People are the Sweetness of Life

By Jen Yip

A few weekends ago my husband and I drove up to Healdsburg to have lunch with two very good friends — the friends who in fact, several years back, officiated our marriage. We hadn’t seen them in over a year. As we soaked up the warmth of good company and the late afternoon sun, Joe leaned back in his chair and observed, “people are the sweetness of life.” He was right. Life, in that fleeting moment, was indeed sweet.

I’m struck by how simple the recipe is for the things that bring us joy. The sweet malt scent of freshly broken bread, that rare short-sleeved day in California mid-January, a lazy Sunday afternoon, and, above all, a hearty meal shared with good friends.

I want to take this opportunity to reflect on how we’ve come together over the last year at RenCo, and to set context for how we intend to grow moving forward: by investing more in and practicing creativity with the people in this community.

How we come together at RenCo: Some observations
Over the past year and a half, we’ve run an unusual social experiment to create new friendships and discovered, simply, that when people come together, in whatever ways bring them happiness, meaningful connections are formed. Some examples that come to mind:

• The Unblocker session where we spent a couple hours talking about our hopes and fears for the state of our nation

• The Teach Me where Kate Yuan taught us how to talk to someone about suicide, sharing her own experience

• The time one of our members got laid off and everyone got together to buy him a miniature mushroom farm

• When JLai helped Ally buy and set up a new road bike after she fractured her foot running

• The Teach Me where Matt Dunn talked about what it’s like to care for a dying parent

These moments are the sweetness of community. Through these interactions, many of us have organically grown to trust and respect each other. That these connections are largely, if not entirely, virtual, that we can even make friends in this strange time without ever having met in person, feels magical.

Building together instills a sense of belonging

We initially hypothesized that a high bar of curation in building a community of smart generalists encourages trust and a sense of belonging. We created a rigorous admissions process in service of identifying the best and brightest problem solvers, communicators, and thinkers. Our hope was that members of a top-tier community would feel comfortable extending their personal networks and new opportunities to each other.

What we’ve learned, however, is that curation is only the first step to cultivating belonging. For a community to work, people have to come together with a shared sense of purpose. At RenCo, we don’t force a shared sense of purpose by requiring that our members connect in a certain way. We don’t have a set curriculum or a right way to RenCo. We’ve run an experiment without dictating structure, hierarchy, or rules for engagement and we’ve let the energy of our members draw us into meaningful exchanges. We’ve seen people step up as leaders and organize events that feel like natural extensions of their personalities. Perhaps most notably, what we’ve found is that the members who form the strongest connections through RenCo are those that build with each other. Our shared purpose comes from how we empower each other to create together.

Co-creating has many benefits. When we create with each other, we get insight into ‘working’ together. We see how others think, how they run meetings, how they present themselves publicly, we glean their curiosity, creativity and passions. Co-creating produces artifacts of collaboration that we are deeply proud of — both tangible (videos from our speaker series and co-written blog pieces) and less tangible (minds changed or expanded on controversial issues). And of course, by co-creating, one develops relationships — real friendships — that give rise to serendipitous opportunities.

As generalists, many of us carve nonlinear career paths, in which the best and most interesting opportunities come through friends who trust and respect us, and can vouch for our abilities. A warm intro beats a cold email, but a warm intro coupled with high signal from someone who has witnessed your creativity, organizational prowess, and leadership, is one of the most powerful differentiators generated through the process of co-creation. As opposed to traditional networking or social media self-advocacy, co-creating allows you to showcase skills by actually building things, with others, proving a skill rather than the promise of one.

We’re not directly focused on helping each other find new jobs at RenCo, but we’ve seen it happen many times already. We’ve seen members share opportunities, extend intros to their networks, invest together, and even hire each other as a natural extension of getting to know, appreciate, and respect one another. But perhaps most importantly of all, building together is one of the most authentic ways of instilling a sense of belonging. “I made this here with you, for us.”

So what does this mean for me and the future of RenCo?
Our mission remains unchanged — we exist to build bridges for smart generalists. But we are going to double down on co-creating activities that build the most meaningful bridges. With this in mind, we invite you to create with us, in whatever way that brings you joy.

At RenCo, we want to co-create a feast of activities that connect us in meaningful ways to each other. This is our vision for how we build bridges. We are a community of dabblers, and lifelong learners and we believe that everyone in RenCo has what it takes to lead, build, and organize. Indulge your creativity and use this as a space to explore new ways of bringing people together.

How we support each other as a collective

Our collective can help you create by:

Providing you with a sounding board and laboratory for ideas. We constantly send each other links to tweets or articles we’ve read that may spark an idea for an event. We engage in conversations about ideas, trends, or companies we find interesting -- and in these conversations we poke, prod, and challenge each other to be deeper, clearer thinkers. Use our community as a lab to brainstorm and test the ideas that tickle your fancy.

Sourcing and connecting you with experts. We work together to find great guests for learning opportunities using the power of our combined networks and the RenCo brand as a calling card for warm intros.

Equipping you with our playbooks, templates, and best practices. We’ve done hundreds of events and activities. We will help you with outreach, marketing, event planning, moderating, managing an audience, and collecting feedback.

Supporting your vision every step of the way. We connect you to co-conspirators and help you find co-hosts in RenCo so you can divvy up the work of planning an activity. Being a leader, creator, and organizer doesn’t have to be a full-time job. We believe RenCo shouldn’t feel like work; it’s meant to be a fun ‘extracurricular’ that enriches all of our lives.

Giving you the opportunity to experiment in a lightweight, low-stakes, supportive environment. Creativity requires experimentation. It requires an environment where you can take risks and fail without fear of punishment. We encourage your wildest ideas: from farm tours, to cooking classes, to debates. And if something goes wrong, it’s just a learning experience for everyone. We believe in lightweight experiments as part of the process of finding your voice, and if, despite your best efforts and preparation, your club or event doesn’t go according to plan, we’re still here for you. This is the perfect community to try something new.

Giving you the stage and sharing our audience. Creating something that you feel represents the best of who you are and what you care about, and offering that up to the public is an incredible act of vulnerability. We make this less scary by surrounding you with peers who will collaborate with you through every step of the process.

If this all sounds good to you, you’re probably wondering how you start. An early leader of our community, Emily, simply invited us to go ice skating with her. The result? Many of us can now say we've ice skated with an Olympian figure skater. :) Emily — and so many other RenCo members this year — have set a culture of generosity here by leading through example and by bringing people together in ways that are unique to the talents they have to share with the world.

The possibilities are endless; we’ve seen our members organize Ideas Jams, poker lessons, salons, Operators You Should Know sessions, gift exchanges, book clubs, baking classes, talent shows, and TeachMes.

It is in moments of giving and supporting each other, and building together, that we learn from one another, and find our tribes. Keep it simple: show up, be curious, and look for unconventional ways to delight each other. You will make friends, find people you want to work with, or invest in, and conversely, you will find people who want to do the same for you. Life will taste sweet.

If all of this resonates with you and you’re excited to join us, fill out an interest form here and we’ll reach out to you!

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PS Joe and his wife Rachel – the friends I mentioned at the beginning of this story — connected me with my first full-time startup opportunity several years ago. And, as things come full circle, Josh, one of the founders of that startup, is now a RenCo member. <3

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In typical RenCo fashion, this piece was a collaborative effort. I'm grateful to Alizeh Iqbal, Stan Chen, Henry Su, David King, Robby Huang, Sarah Goomar, Ally Markovich, and Valentin Hernandez for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this.

