During my Stanford interview, my alumni interviewer, a young private equity VP, explained his challenges moving to the geography in which we both currently live, a "tier-2" city with a very small business community. Given my desire to move back to this area in the long term, he recommended networking as much as possible in my desired post-MBA field before leaving for business school because so much business here is conducted in person.
To that end, I have reached out to a few leaders in the local venture community over the past couple months. And this morning, I felt like I hit the jackpot: I met a young, bright, HBS-educated VC. Yes, I'm sure there are many of those floating around, but I connected with this person and have a feeling (hope) that we will stay in close touch. She is smart, "balanced," friendly, doesn't have a tech background (like me), and has lots of ideas on who I should talk to in the area and possible ways for me to get into the local start-up/venture capital community. She has already offered to make two great introductions.
Plus--and this is huge--her firm hires MBA interns! Obviously, she didn't offer me a job, but I imagine I will at least be able to interview with her group in the fall. She didn't have a lot of great ideas for how to combat my tech/engineering deficiency, and acknowledged that that has also been a major challenge for her. However, she make me feel like it will be an additional challenge, NOT an insurmountable obstacle. Readers: any thoughts on how to tackle this deficiency?
Transit Tech Lab
3 months ago
Posts
4 comments:
I am still struggling to tackle this deficiency myself. Are you open to sharing the ideas that your new mentor provided on this topic?
On the entrepreneurial side, I find that as long as you have a capacity to quickly understand underlying technologies on a higher, but still detailed level, you can still assist in the opportunity identification process in a meaningful way. But can this be true in the VC space when it is already filled with so many folks with advanced technical degrees?
PS - I am new to your blog and I hope that you'll love Stanford. I was an undergrad there and found the resources fantastic on that level. I can only imagine how impressive the resources must be at the GSB!
You can perhaps tackle two internships during the summer between yr1 and yr2. Say, spend 1.5 months with a tech startup or established tech firm such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and then 1.5 months with a tech oriented VC firm. Just an idea....
Welcome to MBA networking...isn't it wonderful? I posted a link to your blog on my page.
One thing that worked for her was to do a project for each of two VCs that she wanted to work for while she was at HBS.
The other thing she suggested was to be a consumer of as much social media/tech services as possible.
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