💡 Issue #90: Keys To Success For C-Suite Leaders
Claremont grad Karl Chan shares his 27-year journey to becoming CEO of Laserfiche, his insights on creating a great work culture, and his five keys to becoming a successful business leader
💬 Welcome to issue #90 of Between the Lines
Good morning & happy Thursday. The road to becoming CEO can be tricky, even for the most seasoned leaders. It takes hard work and extensive experience in your field, especially when starting from the bottom.
This week, Claremont grad and Laserfiche CEO Karl Chan (HMC ‘89) talks about his unique career path from entry-level systems engineer to company CEO, his insights on leadership, and the five important things every aspiring C-Suite leader needs to succeed. It’s a Claremont world out there. 👇
~ Josh, Miles, Pat
📢 👥 Community Voices: Five Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective C-Suite Executive
Author: Karl Chan & Douglas Noll
Claremont graduate Karl Chan (HMC ‘89) is the CEO of Laserfiche – a leading SaaS provider of intelligent content management and business process automation. Karl was previously the company’s President and CTO and has been with Laserfiche for almost 30 years. He played a crucial role in developing Laserfiche’s Business Process Automation and Forms and the company’s focus on Laserfiche Cloud. In 2015, Karl was recognized by the LA Business Journal with its highest honor, a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Authority Magazine recently invited Karl for an interview to share his unique story of becoming a CEO, his insights on building a positive work culture, the most common mistakes C-Suite leaders make, and the key lessons he’s learned as a successful business leader for over 27 years.
Before we dive into our discussion, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
My career path is very unique since it began with Laserfiche. I joined the company 30 years ago at an entry level position — I was a systems engineer and there were only 8 other employees. I’ve seen firsthand the significant changes the company has undergone and have risen within the company to my current position as CEO.
Rather than moving up the ladder from one company to another — as many others do — I established my career and garnered experience within the organization through various opportunities. It’s funny to think that I had not applied for most of these roles, but rather was nominated by my colleagues who thought I would be a good fit for these higher-level positions. At times, it was very intimidating stepping into these new roles; many of them were trial by fire and required a lot of learning on the job. It was only after I was in the position that I fully grasped what I needed to do to excel.
My Laserfiche journey took me from Director to CTO (even Head of Marketing for a stint), to President, and then as CEO. There were moments when I dealt with imposter syndrome. A key piece of advice someone once gave me when I was struggling to follow in the footsteps of predecessors is to craft each role to match your working style, skills and expertise, and not the other way around. Those words have stuck with me still today.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
During the early days in my career — perhaps just a couple years in — I was stuck in a rut. I was unsure where my job or my career was going, and it almost felt like an existential crisis. I took a step back and asked myself, where would you like to go with this job? I remembered the advice I was given and took a risk in completely reshaping my role in a way that best suited me.
I told myself that if it worked out, that would be great. But if it didn’t, that was okay too. I sought to take control of my own destiny rather than waiting for my manager to give me direction, and I was fortunate enough that it worked out and was a turning point in my career.
What are your “Five Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective C-Suite Executive”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.
1. Be very resilient. Planning for success means planning for failure, so I always have a backup plan (or three) so that I don’t find myself in a situation with no next steps forward. Things will not always go correctly, so being able to accept that and move on allows you to control your own future and career.
2. Be goal-oriented. Directing yourself and your team towards a concrete and measurable goal is the first step in order to accomplish it, as well as understanding the capabilities of your team to be able to achieve that goal.
3. Never stop being curious. It’s critical to continually adapt and learn about your surroundings as well as other people around you and lean into other’s expertise. I believe this isn’t true just for your company, but for every individual within a team.
4. Learn from experiences. CEOs and other C-Suite executives should constantly look back at what went right — and wrong — so that they can adapt their leadership styles to their teams and what worked well. It’s okay to look back and realize where improvement was needed, and be able to openly communicate about those mistakes in order to improve next time. In fact, it should be encouraged.
5. Build personal relationships with your employees. When I started writing the weekly note to my staff, I looked into the open rate for a previous company newsletter and found that it was 30 at best, so I challenged myself to beat that open rate. Through trial and error of seeing what stuck and led more employees to open and read the letter, I’ve now seen significantly higher open rates. I found that instead of just listing updates, you’re much more likely to engage employees by sharing information that gets them interested and allows you to connect with them.
Read the full article to hear how Karl creates a positive work culture and wrestles with difficult decisions as CEO. 👇
📣 Pardon the Announcement: Groundlight AI
Leo Dirac (HMC ‘95) and Avi Geiger (HMC ‘99) are the Co-founders of Groundlight AI. Leo is a pioneer in machine learning and has been applying ML to solve real-world problems for over a decade. In 2012, he started using neural networks and was one of the first deep-learning engineers at Amazon. Avi has a long track record of bringing barely formed ideas from concept to production and is a serial founder and entrepreneur who’s always looking for new solutions to old problems. He has led numerous engineering, manufacturing, and business efforts at Microsoft and Picobrew. Together, they co-founded Groundlight – a platform that empowers developers to build robust computer vision solutions for industrial applications quickly.
