Rajat Bhageria's Blog

What makes a great product? The way it looks? Functionality? That it solves some fundamental problem?

Amazon Kindle

Indubitably these are all important qualities of great products. But are any of them the most important characteristic? Was the Rubik’s cube not a great product even though it’s not “solving” a problem? Was the Watt steam engine not a great product even though it wasn’t necessarily beautifully designed? Or is a Cartier timepiece not a great product even though its “function” of telling the time isn’t quite useful or even convenient in an age where 2.5 billion humans on earth have glowing rectangles in their pockets?
No. The most important metric that all products share is one that is quite hard to quantify in the first place–how they make you feel. Why is it that you love driving that BMW 3-series of yours, that so-called “ultimate driving machine”? Why is it that you love using that Apple Macbook Pro even though an equivalently priced Lenovo Thinkpad has a lot more functionality and power? Why is it that you trust Airbnb with your life in living at a stranger’s house in a city you know nothing about? It’s because each of these products was designed with trust in mind to make you feel special. Are they all beautiful, functional, and solving some problem? Sure.
But the reason you smile every time you use one of these products is because they make you feel like you deserve the best.
That every ounce of blood, sweat, and tears that went into creating the product are yours to own.
That the magic you feel is completely your own since the product itself fades into the background and disappears when you pick it up.
Perhaps one underrated product of this kind is the Amazon Kindle. On first glance, the cheapest $80 Kindle (often for $50 on holidays) really doesn’t seem to meet any “requirements” for a good product. It’s light and seems to be made of cheap plastic. Unless you pay extra, Amazon shows ads for books on the touchscreen when it’s off. And you definitely don’t need it when you can just carry a book that you obtained for free at the library (rather than Amazon selling you a book file for another $15).
But it’s precisely these qualities that make the Kindle into one of the greatest products in recent history. The fact of the matter is that reading is one of those tasks that we’re often “too busy for” or that is replaced by “something more urgent.” But the beauty of the Kindle is that its form factor–large enough that I can fit enough words on a screen and yet small enough that it’s not much larger than my iPhone 6s+–allows for you to carry it anywhere you go, right in your pocket! Not unlike the original Apple iPod’s quip of “1,000 songs right in your pocket,” the Kindle makes you feel in control; it reminds you that you’re the master of your own destiny and that you have the world’s stories at your fingertips. The device itself isn’t what’s important — it’s just a cheap messenger for what really matters: the knowledge you’re gaining.
And oh yeah, by the way, it’s quite functional as well. I love that I can turn a page with no latency (unlike the Sony PRS-600 Touch Edition–one of the first mass-market e-readers released–I bought during Christmas of 2009); that I can connect to the internet then update my friends on Goodreads, that I only have to charge the battery once a week; that it sends me recommendations that are substantially useful; that if I want to read a new book, I can just buy it right on the device or email it a specified email to automatically upload over Wifi (as opposed to uploading over wire); and most importantly that it just works. Like magic. No questions asked. No BS. Ultimately, I end up using the Kindle for many hours a day; it actually pushes me to read more since I love the light form factor and how well it works.
But just as Achilles had his heel, so too does every product–no matter how brilliant–have some flaws. One major qualm I have with the Kindle is that it doesn’t connect to Evernote directly (there are some workarounds but unlike other features of the Kindle, they are cumbersome and don’t make me feel special). I’m a voracious reader and love to take notes but because the Kindle doesn’t have Evernote connectivity–oftentimes I’ll add upwards of twenty-thirty new notes with ideas and thoughts to my “external brain” throughout the day–I always have to sit down with my smartphone or laptop, which can sometimes lead to distractions. The Kindle has an amazing keyboard and the product already allows you to take notes directly to Goodreads/Kindle; since most of the infrastructure is already there, building this functionality would be relatively simple. Even if Amazon would lose some access to data of what people are commenting on, the marginal benefit of keeping the vast number of Evernote users happy seems to trump the marginal cost of losing a small bit of data.
No matter, the Amazon Kindle will go down in history as a product as impactful as the iPod.

NOTE: This was originally published in FORBES in Forbes Under 30. 

Even though it has never been easier start up in the first place, there’s no doubt that most adults don’t take you seriously when you’re building a company and yet can’t even get into a bar. In my own experience building my company ThirdEye, I would oftentimes talk to another fellow entrepreneur who was 20-30 years older than me and most of our early conversations went something along the lines of “That’s a super cool project you’re working on.” Here are three reasons why you’re going to fail. “But I’m sure it’ll be a great ‘learning opportunity’ for you….”

Credibility matters in almost every aspect of building your business–which clients you’re able to onboard, which partnerships you get, what kind of hiring opportunities you have access to, which investors you get meetings with, what kind of buzz you’re able to get, and what advisors are willing to work with you.

After my experience building and selling ThirdEye and working in VC, here’s what I’ve learned–either by observing others via osmosis or by failing myself–about what you should do when no one is taking you seriously or when no VC wants a second meeting with you:

1) Have a stellar board of advisors and mentors. 

In the early days, we were just a team of students (read as “kids”) with a cool project. But the more we started to develop more relationships with previously successful entrepreneurs and VCs, the more we found that we were able to get into more important meetings. Great advisors can make up for a young management team.

It’s important to note that the way you find great advisors is not by asking people you admire “hey we’re building Y….do you want to be your advisor?” but rather by just asking them for a piece of specific advice that they can definitely help with.

Once you get your foot in the door and they either like your startup concept or they like you as a person, they’ll be there to help in the long run (see here for a process on how to do this). For example, in his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin talks about how when he asked people for a small favor, they were more likely to help him down the line because of a sort of advocacy effect–since they had already helped him, they think they like him, and then helped him additionally in the future.

2) Build partnerships with well-known organizations. 

One of our largest breaks when ThirdEye was young happened when we were able to do beta testing with the National Federation of the Blind. The key lesson here is that going in with the attitude of “I’m going to sell these guys” is probably not the right one; instead, just ask for advice and nudge the potential person to like you as a person. As in the case of advisors, once you’re able to get into the door, just keep on asking for advice and slowly push to build a stronger and deeper tie with the organization until they become a formal partner.

