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Lara Sheldrake
🎤Speaker - Founder - Mentor - Community Expert - Top 20 most influential female founders of 2020 - 1:1 & group workshops
Professional Background
Lara Sheldrake is a dynamic and accomplished consultant, community expert, and entrepreneur deeply focused on fostering human connections through community-led growth. With a wealth of knowledge and expertise stemming from her early career in social media, Lara has dedicated her professional life to understanding how communication impacts community building. As a person who believes fervently that "no one is an island," Lara advocates for the importance of collaboration, trust, and shared experience within business environments.
Her multifaceted career includes a variety of roles and experiences that underscore her commitment to promoting community. Lara founded and runs initiatives like Give A Shit, which serves as a platform for purpose-led founders. Here, she nurtures a community that values making a positive impact while simultaneously cultivating profitable enterprises. The community hosts events and a podcast named #GAStalks, which fosters discussions about the intersection of purpose and profits.
In addition to her entrepreneurial ventures, Lara is passionately dedicated to closing the gender gap in entrepreneurship. She is the founder of Found & Flourish, a thriving business network that supports women and non-binary individuals by offering productivity frameworks, inspiring events, and resources designed to empower them in their entrepreneurial journeys.
Her ability to engage communities extends to her role as a frequently invited speaker at panels, podcasts, and other media platforms. Here, she shares her insights on community dynamics and advocates for women in business. Lara challenges the conventional landscape by promoting innovative methods to leverage community strength to bridge opportunity gaps for future female leaders.
Education and Achievements
Lara Sheldrake is well-educated, having earned a BA (Honours) in Communication and Media Studies from the esteemed University of Brighton. Her academic pursuits didn't stop there; she also completed an NVQ course in Business at Brighton MET and a Diploma in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) at Kingston University. Demonstrating her diverse interests, she pursued a Diploma in Biomedicine at CNM College of Naturopathic Medicine, showcasing her commitment to a holistic understanding of various fields.
Lara’s professional journey is marked by a series of noteworthy positions and significant contributions to the community and business landscape. She has held a variety of influential roles, including Community Host, Editor, and Event Facilitator at Give A Sh*t, where she helped craft community engagements tailored for socially conscious entrepreneurs.
As a Business Mentor and Workshop Host at Roundhouse Trust, Lara further honed her skills in guiding new business owners in developing their ideas into successful entities. Moreover, her time as the Chapter Director at Startup Grind allowed her to access a network of startup enthusiasts, whereby she curated events to foster learning and mentorship.
Lara's impressive resume also includes stints on the Advisory Board at THE VISION and roles such as Founder & CEO at Found & Flourish, Digital Director at Santa Monica Talent, Executive Consultant at Sphere, Advertising Practice Lead at Salt, and Social Media and Project Manager at Message Digital Ltd. Her versatility and ability to adapt across various functions have made her an asset in each of these roles.
Over the years, Lara’s brilliance and contributions have been recognized widely. She's honored to be listed as one of the top 100 female business leaders in the UK by f.Entrepreneur's #ialso initiative. Additionally, she was named 'One to Watch' by the Alt Marketing School and recognized as one of the top 20 most influential female founders by Startups Magazine. These accolades reflect her continuous efforts to inspire and uplift others in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Notable Collaborations and Clients
Throughout her illustrious career, Lara has partnered with numerous esteemed organizations, enhancing her credibility and broadening her impact. Some of her significant collaborators include industry giants such as Mastercard, NatWest, and the UK Government. She has also worked with esteemed educational institutions like Ravensbourne University and participated in transformative projects with recognized brands including Penfold, Xero, StartUps Magazine, Forbes, Marie Claire, and Techround. These collaborations illustrate her capability to bring innovative ideas to fruition across various sectors and audiences.
Lara's diverse network enriches the communities she builds, allowing for ideas to flow between sectors and creating an environment ripe for innovation and growth.
Commitment to Community Growth
Committed to making a difference, Lara champions the notion that businesses need to be community-led. She believes that the synergy between businesses and their communities leads to sustainable success. By cultivating genuine relationships among founders, teams, and customers, she helps organizations harness the power of connection, ultimately driving growth in an authentic and values-aligned manner.
Her workshops and training sessions are tailored for startups and business owners, where she facilitates deeper connections with their audience and between potential collaborators. Through her leadership at Found & Flourish, she has inspired an entire community of women and non-binary entrepreneurs to thrive amidst challenges in the business landscape.
As a mentor and consultant, Lara takes pride in supporting professionals at different stages of their entrepreneurial journeys, further extending her impact on building sustainable and engaged business communities across the UK and beyond.
With an unyielding drive for community connection, Lara Sheldrake stands as a transformative force in the business environment, turning her passion for communication and connection into action. Her efforts pave the way for future business leaders, ensuring they have a supportive community as they navigate their paths, achieving their dreams without feeling alone.
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Clay is a relationship management platform that serves as a personal CRM, helping you organize and deepen both personal and professional relationships. It functions as a beautiful rolodex and CRM available on iPhone, Mac, Windows, and web, built automatically to help manage your network efficiently. Unlike traditional address books, Clay centralizes all your contacts in one place while enriching them with additional context and features to help you stay thoughtful and connected.
Clay works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Clay offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
- Smart Search: Allows you to search using natural language like "People I know at the NYT" or "Designers I've met in London"
- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Clay is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Clay is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Clay as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Clay offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Clay takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Clay encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Clay work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Clay is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Clay is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Clay is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Clay offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Clay offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Clay for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Clay accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Clay offers extensive integration capabilities. Clay introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Clay supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Clay also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
Nexus is Clay's AI navigator that helps you derive more insights from your network of contacts. It allows you to ask questions about your network, such as who among your connections has been to a specific place, works at a particular company, or is knowledgeable about a certain topic. Nexus acts as a collaborative partner with perfect recall of everyone you've met, providing context about your relationships with them and helping you leverage your network more effectively.
Clay makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Clay's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Clay is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Clay stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Clay excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Clay is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Clay offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Clay's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Clay has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Clay is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Clay beneficial.
Clay offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Clay offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Clay's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Clay offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Clay focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Clay also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Clay offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Clay isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Clay instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Clay is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Clay can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Clay is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Clay's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Clay has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Clay a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Clay's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Clay's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Clay has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Clay's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Clay as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Clay eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.
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