🦄 Issue #117: From Claremont Grad To Unicorn Founder
Unicorn founder Daniel Kan talks about how he got introduced to the world of startups and his journey to building Cruise.
💬 Welcome to issue #117 of Between the Lines
Good morning & happy Thursday.
This week, serial Claremont entrepreneur and Cruise founder Dan Kan joined fellow Claremont alum Erik Hansell to talk about his introduction to the startup world, the challenges he’s faced as a startup founder, the day his company was acquired, and some of his favorite memories from his CMC days. It’s a Claremont world out there. 👇
~ Josh, Miles, Matthew, Pat
👤 Community Spotlight: Daniel Kan
Serial Claremont entrepreneur Daniel Kan (CMC ‘09) is the co-founder and previous Chief Product Officer of Cruise, an autonomous vehicle company acquired by General Motors for $1B+ in 2016. After completing his degree at Claremont McKenna, Dan was first introduced to the world of startups when he joined the early team of software startup UserVoice. In 2011, Dan decided to start his own company, Exec, an on-demand personal assistant service that most customers used for house cleaning. After Exec was acquired by Handy, Dan then decided to join his co-founder, Kyle Vogt, in building Cruise Automation.
Dan Kan recently sat down with fellow Claremont alum Erik Hansell (CMC ‘09) to share more about how he started his journey in the startup world, the challenges he’s faced as a startup founder, the day his company was acquired, and some of his favorite memories from his CMC days.
Then you founded Cruise which is obviously different than on-demand help. Talk to me about going from Exec and then founding Cruise.
We went from high labor intensive where you’re sending people to do certain tasks to if we did our jobs right, we could hopefully eliminate a lot of people in pretty mundane tasks. It was something that my co-founder wanted to do, and I thought it would be really interesting and fun if it worked. If it didn’t work, it would be a really fun story to try and build it.
So we set off to go and do that with a number of other people. I worked there for ten years, and we kind of just got our product into the world in a way that we believed was safe enough to actually sit in the back seat. So for everyone who hasn’t experienced it, you might experience it in the future. You actually couldn’t seat beyond the front wheel. You’re a passenger in this car and you have no way to control it other than your iPhone to say, “Take me here”. At the peak, we were doing thousands of rides a day.
What would you say is the thing that you know now that you wish you knew when you started Cruise?
There’s a lot of things. I think the biggest thing, and maybe this is a part of why I was able to go and do this, is that everything, if you think of it on a large scale, can feel very daunting, right?
Self-driving cars, it’s like, where do you start? You know, you got a whole vehicle that you’ve got to build and make sure it’s safe and make sure it’s going to be better than the average human driver. If you look at that, you might never start building it because that task might seem so enormous.
But for us, it was all about breaking it into smaller problems along the way, and any problem can be broken into enough smaller problems that eventually you can be like, “Okay, I can do that thing in a day or a week or whatever” and start to add those things together. That’s something that I think I learned along the way, but also because I didn’t know a lot, I was willing to just dive in and I think that that was extremely helpful in my journey.
Watch Dan’s full interview with Erik to learn more about his journey from Claremont grad to unicorn founder. 👇
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Emil Kakkis
Claremont alum Emil Kakkis (PO ’82) is the founder, CEO, and President of Ultragenyx, a biotech company focused on developing drugs for rare and ultrarare genetic disorders. After graduating magna cum laude from Pomona, Emil started his career at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, where he developed an enzyme replacement therapy for the rare disorder MPS I. While working as an assistant professor of pediatrics, he also completed a pediatrics residency and a Medical Genetics Training Fellowship at Harbor-UCLA. He then joined BioMarin in 1998 as the Chief Medical Officer, where he guided the development and approval of three treatments for rare diseases (MPS I, MPS VI, and PKU) and contributed to the development of approved and development-stage products for four other rare diseases (CLN2, MPSIVA, PKU, achondroplasia).
In 2010, Dr. Kakkis founded Ultragenyx to create a company uniquely built around a deep and meaningful engagement with patients and their caregivers to understand their needs fully. This included designing a novel development model that fundamentally changed the established paradigms in clinical protocols, endpoints, and analyses, challenging traditional beliefs around commercialization and access to therapies for patients with rare and ultra-rare genetic diseases. Ultragenyx IPO’d in 2014 after only raising ~$120M in venture funding and now has a market cap of ~$3.5B.
