Why I’m Starting Bruins in Tech 🐻
If you’re interested in joining the Bruins in Tech community, fill out this form
When I was a sophomore at UCLA, Travis Kalanick returned to campus for an interview in front of hundreds of students, faculty, and alumni.
He was asked, “What’s the biggest way UCLA helped you in starting Uber?”
He quipped, “Classes were never mandatory.”
TK’s answer left the audience, including me, in stitches. At the time, I figured he was commenting on the inapplicability of college classes to startups, and to some extent he probably was.
Looking back on his answer and on my conversations with UCLA founders like Nick Handel (Transform Data) and Alex Reichert (Papercups.io), I realize that the Bruin work hard/play hard ethic manifests itself in an alumni and student community of scrappy, passionate, committed people.
UCLA is where I discovered the friends that would become my co-founders & first few angel investments, tried (and failed) at running an accelerator, and played around with software engineering, design, product, VC, and even law (in a quarter-life crisis).
When I was a student, I saw that the Bruin network was both massively helpful and tremendously untapped. Most alumni I’ve reached out to have been extremely generous with their time, and in many cases, have become close friendships and mentors. All of them expressed a strong willingness to meet more Bruins.
I come across tons of awesome Bruin investors, operators, and founders as a VC at OpenView and former PM at Atlassian. Bruins in Tech is my way of showcasing and connecting all of us. By interviewing and sharing the stories of 1–2 notable UCLA alumni on a monthly basis, I hope we can help current students figure out their path into tech and build new relationships.
Eventually, I’d love to turn this into a “Who’s Building / Who’s Hiring / Who’s Raising” style newsletter, host a Slack community, and run regular happy hours so we can all get together more often. Whether you’re thinking about your next move or just want to make some new friends, this is for all of us to hang out, build camaraderie, and make the big world of tech a little smaller.
Join us
If you’re a current or past student of UCLA that’s interested in tech, join our community here!
I’d love your help in sharing Bruins in Tech with your UCLA friends, nominating alumni you admire that we should interview, and in giving me feedback on what you’d want to see from us. None of this works without you, and I’m grateful for all of you.
Thank you
I had been playing around with this idea for a long time. A big thank you to my friends Jessica Li and Anant Akash for inspiring me with their Harvard and U-Mich alumni efforts respectively.
Thank you to the many UCLA alums who’ve helped me in every step of my career and life, and a special bit of gratitude to the founders, investors, and operators who take time from their extraordinarily busy lives to respond to a random guy’s Twitter DMs and emails.
Go Bruins! 💙🐻💛
