Early Career

This is a cumulation of thoughts I have for ambitious college students struggling in their early career around technology, startups, and entrepreneurship. I get questions around this pretty often, so these are my thoughts so anyone can read it on their own time.

Disclaimer: This advice is biased towards startups and tech, but I tried to generalize this to apply towards any company size, industry, or adjacent career path.

Your situation

The ideal: You love thinking about your career. You're proud of what you've achieved — it's a historical representation of your hard work and determination. You're fulfilled with the work you currently do — it's interesting, fulfilling, and challenging in all the right ways. You're excited for the future even though it can be uncertain — you're eager to learn new things and take new opportunities.

The reality: Thinking about your career is stressful. Maybe you're not proud of your achievements — you feel like you could've done more by this point in your life. Maybe you don't love the work you do currently — maybe you're doing any work at all. Maybe you dread the future — it's full of uncertainty, stress, and anxiety.

If you fit the ideal, good for you! It's an amazing place to be, and an amazing feeling to feel. If you're facing the reality, this post is for you.

Failure modes

To me, failure modes refer to states of thinking that are systemically flawed. I think the problems that people face in their careers can be commonly traced back to these failure modes. But, take these with a grain of salt.

Results > merit

Problem: "I can't find any opportunities."

Advice: Companies are meritocracies (ideally). Become a hireable asset to the organization(s) you want to join.

Getting a job in competitive US markets (especially for younger students and international students) can be challenging, but it's far from impossible. I've known many young people from all ages and backgrounds that get the opportunities that they deserve, all from their intelligence, work ethic, and character.

Capitalism rewards meritocracies. Those who have extraordinary ability to create value are the ones that succeed in a merit-driven market, and they are rewarded for it. Get good at something that companies want, and getting hired will become easy.

A few rules of thumb:

• Employer: "I want to hire [your name] because ___________."
  • Can you fill in the blank? What value do you provide?
  • It should be crystal clear why a company would benefit from hiring you.
• A good hire is someone whose value exceeds their price.
  • Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
  • There are two ways to increase the delta to become a better potential hire.
    • Increase the amount of value you give. (opt for this)
      • Do better work, faster.
    • Decrease your price.
      • Get compensated less.
• Sell yourself. Demonstrate yourself.
  • You shouldn't need to fake/fluff your capabilities or persuade someone to see your merit.
  • Demonstrate your merit: build projects, put together a portfolio, write about previous experiences, etc.
• Smaller = flexible.
  • Small companies are like clay — you can mold the opportunities you want.
  • Use this to your advantage! Create the job description you want to have.
• Progress compounds over time.
  • Getting your first opportunity is harder than getting the next ten opportunities.
  • Don't give up before you get your first break.

TLDR; Be someone worth hiring. Then, opportunities will come to you.

Having high expectations

Problem: "It's hard to commit to something because I'm not sure if it's worth the time and energy."

Advice: Hold low expectations, high resilience, and a ferocious work ethic.

"One of my great advantages is that I have low expectations." - Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia

I recommend everyone to watch the full Stanford lecture from Jensen. I'll highlight the important parts.

"People with high expectations often have low resilience."

High expectations naturally induce low resilience. If outcomes miss your expectations, it can be hard to feel that those challenges are worth facing. Those with low expectations aren't phased by failure and challenges.

"Greatness is not intelligence. Greatness is character."

Natural-born intelligence and talent are catalysts for potential, but aren't realized unless they're activated.

"I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering."

Pain and suffering is how resilience and character are built. Achievements that are worth achieving is reached through strong moats of work ethic and perseverance.

Decision Paralysis

Problem: "I'm not sure if I should do A, B, or C."

Advice: Find the intersection of what you like and what is worth doing. Then, pick one.

I feel people struggle with picking what to focus on when they try to optimize an un-optimizable problem. "Should I work on A, B, or C" is not something that you optimize by gathering outside datapoints (e.g. consulting with others), but it's a personal, subjective decision.

Approach it in two steps: prioritize and select.

To prioritize, rank all your options by scoring them the following criteria:

• What do I want to work on?
  • What do I feel like doing? What's interesting to me?
• What is worth working on?
  • What will bring the most value? What is most worth my time?

To select, pick from the top of the ranked options. How many do you choose? That's up to you and your own schedule and preferences.

Completely lost

Problem: I want to do something, but I don't know what to do.

Advice: Action produces information.

It's natural to be lost sometimes. Rather than being overwhelmed with options, you feel like there are none.

"Action produces information." - Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder/CEO of Coinbase

Poke the world and see what happens. If you have no information on what to do, try doing something and see what comes up. If you don't know what to learn, go read about something random and see if you're interested. If you don't know what project to work on, pick anything and see if any good results come out of it.

The world is like a big feedback loop. The faster you can accelerate it, the more information you'll get out of it.

Lack of commitment

Problem: I don't have enough time.

Advice: Do you not have enough time? Or are you not committed enough to make the necessary sacrifices?

Everyone has 24 hours in a day. Take away ~8 hours for sleeping. What do you do for the other 16 hours? Successful people don't have any more time than you. The difference is in how that time is spent.

Take a few minutes and actually break down what you do during a day. Eating, socializing, rotting, working, exercising, and anything else. Get a glimpse into what takes up your time, and consider what changes you can make to create more time for yourself. More than likely, you'll have to make some sacrifices.

You can make time for anything if you care enough.

Wrapping up

The common theme here is merit. Markets reward those who can bring value to it, and it's the same for companies. Give value, and you will be rewarded.

To end off, some of my own opinionated advice.

• Screw networking.
  • There's a reason I didn't use the word "networking" in this entire post.
  • I hate networking, and so do many others.
  • Just make friends and be genuine. Please.
• Focus on signal.
  • Signals are social cues that signify/deter perceived value.
    • "High signal" is good and "low signal" is bad.
  • Focus on high signal activities.
    • Do good work and share about it. Make genuine relationships with other high signal people.
  • Avoid low signal activities.
    • Fake merit, waste time, be disingenuous, etc.

FAQs

To answer the miscellaneous, specific questions.

• Where do I find new opportunities?
  • Opportunities can be from both outbound and inbound.
    • Outbound: Look at job boards, newsletters, LinkedIn, your existing network, and around the Internet for opportunities.
    • Inbound: Build a brand, make a portfolio/website, distribute content about your work, build a personal presence around your work.
• How do I build a network?
  • Meet people and be friends with them. Swallow your ulterior motives.
  • Where do I meet them? Events in your area, Twitter/LinkedIn, or through your existing relationships.
• Should I focus on job applications, building a network, or something else?
  • For bigger companies, optimize for job applications.
  • For smaller companies, optimize for building relationships (not networking).
• How do I get referrals?
  • Only ask for referrals from people who can actually recommend you.
  • Don't ask random people or acquaintances for referrals.
    • (this is one my biggest pet peeves)
• How do I get an internship as a freshman?
  • Get in touch with as many companies as you can. It's a number's game.
  • Only be as picky as you are capable.
  • Be willing to work for free.
• How do I get an internship as an international student?
  • Bias against cash-constrained startups that may not be able to afford a visa. Also bias against large companies with a lot of candidate competition.
  • Sweet spot: medium/late-stage startups with solid fundraising and aggressive hiring roadmaps.