Like so many others, Conor Swanson didn’t quite know what he wanted to do when he grew up. While attending DU, Swanson (BSBA 2004, MBA 2005) had ideas about continuing on to law school, but a lunch in downtown Denver clarified his path, steering his career trajectory to something completely unexpected.
“It happened by chance,” Swanson said of getting introduced to the owner of a staffing firm. “I went to see if they could help me find an internship. I had lunch with the owner, and by the end of lunch he said, ‘Why not work for me here?’”
And so he did, learning the staffing business at the tech-focused recruiter while completing his MBA. Swanson mostly worked with early internet companies in Denver and Boulder, and he became fascinated with the start-up world in the technology space. While his path wasn’t perfectly linear—is it ever?—that lunch led him to where he is now, a partner in a leading tech recruiting agency, Code.
In between that internship and Code, Swanson left the recruiting world to sharpen his skills within the tech sector at a series of start-ups. All via his connections, a common thread in Swanson’s story, he landed business development roles at SafetyWeb and Lohi Labs. He then had the opportunity to join Self, an internet start-up geared toward helping people safely establish credit, as a co-founder. There, he got to experience seed accelerator Techstars, a prestigious Boulder-based incubator program connecting entrepreneurs, investors and corporations.
“Ultimately that company (Self) moved to Austin, and that didn’t align with my family situation and where I was at at the time,” Swanson said. “I made the hard decision to leave that role. I came back to Denver and decided to get back into recruiting.”
That’s when he joined Code, where he works with just the sort of high growth tech start-ups at which he’d spent the past several years, helping them hire designers, engineers and product managers. “Having the opportunity to get out of staffing and being a part of building a couple different companies on the tech side, I developed insight into what it’s like to be in that sort of organization and what type of individuals would do well there. I also got a mindset for the founder and what it’s like to be in their shoes,” Swanson said.
Continuing his service for early-stage tech companies, Swanson got involved with Denver Startup Week with fellow DU student Erik Mitisek. Two years ago, the last time they held the mega entrepreneurial event in person, they had a staggering 20,000 attendees. “We went from begging people to get involved at the beginning to a massive event for year 10,” he said.
Denver Startup Week, and pretty much everything he’s done since graduating, has been built around connection. His advice to students who, like him, may not know exactly what they want to do upon graduation, is to be open to networking and connections to help lead the way.
“I’m a really firm believer in the power of networking, and certainly I’ve built my career around it,” Swanson said. “My awareness of that earlier in life was not where I wanted it to be. I undervalued the value of networking as it related to an MBA program—I didn’t fully appreciate that my future career was more about who I knew, and not specifically what I studied. I wish I would have spent more time talking with people in my MBA program, just at a social level. A lot will shift around what you think you want to do, but if you can build good relationships and invest in them along the way, they sure do help as your life goes on.”