A Few Quick Tips For People Applying For A Startup Job
Over the last few months there has been a huge spike in the number of startups who are looking for people to join their ranks. This inevitably leads to a huge spike in the number of people applying for jobs at startups. If you happen to be one of those people looking for a job at a startup then keep reading.
For starters, consider what a startup is all about. Most startups do not exist to provide you with a job or to just be a business. They exist to disrupt the market that they are entering. This is as true for a restaurant as it is for a web or software company, but then the jobs at a startup involve equity, huge potential payouts if there is an exit event, and the opportunity to work with amazing peers who will touch millions of people’s lives in many cases if the company is successful.
When you apply for a job at a startup it is imperative that you are thinking about this. You probably have a cover letter that you copy and paste into every job application that you submit. Forget about it! I am constantly baffled by the cover letter that comes in that fails to even contemplate the question posed in the job description. Sometimes I wonder if the application is from a human when I get a cover letter in that is boilerplate. If you don’t take the time to find out who the hiring manager is at a startup that isn’t a bad thing (unless you are in sales in which case that may reflect on your prospecting skills), but if you don’t even bother to visit the company’s website and find out what lies beyond the job description that is a just plain weak effort on your part and it will definitely diminish your chances.
It isn’t that you have to write a research paper about the company or something either. If the company has a web or mobile application you should sign up for it and try it out. This way when someone from the company calls you you can discuss it with them. This may take a little less time, but it will mean that your cover letter may have some original material that gets you noticed while someone else’s copy and paste efforts land them in the reject pile.
Something else that is fairly common with East Coast startup applicants is that they stop just short of where their west coast peers do in researching the industry. If you are talking to someone about a job at a web company then you should be doing everything within your power to get up to speed on what is going on in the industry. Sure, read this blog and others like it but that isn’t all you should do. For example, I talked to four people in the last few days and asked them all how they would stay current on such things and here are their answers:
West Coast Person 1: What do you read to stay current? I talk to a ton of people, I go to a ton of events, I read all the major blogs, and I keep a constant eye on all the apps on several app ratings sites. I also keep track of the people working on the top apps and have gotten to know many of them. I’m working on an app idea that is going to be really big.
West Coast Person 2: I listen to the podcast and read the blog of one of the most influential iphone app developers. His stuff is really good. He talks about product strategy, marketing, managing, design, etc. I also read a lot of the major blogs. If find myself doing this while I’m in transit. This usually suggests other things that I should take a look at. I also go to related events, read related blogs, etc. I’m going take my app to South By Southwest this year and see what people think of it.
East Coast Person 1: I read blogs about this stuff. I got to a few events. I’m working on something.
East Coast Person 2: I am going to South By Southwest again this year. I go to some events here and visit the bay area occasionally. I read related blogs.
It isn’t so much about the fact that you know that Web 2.0 isn’t something you can pick up at Best Buy (I talked to a guy once who thought this was the case) or that your source of industry news is your hometown newspaper (kudos if your hometown news source is Reddit or Hacker News). The difference is that people who work for startups that make it big take their work seriously and they train for their work like an Olympic Athlete trains for the Olympic trials. Once they are on top they are already used to running farther, faster, etc.
You should be thinking about how you will be perceived by a company, not just showing them that you have X years of experience and a degree in Y. These things are all on your resume. Instead, you should use your cover letter as an opportunity to share what makes you stand out. Be bold.
