There’s $7 trillion of market cap for U.S. based financial institutions. In most major industries, the “challenger” technology company is now the most dominant — Facebook, at $540bn, is the most valuable media company, and Amazon is 3x the size of Walmart, at close to $1tn in market value.

This has not yet happened in finance. Despite strong technology players like Stripe, Square, PayPal, and Robinhood, traditional banks are still dominant.

With a regulatory environment that favors smaller companies, digital infrastructure that enables data portability, personalized data and machine learning, and increased trust and user preference for mobile-first products, digital-native financial institutions will have a foot-hold to get started and eventually consolidate financial services.

To invest in this space, we started with a simple question from first principles: what is finance? Our answer:

Infrastructure to exchange resources with unknown people and businesses.

Each word of this sentence represents hundreds of billions of dollars of legacy infrastructure that are being replaced by software. At Greylock, we partner with entrepreneurs who are building category-defining fintech companies such as Coinbase, Blend, PayJoy, Opportun, and Ribbon.

Below is a deck about the characteristics we look for in fintech companies and where we believe outlier companies will be created. You can also find this deck on Slideshare. If you’re building something in the space, please let me know.

One of the biggest debates is who is going to “own the customer relationship”. This is a space previously occupied by retail banks. In the East (including China, Japan, and Korea), there are 3–4 highly consolidated digital players that do everything from payments to savings to lending.

While the West (including US, Europe, LatAm) will never achieve that level of consolidation, there is an opportunity for break-out companies to begin consolidating the disparate services provided by individual companies today. The question is, who will win?

If you are an entrepreneur in the space or have any feedback on the deck, please reach out to me at seth (at) greylock (dot) com or LinkedIn.

First Principles of Investing in FinTech was originally published in Greylock Perspectives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was lucky to be a part of the Messenger team in the early days. As product manager, I worked on the Messenger Developer Platform, integrations with key partners (such as Uber, Lyft, KLM), and the transition from Facebook to a standalone Messenger app. It was an insane period of hypergrowth — we went from 200 million users to 1 billion users in 2 years. This is what I learned from helping drive the product for the developer platform during that time.

Why focus on engaging developers, and not just getting more people on the platform?

At Messenger, even with our impressive scale, we always lived in fear of irrelevance. We believed our product was a better way to communicate, but in a world with pre-installed SMS, we needed to give people a great reason to use Messenger instead. Similarly, in late 2014, there were a lot of great apps that took off, but each of them suffered from the same issue: it was extremely hard to get people to discover them, and even harder to build a habit of using them repeatedly.

By looking at the data, we were starting to see hints of people using other apps to share pictures and videos with their friends on Messenger, and over 1 billion messages were being sent every month to businesses on Facebook (i.e. Facebook pages). So, we embarked on the Silicon Valley right of passage: We created a platform. We had the opportunity to give developers and businesses access to the people using Messenger, while, in turn, providing useful tools and services to make Messenger more engaging for people.

Below I’ve shared 5 lessons I learned from launching the Messenger Developer Platform — all battle-tested, with the scars to prove it!

Start specific and expand

For any experience to be great, it requires an immense amount of detail, which is hard to achieve if you start with generic components. While the tools for Messenger are very open and flexible (to allow for experimentation in the early days of the ecosystem), the best experiences came from 1–2 use cases that the platform was uniquely suited to solve well. For example, we worked with KLM to build an end-to-end integration where people could seamlessly receive their boarding pass, flight updates and customer service directly through Messenger. This was a vastly better experience than searching your email for a 6-digit confirmation code and waiting on hold. But, this level of integration required the product and engineering team to fly to Amsterdam (twice), adapt our working style to work with a European airline in a time zone 9 hours ahead, and become (semi) experts on boarding pass layouts. On the surface, this seems like a large investment to make. But, there was nothing more valuable than sitting with the individual business leaders at KLM, learning what’s important to them, and understanding what it takes to get things done. Putting a “simple” Messenger button on a checkout page is, of course, not simple. With learnings from KLM, we were able to improve the platform for everyone, and provide a sample use case for others to follow.

