berkeshire

Product Market Fit dictates a startup's success. The code quality or the latest tech frameworks are not the key aspects. I know of companies with low-code / no-code approaches who have made it big.

You like the food from a particular restaurant. Does it really matter to you as a customer, if the chefs were home trained or went to a culinary institute, whether they wing it or follow detailed standardized recipes?

FAANG + Uber companies hire former founders - as long as they have credible work behind them - which you do. Each has hardware divisions, if you are so inclined. But bizdev is agnostic of domain, like you said.

Source: I had started startups that eventually folded, worked for 2 of these FAANGU companies right after. The interviews also tend to cover the "what were your learnings from the slide in demand" aspect of the startups.

With 10+ years, are you targeting job roles that match up to your skills and experience? Wouldn't a Director of BizDev be more apt for you?

Anecdata from a sample size of 1 (me): 7 of 10 times the unsub functionality works. The other 3 times where I do end up confirming that I am a human on the other side, the "Mark as Spam" functionality of email providers - that kicks in after a couple of weeks.

Give more than you receive. Help your peers, help an adjacent team, help recruiting. Efforts and Time are within your control to dispense. The ability to care for a product / company beyond the work/pay trade, to be vested in the product's success, the learnt skill to obsess over the minute details and to suggest improvements in features or processes - your past grades have nothing to do with these traits. Any / most of these dimensions would make you a valued team member.

Or maybe I am thanking someone as a peer, acknowledging their quality of work. What has rank or social status or authority got to do with basic manners and courtesy?

Housing as an asset class for the rich - it seems like a Monopoly board game - buy a set of properties across the globe in auctions, trade, flip, speculate, collect rent... And some of us spend decades writing code to pay off one mortgage.

Benefits first, features later. A narrative rather than a list.

How will your product help the buyer? Why is your vision superior to others'? Where do your ideas plug into the prospect's work? How would you make that difference in the new employer's setup?

Or: Focus on the "why". Why should someone buy whatever you are selling. Not the "what" - as in, dont focus initially on "what are the features".

Why first, what later. And when talking about the "what" - more of a couple of key Unique Selling Propositions and then the checklist of features.

[Exceptions will apply where it is purely technical sales and features / standards / compliance carry more weight than the 'story'. The narrative then shifts to "being compliant"]

Paper notes with a pen.

Hand writing the to-dos and tasks has a way of helping prioritize the items. It also slows you down to think through some aspects of each problem.

Slowly you will find your way around optimizations - dates, urgency levels, past due items, etc.

Upskilling. Tech: GraphQL, Serverless, Azure cloud. Know my way around AWS, but it's a two player game now.

Product: MVPs via No-Code platforms.

“Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft” [1]

Amazon is the New York equivalent in the analogy. The NYT article in 2015 [2] changed a few things, but not all.

Worked 4+ years in Amazon, or as the OldFart tool would say, was among the 4% oldest employees.

Left to preserve my sanity and to not become toxic, I could feel the negative change permeating my personality. I avoid most ex-colleagues from there, they "are now become the KoolAid".

The toxicity and gaming of the system by old timers is bad. Promotions and upwards-management are well managed by a select few who start charming the next level of approvers from day one. The ones who put their heads down and work will get spat out by the system. There is pressure on managers to "top-grade" the system, i.e. to remove bottom performers, never mind the fact that in a hyper-competitive environment that screens for the brightest, the so called bottom performers are merely relative to the top ones.

It's a system designed to burn and churn - burnout and churn the folks before they complete the 2 year cliff (5% and 15% equity at years one and two).

The system gnaws at your self-worth. It's good if these points come out in the open.

[1]: Mary Schmich, Wear Sunscreen: A Primer for Real Life. http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/poetry/mary-schmich.html

[2]: Inside Amazon, wrestling big ideas in a bruising place ... https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...