Founder spotlight: Sarah Rumbaugh, RelishMBA
One of the goals of INITIATE is to boost the voices of founders and entrepreneurs who are looking at business from a different perspective. This is the first post in what will be an ongoing Founder Spotlight series.
For people finishing up their Masters in Business Administration, finding an employer can be a frustrating experience. RelishMBA is an online recruitment marketplace created by co-founders Sarah Rumbaugh and Zach Mayo to streamline the inefficiencies they experienced first-hand in the process. Fostering connection is the driving mission of RelishMBA, and technology is at the core of their success.
Recently, I got the chance to sit down with Sarah (whose formal title is CEO) to learn about her experience as an entrepreneur, and to find out what advice she might offer to others considering their own path in tech and business. We focused our conversation on some of the stereotypes that INITIATE sets out to challenge, as well as the guiding principles that inform her own life and work.
More value in execution than in ideas
Sarah’s experience in business and business administration is impressive: she graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in business and then went on to get her MBA from University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. She took part in Darden’s start-up incubator, the Innovation Lab (i.Lab for short), and has put a great deal of thought — and action! — into questions of business creation and start-up culture. When I asked for her thoughts on what makes a thriving business, she made it clear that there are lots of great ideas out there — but the execution of those ideas is the real measure of success. If you see a problem, and you have an idea for a solution: that’s a great first step. But having experienced the process first-hand, she urges people to put that idea to the test early and often, and not to be afraid to revise your strategy or allow the original idea to morph into something new. In the end, your goal should be solving the problem you identified, not building your first idea for its own sake.
Authenticity and building foundations for understanding
One of the things I really appreciated about Sarah’s approach to her work was the emphasis on authenticity. On discussing the pros and cons of that staple of entrepreneurship, the pitch deck, Sarah commented that she sometimes finds pitches to be better than business plans. Indeed, something really personal and passionate comes across when you hear her speak about RelishMBA, and it goes beyond requisite details about margins and market verticals. And when we discussed her experiences as a non-technical person in charge of a tech company, she made it clear that differences in expertise can always be overcome through empathy and understanding. To quote her directly, “if you’re working with people who perform very different tasks and you don’t understand their work in the same way they do, it’s important to understand them: their needs, the way they work, and why.”
It’s very clear when talking to Sarah that she enjoys working with people, and her role as CEO is well-suited to her temperament. You can learn more about Sarah on the RelishMBA website, where you can also meet my own personal favorite member of their C-suite: the Chief Fulfillment Officer, a 9-year-old Hungarian Vizsla named Baron.
Sarah also participated in a panel conversation on Inclusivity and Entrepreneurship on July 13, 2016, and you can see more of her comments in the write-up, here.
This article was written as part of INITIATE, a project sponsored by CoshX Labs to find new ways to explore business and entrepreneurship. You can follow us on Twitter, and visit our website to learn more about our efforts.
