Stephanie Campa

I used to be a TA. I was mostly checking code, not essays. The students who cheated were still more creative( WITHOUT ChatGPT) than VCs when they send rejection✉️ to founders. The rejection emails from partners at different firms look damn copy cat. Different variations of: *The market is crowded* => code for I don’t have the foggiest clue, I don’t have conviction. *You’re too early* => we don’t believe in you like we believed in the other dudes pre-product but we don’t want to waste our time telling you why. *We’d love to stay in touch at the next round* => code for in case we were wrong we still want you to take our money but we won’t help you in the meanwhile with anything other than wishing you good luck and telling you we “cheer from the sidelines” after we wasted your time and we won’t even take 5 min to give you any feedback. Cheer how? Founders, it’s your right to call *bs* and ask for actionable *feedback*. Maybe you won’t agree with it. Maybe it will be useless. Maybe you will learn from it. You won’t know unless you get an actual thought and not a generic pass email, swap your company’s name here please.

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I’m hiring a new Chief of Staff. In tech, a CoS can mean a lot of different things. For me it is two things. First, a person that gives me institutional grade leverage. Second, a person that can speak for me both inside Carta and outside. Many CoS’s have gone on to do incredible things like Matt Howland who after being my CoS became Carta’s General Manager of the captable business and subsequently a founder and now CPO/CTO of Cordial, Sumeet Gajri who became Carta’s Chief Strategy Officer and then Managing Director of Original Capital, and Jane Alexander who became Carta’s Chief Marketing Officer and now Partner at Capital G. Every chief of staff has brought their unique skills to leave a positive impact on me and on Carta. It is a hard gig. You will work my hours (which are a lot). You will do everything from deciding how to use my time to developing Carta strategy. You will be in every meeting I’m in, you will be involved in every decision I make, and you will see what it’s like to run Carta. You will see things you haven’t seen before, and if you’ve seen the press, it is not for the faint of heart. But if you do it, you will learn a ton, experience things most people never get to, and see the world in a whole new way. It is a three year tour of duty and then we try to place you in a leadership role somewhere within Carta. I’m posting this because I’d love to find a wonderful person to work with for the next three years. If you are interested please consider applying. For those that apply I’d like to ask you to submit two things. 1. Please submit a short answer (less than 600 words) to the following question. Last November I got a lot of negative press for sending a pre-emptive email to thousands of customers about upcoming negative press about my leadership style. The subsequent storyline was “Henry is terrible at PR and what an idiot for bringing more attention to negative stories???” They could be right. I could be an idiot. But for this question, assume I wasn’t. Assume that it was a calculated decision and, in hindsight, still a correct one. Why did I do it? Please write it in the form of a in memo to the Carta Board explaining why we made that decision and thought it was the right one. 2. Please submit a short video presentation (less than four mins) teaching me something I don’t know. It can be about anything. It can be a cooking lesson, a business lesson, a history lesson. I’ll give an example in the next comment. I know it is a big ask but hopefully not much more time than preparing for an interview. And it will give us a head start so that in the second round, instead of asking you questions, you get to come in and grill me. 🙂 If you are interested please apply through the posting below with your board letter and a link to your video; I'm excited to see it. Thank you for taking the time to read this. I’m super excited to hear from you. https://lnkd.in/gtmFfrjV

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This is how you write a job post

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“Your transaction of $2.21 to Acc. XXX-9210 was successfully processed.” It’s never a good day when you get a text about a payment you didn’t make. This happened to me last month with a credit card I hadn’t used for a year. I didn’t lose the card. Chances are, a site I bought from got hacked and my details were stolen. It’s not just me, there’s a much bigger problem. This year, 93% of credit card fraud cases in the U.S. were “card not present” transactions. Hackers don’t need your physical card to pull this off, just its details. I don’t know how they got my card details, but scammers have a bunch of ways to do this: ↳phishing: tricking people into sharing their passwords and card info through email by pretending to be from a real company (500 million attacks in the U.S. in 2022) ↳hacking databases: using tactics like guessing passwords to illegally access large sets of customer data from corporations (like the 70 million current and former AT&T customers last year) ↳skimming devices: physical attachments to fuel pumps or ATMs that copy data from a swiped card ↳buying people’s card information from the dark web: where card and account information sells for as little as $5 With the increasing digitization of our lives, this type of fraud is only going to get worse. That’s why my co-founder Francisco Rubin and I are building Archer, to stop fraudsters from getting your money. Archer is an anti-fraud system that unites banks and fintechs against their common enemy, fraudsters, and protects their customers in real time from fraud. Has this happened to you? What’s your story?

