How To Land A Startup Job: A Success Story, With Advice

Wharton School MBA candidate Daniel McAuley – Ethan Baron photo

A company-specific selection of readings can also smooth the way into a job, if, for instance, the founder has written a book, articles, or blog posts, McAuley suggests.

To McAuley, the extra reading, the online learning, and the inter-disciplinary education play key roles in the ability to develop empathy for a startup environment. Empathy, in a business context, is less about compassion and warm feelings, and more about the ability to grasp the problems of team members in other types of jobs. That requires knowing what it is, exactly, that the other people do, and in what workplace languages they speak, McAuley says.

LEARNING FOR MORE EFFECTIVE COLLABORATION

Although conventional wisdom says that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, conventional wisdom, when it comes to tech startups, often does not apply. Most jobs require extremely specialized knowledge. But they also require intensive collaboration with colleagues from other domains, and rely heavily on effective flow of ideas and information within the company. Maximal impact is achieved when one hand knows what all the other ones are doing, can comprehend other people’s problems, and provide assistance when required. And everybody needs to actually care about their colleagues’ issues – and their customers’, McAuley says.

“There’s no class you’re going to take, I think, that will help you with that,” McAuley says. “There’s no class on empathy. You have to genuinely care about other people. You have to genuinely care about the issues that they’re facing and want to help solve those issues.”

To be sure, some people are more empathetic than others. For those whose best abilities may lie elsewhere than in caring deeply about others, an empathetic approach remains wholly possible, McAuley says.

“We’re all coming to business school with differing degrees of your default level on the empathy meter. The question is, ‘Can you adjust that dial?’ I think the answer is yes.”

THE REQUIREMENT TO CARE

Achieving empathy can come down to self interest: it’s essentially a matter of recognizing that the more you help ensure colleagues have their problems solved, the better your collective work will proceed, and the more you care about your customers’ satisfaction, the better you’ll be able to serve their needs and propel company and career success.

Most MBAs are well grounded in the core domains of finance, marketing, and management, but for those entering or founding startups, the biggest knowledge gaps are in engineering and design, McAuley believes. As for which outside-B-school studies would add the most value for an MBA, he puts the area of data first, because it’s used in every domain of a startup, and product second. “Everyone needs to know basic data analytics,” he says. “If you get deeper into product, that’s where you get the most leverage, after data.” As a data scientist, he admits he may be biased.

People interested in startups and who are trying to figure out if they need an MBA to achieve their goals will also benefit from the reading list, by learning specifics of roles and industries to see how much the degree might help, and to facilitate choice of schools based on what they offer, he says.

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