All in Path 101

Check me out this Thursday 12/18 at 2PM ET on our own Path 101 BlogTalkRadio show

Charlie O'Donnell
Path 101, Venture Capital & Technology, nextNY

You can call in (646-929-1686) or check out the show online...   be there!

Topic:

With over 2700 blog subscribers, 1700 Twitter followers, 1000+ LinkedIn connections, and 600+ Facebook friends, not to mention IM buddies, 100+ blogs in my RSS reader, and 3000+ e-mails in my address book, you'd think I'd be a bit overloaded!

I'm going to talk about how I "manage" all of these and also take some questions around the following...Friend everyone or keep a velvet rope? Can you develop authentic relationships at scale? Where does networking cross the line to self promotion?  

Aiming for 30 Under 30

Charlie O'Donnell
Mentoring, Path 101, Teaching

Have you ever felt like you never realized how much you were capable of, because, simple as it may seem, no one told you along the way? Despite the fact that I went to a magnet school, I never strived to be a leader in high school or to discover the unique imprint I could leave on the world, mostly because I just didn't realize that I could be on the same level as the high achievers.

And yet, somehow we assume the US is going to retain a leadership position in the world over the decades to come, even though we really don't spend much effort at all on leadership training.

Sure, we have lots of leadership problems. The top of every class get special awards, plaques, and wind up on lists, but how many of those students are actually getting the leadership tools they need to impact cities, states, countries, even the whole world?

What's worse, how many are being told they can?

What passes for student leadership these days is often pretty lame. Lead a club that had been on campus for generations. Get elected to the student council and run a new program. This will put you in the top 10% of your school in terms of leadership, but that's a pretty low bar, since we all know most students don't try too hard to be leaders.

The difference between that and being one of the top 30 under 30 years of age in your profession is huge, and most people don't know how to teach or motivate for that. In fact, I'm not sure they even try, because much of that level of achievement involves reaching across institutions and changing the way things are done, something most schools aren't even good at themselves.

Imagine, for a moment, what the top 30 people in your profession under 30 years of age are probably doing. Or the 25 under 25. Maybe your industry actually has that list . Maybe you need to create it. Identifying standout performances could help motivate yourself and others by identifying just how high the bar really is.

Many people don't strive for leadership because they don't want the pressure and responsibility that leadership comes with. What they fail to realize is that it's actually much easier to be a leader than being the low person on the totem pole. Leadership brings with it the flexibiliity to do more on your own terms, and the support of others who follow you who can help lighten the load because they believe in your vision.

So if you're a college student or in your 20's, think about what you need to do to be recognized as one of the top people in your field at such a young age--part of a 30 under 30. If you don't know what that would entail, go ask anyone and everyone that you know who is involved in the industry what it would take.

Publish the answers, strive the the goal, make an impact, because who really wants to ride in the back seat for this lifetime?

I live for this: The challenge of entrepreneurship

Charlie O'Donnell
Path 101, Venture Capital & Technology

I've said this before, but I'll be honest:  I never wanted to be an entrepreneur.

Well, I never wanted to be an entrepreneur when I knew what being an entrepreneur was.   Back when I was like 10, I wanted to have my own car company.  I used to draw cars and I'd make annual reports on our computer using Harvard Graphics.  I called it Impulse.  I liked naming the models. 

When I started working in private equity, it didn't seem nearly as appealing.  It seemed like a huge pain in the ass for not a lot of reward--on average.   Sure, I had done entrepreneurial things in college, like start a business newspaper, but I was never any good at delegating and so while I enjoyed my experience, it was kind of all for naught.  The paper died when I graduated, after two years.

What I didn't realize then, and what I'm realizing now, is how much I enjoy the challenge.

People ask me if I stress--if I stress about the fact that I know the very day we run out of cash.  Do I stress when investors turn us down or when we need to make difficult product decisions?  Do I stress when something on the site doesn't work as its supposed to?  Do I stress over the hours I put in?

Not in the least.

In fact, it's fantastic.  The challenge of it all has been enormously rewarding.  So as I sit here getting ready for a big investor meeting... a  "go/no go" final meeting... one where I'll be giving a pitch that could be worth nine more months of life for the company, for my partner, for my employees, for our investor's capital...  I'm really loving it. 

