🌱 How to grow your career and impact. A new newsletter: Opportunity Seeker

Opportunity Seeker highlights ways you can grow your career and personal impact. We’re here to open up opportunity so more of us can belong in spaces that need us.

Here we go. Reporting in for email number one. I decided to start a newsletter called Opportunity Seeker because more of us deserve to know about the opportunities for growth, change and positive impact that are out there.

It’s become clear that in a time of Climate Crisis, rising inequality and AI disruption, it is more and more evident that we need you at the table, in the board room and doing work that gives you space to thrive, learn and belong.

Expect to see a strong dose of tech, climate, non profit, communications and startup/VC opportunities in the mix, as this is my background. And as I’ve worked across Europe, the US, UK and Australian markets you’ll be getting a full global tour 🌎.

Before we dive, deep breaths and let’s remember…

Two board roles to grow your impact

• Flexible location: The UK’s Refugee Council is recruiting for multiple trustees — they highlighted that they’re looking for people with ‘attunement to young audiences’ or experience in fundraising. There have been some heavy refugee stories come out this week (BBC, AJ, The New Humanitarian) and the sector really needs skilled support right now. Deadline: Sept 3rd

• Hybrid/London: The Economist Educational Foundation is on the hunt for a board trustee that can bring practical strategic guidance in either funding development, school relationships or strategy. Deadline: August 18th

VC networking & accelerating opportunities

• Virtual/EU: Village Capital have opened up applications for women-led startup teams who want to join their EU based Green Tech Accelerator. Side note is that they’re also looking for mentors across their global programs — it’s a great chance if you’re a senior tech operator to build out your network and give back to the community.

• Remote/UK: Intrigued about Angel Investing? The wonderful Andy Ayim MBE who runs the Angel Investing School kicks off his annual live cohort next week. There’s still a handful of spots.

• Berlin: It seems like every Berlin-based female founder I know is applying for the Grace Accelerator. Rather than giving away equity for funding, you get a monthly stipend funded by the EU. But don’t limit yourself just to the female founder program — Cephas Nudubeze has put together a list of the 11 other pre-seed program that have funding to run a Berlin Startup Stipendium.

• Vienna/hybrid: Switching European capital cities, Female Founders is running a 5wk investment readiness program for gender-diverse SaaS founders. You can be from anywhere, but you’ll need to be in Vienna for some of the program — ping Antonella Cvrtak with qns. Deadline: this Friday, Aug 18th.

• Virtual: And on the other side of the planet, Blackbird VC is accepting applications for its Giants program. It’s coordinated by Meg Williams who used to be one of my favourite music managers in Sydney/Gadigal Country, who has now switched to the world of empowering early-stage founders (not unlike nurturing fledgling bands).

• Virtual/London: Forget bookclubs — we read articles about AI now. One of the partners at Bethnal Green Ventures has broken her ankle and started a Zoom reading club focused on the intersection of AI, ESG and climate (numbers are limited but you can still signup). Yours truly was in attendance last week and it was a delightful, brain expanding event. Two fascinating articles we discussed were:

  • India’s religious AI chatbots are speaking in the voice of god — and condoning violence by Nadia Nooreyezdan, RestofWorld, 9th May 2023

  • AI-generated art sparks furious backlash from Japan’s anime community by Andrew Deck, RestofWorld, 27th October 2022

*hush hush* C-level positions

Sometimes, just sometimes, we help out recruiters who are looking for a C-Level candidate. As we know once you get to this career stage it’s very rare to see roles advertised, it’s a veritable black box of nothingness out there in job postings. Which makes it hard for talented Director level candidates to make the jump and catch the eye of an executive recruiter. This week we’ve got a heads up that two roles have opened up in German tech for Chief Marketing Officers.

• Hybrid/Germany: First up we have a travel CMO role, the marketing team is already +30 and they’re looking for the magical combo of performance, brand and LEADERSHIP.

  • Preferably you’ll have worked in the travel industry or multiple high growth consumer brands. Crucially you don’t need to have CMO in your title to be in the running for this one.

  • Send us a reply with #TRAVELCMO in the subject with a link to your linkedin and we’ll forward it across, but remember we can’t promise any response from the recruiter 🙂 

• Hybrid/Germany: And next, a growing player in the online education space is looking for a education focused CMO, this is a high growth role that wants to bring an outside perspective to their c-level team.

  • Ping us with #EDUCMO in the title, with a link to your LinkedIn and we’ll share. This role was moving fast so no guarantees.

Is it just us, or have Product roles gone very, very quiet?

We heard it from our PM friends first, but it seems that the industry is a bittttt quiet right now. It might be the lack of funding in the market for scaleups at the moment (our thoughts and prayers are with you dear late stage founder teams)— but it’s starting to show in the level of job postings.

So we decided to do a roundup of open Product roles, focusing on companies with strong product leadership…

• DE/Remote: My old employer, Ecosia just hit 180 million trees and they’re on the hunt for a Senior Product Manager. They’re open to remote and you’ll get to work with the excellent CPO, Michael Metcalf. Interested? Ping a reply email with #ECOSIAPM and we’ll share with the recruiter.

• Remote/EMEA: Want to pivot to AI? Turnitin which detects plagiarism and students’ use of ChatGPT is scaling rapidly and looking for a Senior Product Manager. The company has a stateside HQ, but they’re looking for a candidate based in London or Europe. Plus side — they have a female CPO, Annie Chechitelli with years of scaleup tech experience.

• London/Hybrid: There was a big loss for Germany’s tech scene last week with excellent Australian-born CPO and angel investor, Georgie Smallwood jumping from Berlin based Tier, to the UK’s Moonpig. Her Product teams love her so we dived deep into the jobs board to find an open role, and spotted a Senior Product Designer position.

• Berlin: There’s been a switch of leadership at Zolar this year, with their founder leaving day-to-day operations and additions to their finance team. Now they’re looking for a Senior Product Lead with an e-commerce background who can transfer these skills to renewables. While German would be a plus, you’ll only need English for this one.

*We’re still keen to share any junior and entry level Product roles — so if you’re hiring please share.

Learning opportunities

Some of you might be lucky enough to have a learning and development budget covered by your employer 🙏, but even if you don’t it’s a great way to start pivoting your career and growing your skillset. Here’s a couple of options to warm us up:

• 17 cohorts have now gone through Terra’s Climate Change: Learning for Action course. It’s a 12 week bootcamp focused on understanding the challenge and solutions we face. Application deadline: August 25th

• Oxford University has opened up its autumn aka ‘Michaelmas’ term selection of short courses. What’s great about Oxford’s School of Continuing Education is that they are significantly cheaper than a lot of other ‘top’ universities. Courses we like include Social Entrepreneurship, Biodiversity Loss & Recovery, and the +40 Psychology related courses that focus on everything from emotional intelligence to cognitive behaviour.

Next week

We’ll dive into PR and communications roles and talk about fellowships (not the LOTR kind). Have a cool opportunity or feedback to share? Send us an email.

Signing off from (a finally) sunny Berlin…

P.S. Got a spare second and feeling generous of heart?

Our giving highlight this week is Camfed — a nonprofit that supports girls and women. They have exceptional impact transparency, and perform well on external audits. If you can budget 11 euros a month you can support school fees for one girl for a year and provide an ongoing support network.

What to know more? They’ve written a great piece on how girls’ education is a form of climate action and their CEO Angeline Murimirwa did an excellent Ted Talk last month.