Groundlight recently emerged from stealth with a $10M seed round led by Madrona. StoryHouse is excited to be an investor in this round, along with Greycroft, Founders Co-op, Flying Fish, AscendVC, and EssenceVC.
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Drew Oetting
Claremont grad Drew Oetting (CMC) is the Founding Partner of 8VC. This venture firm invests in early-stage tech companies disrupting traditional healthcare, finance, and transportation industries. Before 8VC, Drew served as chief of staff to Palantir Co-founder Joe Lonsdale and worked for Bill Gates' Cascade Investments. He co-founded 8VC in his mid-twenties and helped grow it into an $8B AUM firm. Forbes recognized Drew as one of the top 30 under 30 in venture capital.
Last month, Drew and 8VC announced their $880M Fund V to continue backing entrepreneurs who are building innovative solutions to the world’s complex problems.
Drew was recently on the Dealmakers Show to discuss the links between golf and investing, raising money for venture funds and startups, taking advantage of trends, the new shift in where the best talent is moving to, and the list of companies he’s excited to fund now.
💼 Who’s Hiring?: HamsaPay & Nimbus Health
HamsaPay, co-founded by Claremont entrepreneur and CEO Adam Zbar (PO' 91), is the world's first DeFi Network that bridges real-world assets to digital investors leveraging data. The company's DeFi marketplace is revolutionizing who can invest in cross-border trade financing and opening the market to investors worldwide. HamsaPay is backed by top institutional and strategic investors who were senior executives at Google, Alibaba, and Stripe. Adam was previously the Co-founder of at-home meal kit industry leader Sunbasket, which had a $1.3B merger last year. Now, he's looking to hire for his growing team:
Nimbus Health is a healthtech startup that addresses the unique needs of the 50M+ Americans who suffer from asthma, COPD, and other respiratory conditions through an innovative blend of in-person care, care coordination, and remote patient monitoring. The company is launching a network of pulmonary clinics equipped with a technology stack that continuously analyzes patient data and automates elements of patient outreach. Claremont grad Clay Spence (CMC ‘16) is the Founder of Nimbus, and he led the company to a successful $4.8M Seed round last year. He’s now looking for a Senior Full-Stack Engineer to join their growing team at their Atlanta office:
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 must-watch 📺
Nobel laureate and Claremont grad Jennifer Doudna (PO) was featured on the PBS NewsHour, where she shared a brief explanation of what CRISPR gene editing is and her thoughts on where this field is headed in the future as one of its pioneers. Jennifer is also the co-founder of the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) at UC Berkeley and five different biotech companies — Caribou Biosciences (NASDAQ: CRBU), Editas Medicine (NASDAQ: EDIT), Intellia Therapeutics (NASDAQ: NTLA), Scribe Therapeutics, and unicorn Mammoth Biosciences.
This week’s Claremont financing 💸
Congratulations to Gather Health on their recent $15M Series A. Claremont grad and serial entrepreneur Burke Wise (PO ‘08) helped found Gather Health – an international healthtech company focused on empowering chronic disease patients to improve their health. Burke is now the Co-founder of healthcare startup Empassion Health, which recently raised $20M in venture funding as well.
Everything else you need to know💡
Claremont entrepreneur Tristan Zajonc (PO ‘03) is the Co-founder and CEO of Continual – an operational AI platform for the modern data stack. Continual is the easiest way to maintain predictions – from customer churn to inventory forecasts – in your data warehouse. The company raised a $14M Series A led by Innovation Endeavors last year, and Tristan announced that they’re currently working on a next-generation development platform for generative AI.
Can’t get enough of Between the Lines? Follow and connect with us on Twitter!
🍽️ BTL Snacks:
💲An Investor’s Advice To Tech Startups….. Claremont entrepreneur and Madrona Principal Elisa La Cava (CMC) sat down with the team at Find Ventures to talk about her experience working with new entrepreneurs and what excites her the most for the future of tech startups. She also shares critical advice for all the startup founders thinking of launching their own company. Elisa is an investor at Madrona, focusing on software startups building intelligent applications with machine learning and artificial intelligence.
🧑🎓 Democratize Learning with AI….. So much of the conversation around AI and education has focused on a very narrow question: "How will this tech serve students who want to cheat?" Claremont grad and edtech startup founder Julia Stiglitz (PO) shares her thoughts on this issue and talks about the four trends she's betting on for AI and L&D. Julia is the Co-founder and CEO of CoRise – an edtech startup partnering with industry leaders to transform how professionals and companies build technical, high-demand skills at scale.
🤖 A World Without Work….. Although automation and AI have eliminated some jobs, they’ve also created new ones, and many tasks still require human expertise and skills to be executed properly. Claremont grad and Pomona Economics Professor Gary Smith (HMC ‘67) explores the idea of being replaced by AI as an exaggerated fear. He also cites examples of why LLMs still can’t replace critical thinking, and shares his insights on several job-at-risk studies they’ve analyzed.
We’ve tracked 1,120 private Claremont-founded startups that are currently active. Seventeen are unicorn companies, including Resilience, LaunchDarkly, Honeybook, Dremio, and Zwift.
Feedback? We love to hear it. Hit us with an email. 👊🏼