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Is HBS becoming a tech feeder school? I hope so.

I graduated from Harvard Business School in the nuclear winter of job seeking: spring of 2009. I remember quite a few of my classmates thinking they were going to “career transition” into private equity out of consulting or I-Banking being sorely disappointed. We hit a record low for job acceptance, and many of those who accepted were returning to prior employers. Interestingly, a large number of great startups (Rent The Runway, thredUP, VigLink, Cloudflare, etc.) came out of my class, perhaps a slight consequence of the dim traditional job prospects.

I usually follow HBS MBA job stats as something of a curiosity to see how much things have improved since I was there. The school recently released the most recent data for the Classes of 2012 and 2013, and what it shows is a surprising shift towards supplying labor into the tech market:

• More engineers: 36% of undergrad degrees hold by the Class of 2013 were STEM vs. 33% in 2012.
• More job seekers: 88% of grads were looking for jobs in 2013 vs. 74% in 2012. 
• More technology seekers: 19% of 2013 summer internships in technology vs. 12% of 2012 full-time jobs.
• More Silicon Valley: 15% of 2013 summer internships in Bay Area vs. 12% of 2012 full-time jobs.

Overall, 6% of the Classes of 2012 and 2013 accepted full- or part-time jobs at startups last year. That’s slightly down over the prior year’s statistic of 7%. So while HBS seems to be gaining a tech focus, startups remain roughly flat as a percentage. 

To me, these are good signs. Often the best role out of an MBA isn’t to join something small, but to join something a bit larger with some structure in place. I suspect that’s what is going on, but if you tracked these cohorts of students for 5-7 years, I bet you’d find a high percentage of them in startups. Happy to see HBS growing its influence here.

Crank turners

I had lunch yesterday with a friend who runs product at a giant consumer tech company. We talked a bit about my impressions of Silicon Valley and the temporariness of some of the startups we’ve both come across. His response was that the sole reason his company was successful early on was that they “had 10 really smart people in the same organization, working on the same problem, for 3-4 years.”

Imagine how difficult that would be now, with talent as fluid and competitive as it is in Silicon Valley. Many of those smart people are tempted to build an incremental feature on top of something another team spent years focused on. Sometimes that strategy works, and when it does, it reinforces the cycle that this is the best thing for smart people to do: build incrementally and move onto the next thing.

The American author David Foster Wallace critiqued this approach in the world of literature in a 2005 interview, when he called these people ”crank turners.” I think the analogy is somewhat apt to the startup world:

But when you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you’re talking about real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction. But after the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other end. The crank-turners capitalize for a while on sheer fashion, and they get their plaudits and grants and buy their IRAs and retire to the Hamptons well out of range of the eventual blast radius.

There are some interesting parallels between postmodern crank-turners and what’s happened since post-structural theory took off here in the U.S., why there’s such a big backlash against post-structuralism going on now. It’s the crank-turners fault. I think the crank-turners replaced the critic as the real angel of death as far as literary movements are concerned, now. You get some bona fide artists who come along and really divide by zero and weather some serious shit-storms of shock and ridicule in order to promulgate some really important ideas. Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes come running to the machine, and out pour the gray pellets and now the whole thing’s become a hollow form, just another institution of fashion.

Take a look at some of the critical-theory Ph.D. dissertations being written now. They’re like de Man and Foucault in the mouth of a dull child. Academia and commercial culture have somehow become these gigantic mechanisms of commodification that drain the weight and color out of even the most radical new advances. It’s a surreal inversion of the death-by-neglect that used to kill off prescient art. Now prescient art suffers death-by acceptance.

We love things to death, now. Then we retire to the Hamptons.

Working long hours in NYC

I spent a few days this week in NYC catching up with a few startup folks I haven’t seen in a while. One team I spent time with is probably 80% engineers right now, and the CEO remarked that the office is basically empty by 7 or 8pm (with the notable exceptions of the CTO and him, of course). He spoke of a few other startups in NYC who work the same way and remarked at how different this is from what happens in Boston or Silicon Valley.

What’s the big difference? In a word: nightlife. NYC has a cultural norm for 20-somethings to hit the town after a long day in the office, and many of the team moved to NYC for that very reason. Far be it for him to deprive his staff of that desire. Instead, this CEO has a “standing meeting” each morning at 8:15am, which he makes slightly more bearable by providing breakfast to the entire team. The engineers are usually cranking by 8:45am and will get in a solid 11-12 hours of coding before heading out for dinner or drinks.

I’m not sure which is more painful: living in NYC without a social life, or having to be productive before 9am!