Rich Headley
- Chief Product Officer
- Moth+Flame
School Information
School: University of California, Los Angeles
College Major: Business
Years at College Works: 2006 to 2007
Career Information
Working For: Moth+Flame
Title: Chief Product Officer
Industry: Software
Brief Description of Duties / Responsibilities:
Empowering organizations to assess and understand operational risk at scale while helping their people develop their communication and persuasion skills. Moth+Flame is a Generative-AI-powered learning platform delivering immersive, photorealistic, Hollywood-grade extended reality training and coaching proven to increase learner satisfaction, performance, and retention.
What Has Been Your Proudest Accomplishment Post-CWP?Leading the first Signal Company in the California Army National Guard to deploy to Iraq, and bringing every soldier back home with me.
College Works Career Impact
In one sentence, what has CW meant to you?
Integrity: Being able to look in the mirror and tell yourself you finished what you started, gave it your all, and didn’t listen to the people laughing along the way… whether you hit your goal or not.
How did your CW experience impact your career? Immediately after graduation? Now?
My College Works Painting experience gave me basic sales skills that help me build relationships and relate to people; confidence to know that an opportunity doesn’t always come knocking at your door — it comes after you knock on someone else’s door.
What was the greatest lesson you learned from your CW experience?
Tell your friends and family all about what you intend to accomplish; it’ll drive you that much harder to achieve it and prove the naysayers wrong. Trust me — people laughed in my face when I told them in January that I was going to make $25K by the end of the summer. But I did it, partly just to spite them.
Advice
What advice do you have for potential CW participants? Current CW participants?
To potential College Works Painting participants: Ask yourself if the opportunity cost of losing most of your weekends and weeknights, among other luxuries, is worth the life-changing confidence you’ll build through starting your first business as a college student while your friends are playing video games and sleeping in. To current College Works Painting participants: Celebrate successes and learn from failures. Finish strong; Don’t lose sight of the reason why you had this crazy idea in the first place.
What’s your favorite memory from CW?
A Russian painter calling a safety harness the safety. Yes, I must put on safety so I do not ski from roof!
Last words of wisdom?
They’re not buying your (inexperienced) paint job. They’re buying your hunger for success.