Q&A with investor turned tech for good entrepreneur, Claire Shorall, CEO of Topknot
Image courtesy of Claire Shorall. Claire Shorall and Brook Osborne, co-founders of Topknot.
Before working in VC, you created a tangible impact in the CS education space. How did you get your start?
I remember going to an Obama rally in 2008, while I was a senior at Rice. He just so happened to be talking about domestic service, and I was so enthralled by him and the political movement that I ended up applying for Teach For America. I didn't have a strong sense of that being a good fit for me personally, but I just had the drive to do something bigger than myself. So I moved to Oakland in 2010. I was initially teaching bio and a physiology course. But by the end of my teaching career, I was teaching bio, calculus, and computer science. I was like this one-woman nerd show.
In my second year as an AP bio teacher, I had kids saying they wanted to get into medicine. I was pouring over the research on how to get these historically underrepresented students to and through a STEM field in college. Almost uniformly, all research said they had to have exposure to calculus. A month later, I was teaching calculus. The same sort of thing happened for computer science. I was taking kids to hackathons and kids were just so enthralled by it that I also ended up teaching CS.
CS education sort of became my calling card. I eventually won a national teaching award, and remember feeling demotivated at first, because I thought 'oh I'm at the top? Well, how do I keep learning, and what's the next attempt to create impact?'
After that, I decided to create an impact at the district level by pushing for CS classes to be implemented across the district. My big thought was that CS couldn't be an elective. I wanted schools to think of CS as they would think about math. Unless CS was implemented across the board, then I wasn't interested in supporting it.
I’m grateful to say that my model of operations has been reciprocated in a lot of places, and I've done a lot of work writing out playbooks so that other school districts can do the same.
There was actually a moment when Melinda Gates was giving a keynote speech at Grace Hopper. Her press team tweeted at me since Melinda had mentioned my work during the keynote. That was a trip of a day on Twitter.
Image courtesy of Claire Shorall.
How and when did you decide to make the switch into VC?
After working as a teacher and administrator for eight years, I was itching for a change.
I asked 2 of my mentors to write letters of rec for business school, and they intuited that I would hate it. As luck would have it, my mentor's twin was building a community and the business model would be a VC fund, and that is how I got my foot in the door within the VC community. I went into it with the mindset and lens of wanting to learn as much as possible from early-stage startups. I eventually realized that despite the incredible opportunity I was given, I was more energized by the work I saw entrepreneurs doing than I was with investing.
What’s Topknot’s origin story?
Topknot fell out of a couple of different things but ultimately, for me, during my time as a teacher, I had witnessed spectacular young people who frankly had fewer resources and support, and who navigated systems the best they could, but largely without privilege. Many of them don't realize that the people who supposedly ‘made it’ have entire support structures around them.
For both my co-founder Brook and me, we wanted to make this coaching system accessible by bringing it downstream. We knew we wanted to remove the cost barrier by creating a coaching system that is both high-tech and community-powered. The programmatic piece is focused on peer groups. What I love about coaching is that it’s a space for getting clear on what you want and going after it, it’s different than therapy or mentoring.
Courtesy of Claire Shorall.
You found a gem of a cofounder. How should entrepreneurs go about finding theirs?
I think people overemphasize the search and then fall short on designing their relationship. On the surface, I had the perfect setup. I knew my person for 6 years. We had a friendship rooted in collaborative work. She had seen me execute. I had seen her execute. This isn't a friendship that became a working relationship. It was a working relationship, that became a friendship, and then became a deeper working relationship.
We didn’t take the decision to work together lightly. We took the better part of 2019 to discuss our values, learn how we make decisions, and how we handle conflict. I really wanted to know who I was possibly working with for the next decade, and she felt the same. I think the depth of the relationship has to be mutually agreed upon.
Oftentimes people look for a team for the wrong reasons. People may pick someone because they're technical. I can't think of a worse reason to jump on board and build something if you think of someone just as a skillset. In sum, be hyper-intentional about what you actually need.
And finally, how do you hope Topknot will enact social change in the coaching space?
The current industry works really well for the people it's designed to serve. If you have access to it or have the spare budget for it, it was designed for you. If you don't have knowledge of it and don't have traditional resources for it, there are very few incentives in the current state of the market to go after and find you.
The best coaches aren’t sharing their journeys or giving advice. Honestly, I’m fucking over advice. You know your life best, and with coaching, you get unleashed and are given the space to understand who you are and what you want. You learn about you - what makes you tick, feel fulfilled. I’m so bullish on what we’re doing. I see a world where women know what they want and have the skills to go after it with purpose.
We are designing [Topknot] for people who haven't had access to it previously. We're making it something that meets people where they are - something more ephemeral, community-driven, and centering around imparting skills to utilize on yourself and others.
My hope for Topknot is that it changes the conversation around support and that it rewrites people's understanding of the roles of different relationships in their lives. We try to get way too much out of our friendships and families. Everyone deserves a learning space.