✌☝Issue #55: Scripps College - Here Begins New Life
How Claremont became a consortium and a tribute to Scripps’ first entrepreneur and the mother of Claremont
💬 Welcome to issue #55 of Between the Lines
Welcome to part three in our seven-part series on the entrepreneurial history of the Claremont Colleges — Scripps College. In case you missed them, parts one and two were about the founding stories of Pomona College and Claremont Graduate University.
Read on to learn more about the founding history of Scripps College, the first Scripps entrepreneur, and the myriad impressive alumni who have followed in her footsteps.
~ Josh & Miles
📊 6th Street Stats: Here Begins New Life
Authors: Josh Tatum & Miles Bird
It started with a letter. A handwritten letter from Pomona College’s first president James Blaisdell to entrepreneur and businesswoman Ellen Browning Scripps. In October 1923, 35 years after the founding of Pomona College and two years before CGU officially started accepting students, James wrote to Ellen describing a vision of educational excellence he had for the future Claremont Colleges:
“I cannot but believe that we shall need here in the South [of California] a suburban educational institution of the range of Stanford. My own very deep hope is that instead of one great undifferentiated university, we might have a group of institutions divided into small colleges—somewhat of the Oxford type—around a library and other utilities which they would use in common. In this way, I should hope to preserve the inestimable personal values of the small college while securing the facilities of the great university. Such a development would be a new and wonderful contribution to American education. Now the thing which would assure this future institution to Southern California is land ... It is now or never. To save the needed land for educational use seems to me to guarantee Southern California one of the great educational institutions in America. Other hands through the centuries will carry on the project and perfect it. But never again can there come so fundamental a service as this.”
Flash forward to 1926, and CGU is a year underway. However, Claremont is still far from becoming a consortium, let alone one of the greatest educational institutions in America that James envisioned in his letter to Ellen. It took three years, but Blaisdell’s prophecy clearly stuck with Ellen Browning Scripps during that time. In 1926, she became the founding donor for Scripps College and helped bring new life to the emerging Claremont community through a significant land contribution.
Unsurprisingly, the Scripps College motto eventually became and still is today: “Incipit Vita Nova,” which translates to “Here Begins New Life.” 👇
👨🎓👩🎓 Pardon the Introduction: Fall Interns
Looking for interns? As the fall semester approaches, these eight Claremont undergrads are on the lookout for technology roles. They are part of CMC’s semester-long Silicon Valley Program that will begin on Monday, September 12th, and conclude on Friday, December 9th. You can see the students' resumes here.
If you are interested in hiring any of these interns, contact Ron LaPierre (Head of SVP). Internships can be remote or in-person.
💼 Who’s Hiring?:
Roble Ventures is looking for part-time Claremont interns in the fall to work directly with the founder and GP on multiple investment thesis, marker maps, and branding/content strategies. You will have an independent project and work on building the roadmap on how to invest from the fund. This position can lead to a full-time role post-graduation. Roble Ventures is an edtech and future of work fund with $25M in deplorable capital founded by Sergio Monsalve (Claremont, Stanford, and HBS alumnus). He has worked as a VC for more than 15 years and is well connected in the industry. He also currently teaches an edtech course at Stanford GSB in addition to running the fund. Interested applicants should email Sergio your resume and LinkedIn profile to apply.
March Capital is a top-tier VC & growth equity firm headquartered in Santa Monica, California, and has been investing globally since 2014 with assets approaching $2B. The firm's industry event, The Montgomery Summit, is also one of the most prestigious technology investor conferences in the country. Jamie Montgomery is the co-founder and Managing Partner of March Capital. Jamie and March Capital provided the start-up capital for the CIE at CMC and continue to fund CIE and competitions at Claremont. Claremont alumnus Adele English is also a Senior Associate at March. Jamie is currently looking for a goal-oriented leader with a strong executive presence to work closely with him as the Director of Platform and The Montgomery Summit. If you’re interested, shoot us a note or apply below:
Make sure to check out the other ~5,000 open jobs at 400+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, make sure to 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!
As always, if any of these roles catch your eye 👀 , apply and mention Between the Lines. Or if you are an employer and are looking to hire tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.
🗣️ Conversations on the Interwebz:
This week’s top watch 🔥
CEO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly, Edith Harbaugh (HMC), sits down with Forbes to discuss digital transformation, innovation, and growing a unicorn without burning out.
Everything else you need to know….📖
Congrats to the Crunchbase Team on their recent $50M Series D round! A Claremont fun fact #1 - alumnus Michael Arrington originally founded Crunchbase in 2007 as an internal tool to track the startups that TechCrunch featured in its articles (yes, Arrington also founded TechCrunch 🤯). Claremont fun fact #2 - alumnus Drew Oetting invested in Crunchbase’s Series A in 2015!
Alternative asset management firm Valkyrie Investments and its CEO Leah Wald (PI) are launching a new $30M VC fund to focus on Israeli crypto startups. The focus will be on companies that provide a web2 user experience with web3 infrastructure. TechCrunch has more.
PO alumnus Julia Stiglitz shares a thread on why she decided to start her new edtech company — co:rise. Co:rise works with organizations looking to arm their tech and data teams with the latest skills and best practices.
See how LanzaTech and CEO Jennifer Holmgren (HMC) are helping industries reduce their carbon footprint and bringing carbon-smart chemicals, materials, and fuels into our global supply chain.
Can’t get enough of Between the Lines? Follow and connect with us on Twitter!
🍽️ BTL Snacks:
🌳 Supercharged, Climate-Fighting Trees….. CNN shares how Living Carbon, founded by Maddie Hall (CMC), has genetically modified hybrid poplar trees to grow faster so they'll absorb more carbon dioxide and help minimize the damage of climate change. The company plans to plant about 4M trees by 2023 and has already done test plantings on abandoned mine lands. Along with fighting climate change, the company also generates revenue from sapling sales and carbon credits it receives for its gene-edited trees.
💻 The Rise Of Developer Infrastructure….. When it comes to sustained innovation in software development, good developer infrastructure is the secret weapon that gives the best companies a head start on their competition. Sagar Batchu (HMC), CEO and co-founder of Speakeasy, shares his theory about how the next 10 years will see the majority of developers shifting from using cloud infrastructure to using developer infrastructure. Speakeasy is building its developer-first API platform with usability, composability, and extensibility as the guiding principles.
🌍 Africa’s Local Funding For Early Stage….. Over the past decade, the early-stage African startup space has boomed. One key, however, is still largely missing from the space: The local investment scene in Africa is not as mature as the tech industry itself, and the gap leaves startups with global ambitions to look abroad for funding. Ingressive Capital, a $10M VC fund headquartered in Nigeria and started by Maya Horgan Famodu (PO), is helping to fill this gap and the fund just celebrated its 5th year.
💥 The Impact 50 List….. Every quarter, the insideBIGDATA team releases their top 50 companies making waves in the technology areas of big data, data science, machine learning, AI, and deep learning. This past quarter, data lakehouse platform Dremio (founded by PO alumnus Jacques Nadeau) and data science and AI company Plotly (founded by HMC alumnus Alex Johnson) made the list.
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