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Been seeing PropelAuth pop around a bunch and boy do I love auth. Always like new players in the game. Let's take a quick look. Pricing. I don't get it. The first tier is 150/month for 2.5k mau. 6c an MAU is pretty crazy expensive esp given most competitors offer 10k for free... The feature breakdown between tiers is also a bit confusing. Some features which seem critical to building an app are behind paywalls where as others which are "nice to haves" are in the free bucket. Unlimited orgs is nice I suppose but that cost is just built into the MAU pricing. Maybe I don't need unlimited? I know Clerk charges way more per org but their MAU's are almost free in comparison. Features. Outside the usually suspects, (2FA, SSO, email, RBAC, etc) the API key stuff was pretty cool esp if you are setting up a dev focused product. Waitlist feature is also a nice little touch. I think most waitlists are disgustingly complicated for their purpose and it is cool they have this on the free tier. It would be nice if there was a drop in UI to let end orgs manage their own users but I couldn't find that anywhere. Clerk has this but it was a little janky in my experience. Docs. The setup is awkward or maybe more so strange. When i go to quickstart I see all these warnings about framework selection. It took a solid 5 minutes before I realized there is a selector in the UI. Using what appears to be a HOC withAuthInfo, seems again awkward at least in the react realm unless I am missing a reason for this. I'd strongly recommend dropping all the HOC usage esp given their are hooks which do the same. Backend was pretty simple. My 2c after an all be it brief review, docs need a bit of love. Which features fit into what payment bucket could also use a review. Clerk and everyone elese for example let me have a staging env at the free tier given it is kinda a requirement to move anything to prod. Little odd to gate that behind a 150/month paywall. It is actually kinda a complete non-starter for any project. 2FA is not needed for a free tier and could easily move to a paid feature. The target customer seems to be anyone launching a very early enterprise developer focused product. A waitlist with unlimited orgs and built in api keys hits many of the fast path needs for a GTM play in that space. The per mau cost isn't as important here but the feature bucketing is strange and would be a non-starter for me. I wish propel the best of luck as auth certainly needs more innovation. It is my least favorite part of building an app.

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Two truths and a lie 🔮: 1) Our team is the perfect mix of every synonym of passionate, cerebral, and customer-led. 2) We’ve raised $25M from some of the best at General Catalyst and Forerunner. 3) Fay is not hiring and you shouldn’t consider applying. I love our team. Yet, still, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Citing the team as the reason a startup is doing well often sounds like a cop out answer (even if it’s true), but what isn’t talked about enough is how cool it is working with a team of people all hungrily chasing the same thing you’re chasing. For everyone at Fay, working here is a blessing. We’re blessed with the opportunity to sprint the marathon of building a company solving the food and nutrition crisis in America. ❤️ We’re not just allergic to average; we set the bar high and keep raising it. If you’re hungry to accelerate your career and want to improve & save lives while doing it, I entreat you: apply to Fay. Who I want sliding into my DMs 🫶: - Operations - Growth - Head of Finance - Payor Strategy - Provider Sales - Enterprise Sales - Corporate Development - Chief of Staff - Software Engineer - First iOS Engineer - Product Manager Come find out why we’re one of the fastest growing startups around and the best team to ever do it. I can’t wait for you to meet everyone. https://lnkd.in/eGb9qZj3

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Super excited that Pave and Greenhouse Software are partnering on something pretty cool: real-time insights based on current market offers. How much are AI engineer salaries outpacing software engineers? What are today’s hot jobs telling us about the economy and return to office? Learn more in our latest report (p.s - some of it might surprise you). As someone who's been in the space for a while, I am excited for customers to get access to this soon! Link is in the comments below.

