Entry-Level Positions for Aspiring Co-Founders
Max, Far Homes' co-founder, advises against starting a venture-backed company straight out of college, suggesting instead that early career professionals seek "as generalist as possible" roles, such as growth or business operations and strategy positions at early-stage startups to gain broad experience. The most valuable roles, in their experience, were those with "least well-defined" responsibilities and "highest scope or purview," allowing for learning and development before entrepreneurship.
Growth, Business Operations, Strategy, Generalist Roles, Early-Stage Startups
Advizer Information
Name
Job Title
Company
Undergrad
Grad Programs
Majors
Industries
Job Functions
Traits
Max Blumen
Co-Founder
Far Homes
UC Berkeley
N/A
Spanish & Other Languages
Real Estate, Technology
Entrepreneurship and Business Owner
Video Highlights
1. Gain experience before starting a business: Max discourages starting a venture-backed company straight out of college, emphasizing the value of learning from various roles first.
2. Seek generalist roles: He suggests aiming for generalist positions like "growth" roles in early-stage startups to gain broad experience in various areas such as marketing, product, and engineering.
3. Prioritize roles with broad scope and impact: Max highlights the importance of roles with less clearly defined responsibilities but a wide scope of influence, allowing for more learning and development opportunities. He cites examples in growth and business operations/strategy roles at early to mid-stage startups as beneficial.
Transcript
What entry-level positions are there in this field that an undergraduate college student might consider?
My advice on this is that I don't recommend trying to start a business straight out of college. This is unless you're the type of person who hears that and is so angry about the advice that you go do it right then and there.
There are certain types of people, I'm not one of them, but there are certain types of people who are like the top 1% of go-getters. They probably don't even need anything I'm saying in this video. But for anyone who's like me, who's somewhere else in the distribution stack, I do not recommend starting at least a venture-backed company straight out of college.
I learned so much. Even in the six or eight years between when I graduated college and now, or when I started FarHomes, every single job I took taught me a lot. Whether it was the marketing job, working at Convoy doing growth, or doing corporate strategy at Redfin, I learned a ton.
In that world, I advise trying to get a job that is as generalist as possible if you want to start a company. Those are the hardest jobs to find. Most likely, you can find them with titles like "Growth" at an early-stage startup, or "Growth Associate."
Even in those roles, make sure they don't just mean a marketing position like a paid marketing manager. When you interview for those jobs, I would want to ensure that you are embedded in a growth team or have access to product and engineering. Any type of growth role like that is really good if you can land one early in your career.
You could also do a business operations and strategy type role. If you can find those in an early or mid-stage startup, those are where I've gotten the most value. These were roles that were least well-defined with the highest scope or purview.
When I joined Convoy, it was Series B, so it wasn't super early-stage, but it was relatively early. For me, that was a good mix of things and gave me that same level of a general role type of just taking a goal and going after it. I was able to land that again at Redfin afterwards.
Sorry, that was a trailing answer. I'll stop now.