Listen to Marc Andreessen
June 27th, 2007 by Gen KanaiLots of folks have been buzzing about Marc Andreessen, who recently began blogging and has been doing a great job at it. He’s got lots of interesting posts but this piece of advice caught my eye.
Finally, if you are a programmer, I highly encourage you, if you have time, to create or contribute to a meaningful open source project. The open source movement is an amazing opportunity for programmers all over the world to not only build useful software that lots of people can use, but also build their own reputations completely apart from whatever day jobs they happen to have. Being able to email a VC and say, “I’m the creator of open source program X which has 50,000 users worldwide, and I want to tell you about my new startup” is a lot more effective than your normal pitch.
The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 3: “But I don’t know any VCs!”
June 28th, 2007 at 10:02 am
I’ll vouch for this. Last year job hunting, the one thing pretty much every interviewer wanted to know more about was the Firefox hacking experience I had. How I got involved, what I did, how I did it, what I learned, what I plan to do, etc. etc.
Education? Spent as little as 10 seconds on that college experience.
I guess it just goes to show how much more valuable experience is compared to reading a book of someone else’s experience.