribe VC, and Pear VC.
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🍽️ BTL Snacks:
👵 The Coming of AgeTech….. Will Richardson, Investment Associate at investment management office Point Field Partners, shares why he believes it’s time for AgeTech to come of age. AgeTech aims to positively touch the lives of the aging population and address the problems an aging society presents. And with this population growing (10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day) and these problems surmounting, the need is becoming more urgent.
👶 Transforming The Child Care Industry….. Kinside, the fast-growing childcare marketplace innovating how working parents secure childcare, announced its acquisition of LegUp, the first universal child care enrollment system. Together, they now have the most robust data on the childcare ecosystem, uniquely positioning them to address the needs of providers, parents, and employers. Kinside was co-founded by CEO and Claremont alumnus Shadiah Sigala (former co-founder of unicorn client management company Honeybook).
🧓 The Social App For Grown Ups….. NYC-based Hank, co-founded by Claremont alumnus Andrew Hong, is a platform for people ages 55 and up where users can connect with each other and arrange plans that allow them to stay active and socialize — everything from scheduling casual coffee chats to finding new friends to go skydiving with. Hank officially launched this May, and by late June, the startup had raised $7M in a seed funding round co-led by General Catalyst and Resolute Ventures.
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