This is an excerpt from my newsletter about getting hired, Launchpad. For more of this every week, click here to subscribe (it’s free!).

(Also, thank you to the following people for helping me proofread and edit this piece: Teresa Pho, April Shin, Brian Chan, Anna McMurchy, Danil Kolesnikov, Charlotte Chen, Jessica Zhou, Samuel Stowers, Akshay Chalana, Jasmine Sun, Emily Huang, and Angela Liu.)

Everyone seems to have a different set of rules to "be successful" in life.

Some, believe in maximizing short-term gains to achieve long-term flexibility (think working at a company with awesome pay but bad work culture or mission because, well, the pay is awesome).

Others believe in maximizing long-term happiness through chasing a social mission, like working for Doctors Without Borders instead of joining the Mayo Clinic.

As a former debater (lol), I'm going to firmly argue that everyone - no matter your background or field of study - ought to be a member of the latter camp, but not necessarily for moral reasons.

To be clear: I believe that everyone should care about solving a meaningful problem in this world, and they should either be working towards understanding what problems they want to solve, or be actively solving them at all times.

This is actually a quite contrarian position. If you read through student forums on the hiring process, it becomes clear quite quickly that they focus heavily on concrete things such as how to effectively negotiate salary offers, craft cover letters (I'd argue incorrectly, but more on that later), and optimize for the most prestigious jobs, which in tech means jobs at Google, Facebook, Apple, and others.

The default position, if I were to summarize it briefly, is this:

• Your job, from high school onward, is to survive the next round of "the tournament," a process that involves constantly culling the weakest competitors among you with the eventual goal of getting that cushy Google job.
• From here, you have to make it into a great college, one with a terrific brand name and lots of alumni working in your field (like MIT, or Stanford, or Waterloo).
• Then, if you're at a large school (like Berkeley), you need to compete to get into the best CS clubs, because they give you access to recruiters and direct connections into the top companies. If you're at a small school, you might focus on joining certain academic frats/sororities that have people who "get in" to the top places.
• You'll need to get at least one solid brand name internship on your resumé,and probably work in a major tech hub, like San Francisco/San Jose. While you're at your internships, you'll spend most of your time networking instead of doing work, going to as many events as possible in an effort to meet the kid who'll get you that "in" to the next opportunity.
• You'll go back to school, trudge through classes you might not care much about, and keep crafting a "unique narrative" of being a CS genius who's more experienced than their age would suggest, a member of the elusive "top 10%" that companies want to hire.
• You might start a startup, because it "shows you can take initiative," and apply to your college's startup accelerator. The company won't go anywhere, but you're now a "founder," and you'll display that proudly on your resumé.

By the end of four years, you'll have club leadership titles, a fancy degree, "founder" status, and a brand name internship, if you play your cards right.

And even then, you still might not get the job.

Your Google internship might not turn into a return offer.

You might not get all those leadership titles.

You might have a bad quarter and get a lower-than-expected GPA.

You might not get into the fancy CS clubs.

You might not get into MIT.

And, as the traditional narrative would dictate, if any of those things fail to materialize, if any of those 'steps' are missed, you won't be "happy."

The problem is, this model just doesn't fit reality.

I know plenty of [insert large company name here] engineers who hate their jobs. I also know plenty who love them.

I know people who work on startups who honestly shouldn't, because the stress is insane, but I know many who enjoy it every day.

There are people from MIT, Stanford, and along prestigious institutions whose students are deemed some of the most talented and intelligent people in the world. Then there are those from the same population that fall short of their peers. And there are CC transfers and community college students that far outshine their four-year counterparts.

Since moving to San Francisco, I've been truly privileged to learn from and hang around people that have inspired me so much whether that be 17 year olds working on brain-computer interfaces or Google developers leading initiatives to make tech more accessible.

Many of them went to prestigious schools, worked prestigious jobs, and "won" the so-called "tournament." But many didn't.

