I love my morning reading routine. Most mornings during the week – between 5am and 6:30am – I sit at my computer, catch up on email, read the stuff in my daily folder, go through my RSS feeds, and generally explore whatever I can on the web. Some is systematic (my daily folder, my RSS feeds), some is more random (Techmeme, Hacker News), and some comes from places that I couldn’t tell you how I got to.
Today’s amazing story was from The Tech, MIT’s newspaper (currently in Volume 130). The article is Opinion: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell and is a great story from Keith Yost, an MIT grad, about his relatively short experience working at BCG in Dubai as a management consultant.
It’s a story that will be familiar to anyone who started working at a management consulting firm straight out of school. Or an investment bank. Or a law firm (out of law school). Or an accounting firm. Or any number of other “professional services firm.” It’s especially relevant for anyone who got an A+ education and was at the top of their class, which seems to correlate with the type of people that management consulting firms are interested in hiring.
When I was at MIT, I never really contemplated getting a job working for anyone. I started a few companies while I was in school, the first two of which failed but the third (Feld Technologies) took hold. During my senior year, I was also finishing up my first year of business school at Sloan so for the hell of it I went to a few recruiting dinners, mostly to see what they were like. I vividly remember one for McKinsey at L’Espalier when it was in its old location on Gloucester Street. This would have been 1987 when L’Espalier was the best ticket for a fancy meal in Boston (I think I’d been once) so there was plenty of buildup. The evening was one part delightful (the meal was awesome) and one part “turn a power drill on, place it between my eyes, and put me out of my misery” as the senior consultants and partners from McKinsey took the room through a presentation using overhead slides (this was before the age of Powerpoint) talking about the firm, the firm’s history, the firm’s importance in the universe, and a bunch of other things I forgot within 15 seconds of leaving dinner.
Over the years I’ve had plenty of opportunities to work with other large management consulting firms on various projects. While I found the style and tempo to vary, Keith’s article rang true to me, especially when I talk to some of my ex-investment banking friends who didn’t make it through year three of their “advanced copy machine operation and presentation wrangling” skills.
If you are early on in your career in a professional services firm, you’ll benefit from reading Keith’s article and thinking about the story of “Find Me A Rock.” If you are a manager or a partner, you’ve probably already found a rock, but it’d be worth your time to read this story also and ponder what you are doing on a daily basis. Think of it as having something healthy for breakfast instead of the usual Cocoa Puffs.
Standing Cloud, one of the Boulder-based companies we seed funded last year, is hiring a Java Developer. They are a provider of software and services that facilitate deployment and management of application software, using on-demand cloud servers from providers such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Cloud, GoGrid, and others.
The role is to build, maintain, and support client code that interacts with third party cloud services and virtualization APIs. You’ll be deep in the weeds with the various emerging cloud services and part of a young team of eight other people.
If you are interested, send a resume to jobs@standingcloud.com.
Slice of Lime is looking to for Flash/Flex/PHP designer who is also a programmer at heart. If this is you, apply now!
2008 was a fantastic year for entrepreneurship in Boulder. While the VC firm I’m part of (Foundry Group) invests nationally, the partners have made a deliberate decision to live and work in Boulder. As a result, we believe it is our responsibility to participate actively in Boulder’s entrepreneurial community. I’ve been living here since 1995 and have seen and helped Boulder evolve into a serious entrepreneurial hub, as written about by my friend Ben Casnocha in his article Start-Up Town in The American Magazine.
There are many people that are now engaged in the Boulder entrepreneurial community in a wide variety of ways. I believe that entrepreneurship and innovation are the fundamental drivers of long term economic growth in the United States and have dedicated my work life to this area. Even thought no one really knows what the 2009 holds for us, I’m hopeful that the entrepreneurial energy and momentum that has been generated in Boulder over the past few years will continue strongly in 2009.
To get us started, Andrew Hyde put up two posts that are relevant to all Boulder-based software and Internet entrepreneurs. The first is HackSpace at TechStars. On January 15th at 5pm, the TechStars space (the Bunker) will be opened up for anyone to come hang out and hack together. If you know where the Bunker is, just show up. If you need more info, drop Andrew an email at andrew {at} startupweekend.com.
Also up on the Boulder is for Startups site, Andrew has a post titled Boulder Jobs. If you are a company in Boulder that is hiring, drop Andrew a note (andrew {at} startupweekend.com). If you are looking for a job, drop him a note also. Look for a steady evolution of a local job site that builds off of the very successful Boulder Job Fair event a few months ago.