Very True by Verissimo

Alex (00:00)
Welcome back to another episode of Very True. I am excited to flip the script a little bit today, change my target audience very slightly, and talk to people who are in their early 20s. Maybe they're still in college, maybe they just graduated, and talk about career advice. This is something that I maybe was the great beneficiary of, but really this is the accumulation of the last 15 years of my own learnings from my own career experience.

and also advising dozens and dozens of people over the years. So I'll start with one big thing, which is really important to remember, which is that brands matter. When you look at someone's resume and you hear their story, the first thing you look at is where did they work? Did they work for a company that you've heard of, for a company that you associate with quality, or for something that you've never heard of that you don't understand? And this is super underrated. If I get a resume and it says the person worked at Palantir, I'm like, all right, they must be smart.

says they worked at McKinsey, they must be really smart. It says they worked at Goldman Sachs, Facebook, Google, Microsoft. These are all really, really strong signals and they're not fake. It matters. These companies have been built up to where they are today because of their ability to consistently recruit and train top talent. And other people look to that screening and that training as a really strong point of validation for hiring you down the road or any other reason people want to know about your career.

So that's one, that brands matter. Also, I'll touch on interns quickly and how to look at internships. Every time I get a resume and it has like six bullet points under an internship, I don't even have the patience to read them. Why? Because what did you do as an intern? You did intern things. Now, maybe those intern things were interesting, maybe they weren't, but I always say if my dad who's 68 years old and has been the CFO,

A dozen companies, including multiple public companies, can fit his resume on one page. A 22 year old who's had four internships certainly can fit theirs on as well. It's got to flow. It's got to be clear. We can do another session on how to do your resume, but I'll hit one really important point here, which is anytime I have interns or I talk to interns, always tell them this, this I think is one of my most valuable pieces of advice for an internship is after your first week on the job, sit down with whoever you're reporting to your boss.

whoever you're directly reporting to, if you know, maybe it's the analyst that you work with and say, hey, I want to write my bullet points for this section of my resume now. And the reason you do that after a week is you need to get a sense of what at least the opportunities might be in that role. And then you want to sit down and say, let's write my bullet points together. And really what you're saying is this is what I set out to accomplish. You don't want to spend eight or 10 weeks

just messing around, doing random things. You want it to build towards something, towards some story you can tell so that when you're in an interview, you can speak to what you actually learned and why it matters and how it affected you and how it relates to whatever job you want to do now. For me, I run an early stage venture capital fund. As I always say, if I have interns, I'm just frankly doing them a favor. The work that I do is built on years and years of experience.

It's really nuanced. There's not a lot of grunt work that needs to be done. It's very relationship oriented. So the way I typically structure things is I say, number one, spend a week or two picking an area that interests you, something that we haven't invested in yet. Let's discuss it. And then I want you to spend your free time this summer doing a deep dive and have an output at the end of a research report on that. The second thing that we do is I just teach them finance.

Even though we don't do a lot of hardcore financial modeling and early stage venture, I've done a lot of it in my career. I enjoy it and I've taught it many times and I have a whole curriculum. And so I have them building financial models. And then the third thing is just come with me to meetings. Sit in on meetings, whether there's new meetings, in-person meetings, see me talk to founders, other investors, whatever it may be, learn the lingo, learn the business dynamics, those kind of soft skills that polish that matters. So that's internships. Another really important

piece of advice for earlier in your career is you got to work hard. You know, that's what a job is. A job is work, hard work. And the harder you work earlier in your career, the faster you get ahead. Now I worked in investment banking out of college. It was pretty insane in terms of the hours I was pulling. It was not healthy physically, emotionally or mentally, but I learned a lot and no, I did not have time to join a rec league of anything. barely

had enough time to sleep. I definitely didn't have enough time to exercise. Once in a while I went to a football game, but it was brutal. And yeah, that's probably too much, but I really got like five or six years of experience in the first two years of my career. And then that compounds for the rest of your career. So work hard. Don't burn yourself out. Again, we took it a little bit far where I was working, but you I got to work on really awesome, big stuff and no one could ever take that away from me. And the experience I

I got and what I learned and what I saw firsthand were a game changer. So don't bring yourself out, but plan to work hard because every bit of experience you get compounds throughout your career.