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I've made a career working for brands that were "unsexy" when I joined. Why? That's where you can actually do real work—and make a transformative impact. Here are some of the indicators that gave me conviction I could actually help. 👇 * Coinbase --> the team I joined in 2018—the crypto winter before the crypto winter. The ONLY thing the press wanted to write about was FUD. But when I walked in for my interviews, you couldn't deny the smarts and passion of the team at that time. Bonus, they were fun, too! My job was to figure out what stories we had—about crypto overall, and Coinbase specifically—that could drive proactive, positive (and credible) narratives. Step 1: sit down with the world's best engineers and figure out what they were psyched about. Step 2: Use all my tools and network from journalism, editing, comms, marketing to create what we wanted to see. ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ * Trulia --> the investment our parent company was willing to make to make it work We were owned by a parent company that did. . .ahem. . .essentially the same thing. I was brought in to create a differentiated content strategy, for an essentially undifferentiated brand ( 🤷‍♀️ ). Step 1: work to figure out how we were actually different in a credible and authentic way, working with an incredible brand strategy shop. Step 2: hire a crew to bring that to life. ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ * ALL YOU --> buying power of an often overlooked population This was a brand that no one inside Time Inc wanted to acknowledge internally 🙈. It was the mall-walking Midwestern sister to Real Simple's coastal cousin. But they were happy to cash the checks. On a good month, we could sell hundreds of thousands of copies on the newsstand (exclusively at Walmart). And boy, were those Walmart shoppers psyched when we gave them a good recipe. We made those ladies heroes and even put one star shopper on the Today Show. ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ * Budget Travel --> an engaged community of brand advocates we could put to work When I took over as Editor-in-Chief in 2008 (ps. terrible timing. . .), this brand had heart and a distinctive voice, a crazy-passionate community, and a footprint that was far too small for what that community deserved. We had limited internal resources, getting smaller by the year (see 2008). Not to mention that we had Budget in our title, which was something we couldn't change. 🤕 People still talk to me about how much they love that brand, RIP 😭 ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ When I talk to people whose resumes are a collection of elite logos (schools, startups, blue chips), I'm immediately turned off. That's too easy! Show me what you can do when no one is in your corner, there isn't a clear story to tell (yet), and the headwinds are picking up.

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Unfortunately, we are seeing more and more people getting laid off. Trish Kenlon has some great advice for friends and work colleagues on how to support people. The first and most important thing we can do is be empathetic. Not surprising, it is the first thing we start with in the Design your Climate Career program that we co-created with Trish Kenlon. Our goal is to support you in your transition, pivot or job search. Reach out if we can help. #careersearch #climatecareers #layoffs #networking #support

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Robinhood just bought another company. And this one is really great. Robinhood announced they're buying Pluto. Pluto is an AI-powered investment research platform. People can ask questions about the markets or portfolio. For example, you could ask how a piece of news impacts your portfolio. Cool...but there's so much more to this acquisition. Robinhood is a trading platform. But the real money is in wealth management. And it hasn't gone all-in on wealth management...yet. New fintechs like Betterment and Wealthfront dominated the robo-advisory space. Robinhood focused more on trading. Not wealth building tools. That could change with the acquisition of Pluto. Robinhood could leapfrog the robo-advisors. Providing a new way for people to manage their wealth. Imagine asking "make me a low-cost retirement portfolio with some crypto exposure" A bit of back-and-forth later and Robinhood could spit back portfolio options. Keep an eye on how Robinhood integrates Pluto. Could be pretty gamechanging. #robinhood #wealthmanagement #artificialintelligence #ai #finance #trading