And whether or not they were "happy" with their current state had little to nothing to do with what school they went to or what job they had.

There was a commonality, though.

The people I found to be most "satisfied" with their career paths cared primarily about one thing: impact.

• Some greatly enjoyed difficult engineering and design challenges, and found companies like Tesla and Impossible Aero - who are taking on massive problems in the world - fascinating.
• Others cared about social impact, and enjoyed working at companies with a primary social mission: Khan Academy, Quizlet, Jopwell, the list goes on.

Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, etc fit in that mix as well.

Some of the happiest Apple employees I know believe that Apple's business model of charging customers upfront for hardware to preserve customers' data privacy to be a moral good.

Meanwhile, some of the happiest Facebook employees I know believe the opposite, that advertising-fueled business models benefit the world by increasing access in a way making money off of $1500 iPhones cannot.

I'm not weighing in on these debates, I'm just pointing out that of all the people I've met in this city, the people most happy with their status and work are engaging in them.

They're not just showing up every day to get in, do a job, and get out. They're not just investing time to build up their 401k.

They want to build up a base of knowledge in something they love, and apply it to problems they find challenging, relevant, and impactful.

Last week, Patrick Collison (CEO of Stripe) published an article on his website entitled "Advice" where he talked about this very thing.

If you're between 10 and 20 years old, Patrick recommends to "go deep on things [...] become an expert," to "make friends over the internet with people who are great at things you're interested in," and "make things."

Most importantly, he says this:

"If you're in the US and go to a good school, there are a lot of forces that will push you towards following traintracks laid by others rather than charting a course yourself. Make sure that the things you're pursuing are weird things that you want to pursue, not whatever the standard path is. Heuristic: do your friends at school think your path is a bit strange? If not, maybe it's too normal."

Were you told that in middle school, in high school, in college?

Was that the path you chose?

If you're like most people, there's a good chance the answer is NO, because you were told that following the dreams and aspirations of your childhood was childish, that you ought to just follow the perfectly defined, perfectly reasonable traditional path in front of you.

So, I want you to ask yourself: how's that path been so far? Are you enjoying it? Are you doing fine?

If so, there's no need to read further. You'll be fine. You know what you need.

After talking with hundreds of students at the 30+ schools I visited over the past few years, though, I feel like I can say with some confidence that most of you would answer those questions with no, I'm not fine.

No, this path isn't working.

I'd argue, though, that the core problem is that you've been optimizing for the wrong stuff. You don't need to jump through more hoops, chase more meaningless emblems of prestige, and do things for the sole purpose of "advancing your career", whatever that means.

Because if you do - "advancing your career" for your "career's sake", you'll forget to actually do things for you.

You are not defined by how interested your aunts and uncles are in your job title at Thanksgiving dinner. You are not defined by your salary, or your vacations, or your Instagram feed.

Have any of these things actually made you happy? Actually happy? In a way that was sustained beyond a momentary dopamine hit followed by a crash?

But let me tell you the real kicker: not only is a mission-driven career more impactful, not only is it more rewarding to you, personally…

…but it’s also more likely to earn you those very “emblems of prestige.”

It’s more likely to get you the sort of job your family will “approve of.”

It’s more likely to result in you starting the company of your dreams.

When I started building a hiring platform for students almost three years ago, my first step was talking to as many recruiters as I could to try and understand the hiring process as clearly as possible.

So, I did: I talked with recruiters big and small, from large companies like Facebook and Google to hiring managers at small 20 person startups emerging from accelerators like Y Combinator, 500 Startups, Techstars, and more.

I’d even go to tech conferences like GitHub Universe where I knew recruiting staff would be and probe them with questions. I had a similar opening each time, with the intention of catching them off guard:

“Hi, I’m a college student, but I’m actually not interested in applying for a job at GitHub. I actually run a company called SolverIQ and we connect students with jobs. Could we chat for a few minutes?”

It was through those conversations that I began learning more about the mindset and process recruiters use to actually evaluate applications.

