🤝🚀 Issue #130: How Strong Personal Networks Help Founders Win
Pomona alumnus Helane Crowell shares with The NY Post how her personal network and background in big beauty helped identify the market opportunity and launch her cosmetic startup Saie.
Good morning & happy Thursday. It’s no surprise that companies and startups run on connections. The right network often means faster partnerships, more competent hires, and access to doors that won’t open otherwise. Thankfully, the Claremont network is unlike any other when it comes to opening doors for founders and startups.
This week, Claremont alum Helane Crowell shares how her Claremont and personal network helped shape her cosmetic startup, Saie, and the key connections that fueled its growth. It’s a Claremont world out there. 👇
~ Josh, Miles, Matthew, Pat
👤 Community Spotlight: How Saie founder Laney Crowell’s network built her clean beauty brand
Helane Crowell (PO ‘03) is the founder and CEO of Saie – a New York-based cosmetic company that offers a toxic-free cosmetics beauty brand and affordable and effective makeup, from tints, luminizers, lip balms, kits, and accessories. Last year, Helane and Saie were included in Inc. Magazine’s 2024 Female Founders list for prioritizing clean beauty and achieving profitability in the saturated beauty market within only four years. Saie is backed by investors such as actress Gwyneth Paltrow and Unilever Ventures, and Saie is doing over $100M in annual revenue.
“You Saie It, We Create It”
When Laney Crowell left her communications job at cosmetics behemoth Estée Lauder in 2016, she didn’t have a clear roadmap to creatingSaie — her clean beauty brand that now sells $100 million annually. What she did have, however, was a deep Rolodex that she believed could help her build anything.
“I have this thing where I tell myself that I just have to talk to 70 people,” Crowell told NYNext of her approach to networking. “I make a list in Google Sheets and I just cross people off the list — I ask for their recommendation for who I should talk to next, and then I get another name and just keep going.
“My mantra is, just get up one more day, then [connect with] the next person and you’ll get there.”
That networking ethos ultimately helped Crowell identify the market opportunity and secure funding for Saie, which is beloved by celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Kristen Bell.
After leaving Estée Lauder, Crowell launched a beauty blog where she reviewed products and discovered a significant gap in the high-end clean beauty market.
This was well before #cleanbeauty started trending on TikTok or Sephora launched a “clean seal” in 2018 — an indication that something is formulated without ingredients like mercury compounds or formaldehyde.
At the time, the clean makeup industry, which is expected to hit $52 billion by 2030, was then valued at closer to $5 billion.
So Crowell, now 43, started speaking with dozens of people about her idea of launching a brand free of chemicals, like sulfates and parabens, that can disrupt hormones and damage skin.
By 2019, Crowell had launched with mascara 101 and secured investments from notable figures like Gwyneth Paltrow and G9 Ventures founder Amy Griffin, who has also backed Bumble, Hello Sunshine and Goop.
“A huge part of my success was that being in New York gave me proximity [to investors and other power players]. I could do five meetings in a day if I wanted to, and I did because I like to work fast,” Crowell explains. “Proximity is everything.”
That proximity is even how she got her first job when she moved to New York looking for work after graduating from Pomona College.
Check out Laney’s full interview with the New York Post to hear about her journey to creating a $100M ARR beauty brand. 👇
The combo of Claremont undergrad + Berkley graduate degree seems to be a recipe for success right now. StoryHouse portfolio founder Marco Lobba (PO ‘13) and his company CatenaBio were featured among Berkeley’s Top 10 Startups to Watch in 2025. Catena is built on technology developed in the labs of Matthew Francis, Emeritus Chair of the Berkeley Department of Chemistry, and Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna (PO’85). The company is advancing in vivo validation of its approach, demonstrating superior performance against multiple best-in-class competitors. StoryHouse is proud to support the visionaries behind the science alongside other top investors.
Founded by UC Berkeley researchers, this startup is crushing it in the biotech space with their breakthrough protein conjugation technology that makes connecting different therapeutic components faster and more stable than ever before.
Working out of Berkeley's Bakar Labs, they're tackling major challenges in cancer and autoimmune diseases. Their process is totally changing the game - imagine being able to attach multiple different therapeutic components to a single protein, making treatments more precise and effective.
The company's already caught the attention of big pharma companies, and they're expanding fast with new leadership bringing decades of experience from places like Bayer and Merck. They're not just making incremental improvements - they're completely rethinking how we can build better medicines.
Housecall Pro, a growth stage software company (1500+ employees), provides the leading operating system for home services companies to run their businesses. With over 100 million jobs completed on the platform, the company has a rich data set for AI development. Founded by Ian Heidt (CMC '00), Housecall Pro is looking for a Director / VP to lead its AI initiatives. This position reports directly to Ian.
