This forum helped me go from Blackstone to Facebook to YCombinator startup founder (rebrand.ly/getourchat). Ask me anything!

Honestly - I gave them exactly two weeks notice.

I talked to the VP first who I was a bit closer to - he was the cooler guy at the office and still in his early 30s. He was pissed off and tried to convince me to not to - but didn't yell or anything. The two M.D.s on the other hand.... total silence for like 2-3 days (I think they were waiting for me to change my mind...) and then one berated me over the phone 2 offices away and the other never said a word to me until I was gone.

It's a bit hazy but that's kind of the memory that I have of it haha.

I was in M&A haha. Blackstone's pretty small (~60 analysts across PE/Restructuring/M&A/Credit Fund/Real Estate a year when I was there) overall.

My co-founder and I met at Facebook 4 years and have been best friends/built things together ever since then. I think this is far and away the most important piece - ideas change, execution matters - but nothing matters more than the person/people you choose to co-found with. It's like marriage LOL.

Y-Combinator's been incredible so far. The process was pretty insane - they let about 3% of companies through to interview (....social is a very low hit category. I'd recommend picking something else should you apply haha eg.: http://blog.clearbit.com/what-type-of-companies-get-into-y-combinator/) and were brutally harsh in our 10 minute interview with them. But in those 10 minutes they provided more value than probably any other people we met with by just straight pushing us. Now that we've started it's just the right balance of helpful advice and events and access to almost anyone - while letting us really get to work!

M&A haha - see above. I was focused on Technology which both made it a bit more interesting for me personally, and made sense when I wanted to move into Product Management.

The week we left Facebook together we applied to YCombinator via their standard interview process - not really hoping for much since social is kind of a crazy category to apply in (it's one of the few categories where you're basically saying you're better/smarter than the 10,000 similar things that came before you.... versus a category that's more IP protected like biotech or AI or some shizz).

The week before we were supposed to launch our product we heard back from them and moved our launch to interview.... for 10 minutes. No joke, they do 10 minutes per company with the partners with the strongest background in your area. We interviewed with one of the founders of Twitch - and boy did he tear us apart. Quotes include: - "No I know what you're saying... I just think it's not good enough." - "...ok like literally everyone's tried this. Are you saying you're better/smarter than all those people?" - "But what does it really DO?"

We walked out of that and basically agreed that we were totally fucked. We actually rode back in an hour-long Uber from Mountain View to SF in complete silence. That night we got a call at around 10PM (was in an Uber to a date....) telling us we got in from the CEO of YCombinator and that he was going to be our partner. I was in an Uber Pool and literally yelled / got asked by the other riders if we'd gotten into YC haha.

Now that it's started the value is pretty incredible. We were initially a bit skeptical because having been at Facebook the past 4 years - we had reasonable connections to good founders and VCs. YCs a very different experience though. Just the access honest explanations from phenomenal founders coupled with crazy access to people and ex-YC companies (DropBox, AirBnB, Reddit, etc.) has proven to be invaluable. We have no regrets on taking YC at all!

Happy to answer more specific questions if you have any.

Yep this was before the PJT days when they still had M&A in-house! I did pretty much everything at the time because each coverage area of Blackstone was so small - there were like 4 analysts total on Tech and I think maybe 12 analysts in a single year at M&A at the time.

Unfortunately the flip side is that BX surprisingly doesn't have any of the operations infrastructure you'd typically get at a BB - like help on constructing the decks themselves / a design shop / software for formatting / etc..... so we had to do all of that by hand too...

Hmmm - a difficult one to be sure.

I'm obviously coming from a biased tech perspective, but modern tech consensus seems to be that "network effects" ranks higher than almost anything else as a category of defensibility for a business. This is primarily because (in my opinion) things like synergy from overlapping business divisions, economies of scale, etc. eventually run out. Network effects, however, keep getting stronger with each new user - and kind of continue to do that indefinitely unless your tech product is artificially capped in some way.

So in that view, FB has the strongest network effects of any company on planet earth. A hard one to overthrow haha...

Ah - definitely NOT the idea's originality. In fact, I'm pretty sure they told that to us explicitly after we got into YC - the idea did NOT get us in haha.

At the early seed stage I've heard over and over again that it's always the team. And not even that you're both individually great - but that you work well together and have a lotttt of tenacity together. The primary failure state of your company is if one, or both, or all of the founders give up... or die

I think in the grand scheme if things it's not really bad for IBD (at least from what I've heard from friends lol). The group I was in definitely wasn't a good fit for me though - the dangers of taking a full time offer in a place I never interned I suppose.

newyorkermonkey:

Honestly, the only thing I'm taking away from this is that Blackstone is a horrible place to work.