At the same time, it’s worth remembering that a business dependent on partners for its survival probably isn’t in a great position. It’s important not to build partnerships only for the sake of credibility; it’s better to spend your valuable time building friendships with parties that can be mutually beneficial down the line.

3) Get some kind of external third party recognition. 

Derek Sivers says that the first follower turns a lone nut into a leader. When you’re building something, you’re expected to vouch for your product–after all, you built it; but finding some third party source–especially a well-known authority like a major media company–who has no vested benefit in the success of your product is a different story. We’ve all heard of stories of products that have exploded because Oprah covered them or because they were on Shark Tank.

4) Take design seriously and make sure you have a strong web presence. 

In a world where we’re accustomed to the beautiful industrial design of Apple and the seamless interfaces of Uber, whenever we see a startup with ugly UI/UX, we oftentimes aren’t willing to put up with the product even if it’s valuable to us (unless we’re extremely early adopters for that category of products). Seemingly small concepts to a non-designer like the type of typeface you use or how the colors in your logo interact with each other can create a product that people love or hate.

Even if you don’t have a design oriented team-member, spend time with design and don’t disregard it as “unimportant.” How people perceive your business matters, even if you are selling to businesses (or in our case, the visually impaired). One of the best ways to do this is just to scan the web for designs you like, synthesize which elements you like and don’t, and then create your own. As Picasso said, “good artists copy, great artists steal.”

5) Write about your experiences online. 

In Show Your Work, author Austin Kleon prescribes that creatives and entrepreneurs detail their work on an online journal. The thought is that not only would this become a record for you, but it would also show people what you’re up to.

In my experience writing about my experiences and failures online, I found that not only did people take the company seriously since they could see the team was actually making progress, but when I wrote about the process of building ThirdEye, people frequently recommended the product itself to a visually impaired person they know. Thus, in addition to increasing the credibility of the company, my writing helped us gain valuable users.

6) Get a major VC behind you. 

Although we knew we were going to be bootstrapping all the way, there are many startups that people only know about because a VC at a16z or Y Combinator or Union Square Ventures took a bet on them.

Of course, this is easier said than done and results in a sort of chicken and egg problem: if you don’t have clients because you’re not credible enough, you’re not going to get funded by a major VC, but if you don’t have a major VC, you can’t use this route to credibility. The solution to this might be to find angels and smaller funds who are willing to take a bet on you as a team to build a strong partnership and ultimately increase your credibility.

7) Do your research.

Who are the people we take most seriously? The people who seem to know every tiny detail about their business, their customers, and their market, and who have an answer to every question we ask. According to Gifs.com co-founder, Thiel Fellow, Harvard dropout, and Forbes 30 Under 30 Alum Kieran O’Reilly, “Future advisors will take you seriously if you know why they could help you. VCs will take you seriously if you know what you want, how much you want, in what format, and why. You don’t want to get a meeting with a16z and then tell them that you’re raising at a $100MM valuation.”

Point is that the easiest way to look like a fool is to not do your research and not understand the opportunity you’re going after. It’s not unheard of for young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to raise $10M with just a pitch deck–all they have is a plethora of painstakingly analyzed details on why someone should take a bet on them.

8) Sell. Sales solve every problem. 

There’s a saying in the business world that sales are the potion to any ailment. In most regards this is probably true. If you’re able to onboard your first few clients or able to get a sustainable business, you won’t be running after VCs or press or clients–they’ll be running after you since you have a business model that’s making money.

Interestingly, these sales (or similar metrics for traction) don’t necessarily need to be sustainable. By now the story of the Airbnb founders selling “presidential cereal” to bootstrap their business is infamous; since Brian Chesky and his co-founders were able to sell upwards of $30k selling breakfast cereal, Paul Graham at Y Combinator took a chance on them simply because they were great salesmen. Still, it may not necessarily be a good idea to spend too much nonrenewable time building an unsustainable business model selling something not related to the core business.

9) Don’t worry about it. 

Maybe you just read this and are thinking well this stuff doesn’t really matter. In many regards, you’d have a valid argument; if you go build an Uber or Airbnb, none of this stuff matters: you’ll get the investors, press, partnerships, and meetings no matter what. This is definitely a valid argument–in the early days, all a founder’s time should be going into product and customer interviews.

On the other hand, an equally strong argument could be that you won’t be able to find product-market fit or get major sales without credibility, especially in a B2B business. Plus, some of these things–like advisors who really add value, press, and money from VCs–will be useful regardless of whether or not your company has hit exponential hockey-stick growth.

The post Getting People To Take You Seriously When You’re Young appeared first on Rajat Bhageria.

NOTE: This was originally published in FORBES on Feb. 15th 2017.

For the last two years, my team and I have been building and commercializing a product that empowers the visually impaired by recognizing what they are looking at.

Now, ThirdEye is being acquired by TheBlindGuide. The acquiring company is led by a former Merck executive whose mother was visually impaired and they’re looking to use ThirdEye to help empower people by creating an organization centered around gathering and building tools for the visually impaired. In fact, they’re going to be hiring visually impaired and disabled programmers to embody the message of empowerment that ThirdEye has always stood for.

During our freshman year at Penn two years ago, Ben Sandler, Joe Cappadona, and I had started ThirdEye at a hackathon; we had built a Google Glass app that would verbally say aloud what’s in front of you when you said “Okay Glass. Recognize this.” Since then, there have been lots of twists and turns, many of which I’ve been detailing on this Forbes column. We had chances to present at CES and The National Wearables Conference, work with organizations like the National Federation of the Blind, learn how to empathetically build products for people who are not us, pitch and have meetings with major CEOs and visionaries, and win competitions like the Wharton Business Plan Competition. We also had the opportunity with some of the smartest people I know, including my co-founders as well as Daniel Hanover, Nandeet Mehta, and David Ongchoco.

