Erica Kangas is an engineering leader, voracious learner, and feminist builder who seeks out the biggest levers to move the world. Today she is part of a small but mighty team as the Head of Engineering at hyper curated investment connection & fundraising guidance platform Scroobious.
Born and mostly raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Erica’s parents moved to the U.S. from Indonesia to pursue graduate degrees. Her mom was an environmental & chemical engineering PhD student and Erica’s childhood memories consist of running around engineering buildings at the University of Michigan to check on Mom’s experiments. No surprise that Erica’s younger sister is a life sciences professional.
One really strong childhood influence was a move back to Indonesia during her middle school years while the country was transitioning from autocracy to democracy. Eventually making her way back to Michigan, Erica was a dedicated student and serious musician. She played the bass clarinet in between math & science classes, dabbling with the mock trial team too. She was always looking to dive deep in different disciplines.
After graduating from Michigan State University with degrees in math and economics, she took a year off to visit her stepfather’s family in Sydney, Australia. She began working at a consulting firm focused on the evaluation of nonprofit and government programs and it was Erica’s job to leverage data to measure the impact of their programs.
When she returned back to the U.S., she wanted to apply her data science skills to nonprofit research and evaluation. After spending a summer in Boston in college, Erica moved to the Hub full time to work for the AmeriCorps program, City Year.
Erica was tasked with using data and analytics to improve and understand the effectiveness of nonprofit programming in classrooms & after school programming. It was an incredibly foundational experience with learnings she still uses in her career today. City Year does important work across some of the most systemically under-resourced public school districts in the country and as a program evaluator she had a front row seat to the tangible evidence of impact the organization had in communities across the country.
She could make the numbers dance on spreadsheets to tell a great story, but the extended audience was limited. If she could only make the data more user-friendly and widely accessible. But she wasn’t a developer and internal resources to develop her technical skills were limited.
Ultimately, Erica knew that she would need to be able to develop her own applications to have the reach she aspired to achieve in her career. So she left her role at City Year to attend developer bootcamp Launch Academy.
After graduating from the program, Launch Academy introduced her to ed tech startup Testive. Erica was looking for an entry level Full Stack Engineer job and Testive was looking for a Front End engineer but they thought she had promise so they extended her an offer.
Testive gave her the opportunity to try different things and learn how to be a Full Stack Engineer, experiencing the ups & downs of startup life alongside an incredible team. Next she went to competitive intelligence startup Crayon, another employer partner of Launch Academy, to continue to grow her skills. Crayon had a really strong technical culture and Erica wouldn’t be the engineer she is today without the opportunity to work at Crayon.
Then she stumbled across a job posting from Dough, an ecommerce platform supporting women-owned businesses. Founded by Anna Palmer & Vanessa Bruce in Boston, Erica was inspired to join to help support female entrepreneurship. She reached out cold to the team to help them build a marketplace that could drive revenue for women-owned businesses. The crux of the marketplace was helping every day consumers have an intentional hand in driving revenue to female-owned retailers in apparel, home goods, beauty products, and more.
Building the company right into Covid, they pivoted to a dropship model to counter the challenges the pandemic presented. Dough later was acquired and Rebecca Liebman from LearnLux reached out looking for an engineering leader. Erica interviewed and was hired as their Director of Engineering (while pregnant!). LearnLux has an incredible mission to provide financial wellness as a workplace benefit for organizations with diverse and dispersed workforces and she learned a lot there.
In September of 2023 a federal appeals court blocked the Atlanta-based Fearless Fund from moving forward with a program that awards funding to Black women-owned businesses after Edward Blum’s challenge on the basis of it being “racially exclusionary.” Hopefully you know this story! Erica was flabbergasted. How did we get here? What had she been missing? It was infuriating.
She wondered what Scroobious was doing about all this. Erica had seen Founder Allison Byers present at an angel investor pitch event when they presented right after Dough, building something different but powered by the same mission. Heading to their website to get caught up, she noticed they had posted a Head of Engineering role. On an impulse, she drafted up an application and slept on it.
But this is too important of a mission to sleep on. Erica joined Scroobious as their Head of Engineering to help lead the technical efforts of this very early stage team shaping up capital markets culture for underrepresented founders. She is formally in an engineering role but is naturally wearing a lot of hats across engineering, product, and interacting with partners across the board to better understand what customers need when they use their technology.
Scroobious encompasses a very large community on top of their 3 full time employees and Erica is responsible for the entirety of their technical infrastructure. She is working every day to build out their marketplace product, making sure Scroobious Founders are having a smooth experience so they can effectively onboard their pitches onto the marketplace and connect with investors.
Erica continues to spend time answering tough questions about the business and communicating effectively to equip founders with the resources they need to be successful. Scroobious’ founder community grew 75% in 2023 and is made up of 63% female founders. In her spare time, Erica mentors for Hack.Diversity to help break down barriers and build access for the next generation in tech.
Cataloging Skills & Connecting the Dots
From nonprofits to startups, Erica has always cataloged her experiences. She keeps references & resources on hand from prior experiences to keep memorable frameworks from the earliest days of her career.
From her days working in program evaluation, she developed an approach to research (and note taking) that she has carried forward. There is an important process of reflecting and taking stock, like a version of an academic carrying out a literature review. Where are we? What do we have / not have? What are our questions? What are we looking to understand? Every time she embarks on a meaty project, the first question she asks is “what are our goals”? Then, what are we looking to accomplish? By having something to ground herself in, she can begin to move forward.
That work has paid off in building a portfolio of experiences and an archive of resources. When she talks to career switchers today, she worries that people may make the mistake of leaving their past behind when they don’t recognize that they bring transferable skills and experiences that they can continue to build on.
At Scroobious, she wants to understand the different attributes of founders and successful pitches to effectively connect founders with angels. For example, investors look for coachability as an attribute & trait, so she has thought back to her nonprofit days when they measured grit and growth in students and volunteers. It’s obviously a bit different but there are always overlapping threads to pull on.
Problems Not Yet Solved
Instead of sharing three career insights, Erica offered up three unsolved problems that drive her work as an invitation to think about and join in tackling these issues. Because learning never ends and we have a lot more to do in these areas!
- How do we build AI that won’t just repeat the mistakes and mirror the worst facets of our past?
- How do we continue to develop the field of software engineering such that it is sustainable, equitable, and accessible?
- How do we effectively combat exclusionary systems when many of our institutions no longer have the appetite or have their hands tied from doing so?
Erica continues to take an agile approach to her career. Based on her past choices, she is driven by the prospect of making an impact.
She and the team at Scroobious are focused on helping increase the share of funding to underrepresented founders magnitudes above its current share of capital allocation. Startups founded exclusively by women account for less than 2% of VC dollars today (src). Even in Boston, the third highest venture capital deployment region in the U.S., the numbers are even lower (src). Erica feels very lucky to have worked for four Boston-based, powerhouse female founders when the odds are so probabilistically low. Hopefully not for long!
If you want to learn more about Erica you can find her leading Engineering at Scroobious, running around the Boston area with her family, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We look forward to seeing the impactful mission(s) you continue to contribute towards in the coming years!