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When I worked at Netflix, one thing that really stood out to me was how responsive and helpful my coworkers were. No matter how complex my question was, within a matter of minutes I'd be able to have an in depth discussion with a subject matter expert. I remember early on at Netflix I was running into some performance problems with Spark. I had a complex query and predicate push down wasn't working as expected. I posted in the big-data slack channel and Ryan Blue (co-creator of Iceberg) responded. We decided to meet up at his desk where he proceeded to debug the issue directly in front of me. He quickly identified a bug in the Spark query optimizer and I was able to resolve my issue. I knew at that moment that Netflix indeed was full of "stunning colleagues". I've been trying to emulate this experience at Tobiko because I want everyone to get the same experience that I did. It takes a lot of courage to ask questions in a public forum. We understand how difficult it is to break the ice but are genuinely interested in engaging, learning, and solving your issues. So if you have a question or want to discuss something related to SQLMesh, SQLGlot, or anything data, we'd love to work with you. Even with over 2.5k community members in Slack, we've been able to maintain a 14 minute median response time. We're not only focused on creating the best data products, but also an amazingly supportive community. Come join us at https://lnkd.in/geevzB24 to be at the forefront of the modern data stack. #dataengineering

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Here’s another interview question I like to ask when hiring for Amplemarket. 👇 “What piece of common wisdom in your field do you disagree with?” It could be anything: A technical best practice you were taught early on and have since moved away from. An industry trend that everyone’s obsessing about but you see as a red herring. A conventional strategy you’ve challenged and adapted to unlock new opportunities. You learn a lot about a person by learning what they disagree with... ...and also in how they communicate their disagreement . But it's also relevant to Amplemarket's culture: We constructively disagree We challenge conventions We ask “why?” And we go back to first principles. We can’t build a great platform or a winning pro-sports team by copying what’s out there! We're challenging the assumption that finding and connecting with your perfect buyers has to be hard. Or that it has to take hours of manual work. Or, of course, that the SDR role is dead. 😉 (No, it's not! It's evolving. 👊 ) So: what industry conventions or trending knowledge do you disagree with?

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The labor changes due to AI that we're seeing at big companies are just the beginning. First Klarna made waves pausing all hiring to evaluate where they could replace labor with AI, now Intuit is laying off 10% of it's global work force (1,800) people - to "increase it's focus on AI". As an entrepreneur building an AI-focused startup, and HEAVILY using these tools every single day - I can tell you - this isn't a fad, it's not all hype (blockchain I'm looking at you...) and if you aren't planning for the impact within your own org - you are going to regret it. AI is going to accelerate it's disruption of labor markets - so it's time to be thinking about the social implications for sustainability, equity and justice. We need elected representatives that are thinking about this stuff - because it's going to matter. #nextindustrialrevolution #ai #artificialintelligence #soapbox #equity #sustainability

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Lessons from the growth team trenches: ✅ The allure of experimentation without first setting a clear strategy creates chaotic fragmentation. Too much fragmented energy is debilitating. WIP ✅ I've grown into a decent (non-technical) product manager, but it's not my career endgame. TBD ✅ I love solving a clear goal with an unclear path.  ✅ I thrive in a self-led, small-team environment. Divide & dominate.  ✅ Having fun is a choice not an output.  More to come... #BigLittleThings #plg

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‘When you’re raising a round, try to raise your next 2 rounds at the same time.’ ^Smart advice I heard last week 💡 VCs often say ‘no’ in the early stages because there’s not enough traction. (Also, many funds say they do preseed/seed, seed/A, etc, but lean toward the later stage of the two). When it’s a ‘you’re too early,’ try to understand what traction and metrics you need to hit that would get an investor to a YES the next time you raise $. Add them to your investor updates and keep charging til you hit those metrics. Ideally, if you build the relationships now, it’ll make it easier to raise the next round instead of starting from a cold stop. Also, it can make sure you right-size the amount you’re raising now, so you have enough cash to reach the metrics.