Focus on growth

If a bot speaks, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Even with 1 billion users on Messenger, establishing it as a new habit with users is hard. Our first iteration of the Platform in 2015 required people to download “apps for Messenger”, to create content, and then share back into Messenger. It turned out this interrupted the natural flow of the conversation too much. From this, we found better ways to bring this content closer to people, including launching the “GIF” tab, powered by Giphy and other 3rd party apps, built right into Messenger. In 2016, bots were built right into Messenger, but still, the most successful experiences were distributed through existing channels. For example, Rogers (one of the largest telecom companies in Canada), used Messenger for their customer service, and simply replaced the “contact us” button on their website with “Messenger”. People didn’t have to think about using Messenger, but when they did, their NPS scores increased significantly. One of the key things holding the platform back was the limited organic distribution in its early days. Now, with the recent launch of the bot store, I’m excited to see where it takes brands and developers.

Pay attention to incentives

From the perspective of both building — and building on top of — a platform, get this right (and understand it), and everything else will take care of itself. Platforms will naturally gravitate towards their incentives. When structuring a new system, it’s imperative to deeply understand the incentives of all three parties — developers/businesses, consumers, and the platform itself — and design a system that maximizes value.

Platforms are nothing more than a trusted contract between 2+ parties to allow for specialization and shared resources. Any successful platform requires trust, and trust is best ensured through aligned incentives. When you’re building a platform, a huge amount of work will go into understanding the incentives and scenarios (both success and failure), and designing a lasting system, including product + policy + enforcement, that optimizes for the best outcome. Here are my three takeaways on structuring that system:

1. Have a shared North Star. For Messenger, our North Star was people having great experiences on Messenger with businesses & apps. This is a North Star that benefits everyone, and always wins/ends arguments. On the margin, there are policies and rules that would benefit one party more than another — but nothing can sacrifice that shared end goal.
2. Be Transparent. If everyone understands what you’re doing, how you get paid, and the rules of the road, everyone is happier. Specifically, businesses feel more comfortable investing resources on your platform if they clearly understand the rules of the road. Of course, in the early days of a platform it’s not always possible to define everything up front — some things need to evolve naturally. To counter some ambiguity in the early stages of a platform, investing in the community through blog posts, groups, events etc. can go along way to build trust.
3. Give, don’t take. To kick-start an ecosystem, platforms typically need to give away a lot of value to everyone involved. As the ecosystem matures, and more businesses / developers participate, rules often become more strict to allow for scale without harming the user experience. If a change is perceived as negative, this can have a huge negative impact on the perception of trust and transparency. So, in the early days of a platform, it’s important to (a) define what’s temporary vs. permanent and (b) where possible, start conservative and expand.

Culture of platform ! = consumer

At F8 in 2014, Mark famously changed the mantra “Move Fast and Break Things” to “Move Fast with Stable Infra”. This, more than anything, highlights the difference in culture between building consumer products and building platform products. With consumer products, you can try things quickly, if they don’t work, you learn, change, and try again. Messenger releases a new app every week, giving the team flexibility to take bets, build tools quickly for people, and fix mistakes. With Platforms, people are building their businesses on top of the decisions that are made — businesses require consistency, stability, and visibility multiple years in the future. This requires a much more deliberate process of building products.

Be your own customer

One of the most fun (and productive) parts about building the Messenger platform was our internal hackathons where we built our own apps for Messenger (2015) and Bots for Messenger (2016). In 2015, an internal team built “Sound Clips for Messenger”, which was a fun way to send “audio emojis”, created in a 3rd party app, and shared through Messenger. The sound design team at Facebook helped us create amazing sounds (including recording their own babies laughing and crying), and we built a simple app for people to share them on Messenger. This little side project not only taught us what it’s like to build on top of the platform, uncovering challenges like providing easy ways to test, but also was downloaded by millions of people, which was an awesome experience for the team. Similarly, in 2016, we all did an offsite and built our own bots — releasing creative energy and giving ourselves extremely valuable feedback. I was excited to see that the team continued that tradition at F8 this year and is planning to open source one of the first chat extensions in a group conversation.

I’d love to hear your feedback on this post, as well as your experiences in building platforms. In my new role at Greylock, if you are building a consumer tech company that involves platforms and messaging, I’d love to meet you (m.me/sethrosenberg or seth [at] greylock [dot] com).

