As a Marshall Memorial Fellow with the German Marshall Fund, Jamaal Glenn has had the unique opportunity to engage with leaders across the United States and Europe, exploring critical issues like transatlantic cooperation, governance, and global innovation. His experience as a fellow has been a pivotal point in his career, offering him new insights into leadership and the future of technology. Beyond his fellowship work, Jamaal is an accomplished entrepreneur, investor, and university professor. Read on to discover the prestigious fellowships he’s earned and how they’ve shaped his remarkable career trajectory.
Since we last spoke with you, you’ve accomplished many incredible things! Let’s go back to the beginning– can you tell us why you pursued Business Administration for your undergraduate and graduate degrees?
My high school English teacher encouraged my interest in writing. I decided to study journalism at the University of Missouri, the world’s first and best journalism school. When I discovered that journalists were notoriously low-paid, I looked to how I could also make money. My 19-year-old logic pointed me to Wall Street. I added a second major in finance. The goal was to combine the two: invest for money and write for purpose.
After college, I worked a few years in investment banking before starting and selling a digital media startup. But I always knew that the right graduate education in business, policy, or law would give me a dangerous combination of knowledge, relationships, and perspectives. When I applied to business school, I was fortunate to get into the Stanford Graduate School of Business. I later applied to the Harvard Kennedy School of Government during my first year of business school.
Can you briefly discuss the German Marshall Fund’s Marshall Memorial Fellowship (2022)? Why did you decide to apply to this program?
The Marshall Memorial Fellowship (MMF) had been on my radar for some time. It is one of the flagship transatlantic fellowships, where Europeans and Americans come together for leadership training, debate, and cultural and geopolitical “compare-and-contrast” while spending several weeks traveling throughout each other’s respective continents. MMF allows leaders from the United States and Europe to explore each other’s political, economic, and social landscapes through delegations on either side of the Atlantic.
MMF’s reputation is bolstered by some of its most accomplished alumni, including former Georgia State Representative and voting-rights activist Stacy Abrams and French President Emmanuel Macron.
But for the longest time, MMF felt inaccessible. Before COVID, I couldn’t imagine having the work flexibility to spend a month traveling. However, the pandemic fundamentally changed how I think about the relationship between work and geography. When the fellowship resumed taking applications after the pandemic, I was no longer burdened by the need to take time off from work to participate. I jumped at the opportunity.
These opportunities have been incredibly rewarding for me throughout my career, and MMF felt like an even higher caliber, more fully immersive opportunity to learn and travel. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine re-emphasizing the importance of the transatlantic relationship, MMF became a uniquely-timed opportunity for me to make more friends among rising leaders in Europe.
How was your experience as a Marshall Fellow? What were some highlights of the program?
Exhilarating. Over a month, I traveled from Washington, D.C., to London, Bratislava, Belgrade, and Brussels. Along the way, I had tea and biscuits with members of parliament in Westminister Palace, made a cameo on the Facebook page of the then-Slovakian prime minister, debated politics with South London high school students, and met with volunteers helping to settle Ukrainian refugees pouring over the Slovakian border.
For all the pomp and circumstance, the most impressive aspect of my experience was the young European leaders I met, both my MMF counterparts who traveled around the US, and the business leaders, elected officials, public servants, activists, and hosts I met on the ground. Several of them were recently elected to the European parliament.
Despite having worked and traveled extensively across Europe, this was my first time visiting Central Europe and detouring from tourist-filled Western European destinations.
As I wrote in my newsletter shortly after returning, “I’d only ever once been farther East in Europe than Germany. Most of my perceptions of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe had come from movies, typically U.S. action movies portraying some “American” hero — think Jason Bourne — traversing narrow streets or dark, crowded nightclubs chasing or being chased by assassins.