But most important than the thrill of trying to manage a startup during school while not dropping out was gaining empathy with the visually impaired population. Coming in, the reason Ben, Joe and I even decided to work on ThirdEye is that we believed that this technology that could help empower at least some aspects of this group’s lives by 10x. Understanding how visually impaired persons live their lives was not only a humbling exercise but perhaps more importantly, we realized that nobodies with very little resources (ThirdEye was completely bootstrapped) can do something that helps a disempowered group of people. In this regard, a large part of our experience with ThirdEye was figuring out how to get things that normally would have cost tens of thousands of dollars done for free by consistently asking for help and leveraging our student status.

As time went on though we started to realize that while we might have been the right team to start this product, we perhaps weren’t the right team to scale it to all the visually impaired persons around the world. While we became very successful at building products and launching them with very few resources, since we were students we had limited time and also limited experience with the regulatory healthcare space. When a few parties approached us about taking over ThirdEye we thought hard and decided that it would be for the best.

After a few months of talks with various companies, we decided on TheBlindGuide; given the leadership’s deep understanding of the visually impaired (through their current ecommerce business) and their expertise in healthcare, we decided that their team would be the better team to lead this product forward.

Ultimately, we were in talks with significantly larger organizations that would almost definitely have more resources, but for them ThirdEye would just be a rounding error; we’re confident, however, that TheBlindGuide will do everything it can to continue on with this product and take it to the next level and exemplify our vision.

The details of the deal will remain confidential but I shall remain onboard as an advisor and help transition the company to TheBlindGuide.

At this point, I’m excited to continue writing on this column about my and my peer’s experiences starting up during college. As I’ve said before many times, ThirdEye taught me significantly more than college in itself ever could. With that said, I’m excited to focus quite a lot of my time on empowering students to build–and more importantly–commercialize projects they’re working on.

Part of that equation will be Prototype Capital, a decentralized student-run venture capital fund that adds real value to student-run startups. After being a college founder myself, I understand the intricacies of starting up during college. With Prototype, we’re going to have campus partners around the country–and then in the world–so as to help empower as many students as possible.

College is a formative time for most people; with the fund and the brand we build around it, we hope to help students realize that they can do what they want to do rather than just follow the path that someone else presents to them.

The post Why We Decided To Sell Our Startup appeared first on Rajat Bhageria.

NOTE: Article originally published on Forbes Under 30. See original article on Forbes here.
Recently, there has been a massive rise in digitally native vertical brands (DNVBs). The thought is that your company manages the entire vertical supply chain and distributes itself rather than outsourcing to a partner; the brand is born online and is wholly centered on the customer experience.
It seemed like building a DNVB over the holiday break could be an interesting “little bet” (the idea of little bets originated with Peter Sims’ book about the great products that have come from leaders who take lots of low risk bets to test if ideas are viable).
Based on the concepts of DNVBs and little bets, I decided to go out and try to build a business over the holidays to solve one of my own personal (granted, “first world”) problems: the fact that there’s no service out there that allowed me to mix and match any variety of Keurig Coffee K-cups I wanted.
The thought is that it could provide seed capital for the next more audacious startup idea (not unlike Brian Chesky and his cofounders selling “presidential” cereal for Airbnb’s seed money). After all, what’s the downside? Not much–a $12 domain name and 12 hours of work to build and then launch the product.
“Market Research” (1 Hour):
Now it’s important to remember that one of the main driving ideas in Sims’ book is if you can launch a product fast enough, your product’s performance in the market is the market research
Still, I wanted to quickly ensure that other people even have this “problem.” I messaged many of my friends who are active Keurig users, posted on the Keurig channel on Reddit, and found some Keurig Facebook groups with a few thousand members. The paraphrased question? Would you be willing to pay x dollars each month to have any variety of k-cups delivered to your door each month?
Overwhelmingly, I found out that the answer was yes….as long as there was a lot of variety.
I decided to take the little bet and make a monthly delivery service of your choice of any 30 k-cups right to your door.
Domain Purchase and Website Setup (30 Minutes):
After buying the domain VenetianCoffees.com , I installed WordPress on my Bluehost server and associated it with my domain (software engineers: remember there’s nothing wrong with using WordPress to test these little bets). For non-technical readers, I prefer using WordPress over Shopify since it gives you almost all the features for free, doesn’t have much of a learning curve, and gives you complete control too.
Design/Structuring Website (5 hours):
After structuring the website, I found a nice, modern theme that supported Woocommerce (and was most importantly free!) and installed it.
In terms of now designing the website itself, it’s important to remember at this point that if someone was going to pay me a premium and use this service to have these k-cups delivered monthly over going to Costco and buying a 100 k-cup wholesale package, the UI needed to be attractive. Although you don’t need to do in-depth mockups on Photoshop/Sketch, design is especially important for DNVBs. Remember though that done is better than perfect!
Brand Message and Pricing (1 hour):
This is arguably one of the more important parts of this whole process. It’s important to target a particular market even though “everyone” could be interested. My target market would be millennials whose alternative would be spending $2.50+ at Starbucks each day since they’re on run. This group would provide a great initial target market since they’d be willing to pay a premium to have the product delivered monthly and crave choice.
I centered my brand around the idea: “We believe that you should be able to simply enjoy premium coffees while saving money.”
Pricing follows from your brand message. A simple way to get started might be just to add, say, a 50% margin on whatever the total unit cost is. If you’re launching a more premium product though, like Venetian, you can price using an economic value add strategy and base the price on what comparable experience this product provides.
Launch (3 hours) :
The essence here is social media. I went back to all the groups I had initially found to do “market testing,” and told them that I’d built a product to address the need that they said they had and just asked for advice about the product.
Next, I created an Instagram/Twitter page, added a botched together logo I made in canva.com in five minutes, added a single post with a picture of a box of k-cups, individually messaged everyone who had posted #Keurig, and then asked them what they thought of the new service.
Facebook ads are also a reasonable opportunity, especially if you can target exactly who to send the ads to. It’s important to ensure though that the profit you would expect to get from a customer over his or her lifetime is greater than what you’re spending to acquire the person.
All in all, this drove a little less than a thousand people to the VenetianCoffees.com webpage.
Orders:
And there we go! The orders started coming in. Slowly but surely. Of course, for the early orders I relied on Paul Graham’s idea of doing things that don’t scale . I was actually going to the grocery store, picking out all boxes of K-cups that customers had ordered, putting individual pods into boxes from the craft store, hand-writing thank you notes, and then sending them out.
Of course VenetianCoffees.com is still in its little bet phase and until I get $10k in sales, I’m not going to look out for a third party logistics provider so I can automate the supply chain (or for that matter, outsource social media marketing to India or try to build an AI to automate the site logistics either).
Future:
And there you go–a “business” launched in a day. Of course this is an e-commerce subscription business, but there’s no reason one couldn’t do this for something different–whether that’s an AI bot, a board game, or a blockchain financial app. The key is to remember to actually commercialize the product, not just to build something and then never let the world see it.
Try building your own little bet this weekend and then post a comment to this post about your experience!
Let us know in the comments what you think about this “little bets” process and the VenetianCoffees.com business. By the way, if you like this idea but you’re more of a tea person than a coffee person, check out another similar little bet called VenetianTeas.com .

