Deciding where to work can be hard. Here’s how I chose Wealthfront.
Given that the majority of us spend the preponderance of our waking lives working, the questions of what to work on and who to work with…
Given that the majority of us spend the preponderance of our waking lives working, the questions of what to work on and who to work with are important ones. I have written before about the strategy and tactics that I used to actually get a job with the company I wanted but I never shared the thought process that went into deciding what that company was to begin with. I’d like to rectify that omission by laying out my framework for deciding where to work and why in a brief series of four questions.
Caveat: This approach applies if you want to join a startup or young company. If your goal is to join an established firm, then considerations such as brand and economics will likely be more important to you than the factors that I think should be considered when deciding to join an earlier stage enterprise.
“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life” — Probably not Confucius
Step 1: What does the future look like?
You (should) have beliefs about the future state of the world. In my case that meant understanding the impact that FinTech was having on the finance industry and forming opinions about what that meant for incumbents, startups, consumers, etc. For example, I was confident (and still am) that a decade from now, most people will not be paying upwards of 1% of their net worth every year for the purported privilege of having a human being tell them what to do with their money. Looking at the shift from active mutual funds to passive ETFs over the last decade (and the massive remaining upside) makes it clear that that the financial world of the future will revolve around low-cost, algorithmically-driven passive management.
I had seen the way in which software had transformed other industries with automation and the reshaping of trust models. I also observed that finance had been affected by these forces to a lesser degree due to a number of reasons, including higher regulatory hurdles, the economic power of the industry incumbents and, most importantly, the unusual degree to which trust drives consumer decisions. I concluded that none of these challenges were insurmountable and that it was a matter of time before technology companies began to upend established firms across various finance verticals.
Step 2: Does the company have the right strategy?
Next, you should identify business models and companies that will thrive in the future you believe will come to fruition. Even better, find the company that is actively making that future a reality. The canonical example of this is Amazon two decades ago: Not only was Bezos’s strategy to capitalize on the shift of commerce from the physical world to the digital, but he worked to actually make that transition occur (and reinvests essentially all of the firm’s profits to continue to drive that change.)
Understand how companies plan to become successful in a world that will be very different from today. When I surveyed the automated investing landscape there were, and still are, plenty of firms, both large and small, aiming to change finance using data and software. I found the best way to differentiate one company from the next was simply to talk to people that actually work at these firms.
Step 3: Can the team execute on the strategy?
Strategy is one thing, the ability to pull it off is another. In many markets there isn’t room for more than one winner and you want to make sure you pick the team that can turn the mission into reality (Andy Rachleff explains this clearly in part 3 of his series Demystifying Venture Capital Economics.) The typical markers that people use to make this determination include: Who are the founders, technical leaders, and executives? Who has the firm raised money from, and on what terms? Has the firm found product market fit and how quickly is it growing?
The example Andy uses in the article I mentioned earlier is LinkedIn. The only other competitor that remotely succeeded was Xing.
Xing was forced to bootstrap by charging users from the beginning because it was founded in Germany where early-stage capital was quite scarce. This coupled with too much focus on its home country significantly hindered its growth relative to LinkedIn. Today LinkedIn is worth $27 billion vs. $500 million for Xing.
Picking the right company in a space matters. And, as Andy has said, “You get more credit than you deserve for being with a successful company, and less credit than you deserve for being with an unsuccessful company.” While there will be a lot of teams with missions that sound the same, your career could depend on choosing the one that can actually pull it off.
Step 4: Do you want to work with these people?
Lastly, you need to actually want to work with the people on your team and in the company as a whole. Cultures differ, and different teams within the same firm can vary wildly in terms of how it is to work with them. If you’re a student, taking an internship with the team in a company that you are considering working for is the best way to figure out what the full-time experience will be like. Alternatively, make the most of your network and find out from current and former employees what the internal picture of a firm looks like.
The culture of the firm is important but so is that of the team itself. For example, working on the data science team at Wealthfront is a different experience than working on the design team. To understand these details, ask your interviewers the same questions they ask you: What is a challenge the team has overcome and how did they do so? What is something the team is working to improve? How does the team decide what to work on? I used this framework to really understand what I was signing up for when I joined Wealthfront and there haven’t been (too many) surprises so far!
Sam Altman has a great blog post (among many), The days are long but the decades are short, in which, after having turned 30, he succinctly lays out his life and career advice. I found a couple of points from his list particularly poignant:
How to succeed: pick the right thing to do (this is critical and usually ignored)…Most people pick their career fairly randomly — really think hard about what you like, what fields are going to be successful, and try to talk to people in those fields.
I think Sam is correct on all counts. Deciding what to do is as important as actually doing it, and simply talking to other people is a very good way to figure that out. I hope the steps I’ve laid out here can provide you, dear reader, with a little more context to put his advice into action.