How to Break into Tech Before you Graduate College
Advice to my younger self, and hopefully many more startup-gazing young adults
Some notes from Taryn
A full disclaimer: every word I say in this article is a reflection on my own discoveries and current condition, and written upon the following thesis:
It takes an average of 5–10 years for most folks who want to break into venture capital eventually to make it there, and at the end of this rainbow is the realization that many of the skills great VCs carry can be learned in a mere fraction of that time.
The problems I’ve seen around this mainly stem from a) students who have an inkling of interest in entrepreneurship have no idea what venture capital is until well beyond their college years, b) societal normalcy to pursue more “give-back” roles in tech after building a long track record to begin with, and c) universities priming students for jobs that shuttle them into predictable life paths — all of which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Many people living in first world countries conform to an unspoken, invisible guiding hand simply because they don’t understand what happens when you break free of the mold. What I hope to achieve in this essay is a glimpse of how to hack said molds to accelerate untraditional carriers in tech and chop those 5–10 years of breaking into the space in half.
Another quick disclaimer: The assumption I make of you, my reader, is that you too are picking up on the hints that entering the world of tech isn’t as streamlined as other careers, and that universities rarely hold the secrets for getting you there. Similarly, tech is a high-intensity world to dive into, and very few who enter ever leave — it’s a lifetime commitment and lifetime culture, filled with the boldest, hungriest individuals who think in uncapped mindsets and execute on the impossible. If this sounds vaguely like something you’re interested in (which when I was starting off myself the only interest indicators I went off of was a love for filling gaps in my life with things I hacked on, and itching for something beyond my mechanical engineering textbooks), then I’d love to share my following thoughts with you.
With that, let’s begin.
Getting started: picking the right soil to plant your seeds
The choice of where to attend university will forever be the biggest professional decision that we require of young people, and with good reason: although it’s been said that where you go to college technically doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things… where you go to make your first catalyzing relationships, live and breath your first out-of-the-house experiences, and plant your initial seeds all matter tremendously. If you’re looking into choosing colleges and looking into finding one that will best position you to become an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, creator, or really anything in the tech world, some data points to consider are a) proximity to a city (this doesn’t need to be NYC or SF specifically, but should be in an area conducive to tech), b) a proven track record of entrepreneurial graduates that the college is proud to taut, c) a great computer science department regardless of what your major is, d) an ecosystem of entrepreneurial student organizations. All of this transcends builder-culture into campus life. You also don’t need to go to a top-tier school, but generally speaking, the lower the acceptance rate, the more high-caliber crowd you’ll be surrounded by.
I personally recommend any of the universities on Contrary Capital’s page here. They source their top emerging tech & VC talent from schools with proven track records of churning out innovators, which doesn’t necessarily need to come from the Ivy League. A profiling on why exactly each of these schools has succeeded in producing entrepreneurs could be made, too, though would take quite a long time. I’ll let you start by taking a look for yourself.
Planting those seeds
This is one of the hottest topics on the table right now: how to bypass traditional pipelines of going to school, graduating, going into an analyst role as an investment banker or corporate consultant and then finally breaking into VC if you can ever break free of the beaten path of life at that point — and still have the desire to do so. The same goes for engineers, often baited by the big first salaries right before them over the long-term plays of working at early startups with the most innovative technical brains who are more likely than not going to spin up more and more companies after scaling their first one.
Crazily enough, though, for the right kind of student, the venture and tech world is calling you and wants you to help them in ways that college students are uniquely positioned to do, which typically falls under the 2 main buckets of 1) ground-level sourcing which a fund will trust you to execute on based on your personal track record, and 2) part time growth/engineering/other work at an early stage company willing to throw a low-paying intern some bones to chew on and run with. Below I’ll outline some of the moves I’ve watched my many venture-savvy friends take to build their tech track records in preparation for these early opportunities.
Step 1: Intern at a tech company & build a product on the side
This magic combo is something I’ve seen work for literally everyone. Get a first internship however you can in the later stages of high school or first summer of college. This internship will very likely suck. Mine was assembling and testing hardware voting machines for elections, my friend’s was managing a startup’s CRM (yes, that was his title: CRM Intern). You’ll also find that these early gigs can be categorized into the same tech buckets as any job in tech: generalist or specialist. My recommendation, especially if you’re early, is to always pick specialist roles, whether engineering, design, data, etc. Getting some hard skills down and developed will give you the conviction you need when approaching your next role and the confidence in your own skills to build something yourself. Generalist learning in terms of managing many things at once, creating relationships via emails/phone calls with company stakeholders, and managing and inspiring teams to execute can take place anywhere — not necessarily in the confines of a tech company, where your priority should be executing on your given tasks to maximum capacity, building a portfolio of the impact you’ve made, and making early key relationships with coworkers and managers who will vouch for you.