The post Can You Build A Startup In A Day? I Tried And Here’s What Happened appeared first on Rajat Bhageria.

NOTE: This article was originally published in FORBES under FORBES Under 30. See the original article here.
Press can serve a lot of purposes but one of the main ones is credibility. As 19-year-olds working on a startup during college, credibility mattered a lot for us.
But it especially mattered for the product we were building: a product that helped empower the blind via object recognition. Why? Targeting the visually impaired is quite difficult; you can’t use traditional marketing techniques like social media. Instead, we relied on press to capture the attention of our relatively unconnected audience. Indeed, we found that sighted readers would almost definitely recommend our product to their visually impaired relatives and friends.
After being featured in Forbes, TechCrunch, Business Insider, SIRIUSXM Radio, and HuffingtonPost among others, we learned three major principles when it comes to pitching journalists.
The first basic principle behind finding press–as it is with selling anything–is to understand what’s in it for the other party. If you want to sell something, you have to show the other party–the journalist–that it’s in their interest to write about you.
At the end of the day, media companies are businesses. How do they make money? Ad revenue. How do you increase ad revenue? Increase number of potential clicks by increasing page-views. How do you increase page-views for a story? Make sure it’s “juicy” and that people want to share it on social networks.
Ultimately the question many journalists may use when determining whether to write about a company is: is your story juicy enough so that enough people who read it share it, and then those who read a shared article share it, and on and on?
Students have it easier than most everyone when it comes to press. Since we’re in school, we know we aren’t expected to be working on anything interesting; we’re just supposed to be in the library all day, right? Since nobody expects students to do something interesting, when they do something interesting, people become immediately interested and they share it.
Your job then is to hit a nerve such that the journalist doesn’t feel like she’s doing you a favor but that you’re doing her a favor by earning her pageviews.
It’s also important to not necessarily to pitch what you do but rather why you do it. Don’t pitch journalists on how awesome your crazy blockchain distributed ledger app is but instead talk about how you were students and you had personal pains and decided to solve this problem instead of going to class. As Simon Sinek says in his book Start With Why, people don’t buy what you do…they buy why you do it.
The second major principle is that you must give before you take. Journalists receive pitches from thousands of newly minted founders trying to have their company featured. All of them say something along the lines of “Hey I just founded this awesome company that does this super technical thing; do you want to write about us?” No. Don’t be one of these individuals.
As Wharton Professor Adam Grant talks about in his bestseller Give and Take, the best way to help yourself is to help others. Start early and develop a great relationships with all the potential journalists who’d be interested in your story months or even a couple years in advance. Help them and they will help you. A few months before you want to launch, start talking with journalists and becoming good friends with them. Share their content on Twitter and Facebook. Ask them questions. Send them emails. Connect them with other people.
Once more, connecting with journalists and building that relationship is quite easy as a student. All you have to do is go to your alumni database, find interesting people, reach out to them, and then just ask for advice. As I explained in an earlier article, simply cold emailing my business heros and asking for advice allowed me to establish relationships with them (this article also has email templates). Mentioning that you went to the same school makes the world smaller and thus makes the recipient more likely to respond.
Note that this second principle goes in the face of the spray and pray approach of sending out a hundred emails and hoping one of them works. That approach can work too but this approach leads to authentic relationships that both parties can benefit from down the line.
The third major principle is to build up credibility before pitching to the big whales (Forbes, NYT, WSJ). The best way to do that is via other articles. Just as birds of a feather stick together, journalists tend to like other journalists; in other words, if one journalist covers you, another is more likely to cover you.
It’s easy to get an article in the local university newspaper or in a local town newspaper. Oftentimes, these small papers and magazines don’t have enough stories and if you just cold email them, there’s a good chance they’ll write about you.
Once you can get a local article, use it as leverage and mention it in your email to Huffington Post. Then use the Huffington Post to go to Tech.co or StartupGrind. Use the StartupGrind article to get a Inc Magazine or Fast Company feature. Then use that to get a Forbes or NYT or WSJ feature. If you patiently go up the chain, not only will you get featured by a lot of varying sources, but you’ll also push your story in front of diverse audiences.
Ultimately, there are lots of small tactics you can use but there are already plenty of articles about those. Always remember these strategy principles though: frame the request in terms of the journalist’s desires, give and add value before you take, and go step by step up the ladder. Press isn’t hard. There’s no need to hire an expensive PR firm. Just follow the principles.

The post How To Get The Media To Pay Attention To Your Startup appeared first on Rajat Bhageria.

Note: This was originally published in FORBES. See it here under Forbes Entrepreneurs. 