I would learn that mission fit and culture fit are among the most important factors in a junior candidate’s hiring, because of their impacts on the candidate’s likelihood of staying for a longer period of time (maximizing ROI), as well as the frequent calls from the C-Suite to “improve company culture.”

I would learn that companies hired by referral not because they truly believed that “hiring through your friends” gave them the best chance at identifying ALL of the best talent, but because since everyone writes the same damn things on their resumés and cover letters — “a swarm of carbon-copied robots,” one recruiter told me — most cold applications are virtually unidentifiable from each other.

But, most importantly, I would learn that the second recruiters saw an ounce of humanity in a candidate, a shred of evidence of real passion for the work the company does (or even just real passion for anything!), the candidate was shortlisted.

If you believe any of the following things:

• That your starting salary (unless it’s below the baseline for your region, so $100k in San Francisco for CS) actually matters at all;
• That you ought to prioritize working at a brand name company because it’ll make you “more valuable” in the long run;
• That your own dreams, passions, and desires — including those you had as a child — are the work of a child, and thus not relevant to the needs and wants of an adult, to achieve a higher level of professional prestige;

…then I don’t blame you!

We’ve all been brought up to prioritize these things.

But, based on everything I’ve seen thus far, it doesn’t seem those ideas are actually true.

If you know what problem in the world you want to solve, then go out and solve it. Find people solving that problem already, and ask to join them — or better yet, if you’re earlier in your career, ask how you can be of value.

There’s no better example of this than Laura Deming, the founder of Longevity Fund, the first VC firm dedicated to “curing aging” and a Thiel Fellow and Forbes 30 under 30 recipient.

Here’s her story:

“For starters, the 23-year-old, New Zealand native was home schooled, developing along the way a love of math and physics and, perhaps most interestingly, the biology of aging. In fact, she became so preoccupied with the latter that at age 11, Deming wrote to Cynthia Kenyon, a renowned molecular biologist who specializes in the genetics of aging, asking if she could visit Kenyon’s San Francisco lab during a family trip to the Bay Area. Kenyon said yes. When, soon after the visit, Deming asked if she could work in the lab, Kenyon said yes again. (…) by age 14, Deming was a student at MIT, and two years after that — at the tender age of 16 — she was a college drop-out, having been accepted into Peter Thiel’s two-year-old Thiel Fellowship program (…) Deming pitched the idea of a venture fund that would support aging-related startups, and has since turned that early concept into Longevity Fund, an early-stage venture outfit that just closed its second fund with $22 million.”

Some of you are probably thinking, “That could never be me.” And that’s probably true! Laura’s one of the most brilliant people her age.

But that process is replicable. When people have genuine passion for things, people are attracted to them. They want to help them.

There are people at giant prestigious companies and awesome prestigious schools who are happy, and there are people who are not. If we’re examining the correlation between prestige and career satisfaction, it doesn’t seem that one exists — or at least, it isn’t a strong one.

My argument is that among those who make lots of money and those who make little, among those who lead and those who follow, it is almost always true that those who (in the words of Simon Sinek) start with why — with a purpose and reason for being — are those who live the happiest, most fruitful, most fulfilling, and most productive lives.

If you’ve made it to the end, thank you — I’m so happy you’re here.

You’re going to do great things.

🚀

📚 Stuff you should check out

• Patrick Collison (Stripe CEO)’s Advice — One of the most successful leaders in Silicon Valley describes how to live an awesome life in only a few bullet points.
• Naval Ravikant’s “How to Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky)” — A Twitter thread from the founder of AngelList with some wise advice from a wise person.
• How To Be Successful by Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator — The president of the most successful startup accelerator in the world offers 13 thoughts on achieving success.
• Four Guiding Principles to Build A Fulfilling Career: Ashley Geo of Impossible Foods — Ashley Geo, the CEO of Impossible Foods (the people behind the meatless Impossible Burger) offers four rules to follow when picking a job. I subscribe to all of these.
• How to Pick a Career that Counts” from Vox’s FuturePerfect Podcast — FuturePerfect talks to the founders of 80,000 Hours, a career advising group, and a few Effective Altruists, people who believe in a philosophy of maximizing good by maximizing short-term gains, about their philosophies.