The other thing that's important to recognize is that you work for three reasons. The first reason is to make money. The second reason is because you're learning. And then the third reason is because you enjoy it or it's fun or you get some other fulfillment from what you're doing. To me, that is the kind of Maslow's hierarchy of work and how you should stack it up. Now, those priorities may shift depending on where you are in your career. So for example, if you have an incredible learning opportunity,

but the pay isn't great, that might be a really good trade off earlier in your career. Late in your career, when you don't need to make so much money, maybe, and learning might be fun, but really the fun is what matters. And you wanna just work with smart, people and work on cool stuff and that matters a lot as well. But that is what I call Maslow's hierarchy of needs in work. Other thing to remember as a junior person, nobody hired you for your opinions.

Even if you're a Gen Z, Gen Alpha, whatever, ⁓ you've got your ear to the ground and they said we hired you because you were so smart. In most jobs, they hired you because you were willing to work hard and you're willing to do smart, hard work. know, again, whether AI disrupts that and how, we'll see. But you've been hired to work hard. Smart people who can make lots of small, good judgment calls.

is often what junior folks are doing in earlier in their career in the kind of, we'll call it the elite sphere of knowledge work.

10 plus years ago, I got put in touch with the son of one of our founders of an NEA company who was a junior in college. And I wrote this whole piece on how he should look at going into banking, going into consulting, or going into a corporate job. And what personalities fit each of those and what to expect to get out of them and what kind of opportunities sit after them. I think the calculus on all that has

changed quite a bit in the last 10 plus years, but there are some fundamental aspects that do remain the same. And again, this is all in the world of, we'll call it elite brands. You can go to an investment bank, you can go to a management consulting firm, or you can go to a big corporate that has a training program for new grads. And any and all of these can be very, very accretive to your career. When it comes to joining a startup early in your career,

You gotta be very, very careful. It's really high volatility, high beta. There might be incredible upside. My friend interned at Uber when he was in college and he always says that his undergrad degree cost him like $30 million. And maybe that was a good trade and maybe it wasn't. it's tough to really know at that moment that that is what that's gonna become. The most important thing, especially in a startup is the people.

The people obviously matter too in a corporate environment, but the corporate culture is going to ring really, really strong, almost regardless of who the people are. Again, it reflects the culture, but it isn't the whole culture. Whereas when you work for a 30 person startup, that founder team is really going to mandate the culture of that startup. And you're hitching your trailer to their success. There's this other paradigm that I like to think about is,

do want to have, it's almost a two by two. You can have big impact, small impact, or you can have big project, small project. So you can, usually early in your career, most people can just hope to be either a small part of something big or a big part of something small. If you can be a big part of something big, again, call me. I'm an early stage investor. Those are the type of kids I want to talk to. If you're going to be a small part of something small, that's hard to get excited about.

An example of a big part of something small is I had a friend recently joined as a chief of staff, repeat founder, building some really interesting software technology. So he's meaningfully involved in the operations and strategy of the business from early on with someone who had a proven track record. They were the founder of a public company already, or you could have a small impact on something big. for me, I was the investment banking analyst, the bottom of the totem pole on the Facebook IPO. Another example would be

You know, I'm debugging Microsoft Word, which is used by a billion plus people. you've got to figure out what type of environment and style you want to work on. I always ask people when they ask for career advice, what is the function that you're interested in? What is the team or environment that you're interested in? And then what is the subject matter that you're interested in? Because if you're a marketer or a software engineer, those are horizontal functions inside a lot of different companies.

You've got to also make sure that you're aligned with what that company's mission is. If they're doing something that doesn't get you excited and the mission doesn't speak to you, then it's probably not going to be a good fit.

Now let's talk about AI a little bit. I've been telling all these kids that I've talked to me lately, just learn AI, like learn how it works, learn how to use the tools. I heard a really interesting take recently from Cal Newport, who I'm a huge fan of, where he said, don't waste your time learning how to use AI tools and getting smart on them. Now I understand where he's coming from because his view is that the tools are just gonna get better and better. They're going to change, they're gonna adapt. And so spending a bunch of time learning and being an expert now,

is not going to be worth very much in the future, which by the way, ties directly into 10, 15 years ago, learn how to code, learn how to code, learn how to code. Now all of a sudden learning syntax and coding languages doesn't really matter. And so that's not the key thing. My point here is, and it's the same criticism I have with learn how to code, learn how to do AI is you've got to learn how the machine thinks.

And that is what I broadly define as learning how to think like an engineer. Learning how to take qualitative human thoughts and put them into number forms to make them something useful. Understanding the process that the computer goes through or that a team goes through and creating systems for yourself. That's a skill that you can apply over and over and over again, regardless of what the technology can do. It might help in certain areas.