One of billionaire investor and venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s major ideas is that “competition is for losers.” For example, he talks about how even though Googleprobably creates less value for humankind than the major airlines, the Silicon Valley company is able to capture significantly more of the revenue. Why? The airline industry has incredible amounts of competition and so each firm tries to one up the others, leading to a spiraling effect where margins are incredibly slim. On the other hand, a monopoly in online search, Google is consistently able to cash out huge profits.

Of course, in the article and in his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel is talking about building businesses and starting up. But the same concept applies to students and job seekers: competition really is for losers.

Let’s take the internship search for example. Especially during the spring semester, it seems like every single college student is on the lookout for internships.

After all, you want to be one of the “lucky few” chosen by a random recruiter to be part of a class of interns who works at Goldman or McKinsey or Google over the summer. And so you dress up in suits for on campus recruiting, you polish up your resume trying to impress someone you don’t even know, you write 10 cover letters trying to prove why you’re good enough to make Excel spreadsheets all day, you put your head down and relearn some accounting rules for the investment banking interviews or data structures for the coding interview, you try to summarize your life story in a single “tell me about yourself” question. You live in stress for a month while you await for what seems to be your short term destiny, and then when you don’t get an offer, you question whether you’re just not good enough.

Or if you do get an offer, you’re just an “intern” at the very bottom of the food chain.

What exactly is the point? To do something that you really don’t want to do, just for the sake of saying you did it?

The real goal of an internship is to gain practical experience in a non-contrived, real-world work environment. Sure, the name brand might carry a lot of weight and connections at major firms help. But what’s the point of competing against thousands of people to get that experience? As Facebook COO Sheryl Sandbergargues in her book Lean In, corporate America “is not a corporate ladder. It’s a jungle gym.”

Indeed, it seems like making it to the top (or even “getting in” as an intern) can be significantly easier via the non-traditional path.

Perhaps the best example of this is Keith Ferrazzi. In his book Never Eat Alone, Ferrazzi talks about how he had offers from prestigious consulting firms like McKinsey and Deloitte straight out of Harvard Business School. One day, he was at a Deloitte cocktail party and while all the MBAs were talking amongst themselves, Keith had the confidence to approach a group of seemingly important individuals on the other side of the floor; turns out that one of the individuals was the CEO of Deloitte, Pat Loconto. They both ended up clicking since Ferrazzi was able to figure out commonalities between the two. At one point, Pat himself reached out to Ferrazzi and asked him to take the offer; Ferrazzi slyly responded that he’ll take the offer on the condition that Pat agrees to have three dinners with him throughout the year. Pat agrees…. Within a short amount of time, Keith went straight up to be the CMO of Deloitte.

It’s worth repeating: it’s a jungle gym, not a corporate ladder.

Sure, Keith already had an offer from a major firm. But the exact same lesson applies to getting an initial job or internship offer.

Take for example Nandeet Mehta. A student at UCLA, Mehta wanted to break into venture capital. But rather than applying through the traditional method via his resume, he took a bit of an eccentric path. He would consistently go to technology/venture capital/startup events and have conversations with interesting people; one evening he just happened to meet the managing partner of a major venture capital firm in LA that had invested in many successful companies–one of which was Lyft. He established rapport and found commonalities to create a trust-based emotional connection, and then simply told the partner that he wanted to learn as much as he could about VC, and was willing to do whatever he could do to help the partner out. Ultimately, Mehta secured something a lot more valuable than a run-of-the-mill internship: he was able to shadow the partner for the summer.

According to Mehta, “almost any board meeting that he went to, I went to. Any paperwork that went through him went through me. Any employee conflict that went through him, went through me.” Using this technique, Mehta was able to get experience working in VC funds like Anthos Capital, Machine Shop Ventures, Space Angel Network, and Science Inc all during school. Through these experiences, Mehta has significantly more practical–not “busy work”–experience than most of his peers, even though he never went through a “formal internship.”

In my own experience, knowing that I wanted to garner as much experience building up and scaling businesses as I could, I decided to forgo the stress of pursuing traditional competitive summer opportunities after my freshman summer to work for a few months with a good friend of mine, Hussain Ahamed. His company MainTool is trying to make any normal watch smart. And in hindsight joining has been one of the best decisions I’ve made.

Since it was a small, 15-person company, I gained real experience doing real things: Negotiating contracts, creating a culture where different subgroups are connected, managing people (and realizing how massive of a challenge it is), Fundraising, partnering deals with major Swiss and German watchmakers, working deeply with people and not become critical when nothing is working, overcoming team conflicts, and recruiting engineers.

Ultimately, even though I was working stressful hours–normal startup life–in a country I’ve never been to, I was working for a cause I cared about. More importantly, I saw extreme personal growth in finding what I wanted and didn’t want in life, what I enjoyed and didn’t enjoy, and why I was motivated to do what I do.

And that’s precisely the of point of summers and college in general: to find yourself and do something you’re authentically interested in.

You don’t have to spend your precious non-renewable youth working for a company you really don’t care about . There are always non-traditional ways of “making it.” You don’t have to be one of the thousands vying for one position — especially when you can find a more effective experience by just emailing the CEO.

The post Why Competition Is For Losers In The Internship And Job Search appeared first on Rajat Bhageria.

NOTE: This article was originally published in FORBES under FORBES Entrepreneurs. See the original article here. 

This is the sixth article in a series about how a group of students at Penn created ThirdEye Technologies, a company commercializing a product that empowers the visually impaired by helping them recognize what they are looking at. Check out the first article here about how we created our first prototype, and the second article about how we converted that prototype into a product. 

It’s no secret that the best way to learn is to learn from people who have already been successful. In this regards, students have it quite lucky. They aren’t expected to be working on anything interesting; all society expects them to do is to go school and do well in it.

Interestingly, if you do work on something interesting while you’re in school, people are incredibly willing to help you accomplish your goals.

For example, while I was building up my startup during college, I had no background building an intuitive product, sales, business development, deciding what to allocate time to, management, financing, or business in general.

Hungry to learn as much as possible, I reached out asking for advice to at least 200 people who I believed had made a major impact on the world.

