This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Harvard chapter.
Ryley Reynolds is everything we grew up wanting to be (at least, after our days of dreaming of becoming princesses and mermaids were over): confident, personable, and career-savvy. We sat down to interview her about what it was like leading Harvard Student Agencies, the largest student-run company at Harvard — and in fact the world — and the mentors and mentees she met along the way.
FROM HARVARD TO VENTURE CAPITAL
“I was a class of 2015 grad, and was in Leverett house, Psych with a secondary in Econ, but now I am living in New York, and I work for Insight Venture Partners, which is a technology-based venture capital and private equity company here in New York. So it just means that I am paid to talk to amazing companies and founders [HC: so cool] — yeah, it’s really cool — I get to talk to these incredible founders who have such passion for what they’re doing and hear about how they’re growing and potentially how we can plug in and help them really speed up and accelerate that growth. It’s amazing; it’s very fun to work here. I actually work with several other Harvard people, but the [former] president of WIB [Harvard Undergraduate Women in Business] Juliet Bailin is also my co-worker. We go and get coffee during the day and catch up. It’s a really supportive environment. So, Venture Capital as a whole is, I think, only 20% women. Anywhere from 6 to 20 percent, depending on which study you look at. So it’s really great to be at a firm which has women vice presidents, that has several women analysts, and that’s been really good from that side.”
FINDING HER NICHE
“But then… back to college. So, my freshman year, I was involved in pretty much everything, from the College Events Board, to First Year Social Committee, to doing things in conjunction with the UC [Undergraduate Council], you know, just all of that. And I also did Harvard Student Agencies. And so then, I come around to my sophomore fall. I think I just realized that you can’t do everything, and it’s better to have depth than breadth. So I quit a bunch of stuff, which is the first time in my life I’d ever quit anything. Well, maybe not, maybe like ballet or something. *laughs* But it felt big.”
HARVARD STUDENT AGENCIES
“Anyway, I really just got very involved with HSA, which was so incredibly rewarding. My freshman year I was manager of what’s now called Group Gear, which does custom apparel: t-shirts, mugs, and things like that. Then, my sophomore year, I was managing director of The Harvard Shop, which — I don’t know if you’ve ever been to or seen The Harvard Shop which is on Mt. Auburn Street right next to Insomnia Cookies — do you know which one I’m talking about? [HC: of course!] So I was very fortunate to be able to open that location. So it was very cool because I got to work with the designers and design the whole thing, and go find cool antiques to put inside. It was really fun because that was the first time I had really managed people, too, and I found this passion for mentoring and watching others grow.”
ON MENTORSHIP
“It was a really unique place to be able to find that when I was nineteen. And so that continued when I became president of HSA my junior — well, I guess you’re elected your junior fall and then your junior spring you become president — I was put in the very fortunate position to be able to work with so many really cool students on campus, and to be able to see them throughout the course of the year during my three years at HSA, and see them totally transform and grow into their own, which was very, very rewarding, and sometimes I still try to foster it in other ways today. Actually I still keep in touch with several of the people who either worked for me or worked with me — well, definitely the people who worked with me. One of my best friends, Peter, he was at HSA with me the first two years, we’ve been to maybe 15 countries together. Something crazy. [HC: Wow] Yeah, we’ve travelled during the summers together. He’s wonderful.
And in terms of mentorship, and I think this kind of speaks to females, I think it’s really important, especially on Harvard’s campus, for women to mentor other women. I think that’s so huge to be able to have that. Especially because, you know, there might be social channels where that works out, but to have that in a more academic or workplace structure is really cool. I have mentees that are now seniors and are applying for jobs. It was so exciting, I would walk them through case interviews and things like that. One of my mentees called me at like, maybe 11:30 the other night and I missed the call but she left me this frantic voicemail that said ‘Ahhh! I just got accepted to my dream job’. [HC: What a great story!] It is. It was so cool. It was really cool to be able to be in that position. That’s something that’s really exciting about women in business, that we have this great opportunity to help, mentor, and sort of push women along into these leadership roles, and it’s so cool to watch.”
