Amelia Friedman

Tell us about your background: What are you doing now and where did you get your start?

Right now, Amelia is the co-founder and COO of Hatch Apps a company making it possible for anybody to create and deploy application software without coding. Amelia first met her co-founder, Param, at the Halcyon fellowship. Param pitched the idea to Amelia and they started Hatch shortly after. The team also participated in the YC fellowship the following year, a program to help early stage start-ups grow and scale.

Before that, Amelia was the Executive Director of the Student Language Exchange, a language education nonprofit she founded while an undergrad at Brown. Within a year of graduating, the organization grew to operate programs in 32 languages (e.g. Bengali, Haitian Creole, Vietnamese) in seven cities.

For Amelia, communities are everything. She is on the selection committee and a mentor for the C.V. Starr Social Innovation fellowship, a community that has motivated and inspired her every day for the past four years.

Amelia also founded the Vinetta Project DC and currently sits as the DC Board Chair. In her role at the Vinetta Project, Amelia supports female founders, especially those in tech. The organization now grants a $20K cash prize to a local female founder and engages with 150+ founders and 100+ investors annually. She has been able to help DC-area female-founded companies raise millions in seed-stage funding.

 

Detail a day in your life — from wake to sleep.  

When hard work needs to be done, Amelia is no stranger to the early mornings. She’ll often get up before the sun to work through tough problems or do some creative thinking about the business. Before heading into the office, she carves out time to be with her fiance. From 10am to 5pm, Amelia works alongside her team. While she always devotes some time each week to communicate and maintain relationships with investors and customers, the majority of her time is spent focused on operations and product.

Amelia is a leader in the community and constantly engaged in different events and organizations. This means she’s often at events each night and concludes her day at around 10:30pm.

Her weekends are for recharging. Amelia focuses on relaxing and gathering energy for week ahead.

 

According to the Gallup BP10 Strengthsfinder, a tool to help leaders understand their strengths at work, what are your top 4 entrepreneurial strengths?

Amelia’s top Gallup BP10 Strengthsfinder are; selling, risk, knowledge, and confidence. She takes calculated risks but knows she works well with disruptive thinkers and those who naturally build partnerships.

 

How do you believe you use your strengths in the context of your work?

Recruiting is a form of sales or ‘selling’ and that skill has helped Amelia get good talent AND good media relationships built. Where she wouldn’t call herself a traditional ‘sales’ person, she knows she can sell ideas and concepts to people which has been tremendously helpful in her leadership role. Her ‘knowledge’ strength has been an asset in assessing the risks that she wants to take. As someone who leads with ‘knowledge’, she can gather the right information about the risks she wants to take in order to be successful.