The Ultimate Playbook for Moderating Events on Zoom

By Alizeh Iqbal and Jen Yip

Our transition to a remote-first world this year has been a swift adjustment. Amid the transition, one thing’s apparent—when you attach "remote" to activities of the past, they become different activities. "Remote work" is not simply "remote" plus "work," but requires a palette of new skills and habits. The same is true for virtual events. We've learned through spliced sound bytes and hours spent fixated on our own little square pictures that the difference between an in-person event and a virtual one is like that adage about the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. But that doesn't mean that virtual events have to be any less memorable. Instead, we need to figure out how virtual events can best preserve the atmosphere and serendipitous connection of IRL events—i.e. the experience factor, which distinguishes an event from, say, an informative blog post. 

Moderators create this experience: a good moderator adds a third dimension to an otherwise flat, pixel-bound conversation. Zoom is becoming the platform du jour for the world's unrecognized Terry Gross's and John Stewarts to showcase their knack for interviewing and conversation. New platforms reward creatives with latent talents—early Twitter was for pithy quippers, Instagram for those with a good eye, and Zoom, similarly, rewards those whose warmth and insight draws our attention despite innumerable digital distractions. 

Great moderation is tough, and the best moderators are inquisitive, thoughtful, attentive: they welcome a speaker like a guest to their home. Their presence magnetizes events and bats away Zoom fatigue—feedback from dozens of our zoom events indicate that a great host is the most important contributor to an event’s speaker and audience engagement.

We wrote this as a guide to help moderators in the RenCo community refine their craft. We’re sharing our thinking with you in hopes of catalyzing a discussion around how to host the most memorable conversations in this new format. If you have advice or ideas to add, we’d love to hear from you.

BEFORE THE EVENT

Attendees leave a well-moderated event feeling like they would want to get coffee or a beer with the speaker, especially because they feel like that connection has helped them better understand how they themselves can become a better X or achieve goal Y. They want to hear the story of the whole person, not just some of their resume highlights. They want an event, in other words, to help them actually get to know someone—their personal history and development. Our feedback forms often indicate that people are interested in the speakers' challenges and victories, their times of growth and slough.

The best moderation might be summarized as an act of "we." In as swift and authentic a manner as possible, the moderator should align sides with the speaker and make clear that their success is codependent. Moderation is like improv—the goal is not to make yourself look good, but to make your partner look good, and, in doing so, odds are you'll both look good. Moderation is a way of presenting yourself and others that inverts everything we're told about, say, a job interview or meeting presentation, where the goal is to highlight personal contributions and strengths. It is equally an exercise of IQ and EQ.

Prepare for the event

As a moderator, your preparation and engagement will make or break the event. An event starts long before the event itself. It begins the moment you prepare to understand your guest. When making preparations, be sure to remember the goal above: to get the speaker to share their personal story and development.

Some points to consider:

• Do your homework. Level up your Google game: read their writing, scroll their Twitter feeds, and watch past interviews to figure out what they’re excited to talk about.

• Do a pre-event call. Use this conversation to help your guest know what to expect and get a sense of who will be in the audience. Figure out what they care about and listen for tidbits that you can use to build out your roadmap for the event. What are they passionate about sharing? What will make them stand out as a speaker? In your conversation, don’t just focus on your guest’s CV; dig into why things happened and what motivated them to do the things they did. Here are some things you can ask:

  • What are your goals for this event? Teaching or conveying a specific message? Marketing a book? Discussing a top-of-mind question?

  • What topics are you most excited to discuss with this group? What do you want to avoid? Ask the speaker if there are topics they get asked about frequently and would rather not get into; e.g. “if you’re an angel investor, people probably always want to pitch you on their company. That’s probably not something you want to get into in this forum and that’s ok.” 

  • Personal big picture questions: What part of your thinking/experiences do you believe are unique and formative? What’s been a unifying thread in your career? What challenges are you most proud of overcoming? 

  • Ask if the speaker is ok with having the session recorded by pitching the value of recording. E.g. “We usually like to record these sessions so we can share them with folks who aren’t able to make it. Is that ok with you? We’re also happy to do this off the record if that’ll make you more comfortable being candid.”

• No surprises. By understanding your guest's domain and story, and communicating before the event, you can eliminate unwelcome elements of surprise. You're there to help your guest tell their story and look good doing so, which is difficult to do with an errant, unexpected course of questions. 

• Nail the tech you are using. Make sure you know how to record the session, monitor the chat for interesting questions (you should assign someone to help you with this if you find it hard to listen to the guest and stay on top of the chat), remove inappropriate audience members, etc. 

Create a roadmap

It's crucial to develop a story arc for each event. Our brains are wired for stories, and maintaining narrative enclosure is arguably the best way to counter audience distraction and fatigue. 

As Sonal at a16z aptly puts it, a good story addresses what's being talked about, why it's important, and what its implications are.  Be flexible to play with the order the way the story unfolds—even after a thorough prep call, your guest might decide to share ideas in an order you didn't anticipate. Structure, but don’t script the conversation. Organize questions by theme, and rank the themes by importance/significance so that you can transpose between groups of questions while guiding your overall story.

Here's an example of a roadmap developed by Alizeh for a RenCo conversation with Mark Wiliamson, COO of Masterclass. Pay particular attention to the top grouping of questions, as these pertain to the story Alizeh wanted to capture:

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DURING THE EVENT

During an event, the audience should feel inspired and the speaker should feel appreciated and engaged. The best conversations have a natural momentum that feels “casual yet informative.” In the events where we’ve managed to achieve this rapport, this is some of the feedback we’ve received:

• “The conversation was insightful, honest, and down-to-earth.”

• “Best event I've attended in quarantine. The dialogue was so smart, refreshing and candid. And Alizeh did a great job of moving the conversation along but also choosing interesting bits to focus on.

• “I always find myself wanting to stay on longer”

• “The other night was fantastic. The questions and comments were so insightful -- you’ve clearly curated an excellent group. I could’ve kept going for another hour!” - from a RenCo speaker

Here are some tips for creating a welcoming experience for the speaker, and a warm, inclusive, and engaging atmosphere for the audience:

Context: Infuse warmth with a personal, specific intro

• Make it fun. Be lighthearted or joke with the guests before the event. Share something personal, like a fun fact about your guest (e.g., he used to be a coffee farmer in Hawaii). 

• Introduce the speaker as a full-fledged human. You're talking to a person with hopes, fears, desires and demons, not a LinkedIn profile. No reading bios aloud! Cover your speaker’s background, a personal quirk or story, and explain why you are featuring this guest with this audience (e.g. “Anna has built three different successful startups in the past and is a poet herself—the perfect guest for our audience of people working at the intersection of technology and the arts.”). Consider inviting a friend of the guest to give a warm intro; you can ask the guest for recommendations in your pre-call.

• Set the high-level context for the conversation. To start the conversation, ask guests big-picture questions that they can answer with specific stories. What drives them, and what was the moment that they realized it? What are they most proud of recently? Frame your speaker's passion topics, and double down there.

• Start with topics of common human interest (e.g. career journeys, mentors, personal motivation). Press for stories that reveal tactical lessons that the audience can apply in their own lives. Avoid topics that are too esoteric for most people to appreciate (e.g. getting into the weeds of technical topics for a non-technical audience).

Set the right tone

• Be curious. Tone is everything: when you ask questions, let the curiosity be genuine and palpable in your voice—your audience will mirror you. You can kick off a conversation with a few expository statements to set context and ask with genuine curiosity, “What were you thinking when...?” or “I’m curious about your understanding of X.” 

