

Discover more from Startup Riders
I’m Ivan Landabaso, VC at JME.vc. Startup Riders is a weekly newsletter where I go down startup rabbit holes and share actionable insights. I also love surfing & BJJ 🤙
Summary
🏔 Individual Contributors: 3 tools I wish I had found earlier.
👋 JME Ventures: Say hello on Clubhouse Tuesday 5pm GMT+1!
💵 Recent Deals in Spain: Mjn-neuro, 2gether and more.
💭 Thinking or Reading: Physical fitness empowers the mind.
This post is sponsored by Yellow Birds Creative:
Yellow Birds is a creative agency based in Madrid & Sydney that covers all the creative needs of a business. We offer social media management, content creation, video services, product photography, branding and marketing collateral.
Our one-stop Creative Agency helps bring brands into the spotlight. We help you define and sharpen your vision, and help you bring it to live in a way that connects emotionally with your audience.
❤️ Do you want to sponsor Spanish Startup Riders? Please DM me on Twitter.
🏔 Individual Contributors
I’ve been developing a little individual contributor (IC) tool-box. My hope is that it’ll be helpful to both IC’s and managers - who often rely on overly vague advice - to navigate career decisions and conversations.
I’m aware there is a trade-off between overly prescriptive and flexible approaches to the problem of helping an IC find their “path”.
I look at a “career” as a process of self-discovery, rather than a rigid decision-making protocol one must follow / control (which is were the anxiety usually comes from).
👇 3 tools that I've found particularly impactful 👇
1. What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20
This one is great gift for your 20-something friends, but useful for all of us.
Written by Tina Seelig (Stanford Technology Ventures Program) - she offers a plethora of tactical advice for students as they make the transition from the academic environment to the professional world.
Here’s the super simple framework - which is also the central idea of the book:
Keep in mind all of these frameworks are meant to be dynamic pictures - filled multiple times over time.
Pretty self-explanatory - a good way to navigate through a career is to aim for the intersection of your Interests, Skills and Market. Granted, this is not a prescription on how to live your life - but it can help alleviate some of the “pressure”.
A few tactical pieces to implement it:
Track your 3 circles - Bookmark it on your browser: Open a Google Sheets, make three columns (Interests, Skills & Market) - and fill them (over time) with what you believe could fit each category. Bookmark it.
Track your high/low energy zones: I particularly struggled with skills, in the sense that I struggled to identify which ones I enjoyed exercising more. Keep a piece of paper next to you at work marking high-low energy zones - then update your Spreadsheet (above) over time.
Go deeper: You can try a few questions to identify your real interests aka those you had even before being subjected to (a lot of?) outside influences (i.e. as a kid).
Three things you loved before age 5 (ask your parents)
Three jobs you wanted or heroes I had before age 5 (mine were Batman and Goku)
What things did you find energising when you were at school?
2. Design your life
This one is very helpful to help you decide when / if you need a change.
This book (and also extremely popular course at Stanford) is a phenomenal resource. There is a multitude of frameworks and tactical advice, but out of all of them, my favorite is the Energy Dashboard.
The idea is super simple - every 6 months or so, map out your energy across 4 dimensions (Work, Play, Love & Health). Then time-stamp it and include a location, and make changes when/if the data shows you that you should.
Here’s an imaginary example:
3. The Job Algorithm
I stumbled across these great tactical frameworks a few years ago. I’m going to break this down a little differently than Hemant (the author).
Here’s what it looks like and the steps to follow:
Identify Jobs: Use tools 1 & 2 in this post (intersection of market, skills and interest) to figure out a few potential jobs you might possibly be interested in. Set them in the first column.
Set Variables: Map out what factors you value about and around a given job. Break it down into Professional (i.e. fit, autonomy, learning) and Personal (i.e. location, salary, time) segments.
Set Weights: Assign a weight to each of those segments (Professional & Personal) from 0 - 1. And do the same across sub-segments (aka what you care about) - see the example below.
Set Job Values: Now give a score from 0 - 10 to each sub segment for the jobs listed in column 1. For example, you might five Job#1 a score of 10/10 on fit, but a 2/10 in terms of learning potential/feedback.
Calculate Total Score: now calculate the weighted average score per Job. For the example above, for job#1, the way you find the total score is:
professional-weight *{(fit-score * 0.3) + (autonomy-score * 0.2) + …} + personal-weight * {(location-score * 0.6) + (salary-score * 0.4)}
By now you should have identified which Job might be best to pursue BUT perhaps it is not something you could (realistically?) get to in the immediate-term.
I found it super helpful to map out / visualize — on a 3 dimensional plane- what skills you’d need to get there, and what intermediate steps (including lateral career moves) you could take to get there. Here’s Hemant’s example:
Now Execute
! You can do this 2x/year to accommodate for change (ps. IMO change is great, my own visualization has zig-zagged many times just like this 👇).
👋 JME Ventures
If you are interested in learning more about the Spanish startup scene, come join the JME Ventures team for a casual coffee on Tuesday Feb 2nd at 5pm GMT+1.
This is a highly experimental session, so all feedback (especially the harsh one!) is appreciated.
💵 Recent Deals In Spain
You love startups and want to enjoy a Spanish lifestyle? Come join the Spanish startup ecosystem. Here’s a list of recently funded startups:
Mjn-neuro (Healthtech) raised €2.1m
2gether (Crypto) raised €1.5m
Yamnaya (Ecommerce) raised 350K
The Sampling Solutions (Sampling) raised €260k
Legal Pigeon (Legal) raised €200k
💭 Thinking or Reading
Physical Fitness Empowers The Mind 🧠
A healthy body leads to sharper thinking.
Monkey Business
Interesting article on economics written by the creator of Ethereum - Vitalik Buterin
Quote Of The Week
🙏 If you liked the newsletter, please consider sharing it with your friends 🤙
🌊 Individual Contributor
One of the ones I enjoyed the most, Ivan! Great stuff