Job description archetypes
A hot take on types of careers
I’m on my way back from Cambridge, MA, where I watched one of my brothers defend his PhD thesis. It was a truly awesome experience.
Congratulations on passing your defense, Dr. Pickard!
I know very little about what he is now an expert in, and less about academia, but one of the things I’ve been particularly impressed by is how he seems to have really found his vocation.
Between the support I provide my classmates as a Career Advisor and the people I chat with as a student VC, I see a lot of people looking for a vocation — or who have found their vocation, and need funding to pursue it.
At this point, I’m convinced that regardless of whether or not we find our vocation right out of school, all of us will eventually land in one of three job archetypes:
Some people sell a product
Some people build a product
Some people are a cost center
Who sells the product? Sales, marketing, investor relations, and some C-suite executives — usually founders, and always the CEO.
Who builds the product? At startups, it’s engineers, UX designers, and software developers. The composition of this probably varies more by industry than the other two archetypes.
Who’s a cost center? Everybody else. That includes some executives, all lower-level management, finance, accounting, PMs, HR, and other teams. It also includes external support like outside lawyers, bankers, and consultants (though they will themselves be building or selling the product of their own organizations).
If somebody’s very good at their job in either building or a cost center, they might get promoted into a sales role.
Why does this matter for me as a VC?
A mature company needs people who fit into all three of those buckets.
However, startups, particularly early-stage startups, tend to not have a whole lot of cash lying around. This drives my advice to people who want to work at startups — and who want to invest in them. My impression is that the startups worth working for are most interested in hiring people who can build, and people who can sell.
This applies to investors as well — both in terms of attracting founders, and selling them on my fund’s capital. In order to sell founders on the idea of preferring to collaborate with me as an investor, it’s important to show that I can help them, both based on my interactions with them and my past experiences.
I think the best way to do that is to get good at building or selling (or better yet, both).
What type of products I enjoy building and selling drives what sorts of founders I’m most excited by — though I’m happy to chat with and try to help anybody.
What’s the next level?
Career trajectories are rarely linear, but that’s no reason to not be intentional about them.
My view on “what’s the best next job for me?”, both for myself and others at my stage in life, is specifically a function of three things:
What role (both in terms of the job archetype and specifics like title and compensation) somebody aspires to have in the long term, and the extent to which the role they’re evaluating creates a path to it.
How closely aligned the role’s output is with the firm’s.1
Where does somebody think they’ll learn the most?2
I’m not going to put weights on these questions — that’s an exercise for the individual — but I stand by them as the most important ones.
When I was looking for software-related work out of my undergraduate program, I preferred to work in the space sector rather than finance in part because I believed that the former would value the software perspective more than the later in a cultural sense.
This I view as most critical for entry-level roles, and I think becomes somewhat less important with more experience.
Some of the first advice you gave me. Awesome to see it all laid out!