• Create moments for audience participation. Inject energy into the room by polling your audience with a fun, quick-to-answer question. Tell everyone how to respond to your question (e.g. in chat, by raising their hand, by sending a Zoom emoji, etc.) and then once they’ve responded, acknowledge their response. E.g. Mark Wiliamson, the COO of Masterclass asked everyone “Who do you think made more money with his MasterClass: Gordon Ramsey or Wolfgang Puck? Put your answer in the chat.” After waiting for audience members to respond, he acknowledged the sentiment in the room with something along the lines of, “Most of you said X. Actually…”

• Bring your audience in with inclusive language. As the moderator you speak for the audience. Frame your questions to make your audience feel like they’re part of the conversation. E.g. “Many of us are interested in” “We’re curious whether…”

• Project confidence with nonverbal cues: Nonverbal cues can advantage or disadvantage your performance. Your posture should be confident and composed, and big, like you spotted a mountain lion (hopefully the event is far less nerve wracking, of course). Don't tilt your head, pull your shoulders down, look into the camera, and keep your hands at shoulder level when you gesture. When gesturing, use sloping, rounded motions, as though you're inviting guests inside. Vary your vocal intonation—a great hack is to pepper your speech with adverbs/adjectives, because our voice naturally reflect the adverb/adjective ("I'm REALLY excited to be here.") And finally, remember that the ears of audience members need rest too—a good way to ensure pauses is to finish sentences at the end of a breath, so you're naturally forced to inhale silently. 

• Don’t hero worship. Treat all guests, regardless of their seniority or unique set of experiences, as an equal to you when you’re onstage. What not to do. :)

• Don’t put your guest “on the spot.” Treat your featured guest as if they’re a guest at a dinner party in your home. Don’t try to one-up or go for “gotchas,” or ask them to give away confidential information or comment on/criticize their competitors or past companies. 

Manage transitions

As a moderator, you are aiming to a cohesive, satisfying story arc, which requires you to manage transitions well. Here are some tips:

• Be present and listen for speaker and audience cues. Oprah’s first rule of advice for interviewing: “The first thing you need to know is that you cannot work off a list of questions, because if you do you won't listen and you will miss the most important question: the follow-up question.” If you’re thinking about what question to ask next, you aren’t focused on what the speaker is saying. When the speaker (or audience!) seems eager to talk about something, ask more questions about it! Pro tip: ask another attendee to help you queue questions if it’s hard to listen and read the chat at the same time. We usually have one other person running the backend of an event and bucketing audience questions by theme. Here’s a screen capture of how we manage audience questions behind-the-scenes:

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• Invite people who post questions in chat onstage. Choose the best questions from the audience using your discretion and audience cues (e.g. “+1” in chat from others). Transition to an audience question by connecting it to a previous topic or to the speaker’s background (Eg. “Earlier you were talking about... Jane {person in the audience} has a question about this. Jane, do you want to ask your question?”)

• Acknowledge and appreciate the audience’s contributions. When someone from the audience asks a great question or makes a point that dovetails on something the speaker said, acknowledge their contribution. Even a “thank you for the great question, [name]” can make audience members feel appreciated for their contribution and encourage others to participate.

Get Deeper

"The specific illuminates the universal, and never the other way around." - Eudora Welty

Great moderators draw out specific stories, not summaries. It’s hard for audience members to learn from or implement high-level advice, like “work hard to grow your network.” Stories on the other hand, draw a listener in and serve to both clarify and cement more generic points of advice. A few tactics to encourage your guest to go deeper:

• Consider using an open-ended prompt. These prompts frame the topic or issue you want to hear about, but they leave lots of room for your guest to take the conversation in a direction that’s top of mind or interesting for them. E.g. “So let’s talk about what happens here…” “Tell me about the situation with…”

• Master the probe. If your instinct is telling you that there’s something juicy one or two layers deeper than the answer the speaker gave, don’t move on right away. For instance, imagine a speaker mentions that she grew her responsibilities as an operator, even while those around her were getting layered. End of answer. Don’t just jump to the next question, engage with follow-up questions: “When layering was happening who was invited to those meetings? How did you make sure you were in the meeting? Help me understand that process.” Other ways you can probe: “Can you give us an example of..” “Tell us more about…” “I’m not sure I understand.. Can you explain?”

• Offer several hypotheses for why something happened. When you’re trying to understand a situation, instead of asking your guest directly “So what happened there?” you can offer a few credible explanations for your guest to react to. E.g. “Is it possible that...” “Do we think that...” Pro tip: using the word ‘we’ lets you speak on behalf of the broader audience or society at large so you’re not making accusations. 

• Offer your own observations. Too many direct questions can start to sound like an inquisition. To keep a conversation flowing but to break up a line of questioning, consider offering your own observations on a situation. Frame these in a way where your observation isn’t confrontational or critical. Phrases to borrow: “And part of that seemed to involve...” “I think everyone was waiting for…” “It ends up feeling like...” 

• Play out an interesting hypothetical. If your guest is particularly knowledgeable in an area where there are still a lot of unknowns, tap into their understanding of a situation by framing a hypothetical. Eg. “What would happen if…” 

Work through snags

• If someone rambles: If either the speaker or an audience member starts to ramble, don’t panic, but regain control of the room. Listen to what they’re saying and paraphrase one thing they’ve said that pertains to the topics you’d like to cover during the conversation. Then connect that point back to a followup question that’s on topic. E.g. “You made a really good point when you said X. This relates to Y (original topic). I want to double-click on this because many of us are curious about…” If an audience member you’ve called up on stage to ask a question is offering statements instead of asking a question, politely ask if they have a question for the speaker. If they're having trouble with their thoughts, give them enough space to have a shot at making their question coherent and, if it's not coming together, help them by attempting to summarize their question.

• If there's an awkward silence: Silence is okay if it's contemplative. But to avoid feeling like you've run out of material, generate more ideas than you think you'll need and keep a few in your back pocket. If you’ve run into a dead end with a line of questioning, don’t be afraid to try a new tack and introduce another topic with a new line of questioning. 

• If an audience member asks about a topic that was on the “don't talk about list." Sometimes an audience member asks a question that puts the speaker on the defensive eg. “Your competitor did X, what do you think about that?” In this situation, your job as the moderator is to drive the conversation forward. Borrow the “yes and…” technique from improv and broaden the question to elicit a more general observation about a trend E.g. “Yes and what that really highlights is the importance of X, so [speaker] what do you think of X? Another tactic we’ve seen work really well here is for the moderator to interject immediately with a joke or turn it into a light moment and redirect the conversation. E.g. "We don't want to get Jason in trouble with his old boss! Next question."

• If you lose focus on the speaker. If participants start debating a topic as a group, you and the speaker lose authority in the conversation. Find a wedge in the debate, like a point someone just made, and use that to bring the focus back to the speaker by asking him/her/them a related question.

End on an appreciative note and review key takeaways

• Keep an eye on the clock. We’ve found that people don’t have the same patience for virtual events as they did for in-person events. The expectation is that Zoom events are content rich and end on time. As the moderator, you should begin to wrap up the conversation 5-10 minutes before the designated time.

• Flag that you’re reaching the end of a session. Instead of dropping an abrupt “well, looks like we’re out of time” comment, slide gracefully into a conclusion with “we’re coming to the end of our time together but we can take one final question.” At RenCo, we usually choose the most interesting question from the audience and bias towards inviting someone onto stage who hasn’t yet spoken, but we’ve seen other fun endings including lightning round questions or a turn-the-table question that give the speaker an opportunity to ask the audience for feedback on something that’s top of mind for them. Make the final bit of content punchy and memorable if possible. 

• Tell them what you’ve told them. Finally, thank your guest and your audience and end with the key message you want your audience to leave with. This takeaway should encompass both content and how you want your guests to feel after leaving the event. E.g. “Thank you Alex [speaker] for spending time with us today and thank you to everyone who joined us for bringing your energy and questions tonight. I hope you leave tonight feeling more empowered to X (e.g. create your dream job) with a better understanding of how to Y (e.g. build a network of professional allies on the Internet).” Remind your audience that you’ll send out a feedback form after the event and that their feedback is both appreciated by the speaker and helps to improve future events. If there are additional resources you’d like to highlight for the audience, reference these in the conclusion. E.g. “for those who are interested in learning more, check out [speaker’s] book.”

