Startup experience on resume

I'm in a similar situation and have mine listed because I have little internship experience. I've also received the same question before but if you spin it off, suggesting that it is just a side hobby for you, you'll be fine. Everyone has a side hobby or something they enjoy doing in their free time. Although you like putting your creativity to the test, your work, job, position comes first and foremost. You can probably say you've exemplified this with college.

If they press this, tell them why you enjoy working in finance. How, although the life of an entrepreneur working with little benefit is romantically appealing, you find joy only in building it as a side hobby. If it does become successful I would say that I would find a buyer or hand it off to a co-founder. And emphasize again why you want to work where you're applying.

Hope it helps and congrats on funding.

Take it off- when it comes to having a little something on the side, it's much safer to practice "Don't Ask, Don't Tell".

I don't know if this helps, but I met a guy who had only failed startup experience before B School and is now a IBD Associate at a BB.

Really depends on the experience / the amount of funding you received for the idea. I think the general assumption is that if you received a decent amount of funding, you wouldn't be considering a job working for someone else. In which case the start-up experience can detract from your resume.

thanks for the great tips guys. it looks like the right answer is not to remove it completely but to position it in the right way.

my fear was that financial firms may view it as a distraction and/or way out. but i didn't want to remove it since it was an accomplishment and does say something about myself.

for the record, the funding wasn't a very large amount and this was listed under Extracurricular Activities in my resume.

I had a friend who had a similar situation when applying to MBB consulting firms. He didn't put it on his resume, but because it was such an interesting and formative experience, and one that showed a lot of his work ethic/creativity/intelligence characteristics, he made sure to weave it into the personal/behavioral part of the interview in some way -- for example, describing a time that you failed at something, describing a time you were passionate about something, describing a time when you had difficulty with teammates, etc. This might be a cool way to get the best of both worlds.

I met with a director at CS yesterday and actually brought this issue up. He said most large firms take reputational risk very seriously and would likely not allow any activity in a startup once employed. Not sure how true this is but its another perspective.

I'm guessing the solution is to try and target the resume towards the position. For example, if going for a strictly financial position, maybe best to leave it off. If its a position that would appreciate some type of entrepreneurship, maybe then you leave it on.

Might be putting too much thought into this, but it is currently on my resume and I have not been having much luck in the search for a new job so I'm wondering if this has something to do with it.

I think it will show initiative and drive to have something like that on there. If anything, you can downplay it in your resume by not making it sound too much like a full on company or a start-up, but more like a project that you worked on for fun in your personal time.