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🚀 Coexist went viral last week, and the reactions were incredible! Here’s what I learned: 1️⃣ There’s no one-size-fits-all: Every couple is different. While some thrive on using structure to help with planning, others prefer having more spontaneity. Our tech offers flexibility so that each couple can use what works best for them.  2️⃣ Communication is key: Communication—or lack thereof—is a major pain point. Tools like Coexist can help bridge that gap by making it easier to share, manage, and remember tasks. 3️⃣ People have very strong opinions about home life: The comments we received were eye-opening. It seems like so many of us are dealing with similar challenges of balancing work and personal life, but ultimately have different ideas on how to solve them. At Coexist, our goal is to build a fun, soothing, and easy-to-use app to help couples work more like a team at home. When my childhood friend Stella and I started this journey, we knew how tricky it can be to balance all of life’s responsibilities. We had tried using workplace tools at home, but they felt too corporate and out of place in our personal lives. That’s why we built Coexist—to offer a solution that’s both practical and enjoyable, designed specifically for home use. To everyone who commented, shared, or reached out—thank you! Your stories, feedback, and even criticisms are invaluable. We’re committed to continuously improving Coexist and making it a tool that genuinely helps couples build stronger, more harmonious partnerships. 👉 Let’s keep the conversation going! How do you manage household responsibilities in your relationship? Have you tried any unconventional methods that worked or didn’t work? I’d love to hear your experiences and ideas.

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Always love these cool insights from my company on what foods are trending lately. Burgers seem to be a top seller, but what's YOUR favorite thing to grill? It’s grillin’ season! 🍔🔥 84.51˚'s June Consumer Digest reveals that 42% of shoppers plan to grill weekly this summer. Beef burgers top the list, followed by chicken, beef steak and kebabs. Healthy options are a priority, with high demand for fresh seasonal produce. Mocktails are also popular, with 65% of consumers choosing nonalcoholic beverages more often. Learn more about changing shopping behaviors this summer from Insights Account Executive Kayla Roesch in the video below. Download the full report here: https://bit.ly/4fb9sLU #8451Proud

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First, a fun announcement, and then some thoughts on content marketing as a channel. 1) First, we got into YC and are doing the summer batch! 2) I'm going to be winding down my linkedin / twitter content marketing in favor of other channels that YC provides us for finding customers. First, I'm very excited to tell my network that I'm doing YC in SF this summer. Couldn't be more excited for an in-person program with some of the most ambitious founders in the world, all working on super disruptive technologies. It's going to be a great time. Second, we're going to start leaning more into YC channels for GTM. One thing I've learned as a second-time founder is that distribution and reaching customers is key. Through this experimentation phase I've been posting *a lot* to get the attention of potential customers. It's worked pretty well. I think the content I've been posting has driven upwards of 75% of the current customers we have using the product (n=~70-100 customers we've talked to), and it's been an incredibly effective channel. The problem with content, especially when you're going through your personal channels is it can kind of wear out your network (too much can be borderline insufferable), especially when you're experimenting and pivoting and might not stick to an idea. When you're early, something is better than nothing though so it works, but long term I don't want to do that. I will keep posting and talking about cutting-edge tech, early stage startups etc. But maybe fewer company announcements. Will leave that to the YC channels to get us distribution. If you want my pure train of thought, in a place where it's more appropriate to post more frequently, follow me on twitter @carlcortright

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If you haven't yet read this report from Carta you should spend some time at lunch today to make that happen. Here's a few things that stuck out to me: "The pace of hiring has fallen sharply, with startups collectively hiring 314,000 employees during the first half of 2022, compared to 129,000 in the first half of 2023." - no surprise here. Many orgs have shrunk or eliminated their TA teams and other departments with significant pullback on planned headcount growth. I've seen an uptick in recent weeks and am curious how the year will close out. "Salaries flatlined to start the year, with Carta Total Compensation benchmarks for employee salaries falling 0.3% from November 2022 to May 2023." - Not surprisingly, engineering, product, and sales remained mostly flat with modest increases. This is a huge swing from what we experienced in 2022 with wage growth and rising inflation. "Equity packages saw substantial reductions, with average equity grants benchmarks declining 26% from November 2022 to May 2023." - Money is tight and the path to get more at the desired valuation is harder, so let's rethink how we approach granting equity since the pool might not expand any time soon. Seems like a good time to be in Total Rewards. Oh, and in another world, the jobs report released this morning showed a surge in hiring last month with employers adding 336K jobs. Would love to hear everyone's thoughts after having a chance to read through. #startup #StartupCompensation #TalentAcquisition #EmployeeCompensation #CompensationTrends

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