I've got co-founders!
We're building a company to help people find the career that's right for them
I’ve found co-founders! And I’m super excited to share what we’re working on.
The company is called Clicked (clicked.com) and we’re building a career experience platform. We help early career talent & career-switchers gain experience through work simulations, coaching, and community. At the same time, we help companies connect with talent to build qualified & diverse talent pipelines.
The team is awesome. We’ve already landed Salesforce as a pilot customer. And learners are loving the experience, giving an NPS score of 82 and sharing unprompted testimonials like this one 👇
📣 We’re raising a round of funding from angel investors so if you know folks who may be interested in investing in our mission, please let me know and we can see if there’s a fit!
Making the co-founder decision
I was introduced to Jeff Sample, Clicked’s CEO, by a friend who learned through OnDeck’s EdTech fellowship that the team was looking for a technical co-founder. (Thanks for the intro, Rishin!) After our first call, I was excited to see that Jeff’s passion for helping people find a fulfilling career matched mine. And, after reviewing their pitch deck and other materials, I was pleasantly surprised by the alignment of our values and vision for making serious dents on the problems in this space.
As I’d done in previous co-founders trials, I had conversations with each of the co-founders to evaluate mission & values alignment. And then we put that to the test by actually working together.
I also leveraged referrals more for this decision. The trial period was shorter than ones I’d done in the past because the team was moving quickly toward their milestones. So, I looked for faster signals through referrals. Jeff provided a couple of referrals with whom I spoke. But I also reached out to folks on LinkedIn (a few in my network and a few cold DMs) that worked with the team to better understand their strengths and their growth areas.
Being upfront with an existing co-founder trial
The tough part was that I was already in a co-founder trial that was going pretty well. It was the best fit I’d found at the time but meeting Jeff and the rest of the Clicked team surfaced areas where there could be a better fit.
As soon as I felt that I wanted to consider doing a trial with the Clicked team, I shared that with the other co-founder. It was a tough conversation but the right one. In retrospect, I was eager to make a co-founding relationship work after more than 5-months of searching and that may have affected how I was scoring this partnership in the rubric. Lesson: A structured rubric is incredibly helpful but if you’re not scoring consistently, it loses a lot of its value.
Guidance from experienced founders
One of the most helpful resources in navigating the final decision was the guidance I received from experienced founders in my network that I’ve met over the past year. Huge shout out to Holman, Abi, and Abe; all of whom exchanged text messages and jumped on phone calls in short notice. There were a few topics that were somewhat new to me including equity, vesting, title, co-founder agreements and red flags.
I’m also grateful for the friends who talked me through doing what was best for me. 🙏
What’s next
I’ve continued to be validated in my decision to join the team as they are smart, passionate, and mission-driven. It’s also been exciting as we went a bit viral on twitter when someone, unknown to us, shared our learning experiences resulting in an influx of new learners! 👇
And we’re hard at work on:
Delighting learners with our ongoing pilot with Salesforce.
Kicking off build of the next version of our product based on the learnings from the pilot and past iterations.
Raising an angel round that we’ll be closing in the next month.
Growing and nurturing our sales pipeline to bring more customers onboard. (starting next month)
Thanks for reading.
I've got co-founders!
Super exciting! Congrats. Time to build!
I love the “co-founder rubric”. So thoughtful. Awesome to hear about you joining Clicked. Let me know if there’s anyway I can help!