Breaking Into Startups

Today, we have two amazing people behind the widely successful early stage venture capital firm, Initialized. Today, they discuss the power of coaching, the cryptocurrency space, building teams and community, and some tech trends to watch out for. Dubbed as "Mayor of the Internet," Alexis Ohanian is the Co-Founder of Reddit, Breadpig. He was a former partner at Y Combinator before co-founding Initialized. Garry Tan is also a Co-Founder of Initialized, Posterous.com, and Posthaven.com. Also a former partner at Y Combinator, where he advised over 700 companies. In addition to that, he is the first seed investor at Instacart and Coinbase which will discuss in greater detail on the episode.

It all started when Jacob Hsu immigrated from Taiwan at an early age! Fast forward to now, Jacob spends his time between San Mateo and Baltimore while he’s building and managing his team as the CEO of Catalyte. An ex-banker, Jacob went on to create two startups, one of which is Symbio, a product development and R&D outsourcing services company. In just less than 11 years, the company has grown from $10 million to over $600 million in revenue. In 2016, Symbio got acquired for over a billion dollars. Catalyte has a very unique business model, specifically using AI to find exceptional people from different backgrounds and helping them become great software engineers. Based in Baltimore, the company is now looking to expand to other cities where they can bring massive impact to local people within the community. Today, Jacob talks about the different key elements Catalyte is built upon and why now is the time to kill the resume!

A melting pot of different cultures, Miami is now seeing a dramatic shift in its career ecosystem geared towards technology and startups. But a little more work is needed for the educational landscape to align with the rapidly growing tech space. Raul Moas is currently the Miami Program Director for the Knight Foundation, a national foundation with strong local roots, specifically focused on entrepreneurship. Formerly, he was the Managing Director for Miami Angels, a local angel group with more than a hundred investors putting seed stage capital behind tech and tech-enabled companies from Florida. He previously served as an executive director for Roots of Hope. In today’s episode, Raul talks about the current trends in Miami from both educational and labor perspectives and what they can do to help bridge the gap.

Miami-native Saif Ishoof is the VP of Engagement at Florida International University and a leader in the Future of Work. He started up a nonprofit called City Year Miami and has run family business prior to it. He got his JD from the University of Miami. We wanted to highlight the importance of radio, part of the reason this podcast got started. Undoubtedly, radio is still the strongest way to reach people in the community you want to reach. Alice McLaughlin also joins in as she throws out some interesting questions. Alice is the host of Ask Alice, a radio show on Key Biscayne Radio 94.5 FM in Key Biscayne, Florida. It's also known as Blink Radio, where they feature business, technology, and lifestyle. The show is going to be on live simulcast multi platforms so they're able to reach above and beyond their local footprint.

Marlon Nichols is the Co-Founder & Managing Partner of Cross Culture Ventures, along with co-founder Troy Carter. Marlon previously served as a Partner at Intel Capital. He has worked with several startups, invested in companies like Mayvenn, Gimlet Media, Blavity, Airspace Technologies, Codeverse, and many others. Marlon is huge on CULTURE when it comes to uncovering hidden opportunities. Today, he talks about the power of culture and diversity, the value of mentorship, and how to assemble a winning team.

From economic development to a career in tech, Laurence Bradford is a software engineer and she’s now working as a product manager at EdTech startup Teachable, which is an online course platform. Aside from being a contributor at Forbes, she also runs a podcast called, Learn to Code With Me, which now has over a million downloads. She runs a blog with over 40,000 subscribers and she has a community of over 14,000 people on Facebook where she's helping them learn how to code. Laurence has traveled to over 30 countries, is an avid writer, and is very passionate to help others break into tech.

Daniel Barragan was the first sales rep at Zoom that was able to rise all the way up to the top of the ranks on the Enterprise team. He helped the company grow to over 700,000 accounts in six years, reach a billion dollar valuation, get into 90% of the top universities, and expand into different verticals. What started out as just being a beta product with only one customer supporting 25 people, Zoom now supports hundreds to thousands people on a single call serving a wide range of customers ranging from small and medium-sized businesses to enterprises.

A lot of times in startups, roles are not defined. And although we wear many hats, sometimes it never gets solidified. Today, Evan talks about his humble beginnings. Born in Alaska, he sold his cream puff and shaved ice business that he put up in high school. He then studied Philosophy and Business in Seattle, until finally moving to SF to hustle his way through, living in a hostel while looking for a job. Evan is employee #1 at Checkr, a startup that offers background check and screening solutions, which has grown from a two-person company to persently a hundred-person high-growth organization where he now leads their customer success team.