Step 2: Pick the right major
I hate to say that there is such thing as picking a right major and picking a wrong major, though to make a standardized recipe for advice that I’ve seen yield the best outcome for the most amount of people in VC/tech, I’m telling you now to choose a major as close to computer science as possible — with the exception of if you already know how to code. Learning how to code is the most valuable skill you can learn. It will set you up for much higher-leverage positioning than any other major that currently exists through a variety of lenses: first off, having the “I can code” conviction coming into any conversation in tech enables a level of confidence that so few will naturally have otherwise. Likewise, learning to code gives you a built-in fall-back plan if all else fails, and especially for your early gig — and if you’re willing to work for lower pay, you can weasel your way into some excellent young companies and maximize your exposure to the founders and early team. If a college kid came to any fresh YC company and said “Hi, I code and build products and I’m willing to work for dirt cheap for you” there isn’t a single one who’d turn down the offer. Another skill acquired from learning how to code is developing different frameworks of thinking. Ultimately, coding is just using something outside of ourselves to behave like we want it to, so many different thought frameworks about data structures, goals & triaging priorities, thinking inside of some boxes and outside of others, are all offshoot learnings from becoming a developer. Lastly what learning how to code teaches you (the most important thing of all) is resilience and resourcefulness. You’ll get told by the computer what you’re trying to do is wrong again, and again, and again, and again, and you’ll have to deeply scour the internet for resources on how to fix bugs and trial and tribunate time on time again until you even adjacently get what you’re building to work. The learning that happens in this process — essentially, how to have a strong command of the internet and use Google’s magic to your advantage — is so core to any kind of work in startups and venture. VC funds, for example, love hiring people with CS backgrounds because they know that they won’t miss details and be extremely keen on diligence processes for companies.
Now, if you’re in my bucket (folks that did not fact realize computer science is an easy entry way to tech/VC until it was a little too late to study in college), that is also okay. First off, it’s never too late to learn how to code — I’m diving into the weeds of it right now despite starting in hardware, and some of my friends didn’t pick it up until mid-twenties and are now running venture-backed tech companies. The bottom line is that the internet isn’t changing any time soon and jumping into developing has only been getting easier with the sheer number of resources out there for newbies. My biggest recommendation: find a community of other developers you resonate with and who can help you out along the way. I’ve been fortunate to co-live with groups of coders in San Francisco for the past few months who’ve been my built-in TAs, and their guidance and mentorship was extremely helpful in getting me 0->1. Learning outside of college is often lonely, so starting with a supportive community foundation will work wonders.
But back to my friends who are still in college, and who are in the nontechnical bucket. It’s often that folks run to business before any other route in pursuit of creating, running, or investing in companies. The good thing is what matters even potentially more than your formal education is what you do with your college extracurriculars. Your college extracurriculars will be your first catalyst to VC if you play your cards right. Here’s a sequential outline of what this looks like:
Search for any entrepreneurship organizations and join them. Go to events and meet people, and be open to new relationships.
If you’re at a top-tier entrepreneurship university, you can find a guide to all of the entrepreneurial resources and organizations here.
Once you participate in the club for a bit of time, become a club leader. It will teach you some basic management skills that you need, allow you to earn some on-campus clout, and begin to forge connections that could lead to your next thing.
Find a great summer internship, potentially utilizing these connections. I would recommend, using the page above, to find the Contrary Venture Partner(s) at your school or neighboring school and reach out to them for help on this, but the warmest intros will come from your immediate network. Cold outreach is scary and an uphill battle, but completely worth it to score a great gig that will allow you to get into a company right when great hires are being made and allow you to have a serious delta of the impact you make during your time there.
The TLDR is that it’s imperative that you have at least one gig under your belt that’s more than flipping burgers by the time you’re going into your sophomore year of college. That way, you can begin being more strategic with internships the later half of your college years and carry enough badges to aim for a top-tier VC internship, or (what’s even better in my opinion), have your choice of seed-series B companies to join for the job you do right afterward. Leveraging your experiences with different weights depending on the conversations you have is essentially part of selling yourself 101, and something you’ll become better and better at with practice.
