🚀 Issue #66: Breaking Into Tech, Web3, & NFTs
Iris Nevins shares how she transitioned from community-building to tech and the founding story of her web3 education company Umba Daima
💬 Welcome to issue #66 of Between the Lines
Good morning & happy Friday Thursday the 13th. Unbeknownst to us, Meta’s recent takeover attempt of Giphy has surfaced that gifs are apparently now cringe and only for boomers? Don’t mind us feeling only slightly called out…
This week, Claremont alumnus Iris Nevins shares her career journey into tech and web3 and the founding story of Umba Daima — a collaborative network of people, brands, and communities aiming to thrive in Web3. Also, Strategy & Biz Ops veteran Will St. Clair is thinking about his next career move — don’t miss what we got this week below.
~ Josh & Miles
👤 Community Spotlight: Iris Nevins
Iris Nevins is the CEO and founder of Umba Daima — a production studio that creates experiences/events and builds community as a service. They operate in the web3 space, using NFTs as a community-building tool. Born to Jamaican immigrants, Nevins grew up in the Miami restaurant business before heading to Pomona College to major in Africana Studies. Before founding Umba Daima, she also taught social studies, ran community service orgs, and worked as an Engineering Manager at Mailchimp and Vox Media.
You were a non-STEM major in undergrad and jumped into a non-technical field out of undergrad. How did you then transition to technical senior engineering leadership roles at Mailchimp and Vox?
I first realized that I might be interested in transitioning my career into tech while I was in the thick of doing my community organizing work. While in the community organization space, I noticed that the organizations we worked with were incredibly disorganized and inefficient in so many ways. At times, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. So, I began reflecting on our disorganization and inefficiency because I was trying to actually start making real change.
I put together an entire proposal for how we could improve and make more tangible change; eventually, we started seeing an incredible amount of growth in the number of people that were participating in volunteer programs and coordinating projects. It was night and day. But, as we started to grow quickly, we needed to figure out how to track all of these people and monitor all of their work…another roadblock.
This was when I finally started taking software and the need for it more seriously. I didn’t even know what a coding language was at that time, but I knew we needed more of it to help scale.
It’s funny because one of the tools I really needed was software exactly like Calendly. I remember searching and searching online to try and find a Calendly-like tool and couldn’t find it because we were doing all this manual scheduling. It was a complete nightmare, and I remember thinking to myself “if only I could just build a tool like this myself.”
I then remembered that a Claremont classmate named Blake had gone to Hackbright to learn how to become an engineer, so I called her, and she broke it down for me. After hearing her discuss exactly what software engineering was and the in’s and out’s of frontend and backend programming, I thought to myself, “This is what I need to do.”
There’s a lot more to this story, but I eventually enrolled in a boot camp called Dev Boot Camp in San Francisco, I quit my teaching job, I left my nonprofit, and that was it.👇
🤝 Pardon the Introduction: Will St. Clair
After nearly two years at Notarize launching partnerships like Salesforce, Adobe, and FedEx Office, Claremont graduate Will St. Clair is looking for his next 'tour of duty.' Before his work at Notarize, Will spent over a decade as a Principal at BCG and also spent time at Zillow and Uber in various strategy and business ops roles. He’s looking for any interesting Partnership/Business Development, Managerial, Strategy, Ops, or consulting roles.
If you have any ideas or you know smart, good leaders interested in chatting, reach out to Will.
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Edith Harbaugh
Edith Harbaugh is a Claremont alumnus and the co-founder and CEO of the multibillion-dollar dev ops business LaunchDarkly. After Claremont, Edith started her engineering career but quickly shifted to the product side and spent the next decade in a variety of Product Manager and Director roles for software development startups Vignette and TripIt. While working at TripIt, Edith started seeing a need and problem from the PM side. Her eventual co-founder and fellow Claremont alumnus, John Kodumal, was working at Atlassian and seeing the same need from the engineering side.