What I Learned From Launching the Messenger Developer Platform was originally published in Greylock Perspectives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Oxford University researchers have estimated that 47 percent of U.S. jobs could be automated within the next two decades.

With everything from Amazon Go’s cashier-less stores to automated customer service, to robo-advisors and driver-less cars, we are moving toward a world with more productivity and fewer jobs.

As many have commented, this is very reminiscent of globalization and outsourcing. But, with outsourcing, we only did half the work — we struck trade deals around the world, which increased productivity and corporate profits, but forgot to help re-train the work force to land jobs in the new economy. The result was an entire population left behind, and populist reactions like Brexit and Trump.

We can’t afford to make the same mistake twice.

That’s why the broad adoption of AI and automation is primarily a human and societal challenge, not a technical one.

Depending on the decisions we make as a society, we could be heading towards a beautiful future with shared prosperity, leisure time and innovation, or social/societal unrest and machine uprisings. I’ve laid out a proposal below of how we could structure society in this new world to favour the former — it’s a variation of the commonly proposed universal basic income, but with a key twist.

The new world:

Imagine replacing taxes & welfare with shared ownership in a fleet of robots.

It would look something like this: Robots existence are in the public interest. Any machine/system classified as Artificial Intelligence must reserve 20% economic interest in their production for the public. Every citizen is born with an equal economic ownership in the public pool of robotic production, which vests upon graduating high school.

This has the following benefits:

1. Just like a guaranteed minimum income, in a world with fewer jobs, it provides a starting point to give people equal access to opportunity — healthcare, education and shelter. Without the need to optimize purely for economic survival, it can unlock human creativity in arts, philosophy and science. It’s no coincidence that many of the top 100 richest people in the world come from either upper class or immigrant backgrounds. In either case, they have nothing to lose, and are willing to take on more “risk” to create something meaningful in the world. Guaranteed ownership in robotics can simulate this experience for the rest of society.
2. Replaces the inefficiency of re-distribution of wealth with shared incentives & prosperity. Rather than taxing productive society and re-distributing through inefficient government programs, public shares in robotics allow all of society to participate in economic growth, with the shared incentive for innovation and investment. In the current system, welfare and social payments creates an “us vs. them” mentality, whereas equity in robotics puts us all on the same team. Further, welfare payments or a basic minimum income tend not to keep pace with GDP growth, and the gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow. With shared robotic equity, everyone participates in the prosperity of innovation.
3. Incentive to innovate — this is not socialism. The owners/inventors of robots still own 80%, which, with no taxes, is better than what they get today. Every human is still free to pursue their ambitions, and now has the economic means to do so. You can still benefit significantly from inventing new robots/AI systems, building robots, or doing whatever you want. With a guaranteed minimum ownership in robotics/AI, we will not be in a cycle of artificially creating jobs to produce more things that people don’t need, but rather people will be incentivized by either (a) personal passions or (b) outsized economic/social returns that benefit society.
4. Incentive to have basic education. With a vesting schedule tied to graduating high school, people still have an incentive to get a basic education before they receive their shares. Then, upon graduation, the dividends from their shares can be used to pay for college / art school / trade school / or their new business.
5. Incentive to have more children. Shares are distributed to everyone equally. So, larger families have more equity, providing an incentive to keep our population young & productive.

So here’s what the new world could look like:

Augmenting economic incentives with social incentives…
People like Elon Musk are motivated by a mission to save humanity and colonize mars, not to pay rent. Imagine if we could unlock the creative, mission-driven ambition of the rest of the population?

…with the freedom to pursue passions…
Work only for (a) personal passions or (b) outsized economic/social returns. People will take more risks, contribute more, and be happier. Robots will do the rest.

…and shared prosperity (the people own the robots)

So, expanding on Isaac Asimov’s three rules of robotics, there will now be four:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
4. Robots existence are in the public interest. They must obey rules 1–3, and any machine/system classified as Artificial Intelligence must reserve 20% economic interest in their production for the public. Every citizen is born with an equal economic ownership in the public pool of robotic production, which vests upon graduating high school.