But that is the core skill. It's learning how to think like an engineer, how to use numbers to tell stories, how to understand quantitative and qualitative processes and the interplay between them. This is to me the crux of the value of most knowledge work.

While everyone was saying learn to code, I was out there saying learn finance, learn accounting, because way too often people don't and they get in a lot of trouble. They think something's valuable. They don't understand how money moves. Ultimately, money and currency is how we allocate resources. And that is as business people, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to allocate resources. And so if you don't speak the language of resource allocation,

The idea that you can run a strategy or build a business or create a great product that really matters and makes an impact, think is you're probably not going to be able to do it. It's really, really important to understand the basics of finance. I'm not saying you got to don't be a finance major, by the way, and I'll speak to that in a minute, but learning the basics of income statement, balance sheet, cash flow statement, I'm not saying you got to memorize it and everyone's got to be an investment banking analyst, but

a little basic and counting, like at least be familiar with the concept of debits and credits, even if you can't get it straight. Understand what accounts receivable and accounts payable is and how cash is different from revenue. These are things that could take you maybe a couple hours to get your hands around and can pay huge, huge dividends as you make strategic choices in your company, in your career, in your role down the road.

I had a really funny experience just earlier this week. One of my portfolio companies did a little bit of offsite and they came by my office and they had an 18 year old intern there. And I've been saying this for a while that I view these AI chat bots, whether it's Claude or ChatGPT, like they're really, really smart, like already got into MIT smart when they're 16, intern.

what do I mean by that? I mean that they have access to the world's information, they can process it extremely effectively, but they don't have any judgment. Their experience base of judgment and making those decisions simply is not there. And so a little bit of as a joke, the example I give is this kid was sitting across the table from me I asked him, said, what's the square root of 7,452? And he was like, uh, uh,

And again, he was a little nervous because I kind of called him out, but he was trying to do the calculation in his head. And this is the same thing that AI gets caught in. I'm like, okay, now I'm going to give you the instruction that I need to give you to make it useful, which is calculate the square root of 7,452 using a calculator. Ah, okay, now I know what to do. And that actually takes me back. I was chatting with a friend who I did investment banking with yesterday that

When we were in investment banking training, we had a seven week crash course in accounting and finance and in using the Morgan Stanley templates and tools and plugins and all of that. I was a mechanical engineer. There were lots of finance and business majors there, but there are a bunch of, kind of what we used to call it, Stanford fuzzies, history majors, English majors, sociology majors, whatever it may be, biology majors,

whole mix of people in that room. And this really got them up the curve. they weren't, geniuses, right? I used to joke around when I did like little finance training where I would talk about, okay, now we're going to learn the theory behind the Black-Scholes option valuing method and model. And they'd be like, what? I'm like, no, you just kind of don't need that. If you got it, it's great. There was a guy I did banking with who was like,

Morton finance super smart and he was really holding in Black Scholes I was like, wow, that's great. And I think it came up once in his two years in banking that it was medium level useful. So that crash course, this is a lot of how I look at AI. We've got to figure out how to do this kind of post-training. So in theory in high school and college, you're supposed to learn how to think. Now you've got to learn skills and judgment.

And that is what those crash courses are for. And that's how I look at AI. What do I need to tell it so that it can actually be useful to me? It's the same way that I train junior folks in my own company, in my own system.

Another really important thing about going into finance, I'll never forget this. I have a friend, we did banking together. He studied finance at Haas in UC Berkeley. And at the end of training, it was a little bit of a sad day because training was fun. You know, we were based in California, but they gave us corporate apartments in New York. We were out of the office at six or seven PM every day. And we knew as soon as we flew back to California and hit the desk, it was going to be absolutely brutal, which it was. But he's like,

Okay, I got my seven weeks of training. I kind of wish I studied something else in college because I feel like I got everything I needed in seven weeks. Instead, I spent three years studying the theory and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff, which doesn't really matter. Now, maybe it matters, maybe it doesn't, but that's at least how he felt. And he said, I wish I studied something I was actually interested in. And this gets to another big idea, which is

You've got these horizontal functions either inside companies or entire industries and they all work usually with some underlying thing. So you could be an investment banker that covers healthcare. You could be a consultant that covers technology. And so learning that underlying thing can really, really help you in that mode of doing the finance or the consulting or the accounting or even the law of that thing. So

It's also relates back to this idea of making sure that you're working on a company that you care functionally about.

there is the finance of finance. There is the financial institutions group. And there's some people that just love the function so much that they don't even care about the underlying thing. And that's fine too. But oftentimes, when I got asked, why do you wanna do tech banking? I was like,

Yo, I'm not doing other banking. I'm a tech guy. I'm from San Francisco. I studied mechanical engineering. I grew up in love technology. It's what I care about. I'm not doing real estate banking, which actually probably would have been really interesting because it's more rigorous financially, but I don't care about buildings. know, like I care about cool companies that are changing the world and innovating. Like that's, that's what gets me going. And that's what I care about. And that's what, what really matters.