I can't imagine any of my superiors reacting like that. Makes me think it might be business-unit specific.

LOL haha well let me know if I can help. And will do? Though he's not really as involved any more - there's a different CEO at YC now.

Interesting that you say that - in recent years I would actually say YC's been aggressively biased against consumer tech: http://blog.clearbit.com/what-type-of-companies-get-into-y-combinator/

...Which in general seems pretty right. In the last 5 years or so since Snap/Instagram, probably 90% of the value in consumer tech has accrued to the head. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to find anything that has massive staying power in consumer tech that's launched past around 2012. Which is obviously why I'm doing it? Well my reasons for choosing it are our specialty and belief I suppose haha

Re: Blackstone - On the good side, my peers (the people in my class) were amazing. I'm still really good friends with several of them even though it took some of them a bit to come to terms with my decision to leave. On the bad side... honestly it was kind of like hazing (I was in a fraternity at college). I don't by any means claim this was unique to BX - but there were MDs there who would throw your life into complete disarray just to fuck with you. As in - claim there was an emergency meeting that you needed to work all night to finish the deck for.... and then there wasn't a real meeting. Or even something scheduled. And he'd stop returning your calls. Like I said - not the worst story I've heard by far, but I had a bit of optionality due to my CS degree so I just took it an ran haha

Re: Technical Ability - I actually think I learned more after I left college than in college. Technology's funny that way - new languages, coding patterns, frameworks, etc. evolve at a pace that at least my college education in CS couldn't keep up with. A good example is today, to run my company - I've had to be very proficient in Swift/iOS and at least passable in Javascript (our backend are servers on Heroku running Node.js) - neither of which I learned in school (Swift wasn't even released when I was in college). So tl;dr - it's never been about recalling our using my previous technical talent - it's always been about powering through learning whatever I need to technically to build what we're building. Oddly that's more an exercise in self confidence and pure grit than anything about innate abilities.

Re: Talent War - I have mixed feelings haha. I really do believe that many of my brightest peers are in finance - and some of their experiences in banking and PE have given them tremendous business acumen and the ability to break down any business in the world to it's foundational pieces brilliantly. That's a skill I admire and a path I chose not to take. On the flip side being in tech puts you on the very cutting edge of what's driving society forward today and let's you build something from nothing - something that never existed before. So at the lowest level it's a question of life style, personal lean, etc. At the mid level it's a question of what you believe in more. At the highest level for me it's the question of what impact you really want your life to have - and who you want to be for your kids and grand kids. Sounds cheesy for sure - but I think most people (my college self included) never really get past the lowest tier. Tech was initially much more about life style and personal lean for me - about the immediate comforts. There I do think it wins pretty universally but that's just funneling pretty smart people who will go wherever the tide's high (metaphorically). I think you have to decide for yourself what really matters to you, versus what happens to be the hot thing today.

Caveat - all my personal opinions and claims across the board here lol.

iBankedUp:

Curious to understand where your parent's reaction came from. If you knew coding well enough to work at FB and then start an app, why would your parents care if you left banking?

Thanks!! You can if you want - insert lots of inspirational and only kind of BS startup quotes

Haha but in all seriousness - you just have to get started and you'll get where you want to go.

Hmm - kind of haha. At the beginning we were just kind of two peons in a different company that was a little nicer on average. We were on the business side - which had been a bit neglected comparatively and honestly didn't have as good tech as the consumer side at the time (much more the focus on Facebook overall).

We became best friends at the time from a mutual fuck-the-police and a focus-on-what-matters approach to our otherwise humdrum jobs and... decided to build a product ourselves that we thought the market needed. Let me say at this point that I do NOT recommend doing this haha - but basically we shipped the product to ad clients without really asking anyone... and it blew up a bit revenue-wise. Enough that Mark Z's reports were notified - and we were quite sure we were getting fired. At any other company I'm still convinced we would've been - but Facebook decided we'd actually done a good thing and... immediately promoted both of us to manage engineering teams instead so we could do more of what we were doing, but in a way with mentorship and proper resourcing.

