Hack Reactor presentation: “How to choose a company to work for”

I’ve had the chance to speak to the remote Hack Reactor class yesterday about how to find a company to work for when they graduate.

I usually don’t like to publish slide decks without all the context of the talk, but hope this can still be helpful to someone.

In the talk I explained how the choice of company is really the biggest thing that matters, especially at the beginning of one’s career, as well as how to determine which companies are on a breakout trajectory. It’s usually fairly easy to do.

Roles and titles are MUCH less important than you might think. A good friend of mine got hired by a unicorn who at the time was only 40 people but on a clear breakaway trajectory as a technical support person. He’s now a lead PM there and, if he were to leave, he could pick any startup or company in the valley, as well as most probably raise a seed round pre-product.

In the presentation, there’s an example where someone asked me which company to join in late 2010, and Airbnb was easily the top pick even if they had just raised their Series A at the time.

When I myself was looking for companies to join, I had a much more risky goal of becoming one of the first 5–10 employees , but still managed to identify a number of clear breakouts ones, and pushed hard to join Stripe and AngelList 4+ years ago.

It seems that identifying a company is just one of the steps 😀

More information and a great list of companies can be found on www.breakoutlist.com