Rachel Serwetz of WOKEN: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before Became A Founder

Give yourself more credit than you want to. Trying anything is usually a decent option. I’m often inherently aware of everything I don’t know, but startup life is not about doing anything perfectly, it is about inching along and making consistent progress.

As part of our interview series called “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Became A Founder”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Rachel Serwetz.

Rachel’s early professional experience was at Goldman Sachs in Operations and at Bridgewater Associates in HR. From there, she was trained as a coach at NYU and became a certified coach through the International Coach Federation. Throughout her career, she has helped hundreds of professionals with career exploration and for the past 3.5 years she has been building her company, WOKEN, which is an online career exploration platform to coach professionals through the process of clarifying their ideal job and career path. She also attained her Tech MBA from NYU Stern, is an Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at Binghamton University and has served as a Career Coach through the Flatiron School, Columbia University, and Project Activate.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I experienced firsthand the lack of effective support for career exploration and job search at several points of my professional journey. I learned everything on my own about how to land a great job, leading me to secure a role at Goldman Sachs. Over the next few years, I was referred to hundreds of young adults who needed career support, saw patterns in the issues they faced, and came up with a unique career exploration process. After six years of searching for my own career clarity, I crystalized that my passion was helping others find theirs. That was when WOKEN was born. Now, we have been working for 3.5 years to build tools and resources to scalably support clients to find their ideal job direction in just a few months.