In some ways, this feels like the natural evolution of humanity, as significant as the invention of farming. Humans will be free of manual labor, and able to pursue their creative and intellectual pursuits. Rather than unhappy people working for survival, robots will create abundance, the fourth rule of robotics will create structure, and we’ll have a renaissance of philosophy, art, culture and innovation to solve the world’s most important challenges.

But for the first few months, it felt more like messaging your ex-girlfriend — poor response times, misunderstanding intent and overall frustration. So the question on everyone’s mind: what’s real vs. hype, and when will the future arrive?

The promise…
1. Business used to be personal. The store owner knew your name and your shoe size. Then, the internet came, and brought scale, but replaced Bob the cobbler with a faceless white form and text box.

Messaging offered a chance to make business personal again (at scale).

2. Customer service — the frontline for a business and their customers, was broken. Businesses spent over $10 billion per year to provide the most frustrating experience of your week. Phone calls required your complete attention, expensive human operators, and slow response times.

Messaging offered an opportunity to provide mobile service, automate common questions, reduce costs and increase quality.

3. When people shifted their time from desktop to mobile, the money didn’t follow. The screens were too small, payment was cumbersome, and the browsing experience didn’t work — you had to choose between a clunky mobile website or go through the hassle of downloading an app just to make a simple purchase. So, you still booked your flights on your laptop.

Messaging offered the perfect solution for mobile commerce — better than a mobile website and less-friction than an app, with built-in identity + payments.

4. Consumer software had a distribution problem. Half of US smartphone owners download zero apps per month. Apps are best for things you use frequently. Facebook, Instagram, Uber, Snapchat, Maps. But what about the flight you take once every two months? Or the restaurant reservation you make once/month? How can you interact with the 100s of businesses and services in your life without downloading custom software each time?

Messaging is already the hub for the plans you make with your family and friends — it could also seamlessly connect you with the 100s of products and services that make those interactions more meaningful.

The reality…

And then we messaged the future. We asked for the weather in Oakland and we got an ad lib from the latest Star Wars movie. It didn’t feel like the future (or maybe it did…).

In essence, messaging followed the same sequence as many new adoptions in technology…

1. The right tools became available in an open platform
   → WeChat, Kik, Telegram, Slack, and now Facebook Messenger
2. Hobbyists and first movers experimented to find what works / what doesn’t
   → Games, shopping, productivity, news
3. The killer app. Through iteration & perseverance, a “magic moment” is created for people and/or businesses.
   → This wave is just starting
4. The explosion
   → TBD

The opportunity…

I left my role as the Product Manager for the Facebook Messenger Developer Platform 6-weeks ago to help realize the future of people to business messaging from the other side.

Here are the four most actionable opportunities right now in the messaging space:
1. Re-invent customer service. Shifting platforms from phone calls to messaging, by itself, is a better experience. Even if it takes 45 minutes for the business to respond, you’re not chained to your phone. But the exciting part comes next: automation, instant responses, seamless transactions, and hyper personalization — services that can anticipate your needs before you even need to ask. Customer service will no longer be a cost centre — it will drive retention, delight and revenue.

2. Accelerate mobile commerce. Messaging allows companies to complete the marketing funnel → awareness (via News Feed), search & explore (via Messenger), and purchase (via Messenger). It’s simply better than mobile websites, apps or email. Imagine scheduling test drives, booking real estate appointments, or inquiring about TVs over Messenger, with seamless purchase & delivery.

3. Vertical-specific assistants. Healthcare forms are boring. A personal, private, digital assistant? Useful. Innovative companies are popping up to bring personalization & personal empowerment to important areas of your life including healthcare, finance, and personal logistics.

4. Interact with the world. I imagine a world where you can message your house to turn up the temperature, turn on the lights, and pre-heat the oven. Your fridge will then message you that it’s low on horse radish (g-d forbid). The Amazon bot will complete the order at the tap of a button.

There are multiple frontiers on the path to eCommerce taking over the world. In the 90s, people thought you would be crazy to buy something on the internet. Then came trust, payments (paypal), easy shipments (amazon) and easy returns (Zappos — you can buy shoes on the internet?). Then came social, real identity, and the next wave of trust (you would get in the car with a stranger you met on the internet?). Now, with conversation, and the ability to bring personalized sales to the internet, comes the next frontier. In Q32016, eCommerce made up just 8% of all retail sales in the US — $100 billion of $1.2 trillion. Who’s going to capture the remaining trillion?

