Magnuson Center West Coast Experience 2018
Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship hosted a 10-day trip in Seattle & San Francisco to meet alumni at various industries and stages of the startup space.
Hey Everyone! We’re so excited to announce that we will be heading back to the West Coast this year for our annual Magnuson Center West Coast Experience. In anticipation, we’d love to share some memories from last year’s trip. Please be on the lookout for weekly throwbacks as we look forward to our December trip. Hope to see many of you while we’re there!
Day 1 (11/28/18, Seattle): Welcome to the first day of the Magnuson Center’s West Coast Experience trip!
Dartmouth students from across the globe arrived in Seattle this morning to kick off the first leg of the Magnuson Center’s annual West Coast Experience trip. After hitting the ground at the airport, our group traveled downtown to meet with Matt Oppenheimer D’04 at Remitly, a startup making it easier for workers to send money to their families abroad. Given that a good number of students in our group this year are either pursuing or considering majors in fields like Economics and Computer Science, the opportunity to learn from a veteran fintech entrepreneur was incredibly valuable. After a round of introductions and a brief talk with Matt about his everyday working life as a startup founder and entrepreneur, we had ample time to ask Matt our own questions and learn from his experiences.
Afterwards, we headed out for dinner at the nearby Noi Thai, where we welcomed Orestis Lykouropoulos D’17, Meeka Charles D’08, Eric Din D’14 Th‘16, Laura Gardner D’10, and Sam Andrew D’12 as our guests. Over a few hours of good food and good friends, we were granted even more time to learn about Seattle’s robust entrepreneurship scene from a variety of perspectives. Between Orestis’s position at Amazon, Meeka’s time at J.P. Morgan, and Eric’s work in the field of battery development, each student in our group had the opportunity to interact with an alum whose experiences directly related to his or her own academic interests and goals. As always, it was great to spend time engaging with alumni, and we’re all excited to meet even more Dartmouth entrepreneurs tomorrow!
Day 2 (11/29/2018, Seattle): Welcome to the second day of the Magnuson Center’s West Coast Experience!
We started our day at Pioneer Square Labs, a startup incubator, with Managing Director Greg Gottesman P’22. Greg spoke with us about his own entrepreneurial background as the founder of Rover.com and the necessity of developing a strong, uniform culture. Afterwards, we visited Boundless, a company funded by PSL to help immigrants apply for green cards and work visa renewals. The founders of Boundless discussed the challenge of patience in helping clients, as immigrants may have to wait for over a year to learn if their application was accepted.
In the afternoon, we visited Matt McIlwain D’87 at Madrona Venture Group, who discussed Madrona’s contemporary funding targets, which include companies focused on products in machine learning and VR/AR. We also had a discussion with a panel of Dartmouth alumni, who described their unique pivots from corporate positions to founding successful startups of their own. Finally, we visited Create33, Madrona’s startup accelerator, and heard from three founders about their current journeys in building tech startups in the e-commerce, gaming, and home furnishing spaces.
To conclude the evening, we had dinner at the house of Jeff Blackburn D’91, an Amazon executive managing Prime Video, Prime Music, Amazon Studios, and Amazon’s M&A division. After discussing our current ventures with Jeff, he introduced us to TJ Parker, the founder of Pill Pack, one of Amazon’s most recent acquisitions. TJ spoke about his success in building a billion-dollar business in two years, despite regulatory challenges and monopolistic pushback by the pharmaceutical industry.
We look forward to visiting Jeff at Amazon’s HQ tomorrow, and to continue learning about his role and current projects at the company!
Day 5 (12/02/2018, San Francisco): Welcome to the fifth day of the Magnuson Center’s West Coast Experience!
As hard-working and dedicated as San Francisco’s entrepreneurs are, even they deserve some rest, so instead of spending the day traveling around the city to meet with alumni and venture founders, we instead had the morning and most of the afternoon to explore the city on our own! Some of us went down to the Embarcadero to see the Bay Bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf, and the Golden Gate, while others relaxed in some of the city’s trendy neighborhoods around Lombard Street and Chinatown. A few of us even traveled to Berkeley to visit friends at Cal! After a marathon of visits with high-profile executives, engineers, and investors, it was certainly beneficial to have some time to relax today.
By the end of the afternoon, we all reconvened at the hotel and drove to the home of Jeff Crowe D’78 and his wife Amy, who hosted our group for a lovely dinner and discussion. Over a delicious meal, we all had the opportunity to introduce ourselves to the Crowes and talk a bit about our experiences at Dartmouth and our reasons for getting involved at the Magnuson Center. This was the Crowes’ fifth year hosting a dinner for the West Coast Experience group, and without question, this dinner has become one of the trip’s marquee events. For as much as is spoken about Dartmouth’s uniquely close-knit alumni network, gatherings like this really serve as first-hand displays of how willing and excited our school’s alumni are to interact with and advise current students. It was truly a pleasure to meet with the Crowes on Sunday night. Now we’re gearing up for the week ahead!