You should also at this point, when you’ve ideally climbed the ranks at your university, score a VC student group position. The short list of VC opportunities to join, which I call the Big Three:
Take a look into each of these, as well as other venture opportunities in your area. Joining these organizations will position you such that you’ll be surrounded by like-minded students hailing from universities all around the country, so no matter where you go, you’ll always have someone or somewhere to call home. Plus, uniting with the brightest emerging tech minds only catalyzes everything you’ve been building so far and will unlock opportunities you couldn’t even imagine possible.
The delta of these kinds of network effects can’t even be mathematically mapped out since serendipity will cause your growth equation to have traces of step functions here and there, some downturns, mostly exponents, all wrapped into one glamorous map of your early adult life. It’s those step functions that take place through people, steady state from taking your foot off the gas pedal and assessing, constant growth from doing good work at your job, exponentials usually from building your own thing and meeting all the right people, and step functions — where you inexplicably will leap 10 steps ahead for no good reason — from lucky interactions that can only form when you position yourself to be in the right place with the right people and hold the right conviction in yourself. The way to access the greatest displacement of your professional growth early on is finding the best first step, which for me and many other aspiring VCs is entering these student groups. Joining them will allow you to only meet more individuals of shared interests and build out a killer group of friends, future cofounders, and generally the kind of people you’ll want to spend your 20s around.
Okay, now back to the more professional stuff. If you’re at the point where you’ve chewed on tech jobs for a bit and want to test the waters at a VC fund, don’t be shy to cold email VCs around where you are offering to work part time, highlighting the attributes you bring to the table and why scout/analyst work for them excites you. Most funds will have something for you — it will likely be working for free, but again, your focus needs to be getting skin in the game. I’d also recommend checking out the big brand-name funds that support summer interns, too, such as Insight, Accel, and Bessemer. These opportunities are incredibly well-done and have been a launching pad for many of my early career tech friends, as well as have allowed them to test out the waters: some have decided to go into VC full time after this experience, and others chose to focus on company/product building before doing more on the investment side. The TLDR here is that diversity of experience is core and key to determining what trajectory you want to take, so in addition to your bare minimum one gig at an early tech company, I also heavily recommend a gig in venture at as reputable a fund you can find.
If at this point you’ve not built anything of your own yet, my biggest advice to you will be to build something. Literally anything. I built toys for young girls for a bit and an app on Bubble that was a horrendous failure. What you’ll find, though, is that in the process of building and sharing what you’re making, you’ll a) learn the hard way that to build a company, you need to focus on the distribution and genuine need of the product over hacking together the product alone (every first-time founder’s biggest learning), and b) meet tons of impressive people who see you and want to support you. It was because of these side hacks, in tandem with getting involved in entrepreneurial organizations in college, that gave my personal brand true credibility right off the bat.
It’s important to take mental benchmarks along your journey into tech, too, and return back to the visual of your personal delta graph to get more of a perspective on how your growth has been plotting out so far and what the slope is of your present coordinate. For some, it’s been step function after step function and what you need most is some more consistent steady state time for heads-down focus. For others, it may be a long steady state that could use a steep refresh. And for others, a perfect happy medium of letting progress flow without too much proactive professional development moves, which is a spot I’d generalize many of my Series A+ founder friends to be at from an outsider’s perspective looking in, as well as friends who are deep into a heads-down study mode period of college. What’s most important here, of course, is to recognize what you need most based on where you are and use that to choose the people, places, and actions that need to be factored into your equation to change your graph’s trajectory.
Never stop learning
It’s becoming increasingly popular amongst young technologists still in college to say “screw college, I just wanna drop out and pave my own path because I’m barely learning anything useful here.” I believe the sentiment has some merit — once you break into tech, you must supplement everything you do with a steady flow of learning, though don’t necessarily need to take it to the extreme of full abandonment of traditional education. What you should do, though, is supplement your actions and building with high-leverage resources. Any of the most talked about books by top founders / VCs are great for this, as well as this list of 100 classics. Podcasts, articles, micro-content in between is all rich as well. I’d recommend specifically diving into biographies of top change-makers in tech as well and study their psychological profiles and decisions. This will help set you up to understand what goes into the making of a great entrepreneur’s mindset, and mindset is the #1 maker of success for all of the brightest who’ve come out of Silicon Valley.