HC: Can you think of a time when you were on the receiving end of that at Harvard?
“Oh yeah, yeah definitely. Actually, I wouldn’t have been involved in HSA had it not been for someone. I was actually going to go to Wharton, and this is a story I feel like I tell all the time. I really loved business, and I was going to go to Wharton, and then I came to Harvard’s visiting weekend, and I was at HSA cleaners, and there was one of those info sessions where they give out, you know, burgers, things like that, raffles. And I met this woman names Libby Shuman, and she is two years older than me, or I guess, three. Three years older than me. And she said, ‘Oh, Ryley, don’t go to Wharton and learn about business, come to Harvard and run a business’ and I was sold. …so, I came, and joined [HSA] my freshman year, and Libby became one of my mentors. I would meet with her. In fact, I just met with her in Paris in August. We were there at the same time, and she gave me advice before starting my first job. I think what is really unique is that there’s such a Harvard experience, and especially within HSA… you can really have a lifelong connection with someone who’s been your mentor. And I’ve had many, many more female and male mentors.
I think what’s really nice about Harvard Student Agencies in particular is that there’s this natural structure: there’s the president who can be your mentor, and you have a manger, and you can grow into those roles. But even in other organizations — I’m in Harvard Alumni Association. There’s a committee for the board of volunteers, essentially, and I’ve been on that since I was a freshman, and now I’m on it on the alumnae side, and there’s a woman who’s a vice president on the HAA board, and she’s class of 2010, maybe, she’s about five years older than me… and she’s become my mentor through that… Anyway, it’s very nice to have that long chain of structure here at Harvard.”
THE BUSINESS SCENE AT HARVARD
HC: So, what’s your take on the business scene at Harvard? Did you see it changing during your time here? Especially with regards to women in leadership?
“The business scene at Harvard, as a whole, is definitely there. There’s this huge undercurrent and you just kind of have to know where to look. So that was one of my goals, to get more people plugged in if that was something they thought they had a lot of interest in. What was really cool was to watch more interest coming out of that. US- 36 [“Innovation and Entrepreneurship: American Experience in Comparative Perspective”, a class taught by HBS faculty which is rapidly becoming more popular among undergraduates] had, what, 150 people sit in on the first day, or something crazy like that. It really just shows how much of a drive there is. I was also a course assistant for a course taught in the Spring, which was a non-credit course taught by Bob White, who is a professor over at HBS, and then a doctoral business school student named Pam. And so Bob and Pam taught this class. And it was cool because even though it was non-credit, there were still, I think 150 people who took this class, once a week for several weeks… really engaged and interested students.
Oh, and the iLab has been awesome in driving new women. And I really loved the iLab. I’m a big proponent of theirs. I think they have driven interest in business at the undergraduate level, and not only that, but they’ve connected that across different schools… In terms of women in business, I think what’s really great is that, not only is there Women in Business, the actual [undergraduate student-led extracurricular] group, and I have the pleasure of working with Juliet [WIB’s former president], and I know that’s always growing every year, but there’s just more women that are joining these organizations, and they’re saying ‘Hey, I have this startup idea, I’m going to join Paul Bottino’s class’, which is this research based class [“Engineering Sciences 95r: Startup R & D”, in which students get to launch their own startup], I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it.
I had a great friend named Lexi who’s a senior now this year that had a startup… called Wardrobe-A-Week. So it’s really cool to see that she had this great idea of, ‘Hey, why don’t we get more women who are engineers and founders together and have informal lunches and things like that?’ There’s this supportive element of helping other women that are interesting in computer science or startups or technology or business, and hopefully that continues to grow as there’s more and more women that get into even groups like Veritas Financial [Group]. My little in my sorority… was vice president of VFG. I think there’s always room to grow though. We obviously can’t rest on laurels.”