I'll mention again another thing that I talked about briefly, which is that some of the people I worked in investment banking with were just liberal arts majors. And I think that liberal arts is underrated. Now it needs to be learned properly, but getting exposure to different parts of culture and history and taking classes from inspiring professors with deep discussions that really train you how to think critically and have opinions is really, really valuable. Understanding how the world works, how people work, how people think.

These are really, really important skills. And if you look at the most successful people in the world, this is usually what they're the master of. And it's that that they combine with some other functional expertise. I heard this great explanation once that if you're top 10 % in one category and you're also top 10 % in another category, the overlap there gets you not to 1%. Often it's 0.1%. And if that thing becomes really, really interesting, the overlap of those things, you're the person for it.

And that puts you at the top of the list, which is really, really powerful for your entire career. So learning how to think, really, really important.

I'll mention one other thing, which is the old adage is like, if you don't know what to do and you studied liberal arts, like go to law school. And you know, I just saw some stats that like law school admissions are way up and that's because it's hard to get jobs. And like, that's a good indicator of what liberal arts kids who can't get hired right now are going and doing.

I think that going to law school right now, unless you've just, you watched all these legal shows growing up and you're like, I need to be a lawyer. You did mock trial your whole life and that's it. You're going to be a trial lawyer. You got to do it. Great. But if you're just lost and you decide I'm going to go to law school because it'll, ameliorate my parents and then I'll be steady and good. Let me tell you, and maybe I'm a little bit too excited about it, but like AI is coming for lawyers.

fast, especially junior lawyers. I think it's going to be really hard to get a junior legal job. If you're starting law school now in three years from now, the AI is already good. There's a lot of companies working on it, exchanging emails, these sorts of things. Also, without getting too much into it, not all lawyers, but a lot of lawyers are A, don't love being lawyers, B, not that smart, and C, really lazy business people.

to the point that they're just a tax on doing business, which people kind of accept. And I think people are going to stop accepting it because you're going to ask a lawyer for a turn on a document and it's going to take them two days and they're going to have errors. And you're going to be like, I'll just throw this in AI model and it's going to pop out in 10 seconds and be way better. You're like, I don't think I need a lawyer. I've got founders doing this now where they're like, they hired some big law firm at the seed stage and like, I don't want to pay 800 bucks an hour.

to look at this employment agreement, this is something that LLMs are already really, really good at. So becoming a lawyer, ugh, don't love it. The other thing is I know a lot of people that they were like, yeah, my access to the elite business world is through law. Because you can get into a great law school, part of a great institution, on basically just good grades and good LSATs, no experience or anything. And they say, well, if I go to Harvard Law School, which is obviously, you know,

amazing institution, I'll be able to get into consulting or banking or business or whatever. There's two big problems. The first is I know very few people who've actually been able to successfully make that transition because people don't really want to hire lawyers into business roles. It's a different function. And this gets me to the second point is it's a different way of thinking. It's a different way of approaching and viewing the world.

Last piece of advice is basically don't go to law school. Do learn AI, focus on it, learn how to think like a computer thinks, learn how to think like an engineer, make the most of it. going back to the point I made earlier about Cal Newport saying don't learn the tools, the tools can't learn you or it's not worth learning you if there's not a lot going on up here. If you don't know how to express your thoughts, if you don't know how to...

think clearly and make stuff, express yourself in writing and in speaking, then the AI can't help you. It just can't. And this is really what slop is. No one complains about the blog posts that were someone wrote it, they spit it out, they talked to it, and then they asked AI to refine, refine, refine, shorten, shorten, shorten, make concise, make concise. And it did. No one's complaining about that. No one's calling that AI slop. What they're calling AI slop is

you prompt the AI, write me a blog post about this. And it's obviously contrived because that's the definition of what AI does. It is inherently contrived. So I hope this was helpful and interesting, slightly different target audience pace. Happy to hear feedback. Share this with young people you know who are entering or thinking about entering the workforce and good luck and remember to stay true.