Startup Hiring Team of The Month
Say Hello to the team from Taxi Magic, also known as Ride Charge, an Alexandria, VA startup company that has a ton of a opportunities available for you to check out. The Taxi Magic Team has the #1 Taxi App and is revolutionizing the way people travel, building products that are remaking local ground transportation experiences and reaching hundreds of thousands of users – and growing! The team is smart, hard working, and knows how to have fun too (they literally have a montnly office happy hour sponsored by Heineken, how cool is that?). While we have not met their canine co-workers, we have had a chance to catch them in the middle of some pretty competitive Ping Pong maches and sat in on one of their regularly catered lunches (they get real food and it is good). Employees get a generous 3 weeks of paid time off plus 8 holidays. One thing that really stands out is the fact that they have a bunch of startup veterans who work for the company including West Coast startup people. This is definitely the place to check out if you are looking for a startup that is going places in 2012. For more info visit the Taxi Magic Career site today! Current Openings:
*Accounting and Billing Software Architect
*Software Development Project Manager
*Mid to Sr. Ruby Software Engineer
*Business Intelligence Software Engineer
HelloWallet Raises $12 Million in Series B
HelloWallet, the Washington, DC based startup that provides people and employees of companies with web based financial planning software has just announced a raise of $12 Million in a Series B round.
Morningstar, Inc. invested $6.75 million and TD Fund (TDF) invested $4 Million. The team indicated that existing investors also participated in the new round.
Morningstar and HelloWallet plan to co-market their services to employers and 401(k) providers and in the future expect to further integrate their services. HelloWallet has sold more than 300,000 subscriptions since it launched its enterprise application in mid-2011, and is now working with some of the largest companies in the country.
Brock Johnson, president of retirement solutions for Morningstar, and Jim Pastoriza, managing partner at TDF, will be joining HelloWallet’s board of directors. Other members include Carter McClelland, chairman of Union Square Advisors; Don Rainey, general partner at Grotech Ventures; Tige Savage, managing director at Revolution LLC; Revell Horsey, president at HelloWallet; and Matt Fellowes, chairman and CEO of HelloWallet.
HelloWallet raised $3.6 Million in early May of 2010 as part of a Series A round. That round included Grotech Ventures and Jean and Steve Case.
Goodzer Raises $650k
Goozer, the Reston, VA based startup that helps shoppers find all sorts of products at nearby stores, has just announced their raise of $650,000 in Angel funding which brings their total raise to $750,000 according to the Washington Business Journal’s Bill Flook.
Goodzer ’s co-founders include CEO Dmitry Pakhomkin and CTO Artem Zarutsky. The company started in 2010. Investors include Neal Hunter, John Palmour and Cengiz Balkas.
Cardstar Acquired by Constant Contact, Terms Not Disclosed
Cardstar, the Northern Virginia based startup that provides a mobile customer loyalty app for retailers as an alternative to paper or plastic customer loyalty cards that have thickened our wallets in recent years, has just announced their Acquisition by Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT). You may recall that Cardstar launched at the Social Matchbox Startup Launch event in 2010.
CardStar’s team will join the Constant Contact team. Cardstar CEO Andy Miller will serve as director of mobile products, reporting to Joel Hughes, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development for Constant Contact. Danny Espinoza will be a part of Andy Miller’s team to lead future product direction.
With over two million users, Boston-based CardStar is a leading developer of mobile applications that extend the use of loyalty cards and mobile coupons among consumers.
Cardstar raised $1 Million in a Series A round concluded in March 2001. Their series A was lead by McLean, VA based Amplifier Ventures. Acta Wireless and LaunchCapital also participated in the round. Cardstar participated in Jonathan Aberman’s Amplifier Ventures Business Accelerator Program. Check out the rest of Jonathan’s portfolio here.
The History Of Social Media Hiring
Hello, Social Matchbox Readers. This is the first in a series of posts I’ll be writing with my friend Bob about social media in the technology sector. My name is Jim Durbin, and I’ve been the SocialMediaHeadhunter since 2008, when I started a retained search firm focused on hiring in the social media space. That’s what I’ll be bringing to the blog – my experiences and thoughts on how social and technology merge.
Today we start with the basics: The History Of Social Media Hiring
When I first started writing about social media and recruiting in the salad days of 2004-2005, the question of social media’s place in the business world was hotly debated. Would it be a new branch of marketing, or would it be a talent like graphic design or web analytics? Would social media report to the Information Technology, Customer Service, Corporate Communications, or directly to the CMO in a new department?
