21–30 of 36 posts
I graduated in May and got a job with a startup merely because I spent my spare time building a fairly cool product built in Ruby on Rails. I would argue if you've shipped a product and can show it off, thats more valuable than having a degree from a well-known school. But my real advice: Start a startup out of college if you've got no debt and have a good idea. It is what I'm doing right now and I'm pretty sure its…
I graduated in May and got a job with a startup merely because I spent my spare time building a fairly cool product built in Ruby on Rails. I would argue if you've shipped a product and can show it off, thats more valuable than having a degree from a well-known school. But my real advice: Start a startup out of college if you've got no debt and have a good idea. It is what I'm doing right now and I'm pretty sure its…
That's the part that keeps stopping me.
I recently took the advice to contact entrepreneurs I was interested in working with on the advice of a friend. The response was overwhelmingly positive and generous.
I emailed the founders of two companies I've been following for a while (one a former YC company) simply introducing myself and asking for advice on what I should do to put myself in a position so that they might want to hire me in the future.
The response I got from both was more than overwhelming. One responded to my first email within an hour with detailed explanations of what I should be doing and what I can do in the future. Furthermore, he responded to each of my follow up questions almost instantly after receiving them.
The second responded offering to set up a skype call in the next couple of weeks to talk over my questions with me more thoroughly.
These are both guys whom I have to assume are insanely busy and get far more important emails than random cold calls every day.
I feel like a lot of people don't take approaches like this and don't reach out to people because they have the same assumptions I did. I guess all I can say is, never underestimate the generosity and outgoingness of the entrepreneurial community.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it's written in marketing speak, the kind of thing that must have been rigorously tested as some point to appeal to the widest audience but instantly turns me off. "I used to be struggling like you but now I'm on the top the world and I'm going to show you how", this kind of thing just never appeals to me even if they are sincere because of all the insincere stuff that has come before in the same format.
Excellent post on your blog regarding higher education.
Sort of a tangental topic, but I hate it when people post slides like this. These sorts of things should always work better as a blog post. If your slides are good presentation slides, they're not detailed enough to work without a presenter, and if they are they're bound to be too wordy for the actual presentation. Either way, it's not a presentation I want to be in.
Why force people to use flash to read text.
Jesus, it took 19 slides to get to the point which can be summarized in exactly one sentence: 1) Have skills Newsflash: What we call a "job" is simply the trading of one currency (actual monetary currency) for another currency (useful work). If the work you are doing does not have some element of skill then you will not get a job. If your degree supplies some of those limited in-demand skills then you may not need mo…
The tone of his writing and constant links to others with own-name domains now makes more sense... as do their Squidoo pages.
As a software developer, I would have figured contributing to major open source projects to be equivalent or better than this. Still has the same element of demonstrating your skills, but also shows that you can work in a team, do things like unit tests etc., and actually know the codebase for whatever project you contributed to.
If I ever got an applicant for a position I was interviewing for and they said, "So if you want to look at some of my code, it's available here.", and they gave me a link to a little project they work on, that ALONE would move them up near the top of the pile, even if the code was crap. Maybe it's different because of the industry I work in, but nobody seems to want to show the goods.
Out of curiosity, what industry do you work in?