Claremont graduates with demonstrable tech/AI experience are encouraged to apply directly to Ian (this position is not listed on the company's hiring page and is being shared specifically with the StoryHouse and Claremont community). 👇
Claremont alumJung 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. 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, Canvas Ventures, and CoFound Partners. Parakeet is looking for a Senior Full-Stack Engineer and a Founding Customer Success Manager to join their growing team.
Check out the other 2,000+ open jobs at 290+ 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 300+ remote jobs, 100+ internships, or 600+ 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 top read 🔥
Claremont grad and StoryHouse portfolio founder Roya Amini-Naieni (HMC) is the founder and CEO of Trilobio – a robotics and synthetic biology startup. Trilobio was created to improve synthetic biology and life science research processes by building robotic lab automation modules coupled with an "app store" to package and distribute lab protocols as code. Roya and the Trilobio team recently emerged from stealth, backed by Argon Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, StoryHouse Ventures, and other top firms.
This week’s must-watch 📺
Serial Claremont entrepreneur and StoryHouse portfolio founder Sunil Rajaraman (CMC ‘01) was recently interviewed on the Slice of Real Estate. Sunil is the founder and CEO of Hamlet, a platform which uses a combination of AI with human fact-checking to find valuable data from planning commission and city council meetings for real estate developers, land use attorneys, and government relations execs. In this episode, Sunil talked about his journey from city council candidate to data-focused founder and how his AI startup is expanding to new markets like retail and renewable energy.
This week’s Claremont financing 💸
Congratulations to Lewis Johnson (PO ‘07), Brad Booth, and the NLM Photonics team on their recent investment from Emerald Technology Ventures and Oregon Venture Fund. NLM develops cutting-edge photonics solutions that can reduce data center power use by up to 30%, enabling high-bandwidth, low-power data transfer. StoryHouse is proud to have previously invested in NLM to advance energy-efficient technology for AI, data centers, and quantum computing.
Serial Claremont Entrepreneur Justin Wenig (PO) is the founder and CEO of Starbridge.ai, the first GTM intelligence platform designed to help businesses selling to government and education win more contracts with less manual effort. Justin is also a Forbes 30 Under 30 member and the co-founder and previous CEO of the academic operating platform Coursedog, which closed a $90M strategic investment from JMI last year. StoryHouse is excited to be an investor in their Seed round, alongside Owl Ventures, Autotech, Commonweal, and Avalanche.
Claremont alum Brendan Suh (CMC ‘19)and Rafi Sands are the co-founders of Tandem, a marketplace that helps companies share office space. Their online marketplace uses AI to make the office leasing process less tedious. Since launching in late 2023, Tandem has helped over 300 companies find, lease, and share office space in SF and NYC. The company recently announced its $6.1M Seed round led by Collide Capital and 1984 Ventures, with backing from StoryHouse Ventures, Y Combinator, and others.
This week’s top listen 🎧
Claremont grad Julia Stiglitz (PO) joined The Learning Geeks podcast to discuss AI’s impact on education, edtech, and corporate training. She shared her journey as an edtech entrepreneur and insights on AI’s role in cohort-based learning, tutoring, and course management. Julia is the co-founder and CEO of Uplimit – an Intelligent Learning Platform that helps organizations design, manage, and deliver learning programs.
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🏃🏻 Speedrunning Biotech Market Research With AI…..Market research with AI can be an insane advantage, but in specialized industries like biotech, you need to architect your approach carefully. In his recent article, Claremont AI expert Joey Debruin (PO) shared his step-by-step guide to building an AI system that transformed how they do market research in biotech. Joey is the co-founder and CEO of Robo, which partners with biotech companies to identify and deploy fully customized AI agents that are uniquely suited to their existing workflows and business needs.
🚀 Growth In The Massive Home Services Market…..Claremont grad Bobby Tzekin (PO ‘00) and Wisetack recently secured $25M in growth capital from Trinity Capital Inc. Wisetack offers consumer financing for home services like HVAC, plumbing, and pest control. Their platform is integrated into the software tools that home service businesses already use, making it easy for the businesses to start offering their customers these flexible options.This funding will fuel Wisetack's expansion and innovation in the home services market.
🛡️ A Stronger Defense Against Cyberattacks…..DeepSurface Security, founded by Claremont grad and CEO Timothy Morgan (HMC), is the first risk-based vulnerability management platform that allows cybersecurity teams to automate the process of analyzing and prioritizing vulnerabilities. The company was recently acquired by AttackIQ, the leading vendor of Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) solutions. Before this, DeepSurface raised over $5M in funding from firms including Differential Ventures and Cascade Seed Fund.
