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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.

A few thoughts on 2011 IPOs

The nice folks at Raymond James recently sent me their 2011 Technology IPO Year-End Review. As usual, it contained some interesting takeaways, two of which I will share with you here.

#1. The IPO window is strongly correlated with low overall market volatility.

Check out what happens below when the VIX (an index which is a measure of anticipated volatility in the S&P500 over the next 30 days) goes above 30, as it did in Aug-Oct:

It’s also worth noting that Apr-May saw the largest IPO activity, exactly when the VIX was lowest.

#2: 2011 internet IPOs had all the sizzle out of the gate, but less sexy sectors (software, systems, components, IT) have performed better in the long-run.

Compare the right side of the first graph (lots of orange) below to the second (not so much), and you’ll get my drift:

Reports of the Web’s death are greatly exaggerated.

Jeff Croft, Chief Designerd at nGen Works had an excellent insight on the “death” of the web. The shift of the web from browser-based interactions to APIs and machine-to-machine data exchanges is one that had been on my mind a lot lately, and Jeff summarizes this important evolution succinctly below:

The most important thing I learned about web design and development in 2011 is that more and more, the “web” is APIs and services, rather than sites, apps, and pages rendered in web browsers. Take Instagram: it’s one of the most popular services on the “web” and the entire experience is controlled not by some HTML pages, but rather by an iPhone app. Twitter and Facebook are just as popular—if not more so—via native apps for various platforms (iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, etc.) than they are on the browser-based web. As “web designers,” we have to start realizing that our job is no longer solely to produce sites, apps, and pages built in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We have to expand our definition of what the “web” is. More and more, the “web” is not a platform. It’s a service with clients on many platforms. Wired Magazine called it the “death” of the web. I call it an evolution.

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!