Emil was recently recognized by SF Business Times as one of the most outstanding CEOs in the Bay Area. They also featured him in an article detailing his significant achievements in biotech and initiatives to promote legislative changes and support for rare disease research.
The number of rare diseases has been estimated at 10,000, and Kakkis wants to get to every one.
“I left academia because I wanted to be in the room while people were having discussions on what to work on,” Kakkis said.
Ultragenyx also is assembling a syndicate of investors backing Amlogenyx, an Ultragenyx spinout based in Massachusetts with a unique gene therapy approach aimed at Alzheimer’s disease. Preclinical experiments indicate the treatment could reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s.
“It’s a whole different direction” from rare diseases, Kakkis said. “If you work on enough rare diseases, you find something that’s not rare.”
Check out the full article from SF Business Times to learn more about Emil’s family history and involvement in the sciences and arts. 👇
💼 Who’s Hiring?: Parakeet Health & Crew
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. Parakeet is looking for a Founding Software Engineer to join their growing team.
Crew, founded by Claremont alum and CEO Mollie Mueller (CMC '10), is a professional training and coaching software platform that offers group-based courses that combine the power of coaching and design thinking to help people design careers they love. Their programs help employees take ownership of their growth and development, leading to higher engagement, performance, and retention. Crew is backed by firms such as Garuda Ventures and Goodwater Capital, and they’re currently hiring a Senior Software Engineer to join their 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 Between the Lines. 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 top read 🔥
Claremont grad Jake Heller (PZ ‘07) was interviewed by Artificial Lawyer about Casetext’s deal of the decade, life after their $650M sale to Thomson Reuters, and the rapidly growing role of AI assistants. Jake is the co-founder and previous CEO of Casetext, a leading legal tech company specializing in AI-powered technology for lawyers.
This week’s Claremont financing 💸
Congratulations to Claremont grad Arye Barnehama (PO ‘11) and his company, Elementary Robotics, on their recent strategic investment from Rockwell Automation. Arye is the co-founder and CEO of Elementary – a full-stack robotics startup that tackles Machine Learning for robotic hardware from the ground up, creating assistive tools to improve the human output of repetitive tasks.
Several other Claremont-founded startups also raised capital this month:
Aerial - a record management system that organizes vital data and documents founded by Claremont alum Doug Logan (CGU ‘11)
Scout Clean Energy - a renewable energy company founded by serial Claremont entrepreneur Michael Rucker (PO ‘90)
GridMatrix - an AI-powered software for intelligent traffic congestion, accident, and emissions reduction founded by Claremont grad Nicholas D’Andre (PO ‘11)
CatenaBio - a biotech startup focused on the treatment and cure of autoimmune disorders founded by Claremont grad Marco Lobba (PO ‘13)
Everything else you need to know💡
After over three years and 100+ issues of bringing you updates on the Claremont startup scene and highlighting the amazing work that Claremont entrepreneurs do, our newsletter is getting a fresh new name. Look out for our next issue (#118) from StoryHouse Review.
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🍽️ BTL Snacks:
🏛️ Strategic Foresight In The Age of AI….. Claremont grad Abhi Nemani (CMC ‘10) shared his recent article, discussing the importance of shifting from traditional prediction methods to strategic foresight in leadership, especially with the rise of AI and rapid, unpredictable changes. He also highlights the need for scenario planning and transparency in AI to avoid cognitive biases and ensure better decision-making in governance. Abhi is a government technology advisor and is currently the Senior VP of Product Strategy for Euna Solutions – a cloud-based solution provider that powers administrative functions and financial operations for the public sector.
✉️ Letters To A Young Investor….. In a recent article from The Generalist, Mario Gabriele published his back-and-forth correspondence with Claremont grad and VC Ho Nam (HMC ‘88). Ho talked about the power law of venture capital, finding legendary businesses to invest in, and the lessons he’s learned from the mentors and investors he admires most. Ho Nam is the co-founder of Altos Ventures, a technology investment firm based in Silicon Valley. He’s been Managing Director of the firm for over 28 years.
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