When you talk to three different people about bots you get three different responses:
the entrepreneur: “it’s the future”
the contrarian VC: “it’s all hype”
everyone else in the world: “what’s a bot”

The platform shift is real. The problems are real. Now, who’s going to solve them?

If you’re building a company in the messaging space and want to chat, message me!

This article was published in VentureBeat

“This time is different” — the four most dangerous words in finance.

This time is not different. But maybe, this time we’ll start to care.

Outsourcing over the last 30 years in America has increased profits for multi-national businesses while squeezing many American workers into poverty. This group of American workers have managed to ‘survive’ despite declining incomes as goods imported from China became cheaper and credit became more easily available. Many have simply suffered in poverty.

This initial transfer of wealth — from Americans to Chinese manufacturers — has created an opportunity for China and other Asian economies to invest in future industries they want to own; namely high-tech innovation.

China has taken the money we have pumped into their economy to do two things: lend us a trillion dollars and educate their population. This year, China will graduate over 1 million engineers vs. America’s 140k. 70% of our population over 25 does not have a college degree, and this trend will continue as college becomes less affordable.

So, when we project forward, who will be designing the energy and water supplies of the future? Who will be creating space crafts, medicine and communication tools for the next century? Will our phones read “Designed by XiaoMi in Beijing; Made in California”?

This is already starting to happen.

The Chinese tech industry was previously populated by clones of American innovation: Baidu was their Google and RenRen was their Facebook. These companies were able to succeed through protection from international competition by the Chinese government. Going forward, in the age of mobile technology, China is set-up to be a leader. For many people in China, mobile is all they know. With 1.6 billion smart phones and cheap access to engineers, China is already innovating in mobile products including messaging, payments and mobile commerce.

To be clear: a global economy with free trade is not a bad thing. Over time, it allows each country to specialize in what they’re good at and create a more efficient economy, which raises the standard of living for everyone. But, there are two problems. First, we are not competing on an even playing field. Chinese manufacturers compete directly with American firms, while China blocks our tech companies from competing in China. Second, we seem conflicted on what our role should be in the global economy.

When we talk about outsourcing, we often talk about “bringing manufacturing back to America”. We’re distracted by a battle we’ve already lost, and blind to the battle we’re currently losing.

We might, in fact, get manufacturing jobs back in the US. But these aren’t the middle class jobs we’re looking for. The manufacturing jobs of the future are available to the lowest cost provider — which, if we’re not careful, could be Americans. And while we manufacture toys for our better educated Asian counterparts, they will be creating the next great selfie app.

So, what’s the solution?

We need to play to our strengths. The American entrepreneurial spirit is like no other and has created some of the most transformative innovations over the last century. However, the entrepreneurs of the future need a proper education to get started. Unlike my grandfather’s generation who needed grit and determination to build real estate, trucking and media empires, entrepreneurs of the future need computer science and aerospace degrees to create the next Google and SpaceX.

To unlock American potential, people need a proper education. Today, very few people have access to $100k and 4 years to learn psychology and beer pong. This can be changed if we adjust our priorities. Education can unleash the next generation of American entrepreneurs and create jobs — at all levels — in game changing industries of the future.

If we don’t do this, others will, and we’ll finally get manufacturing back in America.

This story is part of The Codex, a collective of independent thought. Subscribe to our newsletter to get a weekly digest of our best stories and be sure to like and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Outsourcing the rich was originally published in The Codex on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My Mom was complaining of severe back pain, so we cancelled dinner and went back to their hotel. An hour later, my dad called saying that they had rushed to the downtown emergency room and needed help. I took a cab over, went to the back room and saw my Mom screaming in pain. I helped comfort her as they set-up pain killers and ran some tests. As 5am rolled around, I decided to go home to get some sleep — we’d find out the test results in the morning. It was probably gall bladder stones or something.

I woke up three hours later to a call from my dad saying I should come down to the hospital right way. It sounded serious and I was nervous, but had no idea what to expect. I finally got to the hospital room and the doctor explained that my Mom had metastatic breast cancer that had spread to her spine. It felt like a scene from a movie where all the air and sound were sucked out of the room, and I didn’t know how to respond.

