Sean Echevarria, Founder of rees
Sean Echevarria believes better career tools drive better career journeys. He aims to deliver personalized advice, insights, and recommendations that empower career decisions and promote personal growth.
Sean is currently building rees, a career coaching platform that is accessible and affordable for all. Sean was previously a Senior Product Manager at Walmart, on their Digital Acceleration team focusing on their global HR needs. He focuses on developing people products to address the entirety of the employee experience; from learning and applying to Walmart to onboarding at the Fortune 1 and employee engagement across all brands and segments globally. Previously part of the Talent Experience team at Jet.com, Sean is a graduate from North Carolina State University where he received his BS in Mechanical Engineering and fell in love with tech through its Engineering Entrepreneurship Program. When he’s not at the intersection of people and tech, you can find him playing peek-a-boo with his 4-month-old son or playing basketball somewhere in Brooklyn.
Tell me a little bit about yourself.
My name is Sean Echevarria and I am the founder and CEO of rees. We are a career coaching platform that’s aiming to be affordable and accessible for underrepresented people to kind of equalize the corporate playing field. My background is in product management. I had been working at Jet.com and Walmart for the last five years, focusing on internal HR tooling, and I decided to make the jump once I got accepted into the Visible Hands fellowship. I am a father of a seven-month-old baby, have been in New York for the last nine years. And my wife and I both met in Charlotte, North Carolina, where our families live.
What has your experience been like in the VH Fellowship program so far?
I love it. I think a lot of what made me decide to go with Visible Hands at the time versus any other accelerator-type program, was the way that they focused on underrepresented founders. Being in the tech ecosystem for almost a decade now, you see how these companies are established and how VC, in general, continues to be behind in terms of truly finding ways to support diversity. Everything that Visible Hands did from a messaging standpoint and an interviewing standpoint — it was probably the most thorough interview process I’ve been through — just made me feel really good about accepting the fellowship. And it’s been great since. The intentionality and thoughtfulness behind the programming have continued to exceed my expectations. From everything that we did in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to today and how they go about iterating, programming, and providing support efforts behind the scenes on a weekly basis just really exceeded all of my expectations.
What would you say is your favorite aspect of the program so far?
The people. I’m a people person just naturally, and I guess by trade now just in terms of what we do and how we support other folks. But in terms of the cohort itself, I’ve never felt so naturally part of a community this fast. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that Visible Hands took us all to Tulsa where we got to meet each other in person, safely obviously, and it was great. The caliber of talent that they’ve been able to source and bring together has been crazy — just super talented people. I think a lot of us even talked about having imposter syndrome at times, even within the cohort, because you’re just kind of blown away by who you’re working with and talking with on an almost daily basis. So that’s probably my favorite thing and the fact that we continue to support each other. I literally messaged Marcus about getting my first unsolicited paid user and was over the moon about it, and he was like ‘Hell yeah, man. I knew everything that we talked about was going to work out.’ So it’s that kind of support and ongoing open-mindedness to help each other out that really is the power of this program in and of itself.
What are you looking forward to the most by the end of the fellowship?
I am looking forward to seeing what I can raise that by the end of the program and just seeing more impact. Like I mentioned earlier, the first paid user who signed up, signed up without a promo code and without any personal connection to me, and that was huge. The person who I thought had brought them in, also didn’t know them, so it was a truly random person who landed on the site, saw the value proposition, and was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll pay this.’ That really confirmed everything because what I was working with beforehand was beta testers and people somewhat already within the network. So what I’m looking forward to the most is just seeing more of that growth.
Entrepreneurship is not easy. What is your motivation for doing this day in and day out?
I come from immigrant parents and I tend to really resonate with similar stories. For example, I know a lot of other folks within my network where their parents didn’t know how to fill out their FAFSA, didn’t know how to get them a mentor because they didn’t have mentors, or didn’t know people to connect them with whether that’s within the tech world or within the corporate world. All these stories hit home for me, which is why I’m ultimately doing this. I want to be able to empower the next generation of diversity in tech to know that they are bringing value to the companies that they’re joining. I want them to get properly compensated because across the board we’re under-compensated compared to our white male counterparts. That’s something that really drives me as well as someone who’s been passed up for promotions even though my work was always the one that was highlighted at quarterly reports. I just know that what I’m building is striking a chord with other folks, and I want to make sure that story’s out there.