After the recording of the podcast, Erika joined the Impact Team at Amazon Cloud Services. Prior to that, at the time of the episode recording, Erika was the Head of Strategic Initiatives at Twilio.org. Before that, she also worked for TaskRabbit. Erika has not only in tech for a long time, she served on several boards and she also has deep experience in the nonprofit industry. Under the Impact Fund at Twilio, they've given away about a $1.5 million in investments and grants where they take a platform and portfolio approach. Her vision? To have a platform in Twilio where nonprofits have a one-stop shop for technical help. Erika is about to launch The Only, it's a storytelling project and podcast that documents the stories of women who were The Only in all male or mostly male environments. Do you know someone who's been an "only" woman or if you've been an "only" woman yourself in your company or organization, submit a nomination form and Erika will reach out to you. This covers people in practically all types of industries.

Aline Lerner is the CEO and Co-Founder of interviewing.io, a platform for engineers that practice technical interviews and land jobs at the top tech companies. Millions of people have read her writing and thousands of engineers sign to work with her platform each month. You can easily check her out in TechCrunch, Bloomberg, and other publications. From being a chef to breaking into startups, Aline is now the founder of one of the largest platforms in the game focused on getting people to tech companies.

In May 2015, the Congressional Black Caucus launched CBC TECH 2020 to bring together the best minds in the tech, non-profit, education and public sectors to chart a path forward to increase African American inclusion at all levels of the technology industry. Since the launch of CBC TECH 2020 in May of 2015, the following companies have added African Americans to their board of directors: AirBNB – (Kenneth I. Chenault Former Chairman & CEO, American Express), Apple, Inc. (James A. Bell, Former Executive Vice President & CFO of Boeing Co), Facebook, Inc. – (Kenneth I. Chenault, Former Chairman and CEO, American Express), HP Enterprise – (Leslie A. Brun CEO, Sarr Group, LLC), HP Enterprise – (Pamela Carter, Former President of Cummins Distribution), HP, Inc. – (Stacey Mobley, Former Senior Vice President, DuPont), HP, Inc. – (Stacy Brown- Philpot, CEO, TaskRabbit), Twitter – (Debra Lee, Chairwoman & CEO, BET Networks), Uber – (Ursula Burns, Former Chairwoman & CEO, Xerox, Corp), eBay – (Adriane Brown, Advisor with Intellectual Ventures, LLC)

Michael Ellison is currently the Chief Operating Officer of CodePath where he leads product, operations, and business development. CodePath is an education technology startup that has a reputation for excellence in training engineers with the skills that they need for cutting-edge tech jobs. Running for four years now, CodePath has worked with over 850 of the top tech companies. Not to mention, they're the most popular Android resource on the Internet with over 20,000 startups and over 500,000 developers using their resource every month. They've also helped redesigned onboarding programs for companies like Facebook and Airbnb, of which 25% of their engineers have been taught by their program. Recently, they launched CodePath.org that is powering under-searched schools with coding curriculum. Presently, they've worked with over 30 schools and 1,200 students.

Joe Musselman was spending his time in the military working with Navy SEALs and upon finishing his service, he started The Honor Foundation to help special operation forces who have left service to transition and find jobs in tech. Joe has supported over thousands of people with over 200 employee partners who have raised funding from people all over Silicon Valley including Marc Andreessen, and other organizations. Part of their vision is to grow their special operations community to 65,000 by 2020. Here are some surprising stats: -In 2013, only 13% of Navy Seals had jobs when they finished service and their average salary after leaving the service was $87,000. -In 2017, graduates that go through The Honor Foundation received a 97% placement rate with a salary of $130,000-$140,000+.

John Maeda is the Global Head of Computational Design and Inclusion at Automattic. Previously, he was a Partner at Kleiner Perkins where he founded the design and tech report that's read by people all over the world. Fascinated with the idea of remote working, John is an inspiration in the design world currently serving on the boards of Sonos and Wieden+Kennedy. He recently created a site called Design From Anywhere, that tells you more about remote work, inclusion, and how you can get into these positions and basically do it from anywhere. Being in a educational field for a long time, John noticed the art education in the U.S. was decreasing and most educational programs were becoming geared towards STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). So he had been advocating in Washington, D.C. to add Art through STEM and transform it into STEAM, which has become a legislation in 2013 to bring back Art into schools.

If you're a mom or you know some moms who want to know what it takes to break back into tech after you've been out of work for several years, this is a must-listen episode. Today's guest is Wendy Padua who has been out of work for 16 years and is not part of the marketing team at Zendesk. We also have Tami Forman on the show today. She's the Director of Path Forward, a nonprofit organization that creates mid-career returnship programs to ease the transition back to work for women and men after taking a break for raising children or other caregiving responsibilities. Wendi and Tami share their beautiful experiences with regard to motherhood, the struggles with putting yourself out there as you try to return to the workforce, and how to ultimately set yourself up for success!