📖🏠 Issue #118: StoryHouse Review
Taloflow's raise, exciting new startup roles, and interviews with Claremont's best sharing how they're advancing science and technology today in everything from genome editing to autonomous agents
💬 Welcome to issue #118 of StoryHouse Review
Good morning & happy Thursday. Between the Lines just got a fresh new name... Welcome to the “StoryHouse Review.” 👇
~ Josh, Miles, Matthew, Pat
👤 Community Spotlight: The StoryHouse Review 🔎
After over three years and a 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. We’re excited to announce that Between The Lines is now StoryHouse Review.
StoryHouse Review will continue to share stories about Claremont Colleges' entrepreneurship and technology community. We decided on this new name to help bring more clarity and synergy to our StoryHouse Ventures brand. At StoryHouse, we are building the resources and connectivity for the whole Claremont startup ecosystem and supporting the next generation of Claremont’s most daring founders.
Looking forward to the next 100+ issues of StoryHouse Review.👇
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Louis-Victor Jadavji
Claremont alumnus Louis-Victor (or “LV”) Jadavji (CMC) is the CEO and co-founder of Taloflow, the backbone for collaborative technology vendor evaluations. Taloflow provides expert buying advice and tailored analysis, making technology selection effortless and low-risk for IT and software teams. LV also co-founded Wiivv in 2014, a custom-fit 3D-printed footwear that became one of the most successful consumer applications of 3D printing. Before that, he worked within the Developer Ecosystem team at Atlassian, where he built a nutrition app, distributed NGV compressors, and 3D-printed vintage car parts for shows on the History Channel. He also worked in Defense Procurement at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C.
Taloflow, co-founded by LV and CMC parent Todd Kesselman, was recently covered in TechCrunch for its $1.3M raise and the launch of its research AI for enterprise tech evaluations. Taloflow’s new product replaces months-long homegrown software selection processes with collaborative notebooks and AI to generate comprehensive rankings, "cover your assets" (CYA), and requirements tables. Unlike Gartner or G2, which offer mostly generic insights, Taloflow creates tailored reports for specific use cases.
Read the full story on TechCrunch.
💼 Who’s Hiring?: Nemu & Keyplay
Claremont and Wharton alum Sarah Powers (CMC ‘13) is the founder and CEO of Nemu, an inheritance management platform that empowers families during major life transitions. Nemu’s proprietary algorithm enables users to equitably divide property while preserving emotional value. With over 45M families set to inherit $4T worth of heirlooms in the next 25 years, Sarah is on a mission to build a tool to help simplify the process for countless families so they can focus on what matters most during difficult life transitions. Sarah is looking for a talented Founding Technical Engineer to join her growing team and take their tech stack to the next level:
Keyplay, co-founded by Claremont grad and CEO Adam Schoenfeld (CMC ‘05), is a software company solving an age-old sales and marketing problem: the ideal customer profile (ICP). They help B2B sales and marketing teams find and prioritize their best-fit accounts for outbound, ABM, territory planning, and GTM strategy. Keyplay raised a Seed round in 2022, backed by MHS Capital, GTMFund, Ascend, and Evening Fund. If you are looking for a true early-stage environment, this is a rare opportunity to build something from the ground floor. Check out their open roles:
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 must-watch 📺
Claremont grad and builder Yohei Nakajima (CMC ‘09) was on The Next Wave podcast to dive into AI's game-changing role in automating tasks, shaking up venture capital, and reshaping job markets. Yohei is the GP of Untapped Capital, an early-stage VC firm focused on AI. He's also the visionary behind PixelBeasts and BabyAGI, the pioneering open-source autonomous agent with task-planning capabilities. Recently, Yohei also chatted with fellow Claremont alum Erik Hansell (CMC ‘09) about how his journey of building in public influenced his investment approach and the other “builders-in-public” he admires.
This week’s top listen 🎧
Nobel Laureate and Claremont alum Jennifer Doudna (PO) sat down with Eric Topol from Ground Truths to talk about the exciting future of genome editing and how this significant life science breakthrough is just the beginning. Jennifer is an award-winning biologist who has pioneered work in CRISPR gene editing and made several other significant discoveries in biochemistry and genetics. She is also the co-founder of the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) at UC Berkeley and five different biotech companies — Caribou Biosciences (NASDAQ: CRBU), Editas Medicine (NASDAQ: EDIT), Intellia Therapeutics (NASDAQ: NTLA), Scribe Therapeutics, and unicorn Mammoth Biosciences.
Colin Read (CMC ‘06), co-founder and CEO of Whoosh, spoke with Greenshots podcast host Ryan Ballengee about his company’s origin story, its focus on hospitality, and how technology is shaping the golf industry today. Whoosh is a hospitality technology company building modern club management and golf operations software. Because of its innovative approach, the company has been recognized as the most advanced modern club operations software solution and is already working with over 100 clubs nationwide.
Everything else you need to know💡
Claremont grad Cuy Sheffield (PO ‘13) joined CoinDesk Live at Consensus 2024 to share his insights on Visa’s role as a bridge between blockchain technologies and the existing payments ecosystem. Cuy is the Vice President and Global Head of Crypto at Visa and a well-known leader in cryptocurrency.
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🍽️ BTL Snacks:
🦄 The Process Of Scaling A FinTech Unicorn….. The Wall Street Journal sat down with Claremont graduate and Wells Fargo Ex-CFO John Shrewsberry (CMC ‘87) as he readies GoodLeap for its next growth phase. The company has raised $1.6B from investors, including New Enterprise Associates, WestCap, and BDT & MSD Partners. In this interview, John talks about what he brings to the process of scaling a fintech unicorn and his top priorities for the role. The longtime bank executive joined the venture-backed solar financing company as CFO last year.
🍄 Shaking Up The World Of Psilocybin Research….. Claremont alumnus Ashley Walsh PI ‘01 was recently featured in Oprah’s “Women Who Start Things” series. In this discussion, she shared how her new startup is helping change the narrative and therapeutics available to women universally. Ashley is the founder and CEO of Inner State – a preclinical biotech company that empowers women by providing holistic psychedelic biotech solutions for their health and well-being.
🎯 A Challenge For The Biotech Community….. Biotech is ideally suited to solving planetary-scale challenges because of its two extremes: precision and scalability. But there are several reasons why it hasn’t been harnessed fully to address climate change. In his article, Claremont grad and Homeworld Collective Founding Co-Director Daniel Goodwin (HMC ‘08) discussed the challenges of engineering and deploying biotech and shared a few thought-provoking statements to challenge the biotech community.
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