Don’t Waste Your 20s at Google or McKinsey

What should you be looking to get out of your career in your 20s? Should you be looking to make a lot of money? Should you be looking to get a brand name on your resume? The most important thing you should be looking to do – is to find your true professional calling. As the famous rags-to-riches entrepreneur Jim Rohn said:

“Time is our most valuable asset, yet we tend to waste it, kill it, and spend it rather than invest it.”

Investing your time in your 20s wisely enables you to spend the rest of your life doing what you love, not searching for what you might love. So the real question you should be asking yourself is: How do I learn the most (about myself and the things I’m interested in), in the shortest time period possible, so I know what I want to be when I grow up?

Lets start with what not to do – go work at a big tech company. Unfortunately, that’s not the easiest choice to make. Google and all the big tech companies recruit on campus. The perks seem attractive (free food and occasional visits by Hillary Clinton or Bono). The brand feels impressive. The pay is good. A lot of your friends likely work there so there is a certain social comfort level. It feels like a stepping-stone to other things. The trouble is that your learning curve is unbelievably slow. If you are an engineer, you likely work on a large project whose contribution is likely irrelevant to the outcome of the business. You’re going to have high variance in the quality of people you work with (because in a company of 50,000 people that is almost certainly going to be true). You’re going to ship production code relatively infrequently. If you are a product manager – you are not facing the most important challenge of a real product manager (building such a product so great that even a lack of distribution capability doesn’t inhibit its success). If you are a salesperson – it’s hard to know if you are being successful because of you or because of the brand you represent. Fundamentally, you’re in the slow-lane as far as learning curves go. The skills you do cultivate, navigating large organizations or dealing with politics, are ones that don’t push you to the intellectual or emotional edge. Ask yourself the question: will the prospects of the big tech company I join change if I join? The answer will be no. And therefore neither your impact nor your learning can be significant. As a result, you might leave a little richer but you really don’t know a whole lot more about yourself and you’re likely much further behind your friends at start-ups or growth companies.

Big service businesses like McKinsey or Goldman Sachs also seem like super interesting opportunities. They pay well. They offer you the opportunity to flit between different projects (Consulting) or different deals (Investment Banking). You get to travel the country or the world and you’re told that you will be interacting with senior executives at clients. Some of that is true. The trouble is, for 90+% of people who work at big services businesses – they are routes to other careers, not careers in and of themselves. That would be fine if the skills you learn there enable to you to learn a lot about yourself. But most of the ex-consultants and ex-bankers I know are about as uncertain about what they want to do in life as they were on the day they joined the big service company. Rather than clarity, the diversity of projects just creates confusion. While there may be some good critical thinking skills that you cultivate – remember that the fundamental job of a Consultant or Banker is to put together PowerPoint presentations and excel spreadsheets that give advice – rarely to implement anything. Your learning will be so concentrated in strategy (5% of life) that you will lose out on learning skills in the more important part (execution).

I spent two years at a big service company in my 20s (Investment Banking @Lazard) and three years of my 20s at a big tech company (Cisco). But I learned 10x more about myself and the path I wanted in life at a start-up named FirstMark Communications where I was a founding member of the team and spent 3+ years at between the ages of 23 and 26. FirstMark was insane – we built a broadband network to provide high-speed Internet access across Europe in the late 1990s. It was a classic telecom bubble story that involved raising $1bn of capital, hiring 600+ people, dealing with government regulators in 10 countries, interacting with Henry Kissinger, building out optical networks and going after a big mission to go wire the planet. There were a ton of things we screwed up at FirstMark and a bunch we got right. But it was a life changing experience for me.

I had accepted admission to business school before I got involved in starting FirstMark and having been both an engineer and an investment banker, I was pretty uncertain about what I wanted to do in life. I would have likely been even more confused after the Business School experience. Instead, I got involved in starting FirstMark and it was the defining experience of my 20s. It told me I wanted to be an entrepreneur and more importantly, it gave me the confidence to do it. I learned more about business and myself in the first month at FirstMark than at 2 years at Lazard or 3 years at Cisco. And while it was intense, stressful, volatile and crazy – I loved it. I had clarity - the rest of my life was going to be about entrepreneurial pursuits. Interestingly, many of my friends and colleagues at FirstMark did not. Some went back to Wall Street. Some went to go work at big technology or telecom businesses. Some went back to school. But they all found themselves and the professional path they wanted in life.

Going to work at a start-up or growth company in your 20s will put you on the fast-lane learning curve. It will be the best investment you can make because you’ll find yourself. The folks who have come into BloomReach in their 20s unclear about their passions, often emerge knowing who they are – becoming business development people or founders or product managers or people managers. They find their calling fast because the pace of the business requires it. You might be concerned about what happens if your start-up fails. Relax. You (probably) don’t have kids at home. You can always move into your friend’s crappy 1 bedroom apartment for a couple of months. And I promise you this – the most employable person in the tech industry is the highly motivated 25 year old (ideally with technical skills). So even if that start-up doesn’t work out, don’t worry - you’ll have plenty of other opportunities and a clear sense of yourself.

Image from The Takakura Trash Basket by Ikhlasul Amal licensed under CC by 2.0