This is way better than the day that I was interning at a big company and I left for the afternoon after lunch and no one noticed that I was gone.

I live for this.

Lost your job? Laid off? Worried about the economy? Introducing the first Path 101 Career Event on Job Strategies for a Bad Economy

Charlie O'Donnell
Path 101, nextNY

The e-mails are starting to trickle in...

"Help, I lost my job!"

"I've been laid off!"

"Please help my friend find a job!"

 

We're in difficult, uncertain times, no doubt...   and how many of you feel prepared?  Have you ever even been taught how to job search?

And no, uploading and e-mailing your resume everywhere and just waiting patiently for a resumes doesn't count.  Why?   Because very rarely does anyone get a job like that.

I think most people know that but they just don't know what else to do.  That's why we're running a live event about just that:  How to approach your career and job search in a bad economy.

EVENT: Keeping your career UP in a DOWNTURN: Strategies for a Bad Economy

On Saturday, December 13th, we're assembling some really fantastic sessions with top career experts to help you more effectively job search and shore up your career during a very uncertain time.  We've tried very hard to keep our costs low and so we're able to bring you the full day seminar for less than $100. 

Our event will take place at the New York Seminar and Conference Center at 71 West 23rd Street from 9-5PM and lunch will be provided.   Here's the topic overview:

  • Where's the damage and how bad?? Economic reality check and sector focus
  • Keeping a cool head...and mind and body: Recessionary Zen
  • Last employee standing: Making yourself indispensible to your employer
  • When your job is finding a job: A day to day gameplan
  • Going to the mattresses: Budgeting and personal finance tips
  • Old dogs, new tricks: Reinventing yourself and your career
  • Networking 2.0: Using blogs, LinkedIn and other social media to stand
    out and get found

 

Similar events are charging $75 for sessions on social media alone!  Sign up ASAP, because, given the timeliness of the topic, tickets are going pretty fast. 

Please pass this on to anyone you know that has been laid off or just worried about their career who you know isn't conducting a very efficient job search right now and needs help.

Unpaid internships are a ripoff

Charlie O'Donnell
Breaking Open Experiential Learning, Mentoring, Path 101, Venture Capital & Technology

There.  I said it.  More often than not, when you "employ" students as unpaid interns, you and the school facilitating this practice by offering credit are giving students the short end of the stick.

Companies say the students are picking up valuable experience, but how many unpaid internships are really worth a damn?  Maybe if they were learning transferable, in high demand/short supply skills, but filing, photocopying, cold calling, getting coffee, answering client gopher requests, and answering phones do not fit into that category.  Those are the things your well paid executive assistant would rather not do and so they get passed off to the free slave...er...student labor.

If you're going to help a student hone their PHP coding skills, then I'd have a different opinion--but funny enough, internships in computer science, where real skills are used and developed, are paid!  It often seems to be the least interesting, most commoditized work that is most often unpaid.

The "getting free experience" argument doesn't hold water. It isn't free for the student when they have to use college credits to justify the fact that they weren't being paid. They're paying thousands of dollars for those college credits. The system that demands that they receive credit if they're working for free, designed to prevent actual slave labor, actually hurts the student. If the experience itself was actually worth it for its own sake, a student would be better off just getting the job on their resume and not having to pay all that money for the credit. In fact, if I were the student, it would be a better economic deal for me to offer to write a check to the company for my own minimum wage salary, because it will probably be cheaper than paying the school for the credit.

The bottom line is that if someone is work of any value to you, you should compensate them for it, even if its just minimum wage. If your organization can't afford the hundred bucks or so a week for 15-20 hours of work because it isn't worth it, then how good is this experience that the student gets?  Plus, if your company can't afford $6 an hour labor, perhaps your business isn't economically viable--and that goes for startups, too.  If it isn't a no-brainer to get that work done for six bucks an hour, I find it hard to believe that work will impress anyone when it's on a resume. 

Companies make out like bandits with this practice. Not only do they get free labor, but they have no incentive to invest in the education of the student. If they don't stick around or don't like the work, who cares? Doesn't cost them anything! Give them an incentive to make sure the student is doing meaningful work.

You know who benefits pretty well from this practice, too? The school! Imagine if for every degree earned with 120 credits, 3 of those credits were earned by completing an internship. That represents a 2.5% reduction in the cost of faculty normally paid to teach them something useful in exchange for those 3 credits. Schools that allow 2 "for credit" internships are cutting their faculty overhead by 5%!

