Hey folks,
As I’m writing this, I’m on a flight to ASU-GSV in San Diego!
The ASU-GSV Summit is 3-day conference centered around the future of learning and work. I’m headed there to connect with other founders and investors building in this space. And I’ll be accompanied by 30+ founders from the Transcend Network (a community I joined and talk more about below).
I’m also headed there because I’ll be meeting in person a potential co-founder whom I’ve been working with remotely for the past 2 weeks!
If you know anyone who’s headed there that I should meet, let me know.
The latest
💍 In the middle of a co-founder trial
Currently, I’m in the middle of a trial with a co-founder that is going well! We’re both passionate about creating bridges for talent to find and succeed in fulfilling careers. And we’re aligned on the values that we say are important to us. We’re now working on shipping a small project to put our values, skills, and work styles into practice. This is where the rubber really meets the road. I hope to share more soon.
Just before this current trial and since my last post, I had started and concluded one other trial. We worked well together but the timing just didn’t work out as they had already started a trial with someone else before we even started chatting and wanted to maintain momentum there. Ugh fate! ✊
At the same time, ending that trial freed me up just in time to meet who I’m working with now. Yay fate! ✨
An aside on fate: I don’t believe that life is pre-determined but I do believe that there are things I can control and things I cannot. For more on fate, I’d refer you to The Middle Path :)
✅ Completed the Transcend Fellowship
The six weeks of the Fellowship program went by in the blink of an eye. The program had 1.5-hour sessions every Tuesday and Thursday centered around topics relevant to early-stage founders who have not yet found product-market fit. A few of the sessions were particularly insightful for me, especially in the area of storytelling as a founder. The best part, without a doubt, was connecting with the other founders in my cohort. All of whom were impressive including:
A former founder of Lambda School who was now working on Factor, a company helping teens discover careers
The current founder of Bunch, an app to level up managers that I’m a fan of.
Now that the fellowship is over, I’ve joined a weekly mastermind with a small group of founders from the community where we share best practices and hold ourselves accountable.
And, as mentioned at the top of this post, I’m excited to meet many folks from the network in San Diego this week!
💙 Helping bootcamp graduates and other folks from non-traditional backgrounds
If you’re connected with me on LinkedIn or Twitter, you may have already seen my post offering to help bootcamp grads with their portfolios and getting introduced to employers. I made this post to test interest in a direction that I want to take with CalmHire. And, luckily, it was also the direction that my current co-founder trial was building towards.
Helping folks from non-traditional backgrounds get into and succeed in the tech industry is a mission I’m incredibly passionate about. It hits close to home for me because I am a bootcamp grad and so is my wife. We both know how hard it can be to break into tech, how much it can change your life if you do, and how it’s only getting harder for folks trying to break in today.
So, I put together an experiment. I started by talking to 20+ engineering managers about what they look for in fresh bootcamp graduates. Based on their responses, I created a rubric to evaluate and provide feedback to early career talent. Then, I created a simple form (using Airtable) to collect information from job seekers so that I could review their resumes & portfolios to provide specific and helpful feedback.
The post garnered a lot more attention than I expected, especially since I’m not too active on LinkedIn. It showed that candidates were indeed feeling a lot of pain in getting a callback from employers. Here are just a few of the stories:
I have been searching for about 2 months now. Submitted around 200 applications. I've had 3 interviews so far.
I have submitted around 100 applications over the past year, but since I have started actively tracking (this year since late Feb) I have listed 29. I have had 2 interviews thus far.
I've submitted about 150 apps, though maybe about 50 of those were customized resumes that I expected to have a shot at. I've had interviews with two companies, and am waiting to hear back from a few more that have reached out to me.
For each candidate, I’m going through their resume, LinkedIn, Github projects, twitter or blog, and personal website and providing feedback. At the same time, I’m sharing a database of talent with folks who are interested in helping these folks get at least a conversation with a recruiter or hiring manager.
If you know someone who’s hiring for an internship, apprenticeship, or entry-level software role, let me know!
If you know someone who could use some feedback or help find a job, ask them to fill out this form.
One personal thing...
My Mom turned 60 recently and one of the things we got her was a puppy! (Don’t worry, she wanted one). The dog’s name is Ruby and she is now part of the family. Here’s a video of me meeting her for the first time 😍
As always, thanks for reading y’all!