Future of Work: Career Navigating, Community Building, and Personal Branding, with Ruben Harris of Career Karma

The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing

Justin Gordon (@justingordon212) talks with Ruben Harris (@rubenharris), Co-Founder and CEO of Career Karma, which is helping over 1 million workers navigate their careers every month through advice and coaching. By offering free coaching and peer mentorship, Career Karma has grown to over 150,000 members from every background and profession. Through their directory of 9,000 bootcamps and trade schools, career switchers discover training programs by comparing courses and reading student reviews.

Ruben Harris is a Bay Area transplant from Atlanta, Georgia where he served as an Advisor for Forge and organized Atlanta's first Healthcare Hackathon. Over the past couple of years, Ruben has worked with academics, organizers, politicians, and union leaders at Hustle, Honor and AltSchool focused on improving their personalized outreach, healthcare and education.

Ruben began his technology career working in Partnerships and Sales and later Co-Founded the Breaking Into Startups Podcast to demystify the process, resulting in a social media reach of ~3 million people and invitations to be a Contributor for TechCrunch and Black Enterprise.

Prior to working in tech, Ruben worked as an Investment Banker. During college, Ruben organized 50+ events for non-profits, athletes, and celebrities including Tyrese, Kim Kardashian, and Jay-Z. Ruben has been playing the cello for ~25 years, taught music, performed in venues all over the world - including Carnegie Hall, and landed placements from Def Jam. He is also an active member of the NAACP.

Website: Career Karma

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rubenharris

Twitter: @rubenharris

Instagram: instagram.com/rubenharris
Email: [e-mail]

Show Notes:

• What Career Karma is and how they’ve expanded and evolved in recent years
• How the student loan bubble and “the great resignation” have led Career Karma to work more closely with employers
• Career Karma’s secret sauce of community building
• How social audio rooms have played a part in the growth of Career Karma
• The Breaking into Startups podcast
• Ruben’s view on audio, communication, and community in the Future of Work and Learning
• How Ruben has approached personal branding and taking control of your narrative
• Relationship building on the internet
• Ruben’s advice for what employers and recruiters need to do differently to identify and develop talent
• The 110 initiative
• Education as an employee benefit
• Ruben’s perspective on juggling part time roles and the freelance economy
• Career navigating as a social experience
• Social capital and virtual currency

More about the show:

The Vitalize Podcast, a show by Vitalize Venture Capital (a seed-stage venture capital firm and pre-seed 300+ member angel community open to everyone), dives deep into the world of startup investing and the future of work.

Hosted by Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing at Vitalize Venture Capital, The Vitalize Podcast includes two main series.

The Angel Investing series features interviews with a variety of angel investors and VCs around the world. The goal? To help develop the next generation of amazing investors.

The Future of Work series takes a look at the founders and investors shaping the new world of work, including insights from our team here at Vitalize Venture Capital.

More about us:

Vitalize Venture Capital was formed in 2017 as a $16M seed-stage venture fund and now includes both a fund as well as an angel investing community investing in the future of work. Vitalize has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

The Vitalize Team:
Gale - https://twitter.com/galeforceVC
Caroline - https://twitter.com/carolinecasson_
Justin - https://twitter.com/justingordon212

Vitalize Angels, our angel investing community open to everyone:
https://vitalize.vc/vitalizeangels/