AFTER THE EVENT

Capitalize on the momentum from the event to strengthen your relationships with both your speaker and audience. 

Send a thank you

Send an email to the speaker right after the event. This should be a sincere, warm, and thoughtful note that reflects on specific aspects of the conversation you enjoyed. 

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Close the loop with feedback

We send out a “Quick Feedback Requested” email to attendees the morning after every event. Here’s a sample of our feedback form. It should take attendees under 60 seconds to fill out. A few days after you’ve collected feedback, share relevant constructive feedback with the speaker. Providing feedback cements a positive impression and helps you build relationships.

CONCLUSION

Moderation is a skill, like many, that requires deep practice and preparation to render the outward appearance of simplicity. Any great improv cast appears to possess the moment effortlessly, but beneath the look of unrehearsed ease are hours and hours of rehearsal. Like improv, moderation is all about co-creating a memorable story and experience through curiosity, a desire to make others look good, and warmth. Learning how to moderate is an exercise in natural conversation itself, and is a reflection on the ways, as speakers and listeners, we reveal ourselves to one another. Listen with care, engage deeply, channel the room's energy, even if that "room" is a few pixels and a Wi-Fi connection. Your guest and audience will have a great time.

Thank you to Jen Yip, Kali Borkoski, Mishti Sharma, Stan Chen, David King, Brie Wolfson, JLai, Dan Hui, and Jeff Diament for their ideas, edits, and contributions to this piece.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

The Daily, NYT podcast with host Michael Barbaro. We listened to many episodes of The Daily and took inspiration from the phrases Barbaro uses to get his guests to open up. These ‘phrases to borrow’ made their way into our section on how to ‘Get Deeper.’

“How to Moderate Talks, Panels, Meetings, More (Virtual and Beyond!)” a16z podcast by Matt Abrahams and Sonal Chokshi. Matt Abrahams, lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business; principal and co-founder of Bold Echo; and author of Speaking Up Without Freaking Out — shares frameworks and best practices for moderation and communication across all kinds of mediums and modes, in conversation with Sonal Chokshi.

What to Do if You Don’t Feel “Technical Enough” at Work

By Nadia Eldeib

As a smart generalist in tech, there will be times when you feel you lack the technical skills you need to be successful. Maybe you’re working on a new product, project, or team, and are out of your depth. As someone who’s pushed relentlessly towards new challenges and transitioned into increasingly technical roles in my career, I’ve had many moments of confronting the question of if I was “technical enough” to have the positive impact I wanted. 

In this post, I’ll share some of my learnings on how to navigate a career when you’re worried you don’t have the technical skills you need to thrive. To find out where to start, let’s go back a few years to my first full-time “tech” role in 2015: 

I was a few months into my job as a business/marketing generalist at Kamcord, a startup that had raised $15 million in funding a year earlier. Kamcord’s founders had just pivoted the company to a new product direction: mobile live streaming. This was a bold, all-in bet for the startup. Despite having basically no technical expertise, I wanted to support the team at this critical moment.

Ahead of the launch, we partnered with a big gaming influencer to do his first live event on Kamcord. If this event succeeded, we would turbocharge new user growth; if it failed, so would our ability to get other content creators and their fans to try Kamcord. But we had no idea how many of the influencer’s fans would watch since it was his first-ever live stream—a big enough spike in traffic would cause our entire platform to go down. 

To prepare, I did dozens of practice live streams to test and optimize the setup. I spent hours on the phone with the influencer, helping him prepare. I investigated adjacent spaces and studied the influencer’s YouTube viewership to anticipate how much traffic this event would drive. Finally, I recommended to Kamcord’s CEO that I and a senior engineer should be at the office and “on call” for the event, ready to handle any scaling issues. Our CEO trusted this recommendation—and wanted to join us to see this event through. No pressure!

Saturday night, the three of us were in the office monitoring the situation, fueled by adrenaline and pizza. When the influencer went live, to our surprise, the number of viewers skyrocketed past even our most optimistic estimates. Despite the crazy number of fans, the site stayed up, and the streamers and their fans were happy (and clueless to how much happened behind-the-scenes).

How did we get here? And how did I, a generalist with no notable prior technical experience, manage to work hand-in-hand with our CEO and engineers? 

Leading up to this moment, I...

1. Started ‘Dogfooding” our products.

2. Built rapport with my coworkers.

3. Scaled my learnings.

Let’s dive into each of these takeaways for the generalist trying to contribute to the success of their company without heavy technical skills... 

1. Dogfooding our products. 

When I first joined Kamcord, my job was to get game developers to integrate Kamcord’s software so their players could create and share videos on our mobile app. I was not familiar with gaming, software, or how to work with developers. I didn’t have the coding chops to try to integrate Kamcord’s software, but I wanted to get familiar with the product. 

I downloaded a bunch of mobile games and Kamcord’s app and examined how different developers integrated our software. I shared my laughably amateur gameplay videos and engaged with other Kamcord users. By using our products (also known as “dogfooding”) and being relentlessly curious and resourceful, I was able to learn about our users—both the game players and the developers. I scoured the App Store for new games as an “early adopter” and tested them all. I listened to our users’ feedback and deeply understood many of their pain points because I was immersed in our products. If the product or feature you want to dig into isn’t consumer-facing, you can still dive into documentation and learn about the data, architecture, design, and success/failure criteria.

Actually explore your team’s stack and systems. Get access to staging environments and Beta builds (e.g. TestFlight), where you can test features before they launch. Join your team’s GitHub, JIRA, or whatever tools your engineers use to collaborate and track issues. Even if you can’t code (I can’t!) and are scared of breaking things (I am!) you should be able to get view access. Don’t let yourself glaze over as you read—try to understand the code. Learn how the engineers get help when they don’t know something technical, then practice approaching questions yourself in this way.

2. Building rapport.

At Kamcord, I would make a big pot of  morning coffee when I was the first one in the office and then catch up with coworkers over the fresh brew. I showed up to everyone’s bug bashes to help test new features, and went on lengthy lunch-and-chat walks with engineers. 

Now that you are familiar with the tech stack, you have the context and language to ask good questions and earn the trust of more technical team members. So, get caffeinated, and get to know your team. If you’re working remotely, look for ways to recreate the casual coffee chat atmosphere—get together for “virtual” coffee time or a safe, socially distanced walk. 

You’ll likely find that your more technical coworkers enjoy the opportunity to have an engaged discussion about something they built or are working on. Ask thoughtful questions, find out what your engineers need, listen and — when it makes sense — offer to help. 

As you build trust and rapport with your technical teammates and manager, be open and ask for support when you need it, particularly if you’re feeling lost, confused, or overwhelmed. Give context for the problem and how you’ve tried to get unstuck, so that whomever you asked for help knows exactly where you’re at and how to support you. Communicate clearly, concisely, and proactively to help manage expectations with your team and manager. 

3. Scaling my learnings. 

When Kamcord first launched live streaming, we realized it was hard for a new user to properly set up a live stream. To help, I tapped into my work superpowers—I love digging into complex problems, clarifying the task at hand, figuring out a solution, and then scaling or automating it. I researched troubleshooting options and conducted iterative testing. I documented my learnings and worked closely with our founders and engineers to improve our technology and processes. Building on my efforts, we created a “live streaming operations” team and developed an onboarding program for new users. This helped our content creators and product succeed, and I built a lasting rapport with and practice of open communication across the engineering and business teams. 

As you learn from your research and colleagues, take notes, synthesize, and share your key takeaways with the wider team. Whenever I start a new role, I also start a running notes document. These notes can become the connective glue between teams or part of onboarding materials for future hires. By taking notes as you ramp up, then sharing your learnings more broadly, you will contribute to building a culture of strong communication and begin to be seen as “technical” as others on the team can come to you for help.

Finally, fight through feelings of imposter syndrome. 

