Attn Entrepreneurs: Mark Zuckerberg Isn’t the Role Model. Reid Hoffman Is. Forty-plus weeks traveling the emerging world has taught me many things. Chief among them is that most entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley learn the wrong lessons looking in. A lot of that is the fault of publications like TechCrunch: We get excited about new things. If it’s exploding like Groupon, all the better. But we even go nuts over things like Foursquare or Quora that have pretty muted user-bases.
But the bigger disservice we do is not writing enough about the boring companies who work every day to build something that becomes huge, giving the impression that starting a business is easy in the Valley. I’ve always thought of Yelp in this category. You could understand if LinkedIn was just paling next to Facebook. More than ten years ago, Reid Hoffman– LinkedIn’s founder– was one of the first people to believe in the comeback of the consumer Internet, investing in a host of startups, but putting the bulk of his money, personal brand, time and firepower behind LinkedIn.
Why Google’s hiring process is broken | Teambox Blog. Some context... Google is one of today’s top companies, thanks to their continued efforts in building the best and fastest algorithms. They have put together a yet-to-be-matched team of engineers, and I enjoy using their search and Google Apps every day. Even our product, Teambox, is tightly integrated with Google Docs and their offerings.
However, Google still struggles to reach consumers in many ways: Google Buzz failed to build the momentum to compete against Twitter, despite being shoved down our throats through Gmail. There was no community or value for users. Obviously Google has been succeeding at more things that it's failing at. A call from a recruiter Some weeks ago I got an email from a recruiter at Google. I'm writing to introduce myself, as I recently received your name from a current Googler who spoke very highly of your skills.
I have no intention of leaving Teambox, but having heard much about Google’s hiring process I decided to give it a try and experience it myself. Eric Stromberg — How to get a job at a startup if you aren’t a developer. Recently, I’ve received an increasing number of emails from “business people” looking for advice on how to get a job at a startup. Most have the same story, “I could go work at a big company, but want to join a startup. One problem: I don’t know where to start the process.” Everyone knows how to get their foot in the door at an investment bank - just apply online. At least when I was at Duke, there were hundreds of people each year applying to big banks so everyone knew what to expect.
Less clear is the path to joining a startup, especially for those lacking technical skills. What I usually tell people is that it’s not as scary as it sounds, and it is not as difficult provided you are passionate about your goal. A few pieces of advice on how to get a job at a startup if you aren’t a developer: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. I’d start by emailing a few entry-level employees at some of the companies you find most interesting. 7. Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education. Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you. I can say that with confidence because it’s about Peter Thiel. And Thiel – the PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist – not only has a special talent for making money, he has a special talent for making people furious.
Some people are contrarian for the sake of getting headlines or outsmarting the markets. For Thiel, it’s simply how he views the world. Of course a side benefit for the natural contrarian is it frequently leads to things like headlines and money. Consider the 2000 Nasdaq crash. And after the crash, Thiel insisted there hadn’t really been a crash: He argued the equity bubble had simply shifted onto the housing market. So Friday, as I sat with Thiel in his San Francisco home that he finally owns, I was curious what he thinks of the current Web frenzy. Instead, for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble.
Making matters worse was a 2005 President George W. BASES hosts entrepreneurship conference for start-ups. One hundred students, hailing from 26 different universities, arrived on the Farm on Thursday to attend a four-day entrepreneurship conference called E-Bootcamp, which was organized through a partnership between student business associations at Stanford and Princeton. Throughout the conference, students attended talks from influential Silicon Valley power players like Google vice president Marissa Mayer ’97 M.S. ’99, TiVo co-founder Jim Barton and Elad Gil, director of corporate strategy for Twitter.
They also participated in workshops that walked them through the process of creating a company, from brainstorming to user testing to fundraising. On Saturday night, the event culminated with a pitch competition where students had seven minutes to sell their start-up ideas to venture capitalists. The prize was two hours with Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm that has funded companies like Apple, Google, Yahoo, PayPal and Cisco Systems. A Job Board of the best jobs in the technology industry | NextDigest. College Grads Looking for Work at a NYC Startup? Try the NYC Startup Job Fair.
It's that time of year again, when college seniors start thinking about the next phase of their lives. In other words, that means it's time to start looking for a job, polishing up the resume, and hitting the campus career fairs. As we've discussed here before in relations to internship programs, many campus events and recruitment efforts still cater primarily to large, established companies. This can make it challenging for startups looking to hire new talent and difficult for graduates hoping to find work opportunities at small or new companies. The NYC Startup Job Fair - scheduled for the afternoon of April 8 - hopes to address this with an event expressly aimed at matching graduates with startups.
Now in its second year, the job fair is hosted by the Columbia Venture Company and the NYU Venture Company. According to organizer Alex Horn, the NYC Startup Job Fair is trying to attract a diverse group of companies this year, including green tech, fashion, and food startups. Why I decided to work at a startup after graduating. Two years ago, as a Harvard senior studying economics and math, I was faced with the inevitable decision — what to do after graduating. I was fortunate to have great options, including offers of direct admission to business school at Harvard and Stanford. But I ultimately decided to forego traditional job opportunities. Instead, I accepted a job at Rapleaf, which was then an 18-person technology startup in San Francisco. In retrospect, I have grown more resolute that my decision to work at a startup was correct.
As I’ve watched the career trajectories of many of my friends that have entered different types of jobs, I have formulated three principles of entry-level jobs for ambitious young job seekers deciding on a career track -– principles that may lead more people to opt for a startup career. Take a job where you are a decision-maker. The first principle is to join a firm that maximizes the number of decisions per capita. Evaluating other options. 3 tips every entrepreneur should know. (Editor’s note: Doug Collom is vice dean and an adjunct lecturer on venture capital and entrepreneurship for Wharton|San Francisco.
He submitted this story to VentureBeat.) Starting companies is hard. And it’s critical to make sure that your venture is pointing in the right direction from the moment it leaves the launch pad. Any misdirection or miscue on the basic organizational steps can be fatal.It’s a lot like launching a rocket aimed at the moon—if the launch is only 2 degrees off target at blast-off, it will miss by hundreds of thousands of miles. There’s no end to the advice and opinions entrepreneurs will hear in a company’s early days, but three basic rules that every company founder should take into consideration: Keep it simple – In setting up the capital structure and the first equity of the company, many founders either try to innovate or try to accommodate the wishes and desires of every co-founder and early stage employee.
The result is too much complexity. Am I a Founder? The Adventure of a Lifetime. When my students ask me about whether they should be a founder or cofounder of a startup I ask them to take a walk around the block and ask themselves: Are you comfortable with: Chaos – startups are disorganizedUncertainty – startups never go per plan Are you: Resilient – at times you will fail – badly. How quickly will you recover? Agile – you may find the real opportunities for your company was somewhere else. And I remind them that they should be bringing some type of domain expertise (technical or business) to the table. This is the minimum feature set for founders. Other Roles in a StartupGeneric advice given to entrepreneurs assumes that everyone is going to be the founder/co-founder. (And my advice to students who believe they want to do a startup but are unsure if they want to start one, is to join one that’s already raised their first round of funding.
I believe that founder, early and later stage employees require different risk/personality profile. You’re not joining a big company.