From Education to Enterprise — Part 2
Why Students Struggle to Build Enduring Enterprise Companies
A few months ago, I shared my observation that students are at a natural disadvantage when it comes to starting enterprise companies because they lack the context, contacts, and credibility that is typically obtained through years of operational experience. But — as demonstrated by companies like Box, Stripe, Figma, and Segment — that doesn’t mean they can’t succeed.
In the first of a three part series, I addressed context — the backdrop for ideas, innovation, and industry know-how. Hand in hand with context comes contacts. In order to get off the ground as an enterprise company, a well-developed network is crucial to finding investors, employees, and customers. In this post, I will explore how several successful founders — operators and students alike — have developed their contacts. I will then provide a few suggestions for how students can do the same.
Contacts — the door to investors, early employees, and customers
Consider Nima Ghamsari, the founder and CEO of Blend, a company that is re-imagining the future of consumer lending. Before starting Blend, Nima was an early employee at Palantir Technologies. Started by Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsedale, and some of the other PayPal Mafia, Palantir was a magnet for the Valley’s young tech talent. It’s no surprise then, that Nima met his two co-founders (Erin Collard and Eugene Marinelli) as well as Blend’s early investors (Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, and Kris Duggan) through this network. During his time at Palantir, Nima co-founded the company’s commercial group. In this role, he worked directly with some of the country’s major financial institutions — relationships that would later lay the foundation for Blend’s roster of top-tier enterprise clients.
Bipul Sinha, the founder and CEO of data storage company Rubrik, is another great example. Before Rubrik, Bipul spent time in the venture world — the ultimate networking industry. At Lightspeed Venture Partners, he led investments in notable enterprise companies including Nutanix, PernixData, and Numerify. The network he built as a founding investor at Nutanix proved particularly relevant when he started his own company just a few years later: Bipul had no trouble garnering support from his partner Ravi Mhatre (Lightspeed), Frank Slootman (Nutanix board member) and Mark Leslie (Nutanix advisor). Similarly, by working with the Nutanix team from the very beginning, Bipul positioned himself at most two degrees away from any relevant investor, engineer, or customer in the enterprise storage space.
While these examples might be intimidating to those who are just starting out, consider the following two exceptions to see that students can still build and leverage powerful networks.
Dylan Field, the founder and CEO of collaborative design tool Figma, began building out his network at an early age. In high school, he landed a job at O’Reilly Media — a position he scored because his best friend’s dad happened to work in their IT department. During his time there, Dylan met several important contacts who helped him bootstrap his career. Danah Boyd, for example, not only recruited Dylan as her research assistant at Microsoft, but also introduced him to Andy van Dam, one of the most famous graphics professors of the time. Through this network, Dylan also met DJ Patil, an early data scientist at LinkedIn, who invited Dylan to come work for him the summer after his freshman year. Through one intro back in high school, Dylan established a promising initial network that would become Figma’s earliest supporters: Patil, along with LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner, were some of the first investors in Figma. In August 2012, Dylan and his co-founder Evan Wallace (his Computer Science TA at Brown) started full-time, with a $100,000 grant from the Thiel Fellowship and support from its network of founders, investors, and scientists.¹
Segment, an analytics service, provides another example of the power of a great student-grown network. In 2011, MIT roommates Peter Reinhardt, Calvin French-Owen, and Ilya Volodarsky and their pal Ian Storm Taylor headed west to participate in YC’s summer program. The team is somewhat of a case study when it comes to finding product-market fit, hustling to talk to as many customers as possible early on and iterating at light speed. When asked how they were able to get time with these customers, Ilya noted that most came through the YC network: “the better network you have, the better you do.” In those early days, the team reached out to companies in their current batch to try their beta. From there, they simply rode the wave of network effects: “you just go find nodes in the tree and start getting them to unlock new nodes.” With this initial traction, finding investors and advisors came relatively easy. The team now has a top-tier board of directors, including Vas Natarajan, Will Gaybrick, and Ali Rowghani, the CEO of YC Continuity.
While many student founders initially lack the contacts needed for enterprise sales, Figma and Segment gained theirs organically by taking a bottom-up approach. Figma’s browser-based design tool is free for individual users (it’s also free for students). With this model, Figma was able to gain incredible adoption at the user level. Soon enough, teams of all shapes and sizes were hooked on Figma. The same is true for Segment. Just a few days after launching Analytics.js, a free, open-source library that was an abstraction for event tracking, the post jumped to the top of Hacker News, got several thousand stars on GitHub, and gained the attention of the developer community. Segment soon had more than 1,000 free customers using their product and providing feedback, which propelled through the next several years of fundraising, sales, and hiring. Today, Segment serves more than 15,000 companies and processes 80 billion end-user actions a month.²
Surrounding yourself with the right people is key to positioning yourself well as an enterprise founder, but building a network through the traditional operator path can take years. Luckily, there are a few ways students can start to build a robust and relevant network today.
While you may not meet your co-founder in your dorm room or lecture hall, there are plenty of opportunities to build your network on campus:
- Join clubs and organizations that can give you access to the people in the industry you’re interested in.
- Host meet-ups, panels, or workshops with some of the thought leaders in that space.
- Even without the support of your school, identify people you find interesting and try to spend time learning from them. As Dylan Field says, “people are pretty accessible if you just email them.”
I also recommend using summers to jumpstart your network:
- If you are not sure which area of enterprise technology you want to enter, I advise the following: spend time at a venture capital firm. Through this experience, you will build a broad set of contacts and gain exposure to all levels of the enterprise stack.
- If you know which industry you’re interested in, I would suggest something different: go work at a startup. Some companies (i.e. Facebook, Palantir, Dropbox) are known for their ability to cumulate and cultivate future founders. Try to get an internship at one of these companies and, while you’re there, spend time with others who are interested in that space. As shown by Nima, spending time at one of these companies can help you build a more specific set of network tailored to your area of interest.
- If you have an idea for the company you’d like to build, I would suggest the following: apply for an accelerator program. There are many programs that intentionally seek out and support students in their entrepreneurial endeavors. As exemplified by both Figma and Segment, these programs are unparalleled in their ability to transplant aspiring founders right to the center of an incredible network.
My hope is that these suggestions help you gain the contacts you need at any stage in your startup journey. In my last post, I will try to unbundle the concept of credibility and explain how this is the final piece to the puzzle.
Thanks to
, , and for reviewing drafts of this post, and a special thank you and for taking the time to share their stories with me.As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you liked this post, please “clap” to help to promote this piece to others or let me know your thoughts in the comments.
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