We were already close and a thing like that really brought us together in a kind of flight-or-fight way. Around then we'd already started talking about leaving Facebook to found a company together, but the opportunities Facebook threw our way were a bit too opportunistic to turn down. Enough so that when our learning curves finally flattened out - it'd been 4 years. So basically we knew a couple things: - We were great friends - We had complimentary skill sets and built good products together - We really cared about this space

From THERE is when the failures really start haha - i.e. after we quit. At Facebook with a reasonable drive and nice smartness it's not too difficult to succeed repeatedly (+luck as always). Out on your own it's straight failure - and I would say we're still in the process of finding a winner haha. Honestly the process of finding winners never really stops in tech - if you look at companies like DropBox for example: they've been continually redefining their product as crushing competition weighs down yearly... but they're also worth $10B lol.

Ah interesting. Hmm - well the interesting thing I've found about fundraising/Silicon Valley are two semi-truths that layer together: - The people who matter at startups and big tech firms across the Bay Area collectively number... like 2000-5000 people. It's really a tiny community when you think about it. Which means... - Reputation goes really far and it's often feast or famine. So 900K+ isn't by any means a crazy amount to seed at (I once had a conversation with an unnamed VP at Facebook before I left where I was expressing how I didn't want to take money from anyone before product market fit in case I lost it all... and he told me the absolute max investment I could ask from him was comparatively the cost of a sandwich to me on a % of net worth basis....".

With those two in mind I'd definitely focus primarily on getting a phenomenal co-founder that you have high confidence across a couple areas in decreasing priority order: - You trust this person a lot. - You two will stick it through for a couple years no matter what. It's like getting married. - You two can absolutely, 100% execute against this idea in its minimal form as fast as possible. Do you really need $900K to test the waters? Launch as early as possible haha. If you can say those three things about your cofounder - investors at a $900K seed won't be running to you, but they'll at least listen and you'll have a reasonable chance of raising from someone.

Happy to answer anything if there are any more specific questions!

Highly variable across roles I would say? In my 4 years there I worked in pretty much every capacity from Sales to Engineering to Design to Product Management.

• Sales is typically business-y with 9-5 or 10-6 hours but a spike for client pitches and things.

• Engineering is work-when-you-want (no... really). Like work-from-home Wednesdays... I think one of my engineers worked-from-Brazil for the entire month of December once. But it comes with a few strings - you're on-call probably around a weekend every 2 months where if Facebook goes down... it's on you. Also, performance is production-oriented but like task-heavy. Which is kind of always either too monotonously easy or too crazy frustratingly difficult haha. So hours-wise it's really aggressive some times, really chilled out other times - but highly variant on average.

• Design is kind of like engineering workloads/flexibility but with a lot more in-person reviews and debate about the right way to do things.

• Product is... flexible. Meaning that you can always be working and it's easy to get organizationally overwhelmed with small things (like responding to the dozens of channels you get pinged on immediately across Messenger, Facebook, Email, Groups, Slack, Tasks, +5 more internal tools). Or you can learn to chill out and prioritize. I'd say a bit more than sales but definitely less than engineering and design? You do have to organize your workload around big reviews though - which can be excruciating or really helpful depending on your reporting chain haha.

it's easy on the way to the bank, Dick lol

So kind of hilariously - I remember feeling the same way when I was in college. I started as an Econ major to be honest partially because I thought it was easier. Then once I realized I was interested in tech - I thought that maybe if I did Tech/TMT banking I could transition to like a corp dev role in Tech/TMT... and the way that banking sells it is that you can kind of "skip" levels and go in higher than an analyst/associate if you have a strong banking background...

So I have kind of my own perspective on this, and a perspective on the industry itself.

My personal belief is that a major part of the appeal in IBD/consulting (for me especially) was optionality - you maintain a lot of open paths after it. I realized 2 somewhat generalizable things after doing it for a while: 1) Life's too short to do shit you don't like doing every day 2) People who specialize earlier find outsized success later, though you may take a hit monetarily before you catch up 3) Something about just jump on the rocket ship instead of asking which seat you get? Catching trends/a wave is definitely helpful but probably of tertiary prioritization

For the industry I think Computer Science is never not helpful - but (especially in finance) - it's the combination of a technical base + soft skills like negotiation, leadership, etc. that really make a person a rock star. Funnily so - it's becoming exactly the same in technology too. I wouldn't go as far to say that engineering has become commoditized - but at a lot of the best technology companies it's never about what we can do (because you have enough resources to do pretty much everything) - it's about what we should do and why. So something inspiration about that combination of execution and vision haha.

