Upload
maisy-samuelson
View
291
Download
0
Tags:
Embed Size (px)
DESCRIPTION
Citation preview
Consumer Internet & Mobile BBL
Consumer Internet & Mobile BBL
What you need to know to get started in Silicon ValleyMaisy Samuelson / @msamuelson / msamuelson@gmail
What you need to know to get started in Silicon ValleyMaisy Samuelson / @msamuelson / msamuelson@gmail
Topics
• Why Silicon Valley?
• Big company v. small startup v. starting your own
• Getting a job in Silicon Valley
• Classes to take
• Staying up to date
• Further learning
Why Silicon Valley?• Pros
• Leveraged
• Meritocratic (no set career path)
• Growth industry “Software is eating the world”
• Work w/ interesting people
• Flexible lifestyle (not client services)
• Cons
• High Risk/Reward (Gambling)
• Few obviously exciting companies
• Less structure/more chaotic
• Limited location choices (SF, NYC, Austin, Boston, SEA)
• Stress (sometimes)
Established Co v. StartupBigger companies: good way to start, learn best practices, established brand, meet people, little risk
Smaller startup: More growth opt/upside (if startup does well), fun work environment
Don’t work at a startup for the sake of doing a startup! What matters: 1) smart people, 2) good product 3) good brand
Don’t assume that smaller company means greater impact
Don’t get to caught up w/sector
Getting A Job• Approach companies with specific ways that you can help
solve a problem they have (i.e. wireframes for how you would improve a specific part of the site). SV companies value doers more than talkers.
• “Check your MBA at the door.” An MBA is not necessarily a positive in SV.
• Participate in Quora/Twitter
• Leverage LinkedIn (find interesting companies. Reach out to people/companies that interest you)
• Follow companies you’re interested in on Twitter
• Look at VC/angel websites for list of portfolio companies
• Make a portfolio/website/blog
• If the company not too big (e.g. <100 people) take any job and transfer internally. Don’t worry too much about seniority of original role--there’s room to grow and move!
• Network early, but realize that startup opportunities come very late in recruiting season (often May/June)
Getting A Product Job• PMs are risky hires for companies because they control
very expensive engineering resources and make decisions that can make or break a business/product. To mitigate risk, companies look for people who already have PM experience and a technical background. If you don’t have both, you need to be strategic:
• Write a sample spec for the company and make wireframes using Balsamiq Here’s a spec template.
• Exhibit these traits ... Intelligence (“you can’t fix stupid”), product sense, ability to lead engineers without direct authority. Check out Ken Norton’s famous blog post on how to hire PMs
• Get hired for an easier role and do an internal transfer (only realistic if company <100 people)
• Take the CS classes on the later slide and build something
• Get a summer job at Amazon/Microsoft. It’s useful to have the words “Product Manager” at <Company people have heard of> on your resume
• If you work at an internet/mobile company, it’s invaluable to understand how to build websites/mobile apps. These four classes get you 95% of the way there. They’re a lot more work than GSB classes, but grades don’t matter and they’re totally worth it.
• CS106a: Programming methodology in Java (take this in the spring of year 1, so you can take CS142 in the fall).
• CS142: Webs Applications (Only offered in the Fall and need to take CS106a first. This is the best class at Stanford).
• CS193P: Developing Aps for iOS
• CS106B: Programming abstractions in C++
• Learn SQL, html and CSS on your own (lots of good web tutorials)
• Check out iTunes U, Coursera
Classes To Take
Staying up To Date• Fred Wilson
(@fredwilson)
• Brad Feld (@bfeld)
• Chris Dixon (@cdixon)
• Paul Graham (@paulg)
• Aaron Levie (@levie)
• Bill Gurley (@bgurley)
• Quora
• TechCrunch
• PandoDaily
• Techmeme
• Angel List
• Crunchbase Weekly Newsletter (fundraising & acquisitions)
• HackerNews
Events
Recurring
•Hacker Dojo events
•Hackers & Founders
•Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership
Annual• TechCrunch Disrupt
• SXSW (Austin)
Subscribe to Startup Digest!!
Themes/Companies To Research
• Collaborative Consumption
• Sidecar, Lyft/Zimride , Zaarly, TaskRabbit, AirBnB
• Consumerization of the enterprise
• Asana, Box, Zendesk
• Payments
• Stripe, Square, CardSpring, Google Wallet
• Content discovery
• Pinterest, Spotify, Quora, Pulse, Prismatic
• E-Commerce
• Fab, TheFancy, Etsy, One King’s Lane, Nasty Gal, Warby Parker, Quirky,
• SoLoMo
• Highlight (et al.), Nextdoor
• Ed Tech
• Edmodo, Coursera
• Phone as remote control
• Uber, Exec, eBay Now
• Big Data
• Cloudera, Palantir
• The Internet of Things
• Nest, Lockitron
• SEO (app store and web)
• SEM (spend $20 to experiment buying google adwords and FB Ads)
• Analyze Business Models: How does X make money?
• Technology buzzwords (HTML5, JQuery, NoSQL, Bootstrap)
• Mobile
• iOS and Android platforms and apps. What does each platform allow developers to do? Characteristics of top performing apps? App stores? Download a bunch of apps and observe design/mechanics.
• Trends
• Alexa, Comscore, Compete (monthly page views, uniques visitors, time on site etc)
• AppAnnie (iOS and Google Apps)
• AppData (Facebook apps)
Topics to Research
More Reading … • Quora (Ian McAllister)
• All of Paul Graham’s essays
• David Weekly’s intro to stock options
• Blake Master’s notes on Peter Thiel’s startup class
• HBS Platforms and Networks materials
Design
• A list apart
• Dribbble
• Principles of User Interface Design