By 2008, social media positions were primarily community managers, copy writers, and marketing strategists. Companies wanted to hire someone to “do social,” which meant writing at social sites, responding to customers, and setting up profiles that would demonstrate that a company was involved in the social space. Experience was hard to come by. While there were plenty of people with community experience in older networks, and plenty of people eager to learn social media to start their career, there just weren’t many people who had worked in a position using social media for anything other than their own online status.
Social created mini-celebrities out of anyone who wrote for six months on a topic and stayed with it. This wasn’t just in business. Mom blogs, pet blogs, sports blogs, news blogs, and every other topic under the sun had their own mini-celebrities. Early adoption of blogs, Twitter, and then Facebook (Facebook wasn’t big in that way until after Twitter was) led to a significant advantage in terms of conference speaking, news mentions, and online buzz. This was great for the burgeoning class of Social Consultants, but it was a bubble. Celebrity inside a digital tribe was fun, but it didn’t make you money, and companies quickly found that early success at branding yourself didn’t translate into successful hiring.
The difficulty in finding someone with social business experience was inevitable. And so was the response. Internal employees, unable to tap into “experts,” started practicing on their own. There were a lot of missteps, but internal employees by and large learned how social would impact their business units. This was more true in some industries and some divisions. Recruiting and Customer Service learned how to use LinkedIn and Twitter, while Marketing dabbled in Facebook and Sales ignored the wave. As executives started to pay more attention, more departments joined in, and budgets started to be applied.
Larger companies started outsourcing their social to their agencies, and smaller ones relied on individuals who seemed to “get it.” Outsourcing became the rule when budgets were cut during the recession, and hiring someone new into a social position was something of a rarity. Companies did it, but they did it slowly. On the high end, certain personalities did very well. Work for a company in the social media initiative and you’d get another job shortly. That drove salaries up, but in each case, the individual had prior experience that created their salary level. Social was a multiplier that made them a hot commodity. It was not the basis of their hiring. In a weird way, social media was the focus of the job description, but not the job. Social became a preference layer where you were hired because of your social experience, but you were paid based on your work history outside of social.
This created a wide disparity between similar job titles. Some community managers make $30,000 a year. Others make $120,000. The difference is not the size or value of the community, but the previous salary of the community manager. This is true for marketing strategists, directors, and specialists, who each track to similar roles in technology, management, and marketing or customer service. It makes sense. Companies look to assign value to a position based on that position’s importance to the company. The salary is a way of measuring the influence, and that influence is based on who you’re trying to influence.
In 2012, we’ve reached a point where social media titles are on the rise, but each job description is written to coincide with a similar position inside the company. Pure social roles, like Twitter specialist, are just an upgrade from customer service representative. Facebook managers are forum community managers. Content creators are copywriters. While there are the occasional social technology roles in mobile or applications, those are not the norm. The norm, is that everyone is expected to know how social media impacts their division. We’ve taken the shiny new toy and commoditized it as a skillset. And that’s a good thing.
Social media isn’t about new behaviors so much as a deeper understanding of what customers and employees want. We have more information, and the pace of change is increasing, but that’s not social media. It’s the culture changing. Moving forward, we need to understand better how to segment and adapt our business processes to a faster world. Social helps us do that. And if you understand how, companies are hiring.
Lessons Learned Series: The Five Minute Miracle
Over the summer I spent three weeks in the San Francisco Bay area studying the startup community there and looking for areas where the Washington, DC area startup community could learn some key lessons. I initially thought about having a series of lessons learned discussions in area coffee houses, but I realized that I had a lot more to learn before I would be ready to lead a serious discussion about what we are doing right out here vs. what they are doing right out there. So, in 2012 I plan on spending considerably more time doing research. I also want to point out that there is no reason to limit this discussion to the Bay area since there are some really amazing things going on in a lot of different places around the world as Scott Thompson pointed out and as others including Ian Thiel, one of our other contributors has pointed out during his travels in Europe and Asia (he recently visited an incubator in China and attended Le Web in Paris). So in that spirit I’m going to start sharing some thoughts on cultural observations that I have observed while visiting other places. The first in this series of occasional posts is going to be about my most recent Silicon Valley observations.