I also recommend, as you’re finding young technologists/VCs who are a few steps ahead of you who you look up to and hope to become more like, to check out the kinds of people they follow on their socials, ask them for recommendations on newsletters to subscribe to, and ask them anything else relevant to what you want to learn about. People in tech are incredibly open and giving, and many will recognize the same fire within you that was once within them when they were first breaking into the world of things. The key to forging relationships with these people and soaking up learnings rapidly is to just be your whole self, don’t be shy, and realize that everyone you talk to was in your shoes not that long ago. You have nothing to lose in the endless pursuit of knowledge — which, actually, is one of the core characteristics of tech world. In a world where breakthroughs, new decisions, and general change is omnipresent, being a learning junky is one of the requirements of this society.
Build your personal brand
Personal brand is another one of those talked about things that is hard for most college students to materialize outside of seeing the effects of social clout with the “popular group” in high school, though it’s also one of the core drivers of who is most likely to get hired for emerging roles in VC and tech, and (as I keep saying) will unlock opportunities and open doors you didn’t even know exist, as folks will go out of their way to seek you out based on who the brand they know you by. Building a personal brand is, in a way, putting an aura of excellence around yourself and the value that your presence brings to an organization of people, which is easiest to build up by both building concrete things that you can tie back to it (starting a company, working as an investor at a fund all give tangibility here) as well as the intangibles of how you make people feel and how you impact the individuals around you. Not surprisingly, the latter is the most important thing to maximize as you’re creating your brand. Little things like actively listening to others, going out of your way to connect them with people or resources or recommendations you have, and becoming a compounding advocate— hyping people up to others you talk to, and effectively by word-of-mouth facilitating the growth of their own personal brands — is also in turn a rewarding way to build your own.
More tangibly, brands are built by recurrent thoughts and feelings that a person imparts onto others, which is why picking and growing social channels is so important. In today’s world, social media has uncapped value for accessing a breadth of high net worth individuals all at once, and also offers an outlet for your brand to be reminded of when you’re not actively doing the in-person event hopping. My advice: pick 1 social channel to optimize for, but be sure to sprinkle updates in other locations as well. My top 2 for tech will always be Twitter and Linkedin, as I’ve found the crowd those attract and the ease at which I feel myself on when posting (opposed to TikTok and Instagram which my be wonderful for your persona but were a fish out of water for me). Being yourself on these platforms and sharing who you are with the world is core to building a brand, as you want your brand to be a truthful, unguarded reflection of who you are. It’s how some opportunities for events will come up, sales and recruitment channels, scouting great new companies, the whole shebang.
One of the strongest ways to bolster, or even discover what online brand presence best suits you, is to connect with others in real life. So much of tech world is gathering for experiences. It’s these moments together that give way to deep relationships forming, so it’s important that you have at least a period in your early tech career where you and others, likely even friends you’ve met from the VC social groups, are hopping around to 2–3 conferences a year. Each conference will traditionally attract their own unique crowd to them, some heavy on developers, others specific kinds of tech, others with the purpose of just coming together and have fun (like Miami Hack Week, for instance). The goal of going to these conferences and experiencing co-living communities, which I’d argue is also a right of passage in the tech world, is to live in the present, identify what and who you resonate with, and optimize those channels for planning your next move. Similarly, I like to look through every experience I encounter through the lens of identifying the people I resonate with most and act to deepen those relationships while we’re both in the same place. It’s objectively better to walk away from a conference week with a handful of people you got very close with over an armful you’re somewhat connected with. Though for your first conference / co-living situation I would personally recommend casting the widest net you can so that you strengthen your nose properly for the kinds of humans you’d see yourself wanting to spend time with, since that’s the first step to identifying your future cofounder, coworker, and even life partner. The true point of getting into tech is building empires, and empires can only exist with people within them and purpose behind them. It’s a much more social way of life than many would expect, and a very fun one.
Okay, that was a lot of takes on the social side of tech. All that said, though, the one anchor that will truly grow your brand more than anything else is the impact of what you build. At the end of all of the hype, events, and people you meet, I’ve found that only 2 things are left over: what you built, and who your closest connections are. Although the in-between fluff and fun is incredibly important and that kind of practice will lead you to becoming better and better at working IRL activities to your greatest advantage, what will truly anchor your personal brand is what you produce, whether at a company or as a founder. Being a founder, too, doesn’t mean starting the next 10B+ valued SaaS company: many prominent VCs I know are founders of podcasts, articles, and media content, some hack on the weekends and churn out micro-products for fun, others own and manage real estate, some build programs within the funds they work at, and more. There’s no one color to being a founder, and the opportunities to produce great things that help people you may never meet but have felt the impact of what you’ve put into the world — that, right there, is your core brand builder.