We were three Canadians stuck in a downtown hospital in Manhattan. Still before my first official day of work — I called my mentor at Goldman — and asked for advice. She was able to connect us with the best doctors in New York and help transfer my Mom to a swanky wing of the New York Presbyterian hospital. It felt really good to be able to give back to my parents as a “banker in New York”, even before I wrote my Series 79 exam.

The next two weeks comprised of studying for my Series 79 and building financial models from the hospital room while trying to get my new life started.

I’ve seen a lot of BuzzFeed articles giving life advice for “twenty somethings”. The common thread that ties them all together: get lost in the streets of Paris and quit your job to travel the world.

For obvious reasons, these didn’t resonate with me. What about people who have to deal with something that transcends the existential crises of upper-middle class white people? Something that no amount of money or french wine can shield you from. Something like your mom dying of cancer.

Throughout the last 2.5 years, my Mom battled, and ultimately passed away from stage IV breast cancer. I’ve found there are four broad phases of dealing with this while also living life in your early 20's:

Phase 1: Indecision

Shortly into my time at Goldman, I was offered an opportunity to move across the country to be a Product Manager at Facebook.

This decision came with a lot of risk and uncertainty. I liked my job at Goldman; I knew what I was doing; it was comfortable; it was exciting.

Beyond the normal challenges of making decisions with life, love and careers in your 20's, I had the nagging questions of how it impacted my Mom and vice versa. Am I doing this because my Mom is sick? Is that OK?

Despite the challenges and uncertainty of starting a new job while my Mom was sick, taking a risk seemed easier in many ways. If you can die at any time, why not take a chance to pursue or discover a new passion? As Steve Jobs said, “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Phase 2: Lack of Motivation

In the fall of 2014, as my Mom’s condition was deteriorating, I was responsible for leading an important initiative for Facebook Messenger.

Executing a global product roll-out; responding to misinformation in the press; writing daily updates to the executive team and keeping the team motivated were all part of my daily responsibilities.

There’s a certain maximum amount of stress that any individual person can handle, and tough personal challenges can bring you to 80% of your maximum before you even get into work.

The remaining 20%+ is easily filled by the below app store review:

Phase 3: Emptiness

You try to distract yourself with work but there is something fundamentally missing. Sadness will hit you unexpectedly and repeatedly every time something reminds you of your Mom.

Phase 4: Recovery

Life events will change you; but you have control over how they change you. Sometimes, shocks to the system are a necessary opportunity to assess what really matters to you and grow as a person.

Here are some ways this experience has had a positive impact on my life:

1. Define your passions
   If the challenge of your 20's is to a) define your values and b) align your life with those values; a death in the family can accelerate your need to do both. Finding these values early and pursuing them aggressively is a gift; often delayed.
2. Love
   Many of my friends and colleagues who live away from home visit once or twice a year. From this perspective, I was fortunate enough to cram 15+ years of time with my Mom into 2. It also gives you an opportunity to lean on friends and family for support. During the funeral, my childhood friends flew in from around the country without even being asked. People sent flowers and cookies and made phone calls. It made me really appreciate the important people in my life.
3. Take risks
   Life is short and uncertain. Risk is real; but not the type of risk people usually focus on. Real risks include, 1. dying and 2. dying with regrets. Everything else are just manufactured barriers preventing you from pursuing your dreams.

At a time when most “20-somethings” have an opportunity to be selfish and care free; to focus on getting lost in the streets of Paris and obsessing over life decisions; I had a different experience. I hope sharing this story can help others going through similar challenges.

How to avoid your parents’ basement

Robyn Urback from the National Post recently wrote: “What do you mean I can’t get a job with my medieval feminist studies degree?” as a call to action for college grads to take control of their future careers.

There is clearly a gap between the number of qualified college graduates in America and the number who find interesting, fulfilling jobs.

The problem is not medieval feminism.

The whole point of college is to get an education, not attend a trade school. So, if you’re interested in medieval history, study medieval history, and get good grades. The biggest obstacle standing between a college grad and a fulfilling job is indecision. The problem isn’t the economy, medieval feminism, or the 113th session of Congress. It’s the fear of how you will respond to your Grandmother’s 3rd cousin at Yom Kippur dinner asking “so, son, what are you going to do with your life?”.

