I spent 8 years in the Boston area as a student at Harvard and MIT and graduated in the depths of the Great Recession. Prevailing job advice at the time was, “If you get an offer, take it.” There wasn’t much room for subtlety in decision making. Times were tough.
Thankfully, the economy has recovered somewhat, and the technology industry in particular is hiring like mad. Many students find themselves in a situation where they don’t know where to start their job search, and practical advice on campus is typically hard to find.
So, on a visit to Boston last week, I presented a simple framework for making the tough tradeoffs that are often necessary in scoping a job search. It may be a bit “101” for some of you, but I’ve been encouraged to share these thoughts since many of you may be looking for your first job in tech.
Behold, The Career Tetrahedron:
A regular tetrahedron is the simplest of the five Platonic solids and consists of 4 equilateral triangles and 4 symmetric vertices. I have a particular fondness for the tetrahedron. It forms the structure of many of life’s important building blocks (water, methane, ammonia cation), as well as the crystal structure of the elements Silicon and Carbon (diamond phase, not graphite).
The symbolism here shouldn’t be lost on you. The four vertices (product/problem, geo, role, stage) are structurally sound and symmetrically positioned, meaning that you need to think about trading off one vs. the other. Calibrating your own preferences with respect to each of these vertices is the first step to any job search. I’ll go through each one by one below.
It all comes down to what fascinates you. Fascination is the difference between intellectual and emotional interest. I know lots of smart people who are interested in many things, but their heart isn’t in all of them. If you have a bunch of problems that are intellectually interesting, which of these do you find yourself reading or thinking about in your spare time? Which of these could you pursue every day, and it still wouldn’t feel like work?
I’ve long been fascinated by what makes make people choose certain products over others and build purchasing habits over time. Part of this comes from my family, which has been in retail in one way or another for roughly a century. I’ve also been fascinated by the idea that machines are becoming more like humans every year and, in particular, that they can increasingly see and understand the world around them. Commerce, marketplaces, computer vision applied to digital media, VR, AR, and transportation — these are all areas I focus on as an investor because they fascinate me and are changing the world we live in.
For technology companies specifically, any given role generally falls into one of these three buckets:
- Sell: you’re interacting directly with customers and partners, either generating leads (marketing), closing deals (sales), finding new revenue opportunities (business development), or working on retention (customer success). The types of folks who tend to do well in this role are outgoing, with strong empathy and process orientation. In this role, you spend a lot of time “outside the building” working in the field with customers.
- Build: you’re deciding what to build and how to build it. These roles include product management, engineering, design, and any of the roles internally that support the product organization. If your motivations are more external than internal, then product management can be a great fit, but if you’re not comfortable spending a lot of time with users, one of the other “build” roles may be better for you.
- Operate: you’re deciding how the company itself is run. In a way, the company itself is your product. That includes all other roles: finance, HR, supply chain, analytics, logistics, business ops, etc. With a few exceptions, most of these roles are internally facing and work well for folks who are quantitative, detail-oriented, but aren’t externally focused.
You need to take an authentic look at which of these categories best fit your personality. Introverts generally make poor sales people. Folks with poor customer empathy generally make bad product managers. The quantitatively challenged don’t do well in supply chain or logistics. Don’t pick a role you’re not suited for. Only you will know at the beginning, but others will quickly realize.
Note that “advise” isn’t a role in tech startups. If you want to be a banker, or a consultant, just know that you’ll be getting involved much later in the life of a company, and not as an internal employee. The “strategy” role doesn’t exist either, unless you want to be CEO!
The stage of a company is an important factor for people starting out in technology. I am in violent agreement with Wealthfront (see Career-Launching Companies 2017) that the ideal profile for most students is a company between $20–300M of run-rate revenue with a growth rate of at least 50%. These mid-stage, revenue-generating companies strike a nice balance between giving you enough headroom to get promoted and take on more responsibility over time and providing enough organizational support and mentorship to develop your current skills.
If you instead join a true startup, you won’t have much of a support system beyond the small team present at start. And frankly VC’s lose money at least half the time, so you have at least a 50% chance of picking a company that goes belly up (assuming it’s venture funded already).
If you join a large company, you’ll have a ton of support, but likely won’t work on something hugely impactful. The regimented training programs of a Facebook or Google (RPM or APM, respectively) can be good first steps, but these large organizations can often be tough to navigate once you’re out of the program, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll be working on something that excites you.
Your own personal circumstances and risk tolerance may push you to one side or the other of the stage spectrum, but I encourage most people to stick to the middle if possible for that first gig.
Geography is often overlooked as a criterion, but it can be really important. Choosing location will determine the opportunities that you see. In technology, it should come as no surprise that the Bay Area dominates. Around 60% of Wealthfront’s 2017 and 2016 Career-Launching Companies are located in the Bay Area. I haven’t run the numbers, but I suspect that the percentage of market capitalization of these companies is 80%+ of the total:
That’s not to say there aren’t high quality companies outside the Bay Area. We’re proud investors in the Los Angeles (Snapchat, Honest Company, Whisper, Zest), NYC (Giphy, Mic, Cheddar, Hungry Root), Boston (Evariant), Toronto (VarageSale), Chicago (GrubHub), and London (Blockchain) ecosystems. But be aware that these ecosystems are several multiples smaller and tend to cluster around particular sectors. So picking geo often influences your choice of product/problem.
My main point is this — few people get all 4 vertices to work in their favor right away. I’d recommend that you pick 2 that are “deal breakers,” and then be open minded for the remainder. You may in fact see new opportunities in a geo or role, for instance, that you may not have otherwise considered had you not relaxed those restrictions.
The right way to use the career tetrahedron is to frame the tough tradeoffs you must make as you set out on the job process. If you’re aware of these tradeoffs and make them early on, a set of new possibilities could open up for you.
Happy job hunting, and if you found this post useful, please send it to a friend who is starting his or her job search!
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