maxpalmer.co

An Explanation of My Career Up to Now

Resume’s are boring and often don’t tell why you’ve chosen to do what you did. So here I’m going to explain my resume and why it looks like it does.

I’ll start in college. I choose to go to the University of Oregon because I wanted to go to a big football school with a traditional greek life atmosphere and a sports business program. It checked all three of those. I’m a big sports junkie, always have been and always will be. So 19 year old me thought… it’d be cool to work in sports. Well, I was right, it was cool but not all that lucrative and required a ton of hours. While at Oregon I had four separate internships in sports. I spent over three years working with the Oregon Football program on various things. One summer I interned with a USL Soccer team, Orange County SC. Two other summers I worked at the Manning Passing Academy and my final summer of college I interned for the LA Rams. They were all incredible experiences where I learned a ton and met cool people. But as college came to a close my interests shifted.

I became fascinated with startups and entrepreneurship. I also wanted to get experience in something outside of sports. A craigslist ad for a small eCommerce company led me to Tower Paddle Boards. At the time I joined, a five person company that quickly became three because business was bad. I wore so many hats at Tower. From shipping to email marketing to SEO development and logistics with our manufacturer in China I did it all. It was a great experience but didn’t pay well so I was ready to move on to something new.

I’ve heard from many how valuable sales experience is. After all, everything is sales. I also wanted to work for a real startup, one where I could get equity and actually help scale the company. This led me to CloudKitchens. A Travis Kalanick led stealth startup disrupting the restaurant industry? So cool, I thought. And… it was. I began as an SDR, and quickly became the best SDR in the company. I learned how to talk to people, how to phrase things, how to organize myself, and of course, how to sell. I became an AE and got closing experience. I spent two years at the company and enjoyed it all. I worked for some incredible managers who I’m still in touch with today. It was a great experience. By the end however my passion for ghost kitchens died a bit. It’s a cool product but not something that I’m deeply passionate about so I decided it was time to move on.

I took time off before getting my next gig to travel. I backpacked Europe for two and a half months. I had the time of my life and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I’m going to write about that more in depth on this site.

Over the past year, I’ve become fascinated with web3. I follow some incredibly smart people on twitter who’ve convinced me that a decentralized future is inevitable. I think the technology is interesting. Taking power away from big tech and putting it into the hands of individuals is a promising idea. Helping people all around the world become part of the global financial market is great as well. There are so many applications where this technology can make a positive impact and I think it would be prudent of myself to be apart of it early in my career.

So that’s where I’m at currently. Looking for a job in web3:)