🛣️ Issue #120: A Different Path To The Future
Claremont grad Maddie Hall talks about her time as Sam Altman's CoS and how that experience inspired her to start Living Carbon and solve the climate crisis with bio-engineered "supertrees"
💬 Welcome to issue #120 of StoryHouse Review
Good morning & happy Thursday.
This week, Maddie Hall shares her story of choosing to work as Sam Altman’s Chief of Staff at OpenAI and how that decision led her to start her own company, Living Carbon, to solve the world’s climate crisis. It’s a Claremont world out there. 👇
~ Josh, Miles, Matthew, Pat
👤 Community Spotlight: Maddie Hall
Claremont grad and Forbes 30 Under 30 Maddie Hall (CMC ‘14) is the co-founder and CEO of Living Carbon – a biotech startup that leverages synthetic biology to enhance the carbon capture capabilities of trees. Maddie started Living Carbon with a mission to rebalance the planet’s carbon cycle responsibly using the inherent power of plants. Living Carbon is now backed by leading climate investors, including Felicis, Lowercarbon, Toyota Ventures, and StoryHouse Ventures. Maddie’s company continues to scale its swiftly-growing partnership base of sustainability leaders. They were also featured by Forbes, CNN, The Business Journals, and several other publications as one of the top startups to watch following their $21M capital raise last year from Temasek Holdings.
Maddie recently sat down with Mike Maples Jr. of Floodgate to share her story of choosing to work as Sam Altman’s Chief of Staff at OpenAI and how that decision led her to start her own company, Living Carbon, to solve the world’s climate crisis.
Maddie Hall: A Different Path to the Future
If we look at the sweep of your career, it wasn’t at biotech companies. It was at companies like Zillow and Zenefits. How does somebody make the leap from the background you started with to now running a company that makes genetically modified trees and attracting genetic engineers and paleobiologists? How do you go from where you started to where you’re at now?
I think there were some undercurrents that persisted throughout my career that make where I am now a kind of natural landing point. But there's, of course, confirmation bias. So, I think one is just this desire to have a positive impact on the world through whatever sort of company I founded. My dad's an entrepreneur. My family is super into botany and nature, and I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, so those undercurrents existed. More specifically, to answer the question that you asked, I realized what I really enjoyed, and that was working with technical teams and learning about new things. And actually working in spaces that felt like they were high stakes.
So at Zenefits, I was a product manager when I was only 21 years old, working on their life and disability insurance and working with a lot of really technical engineers. That was so interesting because I really learned how to build a team and unify people within a technical team even though there was a lot going on externally related to the company, maintaining morale when you're working on something that is related to life and death in this case, and then after that, really wanting to get into understanding what the seed ecosystems look like. So, working on product at First Round and then really wanting to find an area that I was passionate about, where I felt that I could throw my whole heart into it, and that I really cared deeply about the mission.
I found that at OpenAI, I was working on an area as important as the development of artificial general intelligence, which will completely transform our world in the coming years. I was working around very like-minded people with whom I was able to connect and really get a taste of what it means to truly live in the future.
Why OpenAI? What is it about this “living in the future” that resonated with you?
I wanted to learn how executive teams operate, right? Teams that are making high-stakes decisions. And I thought that there was a lot that I could learn from Sam and the rest of the management team there. I also really wanted to learn about AI research. It's like wanting to actually have a high rate of learning, I think, was a large driver there, too. And just the types of conversations that I had with people, even in the process of getting to know the team, I was just really personally interested as well.
So how did you approach Sam Altman?
I think one of the things that I've learned, just having been in the startup ecosystem for a while, is generally like asking for favors early from people that you meet once at a dinner or something like that, it doesn't go a very long way. Right? It doesn't actually cultivate a relationship over time. And so I had gotten to know Sam through being very good friends with one of his brothers, Max, who I worked with at Zenefits. And I was actually asking him for startup advice on a very terrible startup idea.
And I realized actually that the idea that I had was, one, something that I wasn't passionate about. Two, I could learn a lot more by being at a fast-growing company like OpenAI that was working on an ambitious, hard science problem and also just getting exposure to everyone within his ecosystem and the broader OpenAI ecosystem. I felt like if there was a place that I was going to come up with an idea that would allow me to be passionate about founding a specific company in that space for ten years, there was really no better place in the world. And to this day, I'm exceptionally grateful for that experience.
I think something that's really helpful for people who want to live in the future is to just remember that everyone's a person. Everyone has different ideas. You should feel just as much agency to share your ideas and your vision of the future. That's actually how everyone continues to grow and learn.
