You might not be able to tell at first glance, but Rachel McIntosh’s work ethic is forged from steel. She’s an empathetic community builder & operations leader who is armored by the relentless pace of her formative years. She knows how to create value through helping others and has the determination, drive, and intangibles to go very far. She’s already putting her mind to it.
Rachel grew up in Pennsylvania. Her hometown, Altoona, is in Central PA roughly 45 minutes outside of State College, home of Penn State’s Nittany Lions. She recalled her childhood as a pretty idyllic experience. Her elementary school was in a traditional brick schoolhouse with a bell on top and her high school building was “out of an eighties movie”.
Rachel participated in more extracurriculars than anyone I’ve ever met. She was a member of 18 (!) different clubs in high school. She played the saxophone for the marching band, jazz band, and wind ensemble. She led the Mock Trial team that won the state championship her senior year. She took AP classes. She ran track & field. Rachel was “hellbent on having an impressive college application” and she did just about everything one could do to prepare. Finally, she was ready to head off to college.
Almost. Things took an unexpected turn when Rachel realized she’d need to pay her way through school on her own. Despite having received acceptances from some incredible schools, Rachel took a gap year to save up the money needed to pay her tuition. Rachel worked two full time jobs, realizing in a profound way that “you’re not owed anything in this life.” Faced with a difficult road ahead, Rachel decided come hell or high water she was going to do what she needed to do to pay for her college education. It certainly wasn’t going to be fun but, looking back, she would do it again in a heartbeat because of the lessons she learned along the way.
Let’s detail out what a day in her life looked like during that gap year. It was grueling. She would walk into Chipotle just after sunrise at 6am to help open the restaurant and work her shift which wrapped up around 3pm. Then it was time for a break. For 30 minutes. Cracker Barrel was 15 minutes away so she would drive over, change in the bathroom, and start her new shift at 3:30pm before getting off as late as 12am. That was six days a week, sometimes seven! This was back in Chipotle’s heyday and the company was giving out a ton of overtime so Rachel would take as much as she could get. She had a singular focus and went to work, day after day, with higher education blinders on.
During this year she also participated in a humanitarian trip to Guatemala, spending several weeks with the residents of a remote village near Zacapa where she worked alongside other volunteers to build houses and a community center for the village residents. This experience was a sage reminder of the privilege she experienced back home, even if her current situation wasn’t the ideal one she’d planned.
Rachel then set off to Liberty University in Central Virginia before eventually transferring to Temple University in Philadelphia. There, she majored in International Business with a focus in European Business & concentration in Marketing. She continued to work around the clock to help support her studies. Rachel transferred to Temple University’s on-campus Chipotle and began working at Anthropologie alongside adding a data analytics internship with specialty food company TBJ gourmet. That’s three jobs plus her studies, leaving little time for anything else. She would wake up at 5am and be in by 5:30am. On her “days off” from one job she would go to one of her other jobs or attend classes. If she had classes during the day, she would work at night. And vice versa. Every “off day” for one facet of life shifted her into the other, nonstop. This was still six or seven days a week. She worked her way up to become the Assistant General Manager at Chipotle while still balancing her full time studies by graduation, where she graduated with Honors.
After departing Temple, Rachel accepted a job at Amazon in Operations Management and Supply Chain. Rachel’s responsibilities covered some 1M square feet of warehouse space, learning the inbound & outbound motions of distribution for over 4M product units. The organization & documentation fit her personality well. Amazon was a fantastic place to start a career. This was also the first time Rachel only had to work 40 hour weeks. Days off felt like a new and novel concept. Rachel didn’t know what to do! It was a huge relief but…now what?
At this point, Rachel entered a major adjustment period. There was healing to be done from years spent working in the restaurant industry (carpal tunnel is no joke!), and a lot of internal exploration after years of putting herself and her social life on the backburner. Her college years were certainly formative but not in the traditional sense with which many of us recount those times. Rachel set out to “get to know herself again”, examining what she wanted out of life and taking stock of how her experiences molded her into the person she is.
In the midst of this introspection, an opportunity presented itself. Through a friend she knew from her Philadelphia days, she was recommended for a role at Venture Lane in Boston. Venture Lane is an accelerator, co-working space, and online community helping early stage B2B startups. Rachel traveled to Boston to experience the community in-person ahead of her interview and her visit convinced her that this was a team and community she wanted to join. She’s a “see it to believe it” type of person and explains that she was welcomed with open arms despite being nervous to make the jump from corporate life to working with startups. “Life puts opportunities in your path and you’ve got to take advantage when they come!” She took the leap and moved to Boston where she serves as Venture Lane’s Community Manager today.