Find Your Why was originally published in Launchpad, a newsletter by Phil Hedayatnia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

(This is an abridged version of the Launchpad newsletter — to see the full issue, click here.)

In Issue 2 of this newsletter, I talked about how companies read resumés and what criteria they typically look for while skimming applications.

As a quick reminder, here’s what I wrote:

At my last company, we claimed that candidate-job fit had to do with four factors:

1. Mission Fit, or alignment with the core mission of the company (as an example, Duolingo’s mission according to their website: “Our ultimate goal is to give everyone access to a private tutor experience through technology”).

2. Culture Fit, or alignment with the way teams operate and organize themselves. My friend Brandon Wang, the founder of Conduit Analytics, wrote in his company’s interview prep doc that the ideal Conduit candidate “has passion and interest”, can “see big and little picture thinking”, and is “trustworthy”. (…)

3. Critical Skills, or abilities relevant to processing and filtering information. At SolverIQ, we broke down candidate fit into 100+ of these skills, but a few examples might include developing objective measures and believability weights while making business decisions, staying organized under pressure, or effectively representing complex ideas to peers.

4. Finally, Skills Fit, or your actual ability to do the job required — if the job description is looking for a frontend dev who knows JavaScript, are you a frontend dev who knows JavaScript? This is the technical interview part.

Let’s try to reverse-engineer that list for a second, though. Why would a company possibly care about these things? What’s the strategy behind those priorities?

To understand why those priorities exist, we need to discuss how technical (and a lot of non-technical) recruiting actually works.

An example

Let’s say you’re 22 years old, a recent college grad, and a recruiter reaches out to you on LinkedIn inviting you to apply for a new job at my company, Null.

Excited, you apply — and after passing through a technical screen and acing your interview, you’re in. You get hired at a salary of $100k/year plus benefits. You’re thrilled to work there at first, but after a year you decide that you’d actually be a better fit elsewhere — and lucky for you, your application to work at Google is accepted and you move down to the Mountain View office and get a pay bump. (Nice job.)

The above scenario is any non-top company’s worst nightmare.

First of all, since you were hired through a recruiter external to the company, that recruiter actually gets an additional “finders fee” on top of what you make — so if your salary is $100k, the recruiter or recruiting company might get between $20k-$40k as a finders fee. That means the company’s probably sunk about $130k on you thus far. When factoring in other costs as well (employee onboarding, employee perks, benefits packages, etc) you might cost the company upwards of $150,000 — at a $100k salary. And, given that you’re junior talent, you still might not have all the skills necessary to achieve peak performance.

If you leave after a year, the company you’re working for gets to absorb all of those fixed, one-time costs — but they yield no long-term ROI.

In contrast, let’s take the example of someone who interns with my company during their college years. I compensate that person generously by intern standards ($10k/mo comp for 3 months = $30,000). But, in exchange, I get lots of opportunities to see how you actually work and see if you’d fit in here, driving up the likelihood that you might stick around more than a year if I give you a return offer. I get to give you an offer first, likely before other companies would respond, and get to (likely) pressure you with a quick deadline to reduce the likelihood you’ll be able to effectively negotiate up your total compensation from me. Total cost to hire? $130,000, $20k cheaper than hiring you on the open market — and that extra $30k was in exchange for software engineering work that I’ve likely made money off of, rather than just a sunk cost towards paying someone to spam people on LinkedIn.

There’s lots of other examples like this (please don’t walk away from this thinking that you have to get a fantastic internship with a big-name company in order to get hired there; that’s not true), but there’s a few key points I’d take away from this.

