I recently gave a presentation at the University of Chicago on how startups can optimize each stage of the customer funnel, and that talk was surprisingly well received. The slides from the presentation are below – I hope you find it helpful.
When I was a freshman in college I started my first company running my own painting business. Every weekend during my spring semester, I took the Greyhound bus 90 minutes down to where my parents lived and spent the weekend knocking on doors trying to convince people to let me paint their house. I managed to sell around $50,000 worth of work – not bad for an 18 year old.
I hired a bunch of my buddies who had as much experience as I did (which was none) and made every mistake you can make as a business owner. I ended up firing my friends and completing the last couple houses on my own. Standing on a ladder in the August sun painting while your newly unemployed buddies are at the pool isn’t fun.
In spite of that, starting that business was the smartest decision I made as a young adult. I had three internships at ad agencies in subsequent summers, but none of them came close to helping my career as much as my crappy painting company.
Don’t Get An Internship. Start a Business.
If you’re looking to break into the business world (particularly the world of startups) and are having a hard time finding an internship, I suggest you stop looking. In fact, even if you think you have one lined up but haven’t committed yet, consider changing your plans. Start a business instead.
A traditional internship certainly has upside. You learn skills specific to a given career and get to execute them on a small scale. You get a foot in the door and hopefully impress your boss enough to want to hire you down the road. All good things.
But I’d argue a typical internship doesn’t give you the same value for your time as venturing out on your own. The amount of learning and growth you experience in your own company is orders of magnitude higher.
In particular, I think there are three critical skills you’ll pick up – skills that can be broadly applied to anything you decide to pursue next:
- You’ll learn how to sell
- You’ll learn how to manage others
- You’ll learn how to create value for others
A few weeks back, a friend of mine was talking to me about the end of a relationship he had been in for a few years. As he was describing it from his standpoint, he said she “couldn’t just love him for who he was.”
That same week I had another conversation with someone who had lost his job, apparently because of his attitude and inability to get along with some of his colleagues. “I was just keeping it real and saying what’s on my mind,” he told me. “If they can’t respect that, I don’t know what else I could have done.”
There is a pervasive view that people need to accept other people unequivocally for who they are. To expect you to act in a way contrary to your nature or to change who you are as a person is a completely unreasonable demand.
I couldn’t disagree more, for four reasons:
- There are aspects of your character or life that aren’t awesome.
- You are not one person.
- You are not immutable – most of the traits that make up who you think you are? They’re changeable.
- It is appropriate for people to expect things of you, to want you to be better than what you are.
Last week I was asked for my resume for a speaking engagement at a local university. Unfortunately, I didn’t have one. Haven’t for years.
I’d argue that not having a resume is a pretty good indicator you’re on the right track in your career, and is a great professional goal to set for yourself.
Most great jobs never make it to a job board. A few make it to a recruiter. But most of the time, great jobs are acquired through a network. Smart executives resort to job boards and the like once their network has already been exhausted.
Keep reading…
The summer before my junior year in college, I interned for the head of economic development in my hometown. My boss was a former Marine with an MBA from Harvard. He was a short, strong black man who always wore a perfectly pressed white shirt and a blue suit.
He took everything he did very seriously, and expected his team to do the same. But he was also happy to spend considerable time with me in spite of his busy schedule.
He was full of wisdom – not just opinions, but genuine wisdom. Wisdom earned by clawing his way out of a bleak future in a small North Carolina town. Wisdom earned fighting for his country, saving men from his unit and watching others die. Wisdom earned by working his way into Marquette and then Harvard.
I admired him tremendously.
The interview that changed my life
One of the best pieces of advice he ever gave me was during my interview with him. He asked why he should hire me, and I said that I would work harder than anyone else he was talking to.
He told me that it’s great to say that, but I need to do better. I need to show, not tell.
And then he said 100 words that changed my career.
“You should hire me because I will work harder than anyone else you’re going to talk to. On Sunday evenings I process all of my email and write out my goals for the week. I show up an hour before everyone else each morning to make the coffee and get my most important task for the day done. I spend as many lunches and breakfasts as possible with prospective or current clients. And I take the local train instead of the express so I can write thank you cards or notes to clients. That’s why you should hire me.”
Hard work is undefeated
Those words make the fuzzy platitudes that usually pass for interview responses sound silly. I’ve tried to emulate these 100 words in my career and I think it’s had a lot to do with whatever measure of success I’ve managed to eek out.
As an employer, I can say confidently that if anyone ever said something remotely like this to me I would end the search and pay them whatever they wanted.
Of course, you have to live up to it.
When I was in college I was a TA for a class called Profiles in American Enterprise. Every week the CEO of some large corporation (Nissan USA, Flextronics, etc.) would come talk to the class, and the TAs would get to grab dinner with them after.
During dinner the subject of work/family balance often came up. And it wasn’t pretty. Divorce was common. Missing kid’s events or games was the norm. Men who prided themselves on their ability to move mountains got sheepish describing the fissures and faults in their home lives.
They had constructed their lives in a way that lacked margin.
Keep reading…
In the last few months, I’ve found myself in dozens of conversations with friends, colleagues and acquaintances who have had tremendous difficulty trying to do what they love.
These aren’t stupid people, and they aren’t just looking to make money. Many of them have worked hard, pursuing degrees in interesting subjects, seeking noble professions, genuinely looking to make a difference. But as they leave school with a degree and a pile of debt, the jobs they want aren’t there.
As they round into their thirties, they find themselves working in jobs doing something very different than they hoped, usually for less money, and usually in fields they aren’t really passionate about. What happened?
I think they were lied to. You can’t be anything you want to be.
Keep reading…
In 2004 I moved to New York to chase a girl. I landed a position as an account manager for a startup doing university marketing.
I was hired to manage client relationships, but I really wanted to be involved in the creative department. I had dabbled in design in college, but had never done client work.
So I offered to work for free.
Keep reading…
What makes someone a “deep” person?
How many deep people have you known in your life? For most of my adult life I’ve wanted to be deep, but i didn’t really know what it was.
In college, I thought it meant saying things that sounded smart at parties to people who were drunk.
After college, I thought it meant writing things that were self deprecating and introspective, or talking about God or philosophy at a bar in Manhattan until 2 in the morning.
Obviously those aren’t the marks of a deep person. Those are the marks of someone who likes hearing the sound of their own voice.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned a little more about what it means to be deep. And while I don’t embody any of it particularly well, it has served to focus my energy and attention, and given me something concrete to aspire to.
Keep reading…
It’s a familiar story – you post a position on various job boards, get bombarded with resumes (many of whom obviously didn’t read the job description), and have to spend way more time than you’d like sorting through them all. You take hiring seriously, and you of course want to sit down with a short, highly qualified list of people. But getting from 200 candidates down to 10 is time you’d rather spend elsewhere.
This is the problem we were solving at Brill Street, a hiring startup I where I led product development a few years back. We discovered a consistent pain point at the top end of the hiring funnel and set out to solve the problem using an algorithm.
Using a combination of experience, education, skills, competency and culture, our system was able to take the 15,000 candidates we had in Chicago and tell you which would be the best fit for a given position. The system actually worked, too.
But building a system like this is expensive – you need to know algorithm design, machine learning, statistics. You need multiple developers working long hours for several weeks. Not cheap.
Luckily, you can get most of the way there. You don’t need lots of time or money to build your own candidate screening system. In fact, you can reliably screen candidates for any position for less than $100 and less than seven minutes of your time.
Keep reading…