I listened to a series of talks recently and one of them was concluded with some comments about the Silicon Valley area’s “pay it forward culture” and what someone described as “The Five Minute Miracle”. On the surface this seems pretty straight forward. After a bit of closer observation you start to get a slightly different picture. Having spent a lot of time earlier in my career as a political guy (that is why I arrived in DC instead of Silicon Valley after college), I would like to point out a similarity between campaigns and startups.
With campaigns you get people who move somewhere to work for a campaign or candidate that they believe in. A lot of times this is a very impulsive move that involves very little advance planning. You get your bag packed, you make sure you don’t have any major obligations like rent to pay, and then you hit the road. When you first arrive you are more likely to have made plans to couch surf until you find a place of to stay long term than you are to book a hotel or rent an apartment.
Working campaigns is also turbulent, much like very early stage startups. A campaign may blow up in a matter of weeks or months and you may find yourself looking for another one to hop onto very quickly. After a while you start to get the hang of things and you are plugged into the people who are really making things happen so there is always a lifeline if you want one. With startups the same can happen. You can work your butt off and things can blow up or fall through and you could find yourself in a startup that is trying desperately to raise bridge funds or get acquired. Believe me, this happens to YCombinator startups too. I had a chance to catch up with someone from a YCombinator startup recently who was in this exact situation. If you sit for a few hours in a Valley coffee shop you will hear stories like this too.
In national campaigns, especially Presidential elections, things are very dicey. Only a select few get jobs on the national campaign while others (including some super smart and connected people) volunteer without getting paid or any guarantee of it. After a cycle or two or after you show people what you are made of then you get a shot at a paid job – maybe where you ended up or maybe somewhere else. With startups, the same is true. You may have to work for startup doing sweat equity or for next to nothing while that startup is spinning up. It may work out or it may not, but you are going to get some references and a ton of valuable experience that others will take note of when you are looking for your next thing. There isn’t an hour that goes by when I’m in a bay area coffee shop that people are not talking about recruiting. Even the VC’s are obsessed with recruiting. There are plenty of opportunities.
Something else that campaigns and startups have in common is the concept of helping others. I mentioned the concept of the five minute miracle and the pay it forward culture a moment ago and this is a huge part of the experience. Nearly everyone who has moved to the Bay area to work on startups took a chance getting there. PayPal and Slide Co-Founder Max Levchin tells stories about renting a moving truck and packing everything and a couple of people in with him and heading West. He isn’t aloe. People recognize that newcomers are going to have to adjust and they are usually very considerate of the challenges that people go through during the startup phase as well as during the get there phase. Oh, and by the way – living in the bay area isn’t cheap. You can find a house in a so-so neighborhood for $450k in the lower bay area (Palo Alto to Sunnyvale) if you are lucky, but houses often go for $750k+ (including quite a few that should probably only be worth around $250k). One of the major advantages of being in the Washington area is that you don’t have to be independently wealthy to have a reasonably good lifestyle while being a startup founder.
The takeaway here isn’t that you should go into a startup expecting favors from people or that you should expect people to cut you a break because you are new. It doesn’t work that way in politics either. Use common sense though – if someone wants to make you their coffee slave in politics or in a startup then that is probably a sign of things to come. Instead, you should understand that you should not try to fight the ocean by going it alone. Take the time to network and meet other people. Another important thing to consider is that there are a lot of different camps of people out there. Not everyone in the one part of the Washington area or the San Francisco area is going to be thinking along the same lines as you. You should take the time to explore different communities and meet people in all of them.
I would also like to point out that I’ve had the chance to meet and get to know better a lot of really amazing people on both coasts. Among these were developers, marketers, founders, and VC’s. I have even met a ton of people who had moved East or West for career and/or personal or even family reasons. There is something in every place for you.
