📣 An Update as of Apr 2022

It's a wrap: we just finished running a 6-week pilot fellowship with 17 product, design, engineering (PDE) and data talent from 5 countries 🇧🇷🇨🇴🇰🇪🇿🇼🇺🇸, where we helped nearly all of them achieve some transformational outcomes. My cofounder Karen Sun and I care deeply about these resources being available for anyone so we have organized and published them open source with access to the full curriculum: the frameworks, content and worksheets we created & shared during the fellowship on

1. contemplation & strengths

2. overcoming imposter syndrome

3. improving communication & facilitation

4. planning your role & career (with special emphasis on roles in tech)

5. becoming a life long learner

6. exploring leadership styles

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Taught product at African Leadership University and soon teaching at General Assembly helping talent at Disney reskill into Product! Looking forward to this experience, especially against the backdrop of the global need for upskilling and reskilling. 

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Doing product development consulting (especially at my favorite stage, the ambiguous and messy and super fun 0 --> 1) with organizations from established folks like Teach For America's Reinvention Lab to early stage startups like With Wellness. 

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Working on new startup ideas in talent and future of work and increasingly itching to try something in blockchain/web3/nft. For the future of work idea, next steps are:

1. Synthesizing and finalizing the company and product vision, and capturing via a pitch deck 

2. Completing the next MVP/MVT experiment 

3. A talent recruitment & development tech tools survey akin to the beautiful and informative survey run by UX Tools 

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👋🏼✉️ Reach out if any of this sounds intriguing and you'd be interested in collaborating!

[ARCHIVED] 📢 An Update as of Oct 2021

I am currently focused on: 

1) 💼💻 Finding opportunities to build and grow products customers love. 

2) 🏗📈 Building businesses that deliver impact and profit. 

3) 💰🥋Backing entrepreneurs by investing capital, leveraging networks and coaching (product, growth and leadership) 

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At The MBA Fund, we invest up to $50,000 in pre-seed and seed stage companies. If you are an entrepreneur raising capital and a student or alumni of Penn, Harvard or Stanford, feel free to reach out!
 

Industries of interest: 

• future of education & work

• talent & workforce development

• productivity

• developer training & tooling (incl. low / no-code)

• product & product design

• passion economy, online creators, & community

• fintech & e-commerce

• productivity

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In the last 12 months: 

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1) Product Leader

a) At the African Leadership Group (brands: ALX and The Room):

- I joined as a Senior Product Manager growing an online developer training program from 100 person cohorts every 6 months to 1,000 person cohorts every 2 months, generating over $5.0 million in revenue.

- I was promoted to Group Product Manager and Director of Placements building our v1 of our talent marketplace for connecting African youth to job opportunities. One of our biggest successes was placing 8 talented youth from across Africa with Amazon Web Services in London, thereby transforming their lives.

b) Products I'm currently obsessed with include:  
Productivity: 📄Notion | 〽️ Miro | ⚙️ Roam | 🌩 Clover  
Learning: 📚 Growth.Design Product Case Studies

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2) Entrepreneur
a) 🎒🇿🇦 1st: I served on the Board for a school network that I cofounded that grew to 350 students Grades K-6. We teach coding and were invited to join the global Scratch Education Collaborative in 2021.
b) 👩🏻‍💻👩🏾‍💻 2nd: I started building a community and 6 week experience to empower experienced software engineers to get to the next career level, whether as a lead or manager.

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3) Investor 

• Helped recommend a fintech company (Hopscotch) founder for an opportunity to find a technical cofounder (✅ an MBA Fund investment) 

• Helped The MBA Fund source and diligence:

• Boost Technology, a fintech & ecommerce company founded by a 2x fintech founder building the Shopify for Africa's informal retail entrepreneurs 

  • 🌱 ​currently raising a seed round (as of Oct 2021)

  • ❌ not an MBA Fund investment

• FlutterFlow (YC W21), a tool for making building apps a breeze

  • ✅ an MBA Fund investment 

• Financial Choice (YC S21), a fintech company that gives consumers the power to invest their checking account funds for market returns while retaining instant cash access

  • ✅ an MBA Fund investment

• HiHome, a real estate tech company (backed by among other Global Founders Capital, Bain Ventures and General Catalyst)

  • ❌ not an MBA Fund investment ​

• Teamble, an HR tech company giving teams super powers to grow professionally through feedback and continuous development 

  • ❌ not an MBA Fund investment

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[ARCHIVED]🧢 My Recap for 2020