The reason why as an employer I care about “culture fit” and “mission fit” is because if either of those things are wrong, you’re leaving in 1–2 years, which means I’m losing a lot of money. I want you to stay for at least 3 years so I can maximize ROI.

The reason why as an employer I care about “critical skills” relevant to your problem solving/creative/collaborative ability is because those traits are highly indicative of your likelihood to be able to grow and improve once you take the job — important, because if you don’t improve significantly as a junior hire, you probably won’t end up being a quality team member down the road, costing me productivity or more money.

How to use this information

I know, you want more practical tips — clear things you can do — to improve your chances.

Let’s look one last time at the framework companies are using (generally speaking), in order of importance:

1. Mission fit, or alignment with company goals.
2. Culture fit, or alignment with company operating style/community.
3. Critical skills, or ability to grow/improve.
4. Skills fit, or core technical/practical ability.

If you just operate off this framework in optimizing your application and preparation for the job search process, you’ll avoid a bunch of possible pitfalls.

• Rather than focusing solely on the technical interview, you’ll focus more of your attention on selecting companies where you likely fit well and communicating that in the interview and application materials.
• Rather than writing a resumé that’s super text-heavy and just lists a bunch of technical skills, you’ll try to tell a story, picking the most relevant experiences to your underlying mission/the things that motivate you.
• Rather than chasing a string of ‘prestigious’ internships, you’ll select internships and work opportunities that serve as supporting evidence for your underlying mission.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also drill Leetcode questions with friends or search for intro pathways to get referrals — those are great strategies to give yourself a leg up, though they work for different reasons than some people think.

The reason why direct intros + referrals yield better results, in short, is that companies feel more comfortable hiring you when they feel they can get a better grasp on your mission fit and culture fit, by talking to the person who referred you. We all have an easily triggerable bias in favor of selecting the option which we have more information about, and a candidate with a strong referral has more evidence in their favor. More certainty = perceived higher likelihood of staying = perceived improved ROI.

The reason why drilling Leetcode questions and rereading ‘Cracking the Coding Interview’ 50 times actually works decently well for improving your technical interview skills is because the people doing the assessment (either the person conducting the technical screen or the person operating the Hackerrank assessment) aren’t looking for standouts, e.g. they’re not looking for reasons to think you’re good — they’re looking for reasons to think you’re bad and eliminate you from the pile. If you exceed a certain baseline, you move on to the next stage.

Then, things like mission/culture fit and critical skill development matter — and lots of applicants spend so much time drilling technical questions and so little time developing a solid work narrative that they are tripped up there, not at the technical screen stage.

Thanks, y’all 🚀

Thanks for reading this week’s issue! If you liked it, have an idea for how it could be better, or have a question for me, please don’t hesitate to email me directly at phillip@hedayatnia.com.

Liked this? Subscribe for future issues!

How to crack the job search process, not just the coding interview. was originally published in Launchpad, a newsletter by Phil Hedayatnia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is an issue of Launchpad, a newsletter I write weekly about the job search process aimed at students. To learn more or subscribe to future issues (it’s free!) just click here.

I’m deciding to break the format of the last two issues today because I recently came across a video that perfectly encapsulates a bunch of ideas about hiring that I frequently riff on when offering advice to students.

If you have 13 minutes to spare, it’s a must watch.

Meet Johnny Harris.

Johnny Harris is a content creator at Vox, perhaps best known for his “Vox Borders” series. In it, he travels to different countries and cities and documents his journeys while explaining the historical and cultural context around the things he sees. It’s a great series, and it’s earned him millions of views on YouTube and Facebook.

Johnny tells a story of the start of his career: transitioning from college (where he studied International Relations) to living in Washington, DC and chasing his dreams of being a filmmaker.

His video skills “were nothing special … a little bit of home movies, some motion graphics.” When it became clear that a career in IR wasn’t going to go his way, he scrapped together a basic WordPress website and sent out his portfolio to as many employers as possible.

When his efforts at joining more famous or creatively fulfilling companies were unsuccessful, he refocused his efforts: no matter what, just get a job that allows you to get your hands on the tools you need to learn.