Chances are when you start a new role as a generalist, you feel (and are!) not “technical enough”—and that’s okay. This was true for me when I first started at Kamcord. This motivated me to learn and grow, ultimately leading to where I am today: loving working as a part of a tech team building new products and delighting our riders as a Product Manager at Lyft. Although it will be hard, avoid letting imposter syndrome (which many of us feel!) overshadow your ability to learn and deliver impact; adopt a growth mindset and avoid taking failure personally. Confront the feeling of whether you’re “technical enough” as a smart generalist head on. And when you do, I hope that you succeed, thrive, and grow.

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Special thanks to Jen Yip, David King, Jonathan Lai, Alizeh Iqbal, Matt Dunn, Andrew Woo, Angela Son, Kali Borkoski, Amit Sankaran, and the RenCo team for your ideas and feedback.

Writing in Pursuit of Clarity

By Kali Borkoski and Ryan Rodenbaugh

At Renaissance Collective, we believe writing is the common denominator among talented generalists and one of the most important skills in business (Dave Girouard, CEO at Upstart, agrees). In organizations that are navigating ambiguity—so, basically any fast-growing start-up—creating clarity is one of the most valuable ways to contribute.

The skill of writing is the skill of creating clarity. 

In this post, we’re going to explore the benefits of writing, first to produce clarity for yourself, and then to share that clarity with others.  

As humans, we shape our ideas through language. Yes, some people are more visual, others more kinesthetic, but we all use language. Often, we develop ideas in conversation with others, but writing is among the best ways to be in dialog with yourself. 

Consider Abraham Lincoln’s diary entries: In the privacy of his own writing, Lincoln grappled with why the Civil War had gone on longer than anyone expected. It was only through this meditative process that he was able to determine that abolishing slavery was the solution for ending the war.

While most of us don't contend with the urgency of war-time presidency, we've all encountered moments where we needed to be clear in relating our convictions. But, exposing the contents of your mind through writing—even just for yourself—can be cringe-worthy. Typically, the first draft of anything heartier than a Slack message will sound like stale biscuits. And that’s why writing is painful: it doesn’t lie about the coherence of your thoughts. The great benefit of writing for yourself is that you are safe to continually explore your incoherence until it yields something valuable. Lincoln’s diaries don't read like his public speeches, but they did provide the foundation.

Once you’ve achieved some semblance of clarity for yourself, you can use your writing to connect with others—your audience.

Say you’re writing a memo to recommend a course of action for your team at work. You’ve done your research, explored all the options, and supported your points with data. Your efforts blossom into a thoughtful analysis, and you’re clear on the best course of action. Now, you’re ready to tell your readers...

Ah, your readers. What are they looking for? Will they absorb your full analysis and appreciate its finer points? Or do they just want to know, in three bullet points, the options you considered and your recommendation? This reflective process allows you to present your best ideas in the most impactful way, because it invites you to look inwards at yourself and then outwards at your audience and bridge the gap in understanding through writing.

In this way, your first draft represents your point of view idealized through an empathic regard for the reader.  

Once you have a draft, you get to our favorite part: the collaborative process of creating with others. Writing is a way to build together. This post is a living example:

• Ryan and Kali wrote the outline and first draft together. 

• Leon, Alizeh, Andrew, and Jen all commented on the draft. 

• Nadia edited it and provided even more detailed feedback. 

• We revisited our initial ideas, reinforced the strongest ones, and weeded out the more distracting tangents.

• JLai, Alizeh, and Kali polished the final draft.

And in the process of writing—of creating something new together—we had the opportunity to explore an idea we all intuitively believe, but never took the time to fully explore on our own. This is one of the reasons why we at Renaissance Collective love and evangelize writing. It is, at once, a mirror to our convictions, an exercise in understanding others, and an opportunity to express clarity of thought through collaboration. There’s the respect that elevates writing from a necessity to an art.

Let’s hear from you! How have your writing skills helped you as an operator? What have your writing skills enabled you to do in your career? What are some of your favorite writing tricks? What do you admire in others’ writing? Tweet us @RenCo_Community.

And, if you’re interested in our group of co-authors and co-creators (or you know someone who is!) you can find out more here.

Thanks to Alizeh Iqbal, JLai, Jen Yip, Nadia Eldeib, Andrew Woo, and Leon Lin for their contributions to this piece.

Of Passions and Pedagogy

By JLai, Angela Son, Alizeh Iqbal and Jen Yip

For most of us, how to love and how to teach are things we had to figure out on our own. And yet we’re hardwired to learn by example, mimicking our best lovers and teachers and passing on their lessons almost subconsciously. 

Unfortunately, we can’t offer you lessons on love.

But once a month, the Renaissance Collective hosts a TeachMe for our community to share our passions and pursuits. It’s our collective mastery passed along in 5-minute presentations. And it’s a great way to be a student again, while experiencing a wide range of pedagogical techniques.

This month, we learned about adverse selection, meditation, making fast career transitions, improving data visualizations, and building trust with strangers. And notably, the subjects taught proved as meaningfully distinct as the teaching styles of our members. 

Here are some of our favorite takeaways:

Adverse Selection

David King (DK), founder of Highlighter and a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur and angel investor, shared a lesson about how adverse selection makes its way into most everything in life — from all-you-can-eat buffets to startup investing and hiring.

The TL;DR? It’s good to always harbor a bit of paranoia about adverse selection. For example, if an entrepreneur asks you to invest or if another investor offers you an intro to an entrepreneur, you should ask yourself why this person chose you out of a pool of other potential investors — even if that’s an uncomfortable question. Is it for your domain expertise? What do they know about your personal brand? You can combat adverse selection in hiring and investing by building a strong personal brand.

Lesson in pedagogy: By asking the audience to identify the common thread between 3 seemingly unrelated things, DK captured everyone’s attention and kept us guessing throughout his lesson. The “guesswork” developed an unresolved tension that piques curiosity, encouraging information to stick better. It was like one of those films with separate but interwoven storylines that has you guessing how the threads will come together in the end, holding your attention captive til the end. 

Meditation

Amit Mukherjee, investor at NEA, shared lessons from his personal experience with meditation. Amit’s own journey started with a retreat at Spirit Rock, and over the past few years, he’s developed a practice of a daily 40-minute meditation. His advice to kick-start a practice of your own? Learning to meditate is like building a muscle, so even two minutes of focused breathing is a good starting point. Don’t worry about being too strict about when and where you meditate and find a community that can provide you guidance and support through the journey. 

Lesson in pedagogy: Amit guided everyone through a short meditation exercise. There’s nothing like trying something for yourself, in the presence of an expert, to learn it. The same way you couldn’t learn to swim just by reading about it, by actively teaching breathing and meditative techniques, Amit ensured everything stayed in “muscle-memory.”

Fast Career Transitions

Angela Son, former McKinsey consultant and head of Strategy and Ops at Parallel Domain, shared a lesson from her professional experience on how to make a career transition to a new industry in a new country (she’s Canadian) in record time — just a month after deciding which areas to research.

Lesson in pedagogy: Angela started her presentation with a slide that showed how she dramatically changed her life in the course of a few months. She anchored on an impressive end result before diving into the details of how she accomplished that feat. Like a film told in flashbacks, Angela teased with an end result to whet the interest of an audience to learn the whole story.

Improving Data Visualizations

Daniel Hui, an architect from Harvard, shared with us his love of stunning data visualizations along with some tactical lessons for creating your own. 

He started his presentation with a slide that looks hauntingly familiar to the former consultants and bankers among us: a crowded, complicated chart accompanied by lots of tiny text (see top slide below). He then pointed out how color and text hierarchy are simple yet effective tools to highlight, contrast, or compare the most important information on a slide. Keeping your color and font schemes simple helps your audience extract a story from the data at a glance. The improved slide (on the bottom of the picture below) uses shades of blue to indicate different segments of the market -- while all of the different shades of blue combined represents a higher-priority category over a more neutral group shown in grey. In the bottom slide, bolded text at a larger size is also used to represent hierarchy over smaller text and leads the eye to focus.

