My advice to everyone about breaking into tech/ VC

Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn get onboarded as Nooglers. Good for them!

I’ve reached an age where I’m often asked for advice on various career paths (which just means that I’m pretty old). I had a bit of a random career path myself, and so it’s often difficult to give relevant advice based on my own trajectory.

However, I get asked the same few questions over and over again, and over time, I’ve started to have stronger thoughts. This is an attempt to get some of these thoughts on paper in case they are useful to others:

I’d love to get into VC, but I don’t know where to start. What should I do?

VC is a weird business. The firms are very small, and they are generally untransparent about how to get a job (they are not like McKinsey or Goldman Sachs, where they will do mass campus recruiting, and onboard massive staff each year. Having said that, there is a bit of a pipeline at the “normal” career inflection points (undergraduate ⇒ analyst; MBA/PhD ⇒ Associate, etc). Many firms clearly value people who have spent 2 years getting trained at a top i-bank or consulting firm (in general, i-bankers map better towards later stage VC; consulting firms towards seed stage VC). For people who are curious on what pathways prominent VCs took, some of our summer interns even wrote a blog post about it.

Outside of taking advantage of the standard recruiting channels, and networking like crazy (because VC is definitely a network business), here are my two pieces of slightly less obvious advice:

• VCs are very coin-operated; the currency is deals: all venture capitalists live to invest in great companies. Ideally, they get to “discover” a company before anyone else knows about it. People who want to break into VC should be leveraging whatever networks, datasources, research centers, etc., that they have access to to find interesting founders. If you do a good job of analyzing why a given company is interesting, the VC would likely want to work with you on the deal. Do this enough, and you will start to build a relationship with both founders and VCs, and eventually the transition into a fund (or even running your own fund) becomes much smoother.
• As a side note to the above, if you just don’t enjoy “the hustle” of meeting with potential founders, trying to get in touch with relevant VCs, etc., then I have news for you: that’s a lot of the job of being a VC. So the secondary benefit of starting to work in this mode is that you’re actually trying the job on for size. This is actually one of the great benefits of this job– anyone can just get started with a significant part of the work (that isn’t the case with trying to break into– say– i-banking. You won’t just start running spreadsheets on random companies and sending them to Goldman expecting to get traction)
• Own a space; share your thoughts: there are so many interesting places to invest. It is great to pick an area that you like and go as deep as you can. Did you study food science in school? Great– there’s a whole industry around this. Did you work on “industrial transformation” for a couple of projects at BCG? Same.
• I would just get started blogging about the area that you’re focused on. What are some of the interesting companies in the space? How did they get started/ where did they come from? What seems to be the big, unsolved problem in the space? Are there incumbents that appear vulnerable? It takes a long time to build up a following, but probably not as long as people may think, if they’re consistent about adding their thoughts. And, even if you never gain much of a following, it is good to get your thoughts on paper– I find that this is another good test for a potential investor: do you have anything to add? Do you have anything to say? Staring at a blank piece of paper is frightening; it’s even more frightening to share your thoughts publicly.
• The best case scenario (if you’re doing this transactionally) is that VCs and founders start interacting with you, and it gets you a giant step closer to where you want to go. Even if that doesn’t happen, it allows you to do better work for when you do meet founders/ VCs that are interested in “your” area.
• Worst case, you spend some time thinking about an interesting (to you, anyway) area, and no one really cares. Definitely not the end or the world.

I’m thinking about getting a job with a start-up; any recommendations where to look?

I get this one a lot, especially from people coming from undergrad and MBA programs.

Everyone is different, and I think that it’s useful to understand if you’re more of an “early stage person” (ie., seed-to-series a start-ups), where there will be a ton of chaos, and a high probability of failure, but where the upside could be tremendous), or a mid-to-later stage person, where the company may already have 500 to several thousand people, and have processes pretty well ironed out.

For most people towards the beginning of their career, I’m more comfortable steering them towards the mid-to-late stage companies. For one thing, at early stage companies, (a) they aren’t hiring many people; and (b) they are generally looking for experienced people– they don’t have a training program.

This later point is key to me: I’m a big believer in having mentorship, especially early in ones career. I feel very fortunate to have started my career at BCG, and very fortunate that my transition into “US Tech” came at Google. I feel like I had a lot of opportunities for mentorship and formal training.

I remember being in a meeting at Google, and Jonathan (“JR”) Rosenberg, who was the head of Product, was talking about how to juice your career. JR is an incredibly funny, cut-through-the-noise kind of speaker. He said something like the following: “it’s honestly not so hard. Just pick a pre-IPO company that’s growing like crazy, and then ride it through the IPO. And then do it again”.

Huh. That does seem pretty easy, and pretty great.

My ex-classmate Jeffrey Bussgang (who founded a great venture firm– Flybridge Capital Partners– and teaches about entrepreneurship at HBS) publishes a “Rocketship List” every year that is basically that: hyper growth pre-IPO companies.

So, that’s 90% of my advice:

1. Look up the latest rocketship list from Jeff
2. Filter for geographies/ sectors that you like
3. Figure out if you’re connected to anyone at these places (warm recommendations/ referrals will go a long way)
4. Apply for these companies’ jobs*

JR is right: it should not be that hard.

*There is a little bit of a short-cut to this method. Larger VC firms usually have “platform teams” that will include a “talent team” — these are the people who are responsible for recruiting talent into their portfolio companies. You can look through their portfolios for likely matches for you, and then write directly to the talent team (they will almost always have their contact information listed on the VC website).

I’m currently in consulting/ banking, but I’d love to work in product management at a tech company. How do I make the transition?

A lot of consultants in particular who are interested in jobs in tech would like to join the “PM track”. There are definitely some degrees of overlap: a PM does have to enjoy working on product strategy, which usually starts with sector analysis, competitive analysis, customer analysis, etc. At Google, it was fairly common to find PMs that had both studied CS/ engineering as undergrads, but then did a 2 year stint at a consulting firm (this is actually the path that the current CEO, Sundar, took).

There are a number of formal onramps for PMs, and most large tech companies have a batch recruitment process. However, there are generally few PM jobs at any given firm: at Google , the standard ratio was 1 PM for every 10 engineers. That’s a good thing: the worst thing is when PMs are filled with plans on what to build, but there is no one to actually build anything. That would be a crappy job.

I think that there is a lot of fetishization of the PM role, because it has the reputation of being a “mini-GM” role. First, I don’t think that this analogy is accurate (I think that a PM is more of a “servant leader”, if anything), but also, I think that there are a lot of other great roles that have some degree of overlap: product marketing manager, sales strategist/ops, and many others that get to use strategic thinking alongside product thinking. So, my first piece of advice is: look for other, larger pools of jobs that also take advantage of your skills.

Related to this is my second piece of advice: sometimes it’s easier to pivot on one foot at a time. My path into product management came through BizOps and Strategy at Google. I had been a BCG consultant earlier in my life, and the work that the BizOps team conducted at Google was very familiar to me. I thrived in that role, and eventually moved into a product role (to be honest, I was a pretty lousy product manager; I learned a lot, and I think that I was a lot better when I joined Drawbridge as VP, Product, but I probably should have knocked myself downward a bunch of steps at Google to learn the ropes of being a PM). Many other former BizOpsers, though, became terrific PMs– they got to know the team that they eventually joined through being the strategic partner, and then eventually took over a product (btw– I also wrote a short post on the role of BizOps at early stage start-ups). BizOps/ strategy groups are also quite small, but at least if you’re applying as an ex-consultant, you will be able to get through the interviews, and do well on the job from day 1 :)

To me, that is a HUGE thing.