I think our start-up's probably not too relevant in this discussion because at a super early stage software company (we're just founders + 2 interns) - you really only need engineering until you hit like 8-10. Then design - and only then maybe other roles as needed (community management, content strategy, product marketing, data science, etc.) - and it always depends on what the founders can't handle. I happen to have at least won't-get-fucked level ability in fundraising/finance so our first hire in this category would probably be a CFO.... which we wouldn't need until some serious fundraising hits. So probably like >$10M in fundraising which would be somewhere around series B and at the earliest maybeeeee the 20th employee but probably later. Fingers crossed I ever have that problem!

Oh trust me - we're really quite upset with that. But that's kind of the business we're in - the incumbents in tech (especially some ways in social) have a lotttt of staying power. Mostly because network effects are such a crazy strong defensible moat.

The defining part of starting a company emotionally is much higher ups (your company becomes an embodiment of you much more than when you work for someone else) and much much lower downs. So we're rolling with the punches lol. Also pick someone you really want to be in the trenches with to co-found... because otherwise you might actually want to kill each other haha.

I think the CS degree vs. self teaching is kind of a personal bias question - some people are better in forced classroom environments and some are better taking things at their own pace.

My recommendation would, regardless of what you're more comfortable at - to get really good at self teaching. Technology environments, stacks, libraries, languages etc. - move at a pace I don't think college curriculum's can really handle well. As an example you can look at Computer Science at the major schools and track how often they change languages... so I'd definitely bias to making sure: 1) You actually like Computer Science - this is the basis of self teaching for me. This doesn't mean you have to love algorithms or machine learning or theoretical CS. I love building things - the reason why I like CS is more like why I liked legos growing up haha. 2) You find a way to make sure you can sustainably learn. Some people have a penchant for abuse and raw grit - they just force themselves to learn. Some people need a semi-forced class environment like a Coursera or a Kant Academy. Whatever it is - figuring out how to insure you're learning constantly outside of what people make you learn (work/classrooms) is incredibly helpful.

Language-wise I'm not always super comfortable giving recommendations because of the fluid nature of tech. I would say I've found Javascript to be probably be the most flexible language (albeit some times excruciatingly painful). By flexible I mean you can use it across a lot of areas of technology: it's critical for web development, scales well for server code via node.js, and you can build apps simultaneously on Android/iOS using React. The one issue with it is it's primarily a web development language so those three things are in order of depth. I.e. for my company I still develop our iOS app in native Swift not because we couldn't use React, but just because I've found native Swift to be better documented and flexible with more libraries. So as a general recommendation Javascript covers a lot - but it's really use-case to use-case and it's better to learn the fundamentals of how to pick up new languages than to focus too much on one!

Aaaand this is now the highest voted response. Well done. I will say Silicon Valley on HBO is a surprisingly accurate portrayal of the Valley...

Aw - thanks haha!

1) Silicon Valley would prefer not admit this but finance actually teaches quite rigorous analytical skills and attention to detail. The former is much more valuable than you would think (data science/statistics/experimentation is critical to tech companies to understand what's actually going on) primarily because the best analysts are able to combine data with qualitative understanding. Finance actually teaches this quite well because nothing's ever totally cut-and-dry - which is the same in tech.

2) Hmm this one's hard. Honestly the best thing to do is to make a list of the best engineers you know (assuming you want to do software) and literally go one-by-one chasing them down until each and every person says no. And I mean every single one - you'd be surprised at how unhappy that one guy who seems to be in a super cushy job doing quant trading or at Google is - and how into a cool idea he would be!

Best of luck!

For sure! This forum gave me a lot when I was a truly clueless college kid so it's nice being able to give back a little.

Hmmm - so I would say this varies company-to-company and role-to-role a lot. For truly mature companies (Google, Microsoft, Apple) I think unfortunately it's pretty limited to Corporate Development or corporate finance roles. I wouldn't generally recommend taking one of those roles because in my personal experience they play a bit of second-fiddle role? I.e. Google is at its core an engineering company - Apple a design company - etc. So at Google engineering usually has final say, at Apple it's design, etc. If you're going to go to one of those, I'd find some way to get into those roles instead.

