Stanley Ho, an HBA '21 graduate, initially pursued a career in consulting before obtaining a Visa and diving into the complex US start-up world. Stanley currently works on Member Strategy at samaritan, a platform leveraging community to empower people in crisis towards stable housing.
A journey toward passion
For Stanley Ho, HBA '21, an interest in sustainability didn't strike until the first year of HBA1.
In the early days of his undergrad, Stanley found it easy to desire and pursue the same career path his peers aimed for. For him, consulting initially sounded appealing because of the perceived prestige that came with the role.
After not landing his dream role in that field during his HBA1 summer internship, Stanley re-evaluated his priorities and began looking to other career interests – namely, social impact.
Growing up in an active, diverse neighbourhood in Toronto, Stanley saw firsthand the power of community and support between people of all races, socioeconomic backgrounds, and religions. It embedded in him a desire to see and spread the same degree of inclusivity and community in other facets of his life. Upon reflection, Stanley sought a similar atmosphere in his work with the London Social Value Fund (now known as the London Propel Impact Fund).
Early on, one of Stanley’s misconceptions about sustainability was that it was not lucrative enough for him to live out his young adulthood in the downtown of a major city. He proved himself wrong. Post-HBA, Stanley took on a role at KPMG’s Sustainability & Impact consulting function in Toronto.
At KPMG, Stanley learned about corporate sustainability’s long, iterative nature. He felt that consultants, or consulting-equivalents, should play a part in speeding up industry adoption of sustainable practices. At the perfect time, Stanley met Atmos.ai, a venture-backed start-up trying to figure out exactly how to do this. With his interest piqued, Stanley packed up his life in Toronto and moved to Nashville.
New Ventures
After connecting with Atmos’s founders, Stanley began as a Product and Growth Associate, working to develop a cost-effective, automated AI toolkit for companies pursuing sustainable business practices and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) regulatory compliance.
After a year of building Atmos’s idea into a tangible product, building investor relationships, and securing the firm’s first sales, Stanley shifted gears and moved to Seattle. He now works with and builds strategy to engage individuals in crisis at samaritan, a platform that brings social and financial support to the unhoused.
Despite making up a small percentage of the national healthcare load, individuals facing housing insecurity comprise one of the highest-cost populations to treat in the US. Samaritan helps address this by empowering these individuals to receive the socio-financial assistance they need before they develop or have medical conditions worsen. Samaritan generates positive housing and support outcomes while enabling healthcare and insurance providers to save on their cost of care.
Moving from the corporate sustainability space to a social aid start-up has been a big jump, but Stanley loves that his efforts lead to powerful, immediate outcomes such as providing food, shelter, transportation and listening ears at critical junctions in peoples’ lives. Stanley has made sacrifices to be in this role but is satisfied as he doesn’t want to “lead his life down the most predictable, convenient, or prescribed path, without trying something different at least once.” Across his start-up roles, Stanley has learned the importance of experimentation, craftiness, empathy, and personability when executing at a business. Based on his experience, he has begun to believe that one of the most common and critical tools in the start-up and venture space is “a decent chunk of delusional self-confidence.” He believes that what separates good from great in the sector is how that is managed and leveraged.
Making the international leap
Stanley notes that he made the jump to the United States and secured a work visa by having a unique skill set demanded by start-ups, being shameless, and being relentless in his outreach. He found that start-ups were more willing to sponsor Canadian workers if the applicant’s pitch was strong, as they were hungrier for talent and less risk-averse than massive corporations.
To differentiate yourself in corporate sustainability, where Stanley started, he recommends learning the standards, frameworks, and best practices within the sustainability realm, including ISSB, SASB, GRI reporting, GIIN, and more.
However, his new start-up role has required a whole different skillset - empathy, emotional intelligence, resilience, transparency and candor. Of course, these are in addition to the ability to analyze, plan, and execute strategies over short periods of time. Stanley believes that the sensitive nature of samaritan’s work has required his team to see each other as “humans first, colleagues second” and that it has helped immensely during difficult times.
Throughout his time in the workforce, Stanley has learned a great deal about people. He recalls his time in the HBA program and he and his classmates assuming leadership and communications-centric courses were not as immediately applicable as classes that taught financial modelling. Stanley now firmly believes that the HBA1 course ‘Leading People and Organizations’ has been the most influential course in his career. Stanley notes that “workplaces are, at their core, relationships; the professional veil doesn’t get rid of that. Like any relationship, you need to decide if putting in effort is worth it, learn to communicate well if so, and acknowledge that sometimes things genuinely just don’t work out, and that that’s totally normal and okay”.
Finally, Stanley notes how important it is to make time for reflection to ensure that your priorities are actually ‘yours,’ especially knowing the amount of impact peer pressure has on decisions made during the HBA program. “You’re the only one who has to live with yourself forever. It’s a waste of how wonderfully unique of a human you are to never let yourself ponder what kind of forever you’d like.”
Feel free to reach out to Stanley Ho on LinkedIn and click here to learn more about samaritan.
To connect with fellow alumni, join Ivey's LinkedIn Sustainability Community.
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