There are so many things to consider: how will I pay off my student debt? (or, perhaps more frightening, convince my parents that they didn’t waste their retirement savings?); What do I want to do? What am I good at? What jobs are available? What even is an Investment Banker? A Product Manager? What will people in my home-town think ? What will my ex-girlfriend think? My current girlfriend? My future grand-daughter? My mom?

So, we avoid making a decision. We don’t get a good job. And we blame it on the economy, the government, and the education system.

I was a finance major, but I currently develop Products at Facebook. I studied accounting, but I interned in the mailroom at a talent agency in Beverly Hills. I cleaned pools, scooped gelati and delivered newspapers. I was an Analyst at Goldman Sachs. The point is I never knew what I wanted to do; I still don’t. I find things that interest me and I do them. If I don’t like it, or if I’m not good at it, I move on.

I have laid-out three strategies I have implemented while going through the painful process of 1) deciding on a job and 2) getting that job.

1. Pretend you know what you want to be when you grow up
   When your blind date on Tinder asks you, “what are you going to do with your life” — have an answer. Say it confidently. Don’t assume it needs to reflect reality — the question is asking you to predict the future, and the future may change tomorrow or next week. The point is, today, you should have an answer.
   When you were in kindergarten and your teacher asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up, you confidently said “a Firefighter”. You didn’t say “well, I’d like to get a professional designation, but accounting is so boring, and if I become a teacher will I ever pay-off my student debt? I see the benefit of a master’s program but my dad wants me to go into Law”. No one cares. Project confidence and make-up an answer.
   This is how the word “pre-med” was developed. When you’ve enrolled in a freshmen Biology course, you’re no more of a doctor than my dog Titan. There’s no such thing as “pre-med”. But you have an answer to the question people have been asking you since kindergarten. You’ve made a verbal commitment to do something. It gives you a framework to pick courses, meet people and get inspired when you have late-nights at the library. But don’t confuse this with a contract that can’t be changed. If, in junior year, you decide that your true calling is doing oil and gas M&A in Texas, you can explain to Goldman Sachs the similarities between science and financial valuation. This is a better position to be in than explaining your kill-count on Call of Duty III.
   In business school we learnt a concept that 90% of decisions you make don’t matter. The important thing is that you make a decision. Picking a path doesn’t limit your options, it expands them. It gives you an opportunity to prove yourself, learn more about your interests and expand your network. It is not a lie if it changes. So next time someone asks you that question, have an answer.
2. Be part of a group
   Once you have an answer, join a group of like-minded people. In business school, we had to self-identify with one of three major streams: marketing, finance, and accounting. I chose Finance. Soon after, I worked very hard to get accepted to the Queen’s University Investment Counsel (QUIC), which is a group of 20 of the top finance students. QUIC has a mentorship program and an alumni network that is very strong. QUIC alumni have benefitted from others in the network, and are eager to pay it forward. Importantly, not everyone from QUIC still works in finance. Some are Entrepreneurs, Consultants, Product Managers, Executives etc. — but all are willing to pick up the phone when you call. Nothing could be more important when you’re seeking advice, business or a job.
   So, find a group of people that you connect with in your field, join a group, and contribute. Never make the excuse that your family isn’t well connected, or your college is unknown. I am from the prairies of Canada and my school is not well known outside Canada — it’s not an excuse, it’s an opportunity to create your own network and build relationships.
3. Do something.
   Lastly, do something interesting. Don’t negotiate with yourself. Don’t reject yourself from jobs you haven’t applied for. Don’t assume you can’t afford an unpaid internship — it may be difficult, but you can make it happen. Don’t assume summer camp is your last chance to have fun as a kid. I interned at William Morris Endeavor in LA and went to the Maxim 100 party — it was more fun than summer camp. If you don’t know what Investment Bankers do, the Vault Guide isn’t going to help you. Do an internship and figure it out for yourself. If you want to expand your network, setting-up an ambiguous phone call with a stranger will not help. Lead a conference and invite people to speak. Start a business and create partnerships. Write a blog. Create a YouTube channel. Do something.
   At Facebook we have posters that ask, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”. As Sheryl Sandberg often says, find an answer to that question and do it.

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