The result? I was able to learn from venture capitalists who had funded Fortune 500 companies, founders who had IPOed their companies, and CEOs leading massive 500+ person companies.  More than any particular advice, these conversations allowed me to glance into their minds and see how these kinds of individuals think about life. I learned how they got to the point they did, what they involved themselves with during college, whether they would change anything they did in the past, what they hope to do next, what their routines are during the day, and how they would recommend me going forward with my venture

Here’s an email I sent about a month ago:

Hey Dan,

Hope you’re doing well!

I’ve been following your work for a while and I’d love to get some of your advice on a few ideas I am pursuing.

I am currently a Penn undergrad and am working on aproduct that empowers the visually impaired by recognizing what they are looking at (see our recent TechCruncharticle).

Based on my experience starting up during college, an idea I’m quite passionate about is that smart people should build things. It seems like too many undergrads are graduating at Penn not knowing what they want to pursue. Thus, one of my goals is to encourage students to pursue some kind of entrepreneurship–something that teaches practical skills no matter what field students ultimately pursue (see my column on Forbes).

I’d love to get your advice on what they best way to implement this mission (we’re looking into potentially starting a VC fund to invest in student-run companies). I’m actually in LA just during this week before returning to school. Is there anytime this week we could have a quick 15-minute meeting?

Thanks for your time.

Cheers,

Rajat

Remember, all successful people were once not successful. They were once students as well and spent time learning from others. People really sympathize with you since they were in your shoes not long ago. By reaching out to them, you’re showing them that you care about them and that they’re an expert. After you get your foot in the door, people love to talk about themselves and their experiences.

One of the best ways I’ve found to establish rapport with someone influential is just to interview them; give them a quick overview of what you’re working on and then ask as many questions as you can on how you should go forward. Just think about how special you feel when someone asks you for your opinion.

A few tips general tips:

One of your best assets as a student is your school’s alumni directory. Alumni love to help students from their school and simply by mentioning that I went to their alma mater, I’ve had an almost 90% success rate.
Make sure to craft your email to match with their expertise. It may seem like common sense, but make sure to do your due-diligence. People are more likely to respond to an email in which you ask for sales advice by prefacing with “I know you’re an expert in business development because of your experience at Apple” as opposed to “I know you’re an expert because of your work experience.” Again, it just shows that you care and you did your research.
On a similar note, make sure to read all of the other person’s older interviews, watch any video interviews, and read any blog posts/books she’s produced. There’s no reason to waste your time or hers when the content’s already out for the world to see.
Try to nudge them by demonstrating your value to them as well. In my case, I hinted that by meeting with me, I would provide this VC with a potential company to invest in, a potential contact in the media because of the TechCrunch article, and a potential way for him to advertise his firm to a group of entrepreneurial college students.
Really push hard that you’re a student and that all you want is advice. You’re more likely to get a meeting if you just ask for advice, even if you’re really looking for fundraising or a partnership.
Remember that relationships have long term returns. After your initial chat, just ask the other individual “like I mentioned, all I care about right now is learning. Is there anyway I could help you build out ____?” Think about your competitive advantage and how you can help him. It’s no secret that the most successful individuals in any sector have some of the best mentors; one of the best way to establish an individual as someone you can reach out anytime for advice is just to help them with what they need help with.

Of course, part of this “game” comes down to luck, how much experience with cold emails you have, and whether someone introduced you. That skill only comes with time.

But what if you’re a student and aren’t working on something outside of school? If this is the case, just the fact that you’re a student means that you’re more likely to at least get on a call with them. I’ve found that if you just talk about a problem you’re really passionate about solving and ask for advice on how to implement a solution in your email, you find a very similar success rate.

At the end of the day though, college is a time all about learning. What better way to learn than to work on something you love to do and then (using your student status) get advice from experts to improve it? Maybe if you love to write, you could start writing a series on Medium about ___ and reach out to successful authors for advice; or maybe you’re interested in photography and so you start a portfolio on 500px and then ask successful photographers for advice. At the end of the day, people are very willing to help you when you’re student, so why not take their advice? You’re already paying a massive tuition. Why not juice it for every penny?

The post How Being A Student Allowed Me To Meet And Learn From Dozens Of Successful CEOs appeared first on Rajat Bhageria.

Note: This article was originally published on FORBES in FORBES Entrepreneurs. 

This is the fifth article in a series about how a group of students at Penn created a company commercializing a  product  that empowers the visually impaired by helping them recognize what they are looking at. Check out the first article here about how we created our first prototype, and the second article about how we converted that prototype into a product. 

If running a company that you’re building up full-time is hard, then running a company while being a full-time student is excruciating. Nothing is working, you have no customers, you’re getting no sleep, you have to put up with classes and homework (that you already paid a massive tuition for), and perhaps most importantly, many times it seems like your own team isn’t inspired enough to convert your vision to a reality.

In my own experience building up ThirdEye during school, there were times when it seemed like nobody was on my side. We all shared a grand vision for the future, but for some reason, it seemed like we weren’t making much progress on the product or on business development.

Problems arose when one of us didn’t complete something. It was very easy for any of us to think, “oh he’s just not doing anything because he’s not motivated anymore.”

More probably though–as we later realized–there was just a lack of communication; the other member just had an upcoming midterm, he just had a different timeframe in mind, or there was just overall miscommunication.

In my own scenario, very early on I made the mistake of assuming that since I wanted to build the company up to be huge, everyone else on my team also shared the same sentiments. In fact, that assumption was completely untrue.

See the problem with working with students while building up a venture is that everyone has differing short term goals. Some truly want to focus on education and see the venture only as a side project. Some want to use the credibility from building up the startup to find internship opportunities. Some want to use the experience as a launchpad for a future venture.

Plus, since no one is being paid (something true for most student-run startups), once a particular individual has accomplished his particular goal, his level of motivation drops off dramatically.

After realizing that maybe everyone wasn’t as self-motivated to put 10 hours a day into the business (in addition to chugging though school of course), I learned how much communication really is necessary, and how even a minor lack of communication can result in huge inefficiencies.

