NC Fellowship, Elon Musk’s EdTech Adventure & Careers in Product Management
NC Fellowship, Elon Musk’s EdTech Adventure & Careers in Product Management
Community action and learning adventures on Network Capital
Dear readers,
This past week has been all about learning on the cloud and COVID response. Before we dive into the details, here is a quick overview for you -
🚀 Fellowship: Learning experience on the NC Fellowships
📚Network Capital Summer School: Elon Musk's EdTech Adventure
✨ New masterclasses: Foundational Frameworks for Product Management with Lyft PM Santosh Kumar and Insights for Building Great Companies & Products with Director of Product at Indeed.co Karthik Vaidyanath
💌 Newsletter spotlight: From Taylor to McKinsey: How We Spend Our Time at Work, and Inspiration is perishable
The Network Capital Fellowship(s)
There is enough research and anecdotal evidence to prove that in the 21st century no one is going to have just ‘one career’. As the human lifespan increases and automation takes over; our multiple interests, curiosities, and identities will lead us to make a series of career transitions. We will all reinvent ourselves multiple times and (hopefully) create our category of one.
What is important about these transitions is that they will not happen over night. Instead, they will start as a series of low-risk experiments that lead to gradual change and breakthroughs. They will require consistent learning and unlearning. Navigating through this alone is not easy; neither is taking the first step of the experiment. Through the NC Fellowships, we go a step further.
Think of Network Capital fellowships in three broad buckets.
Foundational learnings: Eternal knowledge & first-principle thinking
Micro adventures: Following your curiosity & trying new things
Essential skills: The hidden tips & tricks that make learning easy.
Under each of these buckets, we have a string of fellowships that make the experimentation and transition fun and easy.
For the month of June we kick off with the Side-Hustle Fellowship, and for July we’ll be back with the CEO Fellowship and ‘I don’t know what I want to do with my life’ Fellowship. We have limited spots, join in now!
Elon Musk's EdTech Adventure
We are thrilled to share that Elon Musk is setting up a school to reimagine the way students learn. Safe to say that Musk is a busy man running a wide range of public companies but the very fact that he is venturing in the edtech space gives us hope that one day schools will be more than factories designed to produced standardized Jacks and Jills trained to ace tests.
Elon Musk isn’t involved with the day-to-day operations of Synthesis but he is the reason why such a school exists today and is being taken seriously. Synthesis just raised $5 Million at a $50 Million valuation from A Pompliano and others. They already have hundreds of happy students and are making $3 Million annualized revenues.
NC is attempting to build its category of one. We are inspired by the foundation of Synthesis and feel even more charged to help students discover what they care most about, work on foundational skills (critical thinking, writing, public speaking), build a strong community and emerge as leaders who make a measurable impact in whatever they choose to pursue.
Learning is contextual. There is no perfect school for every student. Cultural context matters. Relatable mentors matter. Our mission is to enable every student in our school to have a tribe of relatable mentors for life.
In our summer school, school students across age groups will immerse themselves over 4 weeks and graduate with -
A published article
A mini-TED talk
A real-life capstone
The adventure starts on June 1. Last few spots left.
Masterclasses
Foundational Frameworks for Product Management with Lyft PM Santosh Kumar
Santosh is a Product Manager high skilled in Cloud Computing, Data Analysis, and IT Strategy, currently working at Lyft. He started his career trajectory as a Research Associate at Duke University, after years of experience as a Performance Engineer, Tech Lead, Director Partner, and Co-Founder of a computer-based test and assessment platform, Santosh became a Data Analyst at Facebook. At this time, he contributed with the company, supporting data to derive actionable insights for Facebook products. At Cloudera, he became a Director of Product Management. Today at Lyft, he improves customers' lives by developing one of the most famous transportation platforms in the US and Canada.
Karthik is a Director of Product at Indeed, the world’s biggest job search engine with over 250Mn MAU, $2Bn+ revenues & 8k+ employees globally. He currently leads the Product Growth teams at Indeed Singapore; team of 50 working across Singapore/ Austin/ Tokyo.
He previously held Product Leadership roles at unicorn startups as CPO (Media) at GoJek & Director of Product at Hike Messenger. He is a seasoned entrepreneur (3x startups, 1x unicorn exit) with experience across multiple product domains (like SocialMedia, OTT, LiveStreaming, HRTech) & across geographies (like India, US, Singapore, Indonesia). As an entrepreneur, he scaled teams from 0 to 50+ & built products from the ground up to millions of users. His previous company was acquired by Hike (Tencent/ Softbank funded unicorn with 50Mn+ users) in the largest social media acquisition in India.
PS. You can find the complete list of Masterclasses on Product Management here.
Newsletters
From Taylor to McKinsey: How We Spend Our Time at Work
The core challenge is that the overwhelming majority of workers, including but not limited to McKinsey consultants, Goldman Sachs bankers, Google engineers etc, across the world don’t get a great deal of satisfaction out of their jobs.
In the recent Gallup’s annual State of the Global Workplace report, it is revealed that only 15% of employees worldwide are engaged in their job. 67% are not engaged, and 18% are actively disengaged. In Japan, China, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan, only between 5-7% workers are stimulated by their work. When almost 9 out of 10 people are disengaged at work and happen to be clocking 10-14 hours every day, you know you have a problem. Perhaps a pandemic called “The Meaning Crisis”.
Inspiration to write, build a side-hustle, take a random trip, learn something new often stems from a lingering curiosity about our alternate selves. Remember Walter White - Breaking Bad newsletter?
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
We have many selves. We contain multitudes. Psychologists have long argued against the notion of one fixed self that we need to find and unleash on to the world.
⚡️If you are new to Network Capital, start by going through our most popular - masterclass (Career Principles with Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller); newsletter(Writing Fast and Slow); and podcast (The art of writing with Dr. Shashi Tharoor)
💝 Connect and network with other Network Capital members here. You can sign up for a networking session and our serendipity tool here.
💞 If you need an invite to Clubhouse or Lunchclub, let varya@networkcapital.tv know. You can also reach out to them for feedback, suggestions, doubts and any help navigating the Network Capital ecosystem.