NATHANIEL’S BIO
About Nathaniel Koloc.
Nathaniel Koloc is an entrepreneur, a people executive, a seasoned recruiter, and an avid outdoorsman. He is the Managing Director for Pardon, a modern family office.
Before founding Formidable, Nathaniel chaired his wife’s insurgent campaign for New York State Senate, was founding SVP People at Future Laboratories, built & sold ReWork, a purpose-centric recruiting firm, and served as Director of Talent Acquisition & Development for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. The common thread through all of his experiences has been combining insightful strategy, high-output operating principles, and effective tools to create powerful talent engines. Nathaniel’s roots are in ecology, economics, and resilience.
He holds a B.A. in Global Human Impact Studies from the University of Vermont and an M.S. in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability from Blekinge Tekniska Högskola in Sweden.
CURRENT WORK
OPERATING EXPERIENCE
Founder
Campaign Chair, 2018
SVP People, 2017 – 2018
Director of Talent, 2015 – 2016
Cofounder & CEO, 2011 – 2015
Career Experiments
Misc. Projects, 2008 – 2010
BACKGROUND & NETWORKS
On Deck Fellowship
NYC Venture Fellows
New Leaders Council
Singularity University
Unreasonable Institute
MSc, Sustainability
BA, Global Human Impact
SIT Study Abroad
CAREER GUIDANCE
You should see your career as a grand experiment, where you’re testing combinations of which work situations, roles, companies/organizations let you a) enjoy yourself, b) do things you are very good at, and c) get paid well. You can read more specific guidance of mine in Harvard Business Review from a few years ago (How to Build a Meaningful Career and Build a Career Worth Having) – most of what’s in these articles I still agree with. What I would update has to do with pushing harder on the experiments aspect: get really clear about what you think you know about the work you want to do (and in what setting), and then try to do that – but try to do it with as fast learning cycles as possible, i.e. side projects, side hustles, volunteering, even talking to people in another field – these are all underrated I think. They are much smarter ways of testing what you may want to do than interviewing and taking a new job in a new situation without having done preliminary “testing” and seeing promising results from that. Run this cycle of learnings and testing – don’t forget to learn how to negotiate salary and charge what you’re worth! – and never stop.
Here are a few pieces of content that I think are smart and worth considering:
- This series of essays by Mark Andreessen (pages 2-5) are pretty insightful, in my view.
- This post by Elad Gil, which has similar themes, is also smart and worth reading.
- This tweetstorm by Naval Ravikant is more philosophical, but full of insight.