Lesson in pedagogy: Dan began by aligning with our distaste for awful presentations. He showed us a slide we all agreed is bad. This established a collective starting point from which he improved, through a rubric he shared in his presentation. By building agreement around what’s ‘bad’ and then showing us a logical progression to ‘good,’ he guided us through a new way to approach a common problem. 

Earning Trust with Strangers

Chris Chamars has a knack for fitting in and making friends anywhere in the world. He’s lived in 5 different countries and speaks 4 languages. His mom is a Greek ambassador and, after graduation, Chris spent 2 years in Moldova with the Peace Corps. He shared some lessons he’s learned on how to earn the trust of strangers. His tried-and-true advice? Learn to listen without judgement, be aware of what your body language communicates, and entertain other perspectives even if they’re very different from your own. 

Lesson in pedagogy: Chris began his presentation with quotes from famous leaders, authors, artists, and thinkers including Brené Brown, Eckhart Tolle, Jimi Hendrix, and Aristotle. Aligning the audience around a common starting point (people we know and respect) is similar to Dan’s pedagogy above, but Chris appealed to aspirational leaders as a means of building credibility. The importance of social proof in establishing credibility is yet another lesson in earning the trust of strangers -- one that Chris left unspoken but demonstrated well in his approach to teaching. 

We hope you enjoyed this flight of knowledge, and we’d love to see you at our next TeachMe!

The Art of Comp Negotiations

By Allison Steitz

Negotiating job offers can be intimidating, especially as a job seeker. Depending on where you are in your life and career, how secure you are financially and physically, and the support networks you have access to, a lot may be on the line. It’s nerve-wracking to face potential misunderstanding or undervaluation by a party with more power or information than you; and, in my experience, this can lead to not asking for what you want in negotiations. 

I’ve become a better negotiator over the years by approaching them as conversations with an empathetic goal: to align on interests and find common ground. We recently hosted a virtual event with investor Jeremy Carr to equip our community with tips and resources to negotiate more effectively. As an entrepreneur and seasoned operator at companies like Palantir, Juul, and Clearslide, Jeremy has negotiated hundreds of different offers. Below are a few takeaways from our discussion:

Aligning Interests: An Exercise in Empathy

To align on interests, you must know what your and your counterpart’s interests are. An exercise around “wants,” where you closely examine your wants and needs and empathize with your counterpart’s wants and needs, is helpful here. The key is knowing what each party’s most important wants and needs are. If you can align on those and establish common ground upfront, asking for additional items will be easier than you think. To use a cooking analogy, it’s always easier to discuss toppings to your dish once you’ve agreed on the base and flavor set.

How do you do this? 

Things You Want – First, stack rank all the criteria that matter to you for your next job. What are your non-negotiables? Rank those highest. For example, you could make a table like this:  

In this case, the non-negotiables are working with a great team in a role where you are learning rapidly. Once stack ranked, ask yourself, to what extent are your wants aligned with:

• Company goals: Can you get behind the companies KPIs/goals? Do you like the leadership/execution style? Is the company growing in a way that aligns with your growth goals/wants? 

• Commitment level: What does an employee’s average work week look like? How much time/effort do they expect you to put in and for how long? Are you game for that? How many of the “things you want” are you willing to sacrifice? 

Things They Want – During your interviews, ask your prospective employer to share their non-negotiable wants and needs for the role. How do they value this role? What does success look like and how is it measured? How do you think they view you? Map this information against what you believe you can offer — and want to offer — the company as a future employee. Are there any intersections between what they want and need and what you want and can offer? 

Things You Both Want – These intersections build your common ground. Ask a friend, family member or mentor (or RenCo member!) to be a sounding board on whether these intersections are realistic. Iterate on this exercise until you reach what you believe is an authentic common ground. When you begin a negotiation, align on this common ground first. It will make it infinitely easier to ask for additional things because you’re on the same side! 

Keep in mind that early stage startups are limited in time, money and people. They may not have an HR function fully built out. Early stage founders/CEOs are maniacally focused on hiring people who can move the needle for their company’s goals while also managing burn. The more succinct, clear, and objective you can be in making the case for how your capabilities and interests create value for them in the way they need, the easier it will be to ask for the additional things you want. 

Now, for some quick tactics for understanding and evaluating early stage offers:

1. Understand the company’s cash runway: This impacts your cash compensation offer. 

2. Ask about salary ranges: Is your cash compensation within a range consistent with other roles at the company? 

3. Research salary benchmarks: Resources like Gitlab, Angelist, and Glassdoor and your network are super helpful here. Don’t forget to present these benchmarks in the context of your aligned goals and interests. 

4. Negotiate for more equity than cash (if you are in a position to do so): This signals to your prospective employer that you believe in and want a vested interest in the company’s success. Also, equity is most valuable at the time of joining and is difficult to increase once you’ve joined. As companies scale and raise more equity financing, their employee stock option pools get diluted and the value of your equity stake gets diluted as well. Cash compensation, on the other hand, is not subject to dilution and is easier to increase as you grow in seniority.

5. Calculate valuation risk to assess value of stock options: RenCo Member Robby Huang gave us an excellent example: 

   1. Say you are offered 100bps of stock at a company worth 10M in fair market value. Your stock options are worth $100K, likely vesting over 4 years. To calculate valuation risk, you could assign a probability, say 50% chance, for liquidity at the $10M valuation and 15% chance for liquidity where the valuation goes to $100M. This means the estimated future value of your $100K is between $50K (10M*1%*50%) and $150K (100M*1%*15%).  Keep in mind that valuations can always go to 0. Your percentage probabilities should be based on your view of the company’s growth trajectory in the next 2-5 years. 

6. Ask about 83B within 30 days signing and ensure early exercise (for non-qualified options) is in your plan: Your exercise window post departure has serious implications on your tax obligations and financial outcomes. You need cash to cover the strike price and the tax bill due for the year of exercise (which is calculated on the difference between the strike and the current fair market value). If you don’t have enough cash on hand you often have to choose between walking away from vested options or being locked into staying at the company. Sam Altman has a great blog diving deeper into Employee Equity here. 

Negotiations are all about aligning interests, being informed and realistic about your asks once you’ve established a common ground, and working towards outcomes that create value for both sides. We hope this blog post empowers you to negotiate moving forward. If you enjoyed this piece and want to join a community of smart generalists supporting each other’s growth in early stage startup roles, please apply to join the Renaissance Collective here. 

Thank you to Jeremy Carr, Jen Yip, Alizeh Iqbal, Jonathan Lai, Nadia Eldeib, Andrew Woo and Robby Huang for their contributions to this piece.

We Need Rebirth

By Alizeh Iqbal

The word “Renaissance” derives from French, meaning rebirth. 

The historical Renaissance, for which our community was named, was a movement of awakening and revitalization, marking the end of medieval stagnation, an embrace of progress, and the ultimately the rebirth of society.

While birth doesn’t necessarily imply intent, rebirth always does. When ideas are born, it’s often by accident. A child has no choice in her own birth. But “rebirth” is the very opposite: to be “reborn” is to make a conscious choice, a deliberate effort, to alter a current state in a notable way.

Members of Renaissance Collective join because they, too, are navigating periods of rebirth. And as members explore tech careers and transitions, Renaissance Collective strives to enable professional rebirth, by building bridges of access and creating space for all backgrounds. We exist because we believe that outsiders, and those seeking new professional lives, belong in the tech industry.

We, the members of Renaissance Collective, are bereaved by the state of the world and the senseless loss of Black lives. We will fight for indisputable equality, and the eradication of prejudice in all its forms — hatred, privilege, indifference, and bias, both conscious and unconscious. We recognize that racism is not only an individual’s state of mind but an institutional machinery. Black lives suffer from systemic injustice and widespread exclusion. We consider it part of our responsibility to be part of the solution. 

