I just got a follow-up email to my last entry response from T.Y., so I thought I’d post it up here. It looks like my words helped him see that a switch over to the business side would be a more attractive option for him than starting off on the techie side. I’m not saying that starting off as a programmer is a bad thing, but it can be difficult to break away from it once you start on that path…a little more on that is below.

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T.Y. wrote:
Hi Marquis,

Thank you so much for your very long and well thought out email. I’ve asked the same questions to a few others in different situations, but your answer hit most close to home. What was your situation with the startup? How big was it when you were joining? And in the end, what skills sets did you come away with from your startup experience that you otherwise wouldn’t have?

I think your point about the passion for coding is the thing that really hit me. I realize I am much more into the business dynamics and market forces aspect of starting a company then the technical details. So I guess that is a good indication I should be switching to the business side of things ASAP.

Do you have any suggestions on how best to prepare myself for consulting? What should I be doing in my spare time? What about as I work, say at a startup or at a bank?

Cheers,
Tian
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My response:

My situation with the startup was that I wasa naive kid who saw a bunch of dollar signs, but didn’t know enough at that time to ask the hard questions. The company was one of the formerly high-flying Web consultancies that popped up in the late 1990′s and they were masters of recruiting talent out of colleges. I was attracted to the flashy recruiting techniques, incredibly cool people who worked there, and the talk of us being able to cash in when the company went public. I quickly signed on the dotted line when I got my offer, as did many of the other kids that were recruited along with me. The wild part was that the company went public about a month before any of us graduated, so I lost out on that big “going public” payoff before I ever started. I believe I was employee #552 by the time I started, which was bigger than I thought it would be. I took it for what it was when i started and the first year was a great ride. The stock price was soaring and a lot of the pre-IPO folks got filthy rich…needless to say spirits were high. As the market went south, so did the mood at work and people started voicing frustrations that I had thought I was the only one feeling. As the market tanked more, frustrations rose, many folks (including the founder and some of the starting execs jumped ship), and the beginning of the end had started. I was laid off a little less than two years after I started there (in the third of five rounds of layoffs), which was a blessing because I’d been thinking of leaving for a while and had already accepted another job offer…the conference call announcing my layoff actually happened 6 days before I was going to give my notice, so it worked out WAAAAAAY better than I could have scripted it.

By the time I left that start-up, I had gained some skills, but not the ones I thought I’d get. I thought I’d learn about the ins and outs of business within a growth environment, but my job didn’t give me any exposure to that. Instead, I spent my almost-two years 100% behind a computer plugging away at code. In all fairness, I must say that I learned a TON about Java programming at that startup. I came in only knowing C-programming and, through a combination of on-the-job training and Java courses and books, my Java game was pretty tight by the time I had begun looking for my next job opportunity….too bad that didn’t tie in too well with my long-term aspirations to run companies. There might have been a way for me to eventually move over toward building business skills at that startup, but I couldn’t figure out a way to do so and, even if I had, I ran out of time to do anything about it. So, when I was looking for my next job, I had to go the techie route because that’s where my experience was and I was stuck there until I went off to business school…thank goodness for that MBA because it helped me get myself onto the track I should have been on all along.

To prepare yourself for consulting, I would recommend getting as strong of an understanding of business as you can over the next couple of years. You’ve got plenty of time, so there’s no need for you to rush to cram business concepts into your mind.You’ll need to know what forces are at work in a given business situation and how those forces can affect each other. Ideally, you would pick many of these concepts up during your work experience and it won’t end up being a big rush to the finish line to figure it all out right before you start your interviews. In your free time, it might be helpful to read businesspublications to get a stronger grasp on how these forces work in the real world. This last point was a HUGE help in getting me ready to take on the full-time job recruiting cycle during my second year of Bschool after having struggled through the summer internship cycle in my first year. Once you understand the concepts, I would recommend learning about how case interviews work and practicing techniques to get through them. The length of time you should spend practicing varies, but, if I had to do it again, I would have taken a few months to get myself ready for the consulting interview process since business was all new to me. Ultimately, you’ll have to figure out where your understanding is and determine the right time to start practicing cases on your own.

-Marquis