- Maddie Hall
Catch the full episode on to hear more about Maddie’s experiences with Sam Altman at OpenAI.👇
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: June Lee & Alumis
Claremont alum and physician-scientist June Lee (PO) is the founder and previous President & CEO of Alumis, a precision medicine company focused on the discovery, development, and treatment of autoimmune disorders. Before that, she served as Executive Vice President, Chief Development Officer, and Chief Operating Officer of MyoKardia, where she built and led a world-class development organization that was acquired by Bristol Myers Squibb for $13B in November 2020.
Alumis is building a pipeline of molecules with the potential to address a broad range of immune-mediated diseases, such as monotherapy and combination therapies. Their proprietary precision data analytics platform and drug discovery expertise have also led to identifying additional preclinical programs that exemplify their precision approach. Currently, Alumis is led by a team of industry veterans experienced in small-molecule compound drug development for immune-mediated diseases.
They recently announced the pricing of their initial public offering. As of this month, Alumis is now public and trading on the Nasdaq with a $600M+ market cap!
💼 Who’s Hiring?: Marble Health & Parakeet Health
Jung Park (HMC ‘89) is the CEO and co-founder of Parakeet Health, an AI voice answering service for healthcare practices that automates repetitive phone tasks like appointment scheduling, billing, and general inquiries using GenAI. Parakeet’s founding team includes seasoned healthcare industry veterans (One Medical IPO, Doximity IPO, Epocrates IPO) and skilled technology leaders (Microsoft, Twitter, Rippling, PrimerAI). They are backed by top-tier VCs, including StoryHouse Ventures, Canvas Ventures, and CoFound Partners. Parakeet is looking for a Founding Software Engineer to join their growing team.
Daniel Ross (PO ‘11) and Jake Sussman are the co-founders of the mental health startup Marble Health. Having emerged from stealth and with their recent $5M seed round, Marble is on a mission to massively increase access to timely, preventative care for all kids early in their mental health journey. They are backed by top institutions, such as StoryHouse, Khosla, Town Hall, and IA Ventures. Dan and Jake are looking for early employees to join their founding team:
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 StoryHouse Review. 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 Claremont financing 💸
A huge congratulations to Claremont alum Peter Ombres (CMC ‘04) on a successful exit. Peter is the co-founder and COO of Curated, an online shopping service company recently acquired by Flip for $330M. Prior to the acquisition, Curated had raised $140M+ in venture funding from top institutions, including Forerunner, Greylock, and CapitalG.
This week’s top read 🔥
Claremont alum and cybersecurity expert Ben Colman (CMC) is the co-founder and CEO of Reality Defender – a deepfake detection platform enterprises use to flag fake users and fraudulent content in real time. He recently joined the team at DCVC to discuss what it means to be a company solely focused on detecting AI-generated content and how to counter the real-world damages GenAI can bring.
This week’s must-watch 📺
Claremont grad Mark Cyffka (HMC ‘10) is the co-founder and COO of AirMyne – a next-generation Direct Air Capture company building a technology that removes CO2 from the air in a way that’s measurable and permanent. Earlier this year, AirMyne raised a $6.9M Seed round backed by Y Combinator, Alumni Ventures, and Liquid 2 Ventures. Mark shares more about his background with his co-founder, Sudip Mukhopadhyay, and explains how AirMyne’s technology works to combat climate change.
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🍽️ BTL Snacks:
😵💫 How To Handle LLM Hallucinations….. Claremont grad and Lytix.ai co-founder Sahil Sinha (CMC ‘20) talks about a major issue concerning most AI builders: LLM Hallucinations. The blog goes deep into what LLM hallucinations are, how they happen, and how to handle them. Lytix is used by teams building LLMs for product alerting, analytics, and error triaging. They are backed by Y Combinator and were part of YC’s W24 batch. They were also recently featured on Launch YC.
🤔 Fallacy Checking The Presidential Debate….. Serial Claremont entrepreneur Timothy Musgrove (CGU ‘93) is the co-founder and CTO of Logic Arts, a startup that merges AI with paradigms of critical thinking and logic to grab news and content in mass and analyze fallacies. Tim shared an article fallacy-checking the recent debate between Trump and Biden using their internal tooling.
📰 What’s Next For The Chairman of the BOT….. Pomona College Magazine recently interviewed outgoing Board of Trustees Chair Sam Glick (PO ‘04). Sam shares the lessons he learned and how liberal arts at Claremont shaped his life. He also reflected on his time leading the board as he passed the torch to Janet Inskeep Benton last July 1.
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