Founder or Director on Resume? Former Founding Member/ Director of a Startup
Industries of interest for FT and or Internship roles:
Investment Banking
Venture Capital
Equity Research
Management Consulting (maybe the most realistic fit??)
Private Equity
Graduated from a non target, large state school, BS Econ. No prior internships or work experience relevant to the fields mentioned above. Founded/Co-founded two startups, raised seed funding for one(plenty media and press). Acting role was more inclined towards "Director." I have now step aside completely in order to peruse and focus on a career in one of the industries mentioned above. Any recommendations as to what I should list my title at these startups on my resume, Founder, Co-founder, or Director, etc? Or if anyone is willing to take a brief look I can PM my resume. Thanks in advance for all the help.
unless your startup was sucessful and it shows what you write below it then it doesnt really matter. So how successful was it
Its alive and healthy, growing rapidly. It has done fairly well for its lifespan. I can pm you specific details to give you a better idea.
Director & Founder. Or vice versa. You're not a former founder but technically you're a former director if you no longer work there.
Makes sense, but do you think Founder will indirectly imply that I'm busy doing things on the side and or the firm will not have my undivided attention? I spoke to a couple folks in management consulting and they said founder may come off a bit "intimidating" when a firm is reviewing my resume.
I suppose it depends on your age/experience level and I am not a consultant nor have I ever been so I can't say anything worthwhile to that. I have founded multiple companies so I put something like founder on my CV, but I'm also 40. I don't have a one page resume. At 22 I hadn't done that. Maybe others who are closer to your experience level could comment. In addition, when I was in college or fresh out, it was much less common to found a company. I'm old though. It was really expensive to start a company in 1996: you had to raise a large amount of VC money to even get off the ground so it was pretty special if you could. Now, it's not. No offense.
As to your time you can spend in a new full time position, such as consulting or IB, it's pretty obvious you would have needed to give that up. You can address that on your resume with dates and especially in the bullets. Date X to somewhere before today for example. I have existing companies that I don't commit time to but still exist. Bullets of "Raised Y, did a,b,c to start/build revenue" then left.
Congrats on a couple of successes. Would you ever think about just going that route? Start up/entrepreneur? I'm normally not someone at all to say that's the best route but if you've already done things that have gotten off the ground and could possibly support you, it's not a bad thing.
Informative feedback, thank you! I appreciate your kind words of acknowledgment. To be transparent, at the point I'm more inclined towards focusing, full time of course on a career in the industries mentioned above. Their are a couple of outlining factors behind my reasoning(all positive reasons). Although I have raised seed funding from private investors, etc at my age I'm sure I have plenty of learning to do. Not to knock tech, but the ecosystem is not aggressive enough. I've always been passionate about finance, investing and always knew thats what I wanted to be doing. After graduating with no prior internships and relevant work experience not to mention my non target university I had to accomplish something highly significant to stand out before even attempting to break into the industry. I have been in a couple of notable magazines like Entrepreneur assuming this would be a good thing to mention in my resume and validate my successes as a prospective applicant.
Could I send you my resume for a brief look? I would really appreciate your professional opinion and advice considering your years of expertise and successes.
Sure, send it to me. Based on your response you're more likely to do well in the entrepreneur route though. I mean this in the nicest way, but if you've already graduated from a non target (I did, not horrible) and aren't in campus recruiting, it's tough to break in into consulting or IB. I did but it was nearly 20 years ago (and I did it as a new grad). And I had major industry contacts. Things were different then.
Why do you want to get into consulting or anything else related? If you've already been able to raise money for a concept why do you not want to continue?
Founding a start up seems to be the thing to do these days for resume building. I've seen this on something like 75% of the summer intern resumes that have crossed my desk.
"Founder and director" if you have room. If it can only be one, use "Founder" (implies you're a director to some extent).
If your start up is moderately successful, include some useful metrics. eg if it's internet based, what's the unique user views per month or average revenue per month?
In the absence of meaningful descriptions (which don't have to be big numbers), I assume that it's just a phantom start up done for the sake of resume building. A domain name and a bit of web design at best.
Because I'm a cynical bastard (and paid to be cynical), I'm usually assume that any start up listed on the resume is spurious unless the candidate can speak really solidly about it.
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