Two of the most common unpaid internships are in private client/high net worth asset management, and marketing/pr. Here are some alternatives for students to getting ripped off at unpaid internships in these fields:

Private client/high net worth asset management:

Lots of folks make a lot of money being entrusted to individuals' savings. Those people bring big trusted networks and financial expertice to the table--two things students completely lack and will lack for quite a while. A great marketing intern could have a big impact on a marketing campaign, but a private client intern isn't going anywhere near portfolios, so they basically get relegated to cold calling and "interacting with clients" (answering phones and being a gopher). Try getting a big investment banking internship with this on your resume.

Instead, open up a fake portfolio on Yahoo! Finance Or Google Finance, or a trading game site like UpDown. If you don't know what stocks to pick, just pick things you either know or that you might be interested in following (food companies, fashion, autos, Apple). Track the hell out of it. Download your daily gains and losses per stock to Excel. Enter the performance for the indexes--the S&P 500, the Dow, etc. Crunch the numbers. Open up a blog on blogspot or similar service with a fun domain name like TickerU or BullMarketMajor or something and write about your portfolio and the market EVERY DAY. Read and comment on the blogs of experienced investors like TraderMike, Howard Lindzon, and Information Arbitrage. Interview your favorite stock bloggers on your blog, even by email. If you do this a whole semester, you will not have wasted paying for the credits to be at a crappy internship. Instead, you could have taken another accounting, financial modeling, stats, or programming class and gained a lot better experience watching and interacting with the market everyday. Plus, you will have put your name out there as an innovative, ambitious self starter, making it much more likely you'll get hired for a better internship.

Marketing/PR:

If you're going to volunteer to market anything, market yourself. Actually you're already an expert on a certain kind of marketing and you may not realize it. Youth marketing, both offline and online (especially on social networks), is a huge lucrative business. Brands and agencies are always looking for people who are up on the latest trends and who have keen insight into what works and what doesn't.

Every single student who has an interest in marketing and public relations should be blogging about how they get approached by marketing campaigns, brands they love, and trends they see.  How about taking a poll at your school to find out what the top brands are and what people's associations with those brands are.  You should use Twitter, too...   You can use it to update your Facebook status messages, but moreover, you can use it to follow the updates of very high level marketing and PR folks. 

If I was hiring someone to help create a digital presence and brand for myself, I'd want to see them be able to do it for themselves first.  Learning how to do that by attending conferences (you can often go free as a student by volunteering), workshops, informational interviews could be a better learning experience than an unpaid internship.

 

If you're a college student (or anyone else) and you're worried about what you're going to do with your career, you should check out the site my company is working on, Path 101.  Sign up for our e-mail list and we'll keep you posted on what we're doing to help you figure all this career stuff out.

 

 

 

Interview and story in The Deal...and another defense of the New York tech community

Charlie O'Donnell
Path 101, Venture Capital & Technology, nextNY

I was recently interviewed by Mary Flynn of The Deal and profiled in the magazine as well.  It's going to be awesome press for us, so we're really excited, but I did want to add one thing to the article. 

Andrea Orr wrote:

"Path 101 doesn't operate in Silicon Valley, where even in today's tough funding climate, there's a strong fellowship in the startup community that provides at least some moral support when no financial backing is forthcoming."

Oh Andrea...Why the New York community knock?  Actually, we're glad we don't operate in Silicon Valley!  Instead, we're operating right where every startup should be in a difficult environment--right in the middle of where our existing network is, surrounded by supportive people who know us well.

Just the other day, we had an investor meeting with the New York based folks who have supported us from the beginning and I said to Alex, "Jeez, can you imagine if we didn't have the investors that we did.  How tough would that be to just have some random angels that don't know you very well?" 

If anything, there's a stronger fellowship in the New York community, because we constantly get dinged by mainstream media as a "sad assed backwater" of a tech community.  We feel like we're all in it together--NYC tech against the world!

Need more proof? 

nextNY is almost at 2,000 members!

A new co-working space, New Work City, just opened.

Our NY Tech Meetups are filled to the brim and sellout in minutes.

NY's own Fred Wilson won the Donor's Choose Blogger Challenge, beating out Valley competition from TechCrunch, AllThingsD

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