The last piece of advice I’ll give on this is to enjoy doing it. This article, for instance, is taking me forever to write but I’m excited by every character my fingers are ferociously typing at. When you’re acting in your own enjoyment, which often needs to be put aside for some things in life but should take center stage in early tech careers, personal brand growth will become an afterthought. So… share early and share often, connect with others physically and upkeep relationships digitally, and love every minute of being immersed in the community. From there you’ll naturally see mentor/mentee relationships forming and have folks in your back corner rooting for you no matter what — your network will become your safety net.
Build your venture track record
Pivoting the conversation back to constructing your career in venture: having a track record of experience in tech and venture enables others to have faith in your thoughts and trust your nose when it comes to evaluating founders. Ultimately what this will allow for is your ability to refer founders to the funds you know, starting from your student group fund but also expanding to other funds you’re close with as those relationships form.
Your goal should be to first give company referrals to the fund you’re closest with and who is most focused on your personal diligence learning — for me, this was Contrary Capital, as I watched my venture referrals starting from fairly okay companies to slowly but surely becoming stronger and stronger until the quality of my deal flow was at a spot such that I felt confident to approach specialized funds — such as those that are biotech-focused, crypto-focused, etc. — with founders I was finding to gage their more selective interest. Providing weak deal flow will be a reputation killer among funds and is a bump that every early VC person will have to overcome, so my advice is find a) a fund that makes the space for learning and b) assemble a group (can be unofficial) of diligence partners who you can use to bounce companies off of and hear their honest thoughts. Utilizing the relationships you’ve been curating for this purpose is key to making well-rounded judgements of companies and founders, which is a muscle that takes a while to exercise and grow, though the process of doing so is extremely rewarding and makes those relationships even tighter.
What all of this is preparing you for, really, is building your own conviction as an investor to write your own checks. If you have the privilege to angel invest, you may see this playing out in the form of backing your friends as they embark on their founder journeys, even in small amounts. Or perhaps you’ll join a venture syndicate — I would actually recommend joining one as soon as you have the means to, as this will be yet another flow of companies to evaluate and continue sharpening your nose. If your deal flow becomes to a point where you physically have more great founders in front of you than you have the means to invest in yourself, then perhaps teaming up with a friend and launching your own syndicate would make the most sense. I’ve seen a couple of my most venture-savvy friends lead a syndicate deal while still in college once they trust their instincts, research, and quality of deal flow well enough to send other people’s money into a company of their choosing. When I first saw people doing this, I looked at them like they were wizards. Now, I realize that the skills they possess to create mini investment vehicles are ones that anyone is capable of acquiring, even before graduating, if you are diligent to put the extra mile into every crevasse of VC learning opportunities that come your way. If, at this point, you’ve also built something of your own, then melding your VC knowledge with building capability will come naturally, and the output will be the ability to lead venture deals as you like.
Each piece of your college experience will come together, and the result will be abilities that you never would have foreseen possible.
Launch
Let’s take a moment to reflect on the steps and ideas outlined in this essay:
Pick a great home-base college
Pick a tech-forward major
Utilize the college’s entrepreneurial organizations
Grow your campus presence
Join an off-campus student VC group
Build your referral track record
Start making your own investments
All the while…
Score some early internships at seed-series B companies, likely in specialized fields to allow yourself to explore being a generalist in student orgs or with leading your own initiative
Hack on side projects
Build your personal brand and engage with tech community outside of your college
Never, ever stop learning
When you embrace these steps, as I’ve seen so many young technologists around me do, you’ll find that you’re equipping yourself with all of the tools necessary to become whatever you want to be in the world of tech. You’ll be able to choose between being an investor or operator, generalist or specialist, and make every decision in your early twenties from seeing the entire big-picture kaleidoscope of what it entails.
The ability to do that — as well as speak to your experiences — will allow you to bypass the 5–10 year period following college that most dedicate to trying to figure our what they want to do for the rest of their life, and condense that timeline down to a mere 4 years at university. When you graduate, the level of maturity and worldly wherewithal you’ll develop is leaps and bounds ahead of your peers to the left and to the right of you. You’ll find that at the end of your college experience, the delta of your starting and current point of your personal graph — filled with spikes, step functions, constant, zero, maybe a negative slope here or there — will be scores ahead of others your age. There’s a lot more to early career success than that, but the main gist of this whole piece is this: it’s never too early, too extreme, or too crazy to dive whole-heartedly into what you’re passionate about.
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