WayUp Office Hours: Tech & Startups

We always learn how to crush it at our careers during WayUp Office Hours. Last week, we spoke with some of the most successful tech & start-up professionals: Marc Cenedela, Serial Entrepreneur, Matt Hamilton, Product Manager at Venmo, Hussain Ismail, Group Director at VaynerMedia, Adam Feldman, Senior Product Manager at Twitter, Peter Boyce II, Investor at General Catalyst Partners, and Raymond Braun, Social Marketing Manager at YouTube. Read on for some of their advice and insights.

To be a standout intern, you can’t just fulfill your required tasks.

All of our panelists agreed that having hustle–the ability to go above and beyond to get things done–is absolutely key to being an impressive intern. Hussain pointed out that hustle is born from passion, saying that the best people he has worked with “are people who show genuine interest in the work they’re doing.” As a summer intern, Matt, who worked AngelSoft (now Gust.com) during college, automated the most manual invoicing process the company had. “One of the fastest ways you can be invaluable anywhere is to do the thing no one wants to do,” he advised.

Adam, who interned at Forbes.com during his freshman year of college, knew that completing the bare minimum requirements wasn’t enough, thinking, “What is the absolutely most ridiculous, impressive thing I can do in my job? Who would be by far the most interesting person to talk to?” His hustler mentality led him to cold call the office of Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the U.N., who wrote a featured piece for the magazine – which leads us to our next pearl of wisdom…

Don’t be afraid to contact the people that inspire you.

Raymond, who has launched a YouTube campaign to support LGBT youth (check out his channel here!), advocated cold emailing professionals for career advice. “Do your homework. Talk about that specific person and why you want to learn from them. No one will be offended by that,” he said. The worst that can happen when you send the email is that you won’t get a response.

Marc, founder of the renowned online job-matching service, TheLadders, stated that when it comes to your career, “there’s no rule that says you can’t call up really famous people. All those rules exist in your head, and one of the most fun things in your career is figuring out how many of them aren’t true.”

College is about opening doors – the real world is about closing them.  

“Leverage the fact that you have the ability to dream and imagine in a way that’s unbounded,” Boyce, who co-founded RoughDraft Ventures, a company that encourages innovation on college campus, said. Our panelists encouraged students to take classes outside of their expertise in order to stretch their minds–after all, after you graduate, it’s all about figuring out what you don’t want to do, or what isn’t right for you.

At the end of the panel, we brought Shark Tank to Office Hours: three innovative interns pitched their startup ideas to our six panelists, who evaluated and voted for the best pitch. The winner was Priyanka Sekhar, a computer science major at Stanford whose idea “Xfil” reinforces the security of your identity–especially when companies ask for your social security number. That wasn’t all: there were a few eager venture capitalists in the audience listening to her pitch, ready to help her develop her entrepreneurial career.

Moral to the story? You need to come to WayUp Office Hours.