The younger "large" tech companies are where it get's interesting. This category currently are companies like AirBNB, Uber, Snapchat, Dropbox, and maybeeee Facebook though they've almost fully matured by now (Facebook circa 2014 was more of a young "large" tech company). These tech companies are actually probably the best places to work if you want a ton of growth opportunities and an accelerated learning curve without the disastrous black swan outcomes of true startups (i.e. what I'm doing right now LOL) where the entire thing goes to 0. The defining traits here are that these companies all know recruiting is incredibly important, but don't have the massive well-oiled recruiting machines that Google/Microsoft/Apple/Facebook have in place - and also kind of are mid-flight in defining their culture. So - they basically just need a ton of really smart, scrappy people who are willing to play jack-of-all-trades like at a really early start-up, but without as much risk of straight 0s in equity and with at least a base of really good people to learn from (at startups it's typically only the founders + founding team who are super strong). In these companies I've definitely seen my friends from IBD or consulting backgrounds (more consulting typically) move either across the company from Corp Dev to Product Management - or into critical roles like General Manager roles at Uber (on-the-ground deployments, i.e. Uber's bread and butter).

Funnily enough I don't think I've ever seen anyone move from PE into non-Corp Dev tech - I guess you're probably more locked in at that point? I.e. it's harder to make the argument that your skills are transferable? That's just a guess though on a limited sample size.

Happy to!

Re #1: It's definitely more varied than other roles because PM is the jack-of-all trades role - but I'd say typically everything is anything to lead and help your team build. A lot of the time this involves meetings with different parties (engineering, design, other PMs, leaders at the company, product marketing, legal, etc.) to help everyone reach joint consensus on issues and/or decide what to actually build for people. Some times it involves reviews with leadership where you make your case for new initiatives. I think the most surprising part for my role in Product was how everyone defaults to you for decision making. Honestly, at first it kind of felt weird - as any other junior employee I'd say you mostly look to others for guidance. In product (at least at Facebook) it's more of thrown-in-the-fire type of learning experience haha. The amazing part is that you actually have real responsibility and real accountability (some people don't like this though) - and can really track your direct impact. The scary part is, of course - when everyone in the room looks to you by default to be the final say - they're trusting that you're listening and weighing people's opinions and being fair. Nothing forces anyone to work for/with you in tech (especially for high optionality roles like engineering or design) and so trust is really the binding ethos.

Re #2: Hmm - I would re-word this as consumer-focused, business-focused, or tech-focused haha. Definitely varies product-to-product. Almost a full half of the company at Facebook is on advertising products - so those are all at least somewhat business-focused (what advertisers want, how to measure it, taking their feedback and building new business units). I'd say that most other products are consumer-focused with a minority being truly tech focused. Consumer-focused products are totally user-centric - where it's honestly much more qualitative and sense-heavy. You spend a lot of time trying to figure out what people really want versus what people just say they want (i.e. probably very few people would say they'd love to stalk all the opposite gender people they're into on the internet.... but they ALL want that. A lot a lot. $400B a lot.). Tech-heavy roles are mostly isolated to areas of the company like infrastructure/data centers (almost no "Product" Managers - they have "Technical Product Managers" instead... which is a very different more project-management role. The major distinction is if you're tasked with purely organizational work or with strategic and organizational work.). The areas on consumer/business products where there are tech-heavy roles are the ranking and algorithmic teams - like News Feed Ranking, Ads Ranking/Delivery, etc.

Re #3: Ah the most variable question of all haha. Each company has their own culture and own preference for PMs - Google used to be notorious for requiring every PM to go through a coding interview (useless in my opinion, but that was part of their culture). Facebook has seen, through actual real data, that C.S. gives people a boost for the first 6 months or so, but has no correlation with performance a year or so out. So Facebook consciously does about a 33/33/33 split of C.S./Eng or technical non C.S./completely non-technical. They've seen that the defining trait of really strong Product Managers is execution ability combined with an openness to understanding people problems - neither of which is particularly correlated with a strong math/science background. Work experience in my time at Facebook really only influences where you come in compensation/leveling-wise - the only awkward timing happens if you end up too far into your career with no Product/tech experience. I.e. if you're like

Hmm - I don't think there are any forums (at least one's I'm aware of) that cater to tech the same way WSO does for finance. There are a ton of good articles on Medium, a16z, First Round Review, etc. though. Maybe someone should go... build that haha.

Re: I think mixed overall. At Facebook young Product Managers with MBAs were a rarity - I think there were probably a couple in each class year for the young PMs but no more than 2-3 out of 20. There's probably some slight upside to doing an MBA since it allows for a full rebranding if you've made it as far as PE roles - though that skews heavily towards Stanford. Generally I think an MBA's not super useful to either the actual skills of being a PM or for recruiting haha.

Hope that helps!

The company is SpotMap and we build apps to connect you with people around you! OurChat is our latest iteration and the app that we're currently pushing on the hardest given it's stronger retention metrics.

You should check it out and give feedback if you have any - feel free to DM me!