Claudia Colvin

Joined 100% bootstrapped and profitable AI startup as employee #8 with the mission of growing the team and building the people and talent functions from scratch. When I left, the headcount was 50. I was a hands on team-lead, a team of 1 for the first 18 months, later leading and managing 3 people. This was the most fun and challenging professional adventure of my career. The founders wanted to build a team following the Basecamp or pre-acquisition Instagram model: a small team of exceptionally talented generalists with fast learning curves and a hunger for impact and growth. This is hard to build in itself, but on top of that: * The founders wanted an in-person, on-site first company. I joined in May 2021, during Covid when the rest of the world was going fully remote. * Happy Scribe is in Barcelona, which in ’21 didn’t have the talent density you find in places like London, Paris, Amsterdam. * None of the people we needed to hire had ever heard of us. We couldn’t count on well-known investor or accelerator names, we were bootstrapped. * The founders went from university to building their own company; they didn’t have a network of top 1% talent from previous jobs. In sum, I had to hire the top 1% of talent when this top 1% talent had never heard of us, never used our product as a customer, never worked with anyone else in the team, needed to be relocated, needed to be convinced to work in an office, to take a bet on a bootstrapped company and sometimes take a paycut to join us (albeit with good equity). We grew to 50 people, and these hires include ex-YC founders or YC founding team members, Pitch’s ex Head of Product, Hotjar’s ex VP Marketing and some of the best engineering talent in Barcelona, thanks to a strong company culture, a relentless search for excellence and my employer branding efforts.

I wanted to dance in a very specific way, to very specific music, and I couldn’t find any events that offered what I was looking for, so I created them. I organised uplifting 60 minute silent-disco events as a fitness alternative for people who love to dance but are done with night clubs. Turns out, other people wanted to dance like that as well. Nobody's Watching grew into a movement with a loyal community in London. I filled the events 100% through organic growth strategies and £0 spend on marketing. This was achieved through a) strategic partnerships (Time Out London, ClassPass, etc) b) product-led and community-driven growth, focusing on delivering an outstanding experience that would turn customers into super fans c) bootstrapped PR (the events were featured on Heart Radio with Emma Bunton, BBC Radio 5, BBC News, TimeOut London, and more) Consistently rated 5 stars on DesignMyNight and Facebook https://nobodys-watching-silent-disco-events.designmynight.com/ In December 2019, through partnerships with TimeOut London and ClassPass, I made plans to increase the frequency and go full time on the business by June 2020. Winter 2020 was a success and the events sold out till March 2020. Then Covid happened. I moved online and iterated the format until I pivoted to Wake Up & Dance, hosting every week day at 8am a 10 minute dance party on zoom, with a curated newsletter and playlist. It went viral in Jan '21, growing into a community of thousands of people from all over Europe and gaining significant press coverage, like this organic feature on Huff Post https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/wake-up-and-dance-class_uk_60896681e4b046202702553b When things reopened, I wound it down and focused 100% on Happy Scribe.

I joined as a recruiter and later moved internally, focusing my efforts on employee engagement and people operations initiatives. I managed employee feedback through Peakon, analysed trends, proposed action plans to solve employee problems and project managed the solutions. Thanks to employee feedback and the action plans that came from it, we fixed a broken meeting culture, implemented an employee growth strategy, changed the performance management process and the way we did team socials and much more. I led Learning and Development initiatives, creating content and delivering training for managers on several different topics, eg. giving feedback.

I joined Memrise just after they raised Series B funding, on a mission to scale the team from 40 to 100. I hired across all roles, from mobile and software engineering, to data, product, marketing, operations, finance, leadership hires. I helped redefine the hiring processes to make them more efficient, streamlined and inclusive.

In the UK, the entry level role to working in Parliament is an unpaid intership. Living and working in London, upaid, is unaffordable for most people, meaning that only the more financially privileged can access a career in Parliament. I project managed a social mobility scheme that aimed to change that. We provided a paid 9 months internship to people from low income backgrounds, to work as a Parliamentary Aid with MPs across different political parties I was in charge of the recruitment process for the cohort of interns (thousands of applications per year), of the selection of the Members of Parliament. I then acted as the point of contact for both interns and MPs throughout the year.

Part of team of educators working on an ed-tech platform, with schools from 25+ countries all over the world. The programme aimed to equip teenagers with the skills needed to communicate positively with peers from other cultures. • Created educational content and lessons for the programme • Managed the website (and even did a bit of coding) • Delivered training sessions for teachers and country programme coordinators • Moderated the student forum, hired trained and managed the moderation team, ensured all content published by students falls within forum’s positive language regulations, managed misuse episodes. • Devised and initiated alumni programme, created training material and trained alumni • Facilitated videoconferences between teenaged classes from different countries.

Managed co-working space for start ups • Community building. Organised socials to develop community in co-working space (lunches, games nights, pub Thursdays, etc) • Office management. Responsible for smooth running of office space, supporting with any technical problems. • Skills development. Organised networking, skills sharing events and talks.

• Leading and facilitating workshops in UK schools to help students gain cross-cultural and interfaith communication skills • Skills taught to students: asking and answering questions what build dialogue, not conflict; empathising with people from different cultures; learning about different faiths and beliefs thanks to human encounters rather than text books • Managing complex situations that emerge in sessions, ensuring safety of dialogue space

• Coordinated fundraising campaign, organized 10k fundraising walk and arts festival • Administered communications with fundraisers, donors, volunteers and event liaises • Created marketing material, wrote website content and marketing emails • Campaign raised a total of $130.000 in London (40% more than 2012)

Lectured on the theory and practice of interfaith and interconflict dialogue facilitation in MA on Religion and Cultural Mediation

Specialised in education in the sphere of conflict transformation, peacebuilding and dialogue, focusing on the research of the key elements that lead to a successful and impactful peacebuilding programme for young people.

Specialised in Islamic studies and comparative religious studies, gained expertise and wrote dissertation on Jesus in Islamic literary tradition