A concept associated with the Renaissance is Renaissance Humanism: the belief that it is our responsibility to live ethical, fulfilling lives that aspire to the greater good. Humanism derives from the Latin humanitas, meaning: “human nature, civilization, and kindness.” At Renaissance Collective, we believe the world is in need of profound humanitas, and the way to combat pain and injustice is to love and fiercely embrace our shared humanity. But there cannot simply be empathetic language; this is a moment for conscious rebirth. The pain of the status quo has resulted, for many of us, in paralysis. As individuals, as a community, and as a country, our shared grief must be the impetus for change through action. We will create paths for greater inclusion and equity. 

The Renaissance Collective stands with the Black community. We will create space to listen and bear witness to their pain. We will fight in the way we know best: building bridges and extending trust. We exist to champion the outsiders, and we believe that things tend to strengthen and expand from the outskirts: cities, borders, ideas, movements. We understand that diversity strengthens our network, that it is a privilege to include diverse perspectives. Our enduring mission to create access to the tech industry can only succeed by redoubling our efforts to support and include Black members.

As a community we will create space for Black voices to be heard, supported, and included. Our rebirth must support our humanitas: our nature, communities, and kindness.

Special Edition: A RenCo Tribute to our Mothers

By Alizeh Iqbal

As a child, what I loved more than pop music was the fact that my mom loved pop music. Helming the radio, she wore a certain agelessness — when it came to Top 40s, her spirit never aged a day past 25. In our car, every pick-up, drop off, grocery run, and bridge-bound ride sounded stupid-delicious: Carlos Santana’s riffs picante, starbursts of synthesizers, something smoky and mesquite when the station picked up Destiny’s Child. She never apologized for the bass, let alone her extraordinarily ordinary, mainstream taste. In fact, one of her beliefs I’ve spent my whole life trying (failing) to embody: never waste an apology on something that doesn’t deserve one (there are too many apologies in this world). 

Because of her, I have a soft corner for anything that Spotify would call “today’s hits,” and I scoff at anyone who scoffs at that. It’s not simply elitist, it’s just not honest — pop songs are dipped in liquid dopamine, powdered with ear-cocaine, and sprinkled with chopped nuts for good measure. And moreover, this genre reeks of life’s every poignant emotion, whether you take it seriously or not. When you’re hurt, it feels like Beyonce wrote Lemonade just for you. Stephen Dunn wrote, “I love how pop songs sound profound when we’re in love, though they wound us too sweetly. I love the good home clichés can find in an authentic voice.” 

Pop music is the commingling of the universal with the particular. Two listeners will relate to the exact same, universal theme, but completely different memories/imagery will fill their minds. And I thought about this during RenCo’s most recent Mother’s Day Teach-Me event, where members shared stories and lessons from their mothers. The theme could not have resonated more universally — our mothers, or maternal figures, cultivated so much of our characters, imbued us with many shared values, operated out of love and sacrifice and patience. Every member’s “lesson” was a fugue on this common melody, and yet so unmistakably and delightfully distinct.

I want to share some of the lessons by universal theme, broken down by members’ particular anecdotes: 

Have Belief in Yourself  //  (Optional Musical Accompaniment: “Don’t Stop Believin” – Journey) 

Andy Pike’s mother, Cathy Watson, led (to say the least) a most intrepid career, across industries and continents. A  biologist turned nurse turned journalist, then turned environmentalist in East Africa, she instilled in Andy the importance of taking bold, calculated risk to set yourself apart. Moreover, it doesn’t matter if your pursuits seem to lack an overarching long-term strategy — simply do well at every moment, and strong opportunities will present themselves. 

Mishti Sharma’s mom, similarly, encouraged Mishti to nurture her own self-belief -- to trust that she, Mishti, would avail the opportunities ahead of herself. Mishti describes her relationship with her mom as marked by “shared trust and mutual understanding.” Soon before Mishti’s Fulbright ended, after two fellowship rejections, she experienced a moment of brief panic -- what would she do now, amid so many possibilities? What if she picked the wrong thing, and disappointed her parents? She called her mom, who offered just the right reassurance at just the right moment: “You can’t possibly disappoint me. I’ve watched you your whole life and I trust you.”

Create Mental Models for Success  //  (Optional Music: “Empire State of Mind” – JAY-Z)

Emily Hughes’ mom requires no superlative introduction, a list of a few facts simply glows off paper: a mother to six children, two of whom were Olympic figure skaters, a breast cancer survivor, a champion of positivity. And when Emily was growing up, her mother instilled in her a piece of wisdom that Emily attributes much of her ongoing success to: “Work hard now,” her mom would say, “and fun will come later when you see its pay-off.” If Emily ever complained about a particularly hard skating routine, her mom would remind her: “if it were easy, everyone could do it!”

Similarly, Henry Su’s mom also emphasized delayed gratification. When Henry was young, he wouldn’t get an allowance — instead, for any helpful task performed, or accomplishment (doing the dishes, acing a test) Henry would receive a blue strip of paper. Once he collected 5 blue strips, he could trade them in for 1 green strip. And once he got 5 green strips, he could trade them in for 1 red strip. And eventually, 5 red strips meant he could earn 1 dollar. A pretty tough conversion rate, but one that certainly helped develop a mental model for long-term persistence and commitment!

Take Initiative  //  (Optional Music: “Juicy” – Notorious B.I.G.)

Jen Yip’s mother — self-proclaimed, “not a tiger mom” — not only gave, but lived by the advice: there’s never an excuse not to reinvent yourself if it’s what you want. As a neurobiologist, she helped Jen prepare (“prepare” is a very mild, insufficient understatement) for the Intel International Science Fair — something she enjoyed so much, she now coaches students for science fairs. And recently, when she — a Cantonese native speaker — was asked to tutor a neighborhood kid in Mandarin, instead of saying very reasonably that she spoke Cantonese, not Mandarin, she hit YouTube. She completed lessons in Mandarin — literally the same lessons she would then recreate for students hours or days later — and hustled her way to a new gig. She lives and breathes the RenCo ethos: if you’re smart, resourceful, and a quick learner, you can do anything.

Andy’s mom, Cathy, similarly encouraged initiative by way of sheer pluck — if it seemed important, she’d tell you to just do it. When a new highway was built near her home, she started a grassroots movement to turn the road into a biodiversity corridor and beautiful public space. She began in literally a “grassroots” way — planting trees by hand all by herself!

A great way to take initiative is simply to start by being curious. On family vacations to other countries, Cathy will strike up conversation with locals, stressing that stories are found everywhere. Jen’s mother implored her children to approach the world with curiosity — bedtime stories included excerpts from biology textbooks, and instead of humming along to Smashmouth like the rest of us (cough), Jen would sing, “the mitochondria’s the powerhouse of the cell!”

Cheers to some of the most inspiring women of our lives, who encourage us to meow, count strips of paper, and win science fairs. Unlike pop songs, the lesson we learn from our mothers never age.

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About the author: Alizeh Iqbal is a storyteller who flexes her creative muscles building brand, voice, and community for new products in technology. Alizeh graduated from Stanford with a double major in English and pre-med. When she’s not working with startups, she’s writing a television screenplay and pursuing a transition to comedic writing — if you share an interest in the industry, or know someone who does, she’d love to chat! Reach out to her on Twitter.

Special thanks to Rob Sicat for designing the visuals for this piece.

Becoming a Twitter Master

By JLai

Becoming a Twitter master takes longer than you might want (especially if you’re only in it for the followers), because mastering Twitter requires a new way of seeing the world — it’s about a new way of living your life…

. . .