A self described “city person”, upon moving to Boston Rachel took the opportunity to explore the different neighborhoods throughout the city. She ended up in the West End where she could be centrally located but also still have the neighborhood feel. She knows the local bookstores like the back of her hand. She likes the Beacon Hill Bookstore on Charles Street, IAmBooks in the North End which celebrates the neighborhood’s Italian heritage, and Raven bookstore for used books. She reads a book a week these days!
Boston is a good fit for a lot of reasons. Rachel enjoys running and hopes to one day run the Boston Marathon. She’s also one of “those people” who brings a hammock out to the banks of the Charles River with her golden retriever, Finn. Believe it or not you have to get there early because those trees go fast! She’s also a big food lover and is a regular at Ma Maison on Cambridge Street. “Walking in is like a warm hug” she says with a smile. Rachel has found an incredible sense of community and kinship here in Boston. She loves living in an area where academia and innovation intersect. An ecosystem ripe with opportunity, right on the water.
She joined Venture Lane at an interesting time too. In 2022, Venture Lane worked to expand their business beyond the co-working space. They launched their first Accelerator program, Venture Lane Studio, which is currently working with its third cohort. They also continued to grow Venture Lane Connex, a 1,900+ person Slack community of B2B tech folks. Today, they have almost 55 companies working out of their co-working space too. It’s been huge growth across all axes and Rachel has learned a ton. She’s gotten comfortable with not knowing everything, being agile, and balancing the community as a whole as well as the subsets within it. From someone who didn’t have a “traditional path” to where she is now, Rachel deeply appreciates that the Venture Lane team recognized the value in bringing on someone who “didn’t fit the mold”.
Rachel wants Venture Lane to be a space where every single person feels seen & supported. She makes it a point to learn about each member of the Venture Lane space and aspires to make it a safe space to build and scale a company. Beyond Venture Lane’s own robust event schedule, Rachel maintains a consistent presence in the greater Boston tech ecosystem, making connections and fostering access to startup resources. She also meets with other ecosystem partners, forms relationships with local investors, and continues to find ways to make the Community Manager role her own. She’s passionate about representation for women and underrepresented founders and funders. She wants more ecosystem members to understand what’s equitable for themselves and their startups. Being grateful isn’t enough. So many members of the community deserve so much more. Rachel also volunteers with Startup Boston in her spare time to help bring what is being built at Venture Lane to a broader audience.
Here are three insights Rachel shared with me that have informed her work and career:
People are your most important asset: “If you invest in the people around you, they will invest in you. If you make that a priority, you will reap the benefits. It feels cliche but we have so much more work to do to put this idea into practice”. Rachel adds that it’s important to take care of yourself too!
Structure is not the enemy: Rachel finds it helpful to view the world in an organized way. “Adding structure to something that feels amorphous can be difficult but there’s merit to having something to build off of. Everyone needs a starting point”. She’s seen the benefits of having both a starting point and a framework at Venture Lane with companies and members alike helping to deliver strong results. Guardrails or guidelines can actually provide a lot of freedom.
“Failure” is sometimes the greatest lesson: There have been plenty of times where Rachel was going through a situation and thought “I failed at this”. She recalls “now when I look back those are the moments that propelled me to where I am now and taught me the importance of perseverance. That’s something I notice in other people too”. We can all relate to the process of failure. It makes the human experience what it is. What’s important is to take the learnings from both the good and the bad and incorporate them as you move forward.
Rachel is interested in continuing to explore the investment world and has loved learning while helping build Venture Lane’s accelerator – the sourcing, cohort selection, investment decisions, and beyond. As someone who deeply understands the value of a hard earned dollar, Rachel recognizes the weight of both offering and taking on an investment and looks to support cohort companies throughout this process. She’s excited about what Venture Lane is building and knows that she’ll carry these learnings with her wherever life takes her.
For more about Rachel check her out on LinkedIn, at a Venture Lane event, or in your nearest Boston-based bookstore. Thanks so much for sharing. Can’t wait to see how the Venture Lane community continues to grow with your guidance and the learnings you bring to Founders across Boston in the years ahead!