When I landed in Belgrade as the third stop of my three-week European tour, I was excited to see this part of Europe beyond Western film stereotypes and intrigued to explore a region that has spent roughly 15 of the last 100 years fighting literal wars. I have childhood memories of adult discussions and news reports referencing places like Yugoslavia — the Central and Southeastern European nation that encompassed many of the region’s now-separate countries for more than 70 years ending in 1992 — and people like Slobodan Milosevic — the former President of Yugoslavia who died while on trial for war crimes.
Serbia is a stark reminder that part of “American” privilege is rarely being in places where bombs have fallen during your lifetime as part of an international conflict between nation-states.”
In addition to seeing new places, I was fortunate to make new friends and allies among Europe’s best and brightest while also strengthening my frameworks for thinking about topics like artificial intelligence, US-European technological cooperation, and transatlantic corporate governance, all of which are central to my work.
How was your experience as an MPA Prep Fellow?
MBA Prep is the flagship program of Management Leadership for Tomorrow, better known as MLT, one of the country’s premier career and education-focused nonprofits. MLT focuses on equipping underrepresented professionals with the networks and skills for corporate senior leadership. For me, as an MBA Prep Fellow, that meant spending nine months with incredibly talented early career professionals navigating the MBA admissions process.
As is true with almost every fellowship I’ve been fortunate to participate in, the people are the prize. That meant meeting new friends and future classmates and building relationships with MBA students, professors, admissions officers, and others.
MLT provided me with unparalleled access to people and knowledge during the application process, and there’s no doubt that it gave me an advantage in getting into Stanford.
As an accomplished venture capital investor, can you tell us how you came to be an investor?
A few years after business school, I worked for a very well-financed media company. I ran the corporate development team, where we tried to predict the future of the media industry and use the company’s money to invest in and acquire other complementary companies that would thrive in that future. Also, I enjoyed making bets on the future and thinking about industries at a macro level. I decided that my next job would be more focused on these activities.
I found a venture capital fund affiliated with one of my alma maters. So, I cold-emailed some employees and landed a part-time gig advising the fund, which eventually became a full-time job.
Over the last decade, I’ve twice worked for organizations investing tech billionaires’ money. Through working for these individuals, I developed unique insights into how to leverage their capital to invest in startups shaped around my worldview.
In 2022, I started a company that advises these types of organizations—family offices, philanthropies, and impact investing firms—and invests alongside them in startups that are building the future I envision.
I think of venture capital as developing strong beliefs about the future and finding and investing in entrepreneurs who can make that future happen. For example, I believe that the COVID pandemic accelerated several decades of remote work trends in a few short years and that the cascading effects have, among other things, shifted corporate power dynamics in favor of employees over employers, forced the transition of city centers from commercial to residential, and begun to decouple work and geography. I find and invest in startups building the technologies and systems to usher in this future.
Finally, what closing thoughts can you share with our readers?
The one-job-at-a-time model of employment ushered in by the Industrial Revolution is ending for knowledge workers. Highly productive people and those with lots of professional optionality will increasingly derive their income and professional fulfillment from many simultaneous jobs and sources. I’ve called this “career diversification” or the “portfolio career.”
Large companies are perpetually reorganizing themselves at the expense of employees. Many small organizations are one exogenous shock away from financial ruin. Too many startups are in an endless feast or famine cycle in which they overhire employees to justify raising large amounts of capital, only to lay people off at the first sign of market unease. At the same time, the universal normalization of remote work has given office workers much more control over their time. The most productive workers will ask themselves why they are trading their money for time instead of their output.
This labor market volatility and the scheduling flexibility facilitated by remote work will cause tremendous growth in the number of people to diversify how they derive their income and how they pique their professional interests. This means people having more than one “job” alongside the proliferation of side hustles, moonlighting, freelancing, “overemployment,” and the myriad work arrangements people aren’t yet discussing.
I advise those whose professional appetites aren’t satiated by their day job to ride this wave. Fellowships are a great way to do that.
Interested in some of the fellowships that Jamaal has won? Be sure to check out the database for similar programs!
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