He went to work for an architecture regulation firm — not all that interesting, but “it gave [him] the opportunity to spend 40 hours per week learning After Effects”. From there, as he built up his portfolio, he nabbed a job at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where he applied his newfound skills to more creatively fulfilling work telling stories about international relations issues. He began to hone his skills as a storyteller, developing the unique style that would define his later features for Vox.

Finally, one day he came across a Vox video and saw a company with a mission he personally resonated with: explaining the world. Then and there, he decided that he HAD to work for this company. He would do anything to work there.

He decided that, first of all, to work for Vox he needed to be good enough to work at Vox, possessing the skills necessary to produce valuable work. He worked on his skills, and after a couple months, he applied for an animator position at Vox.

He got rejected.

This left him in a state of despair — after all, his dream employer had rejected him.

But, he kept going. Over Thanksgiving break, he worked nonstop to create a Vox-style explainer video that demonstrated his skills, entitled “The 5 reasons I would be an asset to your team.”

Rather than begging for a job, he cold emailed the director of video at Vox asking for feedback. In response, the director of video gave him feedback — and the ensuing conversations, over weeks, led to Vox extending a job offer to Johnny.

Johnny’s takeaways

Johnny sums up the core lessons nicely at the end of his video.

“The first takeaway is you don’t need a gatekeeper to validate that you are professional. I don’t have a degree in filmmaking or InDesign or animation or in journalism, but I was able to enter into this craft and skill set, and I’m able to do it now. You don’t need a gatekeeper to validate you.” “The second takeaway is about understanding the long game of developing professional skills. The long game perspective here is that you find a job that allows you to get better at the skills that you need to get better at that job. It probably won’t be the ideal perfect job that you want, it won’t be your dream job, but it’s gotta be a job that gives you a large body of repetitive work doing the same thing that you want to be doing in your dream job; if you want to get into journalism, that could be going to a local paper and writing a ton of stories and learning how to be edited; if you’re a filmmaker that might be shooting weddings; if you’re a designer that may be like designing for your like local school newspaper. I actually did that in college — I designed for our political newspaper and learned design skills, not because it was my dream job and that’s what I wanted to do, but because I wanted an opportunity to put my hands on the tools and to get experience and repetition in those tools.”

So, what does a video about a video creator have to do with getting hired in the tech industry?

Everything.

A few months back, I posted on my social media channels that I’d answer any question about the hiring process for any student who emailed me for one day. (That offer’s still open; HMU at phillip@hedayatnia.com.) Tons of emails flooded in, but a startlingly large amount of them asked for advice on similar things:

“Hey, Phil — do you have any advice on getting into Google?”

“I know you work with some Facebook people, can they help me get into Facebook?”

I was startled for a few reasons. Firstly, while I’ve learnt some things about how those companies work because of my last startup, I’m not in a position to make referrals — certainly not junior ones. Secondly, the phrasing of those questions — “how do I get into Google” — felt eerily similar to the questions I got when I attended Rice. Not how do I improve my skills at X, not where would you recommend I apply if I want to do X, but… “I want to get in here, can you help?”

To me, that’s an indictment of a hiring process that’s opaque, random, and decidedly non-meritocratic. If people have faith that a system judges people based solely on merit, they wouldn’t ask how to “get in”, but how to “be prepared”. More specifically, if you believe that Google and Facebook hire the best people, then your goal wouldn’t be to ‘get in’ to Google or Facebook — it would be to learn as much as you can so you’d be the ‘best’.

This is going to sound like it conflicts with what I’ve written here in the past, especially as I love riffing on how unfair the hiring process can be and how there’s ‘tricks’ to the process, but let me be clear: the best way to ‘get in’ to a cool job in the Valley is to actually be the best candidate for said job.

It’s true that companies don’t always hire the person who’s truly the best for any given job.