And so, as the unofficial leader, I tried to step up my “leadership,” something neither high school, nor any of my formal “leadership” positions in high school organizations, nor college taught me.

All in all, I sucked at almost every aspect of modern business leadership. I made every mistake in the book: I micromanaged, I messaged my team members on a daily basis, I asked them to do things without asking for their opinion, and I assigned unreasonable “due dates.” Very quickly, it seemed like the friendly relationships that my cofounders shared were disappearing and being replaced with all-too-formal business relationships.

And so for the next two months, I read every single business leadership book I could get my hand on, watched as many YouTube interviews with CEOs as I could, and reached out to successful founders for advice.

Soon I started to learn. Rather than telling a team member to do something, I learned to ask more questions. So what do you think is the next step? Why do you think this will work? What do you think about using strategy X over Y? As soon as each member felt in complete control, our productivity tripled.

Now there’s no doubt that Dale Carnegie’s lasting words in How To Win Friends and Influence People are applicable to college students, but college students, in particular, seem to have some peculiarities. One of them is the importance of having at least some face time, rather than just working online remotely.

Since we were all taking classes throughout the day, we often worked independently and communicated at times almost exclusively though Slack. Thus, there would be weeks (sometimes even months) when we would talk for hours online but never see each other in person. Needless to say, there was still a lot of misunderstanding between our divisions.

As a potential solution, we started a Sunday dinner and meeting initiative where we would have an all-hands meeting and talk about all our updates, everything we need to do in each department for the next week, and any concerns we had. Because of these, we manufactured time to stop working and meet face to face, ensuring that each of us was on the same page.

Transparency was what kept us going in these group meetings. We were almost brutally blunt with each other and didn’t hold anything back. And so, it didn’t take long for questions like “are you sure you have time to keep working on this?” or “you’re not bringing the company enough value to have X% equity,” or “I know you’re focused on this business…but I ned time to focus on school” or “why are you criticizing him so much?” to arise.

Still, even though we were very critical of each other, by being very honest, we all knew each other’s standards and were prepared for any potholes in the near future (such as a team member leaving).

Plus, these dinners allowed us to connect at a level beyond work; even though we had tough conversations at the after-dinner meeting, getting to know our team at a level beyond work was incredibly effective and satisfying. Sure, we could have spent that time working and building the business further; but repeatedly realizing that everyone we’re working with was an incredible individual made it even more inspirational to work with them.

In that regards, I learned the power of celebrating short term victories (and of celebrating them with people rather than alone). For example, in our regards, press of our story founding ThirdEye during school turned out not only to be a formidable distribution channel to the family and friends of the visually impaired, but it was also a phenomenal motivation to keep our team going forward. Same goes for major partnerships with visually impaired organizations and any other short term victories.

Let’s face it: we’re all terrible managers our first time around. That’s especially true for college students who’ve never had experience working in the “real world.” At the same time, one thing’s for sure: there’s no way that school could have taught me any of these skills; and yet as my experience shows, they turned out to be the most vital part of our venture. The only way to improve at this skill is to do it and fail miserably.

Why not improve on it during school, when you don’t have much to lose anyways? Maybe soon enough schools and colleges will catch on and encourage project-based learning as well.

The post Keeping Your Team Motivated When There’s No Pay, Little Motivation, And A Commitment To School appeared first on Rajat Bhageria.

Note: This post was originally published in FORBES under FORBES Entrepreneurs

This is the fourth article in a series about how a group of students at Penn created a non-profit commercializing a product that empowers the visually impaired by recognizing what’s in front of them via auditory feedback. Check out the first article here. 

A lot of student entrepreneurs instantaneously think that as soon as they have an idea, they need to raise money. In reality though, it’s hard to convince investors to put money into student-run companies simply because students have to put up with another major commitment, specifically school.

In our case building up ThirdEye, we had many discussions with major angels and VCs who either approached us because they were interested in investing or because we had reached out for feedback. In each meeting, the investor seemed to send an underlying message along the lines of “we love the mission and drive, but we expect you to drop out if we invest in you.”

Ultimately, we decided to bootstrap the venture completely. We had incredibly low costs, especially considering that we were building the product ourselves and didn’t need a salary, we were already paying rent for college, and our distribution was all digital.

Still, we knew that sometime in the future we would need to raise serious capital to scale ThirdEye, and thus would need a legitimate business plan. With this thinking in mind, we decided to submit a plan to the Wharton Business Plan Competition.

After all, what did we have to lose? Sooner or later we would have to learn how to research business models, write contingency plans, discover marketing plans, do deep market research, find distribution channels, predict our five year net incomes, and form partnerships. Why not start now? Plus, if we did well, we might win some money to cover any of our near-future travel costs.

The only problem was that none of even knew what a discounted cash flow was before the competition, and thus had no expectation of doing well considering that most of the participants—MBA students—have years of industry experience over us.

Beating MBAs at Their Own Game 

We spent countless hours researching all the material we needed to cover (we had never formally “learned” how to do it): the current state of the market, competitors, our own product and it’s value propositions, the barriers to entry, the market size domestically and internationally, marketing plans, customer acquisition strategies, customer retention strategies, risk and contingency plans, potential legal problems, market validation studies and experimental design, ensuring customer satisfaction, expansion into future markets, and horizontal expansion.

It seemed like we were applying the lean startup model to actually writing the plan by iterating and incorporating feedback from our mentors, entrepreneurial friends, professors at every step. It was as if we were reading our way to an MBA in a couple of months.It all paid off though. Three months after we had submit our original draft–which had now grown to a 30-page plan–we found out that we were finalists and that we would be competing against 7 other companies for over $125k in prizes.

It all paid off though. Three months after we had submit our original draft–which had now grown to a 30-page plan–we found out that we were finalists and that we would be competing against 7 other companies for over $125k in prizes.

At the end of the day, there’s no rational reason why we should have beaten MBA students–who were at least 5 years older than us and who had industry experience–and yet we somehow beat around 200 mostly MBA teams to win prizes in the competition. If we had known how hard it was to learn all this information in a month, we truly never would have tried.