They both realized that small and medium-sized firms could not afford the investment to develop their own custom infrastructure to manage the continuous deployment of feature subsets to each customer, and LaunchDarkly was born. Eight years later, LaunchDarkly has now reached a $3B valuation. Edith was also recently celebrated as one of Inc.’s most inspiring women of 2022 AND as one of Entrepreneur’s most influential women!
💼 Who’s Hiring?:
HamsaPay, founded by Claremont alumnus and CEO Adam Zbar, is the world’s first DeFi Network that bridges real-world assets to digital investors leveraging data. Having tokenized billions of dollars in RWA, HamsaPay is disrupting the $10T private credit market and has partnered with top financial institutions, e-commerce platforms, and digital exchanges.
The company is backed by top-tier institutional and strategic investors who were senior executives at Google, Alibaba, and Stripe. Adam was also previously the co-founder of at-home meal kit industry leader Sunbasket, which had a $1.3B merger earlier this year. He’s looking to hire a Securities Lawyer/General Counsel who will work closely with him and his COO to develop their legal framework and policies for their DeFi products:
GoSchoolBox is a customized platform that connects educators with students, saving them time and tracking their progress automatically. Co-founded by Claremont alumnus and CTO Alejandro Mendoza, their platform’s interface allows school districts and other educational agencies to manage and scale their academic intervention programs easily.
GoSchoolBox is backed by Board Members of the Khan Academy, the Global Head of Education at Adobe, Ulu Ventures, and Gaingels. Publicly traded Kip McGrath Education Centres also acquired Alejandro's previous startup, Tutorfly, last year. Learn more about their team and their openings:
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 🔥
Co-founded by Claremont grad Alex Groth, Tab for a Cause creates apps that allow users to raise money for charity just by surfing the web. Every browser tab you open earns money from ads on the page donated to the non-profit you choose to support.
This week’s Claremont exit 💸
iGrad, a financial technology company that offers AI-powered financial wellness solutions, was acquired by Aztec Software. Founded by Claremont alumnus Ronda Perks, iGrad serves over 1.2M students, 600 colleges and universities, 20,000 employers, and 300 financial institutions.
This week’s top listen 🎧
LanzaTech CEO and Claremont alumnus Jennifer Holmgren gave Kentaro an AP chem lesson on the carbon conversion process and shared how LanzaTech has scaled up its startup technology in preparation for going public.
Everything else you need to know💡
Ashwin Navin is a Claremont graduate and co-founder of Samba TV, a global leader in television technology powering real-time insights and audience targeting with their AI-driven advertising and analytics software.
Can’t get enough of Between the Lines? Follow and connect with us on Twitter!
🍽️ BTL Snacks:
⚡Putting A New Charge To Display Advertising….. The digital signage disruptor, Glass-Media, just recently announced its partnership with wireless power solutions company, Wi-Charge. Founded by Claremont grad Daniel Black, Glass-Media is advancing projection-based, end-to-end digital storefronts for brands and retailers with a physical footprint. They’re further expanding what is possible with visual display technology by replacing cumbersome wires and batteries with over-the-air wireless innovations.
💲 The Opportunity That Changed Her Career….. Claremont alumnus Nicole Alonso sat down with NYC FinTech Women and talked about her journey from being a neuroscience major to a Fintech startup founder. Nicole is the CTO and co-founder of Paysail, a company aiming to simplify the invoicing workflow and provide access to payment rails that allow businesses to complete transactions anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds. Nicole and her fellow Claremont co-founder Liam Burke raised a $4M seed round led by Uncork Capital earlier this year.
✈️ Better Than Just Punch Cards….. Legacy loyalty programs are predominantly owned by merchants who print loyalty punch cards or their digital versions — points. FlyCoin, co-founded by Claremont alumni Tom Hsieh and Josh Jones, is a cryptocurrency-based travel rewards company aiming to have customers be the loyalty program owners. Early this year, the company announced its partnership with BitGo, which came on the heels of its $33M Seed funding.
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