It’s true that some students enter the hiring process at a significant advantage due to understanding the hiring process better, which was the impetus for me to start this newsletter in the first place.

Connections can get you a lot, but in the end, it’s raw skills and talent that are most crucial to long-term success, because that talent enables you to earn the reputation you’ll need to get your dream job. If you’re skilled, you can find unorthodox ways of displaying that skill, like the cold email and associated video that Johnny sent to Vox.

At the end of his video, Johnny gives this final nugget of advice to viewers who want to possibly work for him:

“If you really want to work at a place, and you really believe that you have this skill set, then prove it. Show, don’t tell. I get emails all the time from people who are like, ‘I love Vox, Vox is like my dream, it’s so great, and I want to work there, like is there a job…’ and I’m thinking, you’re telling me that you’re passionate about Vox, and that therefore you should be hired. That’s not proof! Like a million people are passionate about Vox. If you feel like you should be hired, prove it. Show me. In fact, the emails I like the most are when people are like, ‘hey check this thing out’ and it’s a link [to something they’ve done]. The perfect example is my experience with Joe. I sent him an email with my application, didn’t hear anything. I sent him a very short probably one line that was like ‘look at this video resume’, boom, I got an interview.”

Across the next issues of this newsletter, I’m going to share lots of tips and tricks with you about how to improve your chances in the recruiting process, but there’s no tip better than Johnny’s: show, don’t tell.

If you don’t think you’re qualified for a job, set a plan to learn the skills you need to be qualified for the job. If you don’t even know what would make you qualified and need guidance, seek it — email successful people who’re doing what you want to do and, rather than asking for a job offer or for them to do something for you, ask for their advice and recommendations on what you should do next.

Personal takeaways

Personally, I haven’t always followed this advice. While building my last company, there were times when I valued building connections and taking ‘shortcuts’ — like doing press interviews or talks that I in retrospect wish I hadn’t done — because it made me feel like I was getting ahead, like I actually had certain privileges I didn’t really have.

It wasn’t until I focused more on building our core product — ditching the networking events for late night product sessions at our WeWork office, focusing on the grind of the product development process instead of chasing some shiny object somewhere else, trading in calls with journalists for calls with my team — that we actually started to move forward. We wasted valuable time at the start of our company, and burned through more of our money than we needed to.

I thought that, because I knew plenty of other founders who pulled their first rounds of funding together off personal connections alone, people who leveraged their prestige to help their company make it off the ground, that what I needed was just that — prestige and connections. After all, if it worked for them, it surely would work for me.

What I learned, though, was that the pressure to gain that “prestige” just wasn’t real. It was all in my head. When I refocused our team on product responsibilities, investors who were lukewarm about us finally started biting. Clubs which stonewalled us opened up to partnerships. Heck, even morale improved among the team, because we were making progress.

And while I didn’t consciously focus on building connections, we started to earn recognition from others as our product improved. People started introducing us to possible investors and clients without me even asking. When those around us began to see our work as impressive, people came to US to ask how they could help.

The process of searching for a job can be stressful, tiring, confusing, frustrating, and feel utterly hopeless. The process of building a company can involve all of those things, too.

It’s in those moments, though, there it’s most important for us to remember what we’re shooting for.

Some of you might get an awesome internship offer for next summer. Some of you might not.

Some of you might get a stellar return offer, at good pay, at a company with good prestige. Some of you might not.

Some of you might have tons of personal connections who can make awesome referrals, improving your chances of getting a super prestigious job. Some of you might not.

Your job isn’t to care about any of these things. Your job is to craft a rewarding career for yourself, one that allows you to apply your skills and talents to building something awesome.

You don’t need a gatekeeper to validate you.

Do the work. Learn a ton. Help whoever you can. Ask for advice.

To be clear: I’m not contending that the most hardworking, diligent, resourceful, and kind always win.

They tend to, though.

🚀

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Charting an Unorthodox Path to a Job was originally published in Launchpad, a newsletter by Phil Hedayatnia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.