The Real Power of Business Plan Competitions

But it was precisely the fact that we knew so little about business that gave us the false confidence to believe that we could figure it out . There’s no doubt that after the competition, I felt significantly more comfortable with a great deal of business, planning for the future, dealing with unexpected problems, writing financial statements, understanding how the law works in relations to building businesses, publicly speaking and expressing our plan in a passionate manner, and really getting to the essence of a value proposition. These are skills that I will surely use for the rest of my life (unlike many of the ones I formally learned in school).

More importantly, by working on the business plan, we were forced to have conversations with dozens of successful business oriented minds. Since we were working on something interesting as students and didn’t know what the best way to go forward was, we reached out to dozens of business leaders (especially those who were alumni), told them that we’re students, asked them for some advice on commercializing our product, and had an almost perfect success rate. Because of this, we had the opportunity to learn from successful VCs, entrepreneurs who had exited multiple companies, and corporate leaders.

This really is the power of business plan competitions. You’re forced to break out and learn to ask for help, a skill that has now allowed me to learn from and establish relationships with hundreds of influential people who have made a difference on the world.

Not Just for Dorm Room Founders

Quite frankly, it seems like every university around the nation is trying to encourage entrepreneurship. College really is one of the best times to startup simply because universities are investing so much money into innovation around campus.

More and more schools are starting business plan competitions to encourage entrepreneurship during school; they are rapidly becoming one of the best opportunities for student entrepreneurs to have their first splash into the business world.

But dorm room founders aren’t the only ones who can gain from writing a basic business plan. Almost every single student during college can take something away from planning a business from scratch whether they want to become a historian or a lawyer or a dentist. Every job requires you to have a simple business acumen, learn to sell yourself and an idea, and how to reach out to those with more experience than you for help.

So educators, why is it that so many American students are going through college without having to write a business plan of their own (even in a simple entrepreneurship course)? For all we know, we could be missing out on the next Facebook simply because a college student didn’t think he had the business skills to commercialize his vision.

The post Why You Should Learn How To Write A Business Plan In College appeared first on Rajat Bhageria.

Note: This was originally published in FORBES under FORBES Entrepreneurs

This is the third article in a series about how a group of students at Penn created a non-profit commercializing a product that helps the visually impaired recognize what they are looking at. Check out the first article here about how they first built a product and here for how they then commercialized it. 

Everyone has ideas, especially in college. Some of these ideas might evolve into billion dollar companies if the students behind them just took a leap of faith. More realistically, the vast majority of students will flush away the ideas with thoughts like how am I going to have time work on both school and the startup? Will my grades suffer? I have absolutely no experience doing anything like this.

You see, our education system has conditioned our students into seeing failure like a disease –we should avoid it at all costs. We’re trained from a very early age to memorize the facts we need, take our exam, and then just move on. No questions. No thinking. If we do anything different than we’re supposed to do, we’re punished. Here’s your B for being a tad bit different and not following my trivial directions.

For some, this mentality lasts forever. For others who can break free, there is absolute benefit in starting a company during school. But the question becomes how in the world do I take care of school and the startup, both full-time jobs in themselves?

Upon first glance, the problem with doing both seems to the physical time constraint. But with 168 hours in the week, even with classes and sleep, there’s still a plethora of time left. And yet, for some reason students always seem to be in a time-crunch, even while just pursuing classes.

For example, when I was in high school–and not working on a startup–I just took the classes that my advisors told me to or the ones that everyone around me was taking. I knew that almost certainly I would never have to use the material again and thus was motivated just to do well and then move on. I was motivated by the grade. To be sure, I wasted a lot of time procrastinating and was neither efficient nor effective.

College was quite different. As early as the second week of school, I started working on ThirdEye Technologies with a group of friends. By the end of our freshman year, we had a fully functional product on multiple platforms, positive feedback from testing the product with multiple visually impaired persons, dozens of daily active users, a partnership that would provide us with distribution to our niche market, a full business plan that had won various large competitions along the way, a board of 4 well-known advisors, 10+ major press articles, and a team of 4 student engineers.

And no, I didn’t fail all my classes or toss them aside. Rather, I put a lot more thought into them and actually tried to understand all the material. In fact, I probably did better in them because of ThirdEye.

How does running a startup–something that’s wholeheartedly more exciting than school itself–translate to doing better in classes? The key was recognizing that there’s a definite subset of entrepreneurship that is “teachable.” For example, software development (as opposed to pure computer science), business management, legal aspects, design thinking, mechanical design, and public speaking are all skills I will surely encounter in some form or another on my entrepreneurial journey. Plus, college actually does a fairly good job of teaching them. I’ll have to learn them anyway, so why not learn them when my family is paying a small fortune for college?

Rather than taking the ordinary chemistry, physics, math, and English courses that most of my peers were taking, I took practical computer science, business management, legal, design, mechanical design, and public speaking courses (while simultaneously finding loopholes to avoid unnecessary requirements or delaying them till later).

Something quite beautiful happened by putting this into practice. While we were learning about incorporation in legal studies, we were working on incorporating ThirdEye. Everything I learned in negotiations I was applying in real-life negotiations to get more for the company. The business models I was learning about in my operations management class helped me enhance our ThirdEye model. My forecasting class helped me price our product and predict sales for the next few years. I was actually using the things I was learning in school. 

As a result, I focused in class and worked to understand the material, rather than extrinsically working for the grade. Guess what? My grades improved. I enjoyed going to class and was a lot more efficient with my time. Moreover, by directly applying class learnings, I actually retained them.

It’s most certainly possible to work on a startup during college. It’s all about finding a way to kill two birds with one stone.

In fact, maybe if we can intrinsically motivate our students to take advantage of their education, teach them things that they actually want to learn, and then have them apply the skills in a practical skills (aka project based learning) they might treat it as more of a gift than a job.

Secretary Arne Duncan, are you listening?

The post Here’s The Secret To Managing A Startup During School appeared first on Rajat Bhageria.