I’ve been advising companies on social media for a very long time, and one of the first questions I always get is: How long will it take me to get X followers?

And my question is always, what would you do with X followers?

And often, the answer comes down to something along the lines of: feeding my vanity and my company’s thirst for socially validated metrics of success.

And it’s important to recognize that.

But if you really want to be good at Twitter, it’s not about coming up with a few really good tweets that go viral.

It’s much more boring than that. And much more interesting at the same time.

. . .

There’s this romantic idea of mastery that, unfortunately, is perpetuated by our desire to “hack” everything in our lives, but which really underscores our lack of focus and commitment.

10-minute abs. 4-hour work week. And so on.

We lionize these stories of people who get rich quick, lose 30lbs in a week, or attain enlightenment after just one silent retreat.

They’re the TLDR of all the things you want in life.

And I get it: it’s alluring because it cuts out all the hard work. We want to fast-forward to success. But that’s not how it works.

How does it work?

. . .

Last week, Leo Polovets, General Partner at Susa Ventures, spoke with the Renaissance Collective about building a personal brand on Twitter. He made some great observations about how to be successful on the platform.

One of the things he says is that “growing your audience is a long game of consistency, not the occasional viral tweet.”

And that really stuck with me, because it plays into the same framework of mastery that is proven and goes back millennia.

. . .

There’s a Zen koan called A Taste of Banzo’s Sword that follows the transformation of a man named Matajuro, the son a master swordsman.

Matajuro’s father deems him unfit for swordsmanship, so Matajuro travels the land looking for a master who will teach him.

He reaches a small village where the locals tell him about a master named Banzo who lives in the mountains above town.

Matajuro goes in search of Banzo, and when he finally finds him, Banzo tells Matajuro he’s not interested in teaching him.

Matajuro implores Banzo to take him as his apprentice. He tells him he’ll do whatever it takes, every day, for as long as it takes.

Banzo considers, so Matajuro asks him: How long, exactly, would it take? Banzo replies: 10 years. Matajuro says, I don’t have 10 years. What if I trained twice as hard? How long would it take me then? Banzo says, in that case, 30 years.

Matajuro is utterly confused. He says, you just told me if I work hard, I could do it in 10 years. Now you’re telling me that if I work twice as hard, it’ll take much longer? Banzo replies, yes, because a man in such a hurry seldom masters anything.

And the lesson is that it’s not about how hard you work; it’s about how long you can stay committed to the practice of constant improvement.

And that’s true of Twitter as well.

. . .

Mastering Twitter is not about getting to X followers in record time. It’s about going through your day and learning to see things—snippets of an article here, thoughts you’re having over your morning coffee there—that you earmark to share on Twitter.

It’s about changing the way that you read, with an eye towards encapsulating that knowledge and offering it to your audience in a way that’s relevant to them.

It’s how you share information over the platform. Multiple times a day. Week after week. Month after month. Creating this trail of wisdom or entertainment that people can recognize instantly when they look at your last three tweets.

So, have goals, but don’t take the learning and growth opportunity out of Twitter by giving up if you can’t get X followers by this date. They’ll come, but you have to build something that’s worth following. And to do that, you have to build the habit of writing for Twitter, and reading Twitter, and thinking in Twitter, and living Twitter.

It’s like a foreign language. If you’re not willing to put in the work to learn it yourself—but you know deep in your marketing budget that you need to operate in the country of Twitter—then hire someone who already lives there and speaks the language.

If you’re looking for strategies to improve your long, slow Twitter game, check out Renaissance Collective member Rob Sicat’s blog post summarizing the key takeaways from Leo’s talk.

==============================

Many thanks to Leo Polovets for sharing your wisdom with our community. Thank you to Natalie Arora of Susa Ventures and Renaissance Collective member, Calanthia Mei, for organizing the event. And to Jen Yip for contributing thoughts and feedback to this piece.

Renaissance Collective Teach Me Series

By J. Lai

The week began normally enough. Members of The Renaissance Collective—spread across 5 states and 6 time zones —started receiving unexpected, yet foreseen, gifts in the mail. A spreadsheet with hints about which members might like what things had been circulating. It was titled only "Secret Bunny."

That Friday, we awoke to find the mystery still unresolved, while, over morning coffee, another began to unfold...

It turns out this exceptionally well-curated and talented group of smart generalists also happens to have exceptionally well-curated and generally smart talents (oh yeah, Renaissance Collective):

Comedy writing. Professional submerged confinement. Unprofessional submerged confinement. Olympic figure skating. Veganism. Security architecture.  

All of these were topics in the first installment of our Teach Me series, which allows members to share with the RenCo community some of their lesser-known talents. The format was 5 minutes of educational storytelling followed by 5 minutes of Q&A.

We learned a lot. Below are some takeaways from our first six:

Writing Comedy (Alizeh Iqbal)

• Surprise is a critical element in comedic storytelling—the punchline should be unexpected.

• Good comedy requires vulnerability and a dose of self-realization to be effective. 

• Comedy should be relatable. We all have ‘watermarks’ from our experiences that we don’t realize we carry with us. A great comedy writer holds these up to the light and reveals them to us.

Captaining a Nuclear Submarine (Steve Weiner)

• Expect to become a polyphasic sleeper: "If you're sleeping more than 4 hours at a time, you're stealing."

• In these sleeping rotations, up to four people will share a single bed in a configuration called “hot racking,” which describes “the sensation of getting into recently vacated bed linens.”

• It's like quarantine, but two months at a time, without seeing the sun.

Freediving (Jonathan Lai)

• If you encounter a shark, hold your ground. If it comes at you, boop it.

• The longer the breath-hold the more prevalent the visual hallucinations—the most common of which, for divers who black out underwater, is the illusion of having made it back to the surface.

• The mammalian dive reflex allows us to function and even survive for many minutes underwater.

Going Vegan (Charles Rubenfeld)

• Vegans should reposition from shaming to learning and educating and informing—veganism is a good cause, not a higher ground.

• Perfection or desire to adhere strictly to one label shouldn’t get in the way of a good habit. If you need to use a label, find something flexible enough to adhere to. 

• Changing the culture can have a bigger impact than anything else. Almond milk has done more for the vegan cause than PETA.

Skating in the Olympics (Emily Hughes)

• Have a positive mindset. Don’t see failures as definitive: You’re either having setbacks or making progress towards your goal. Have a goal, but be flexible and adapt.  

• Everyone falls. If you give up, it’s over, but if you bounce back, you can still finish strong.

• Play to win. Don’t play to not lose. Sometimes, you need to take risks, even those that increase your chances of failure.

Architecting Security Systems (Ralph Lin)

• The more complex the system, the easier it is to break in. One of the "best ways" to take down a security system is to overwhelm it--human guards are often the weak link.

• Security is about making it incrementally harder for “lazy” intruders to break in. For example, given two identical houses with FedEx packages in front, a thief will steal the package from the house without the “Beware of dog” sign. 

• It’s almost impossible to secure a facility from a motivated team with time and resources on their side.

Now that you have some new hobbies planned, be sure to join us for the next edition of Teach Me—where our tasting menu might feature such signature dishes as: Lessons from Professional Poker, 10-Min Abs, Point Systems for Parenting, and Surfing. Sign up by emailing Jen Yip.

Stay tuned for our Mother’s Day Teach Me, where we’ll be diving into lessons we learned from our moms.

And don’t forget to check out our Instagram to see some of our Secret Bunny gift reveals from the past week!

Navigating the Virtual Office

By J. Lai

When I started working from home exclusively in 2007, my former supervisor Christina (who did the same), gave me a useful piece of advice:

“Jon,” she said. “You’ve gotta draw some lines. Otherwise, work is going to take over your personal life: Your dining table is going to become your office. Your bed is going to become your desk. Your bathroom is going to become your conference room. The hardest part of working remotely is knowing when to stop.”

She was right. And I still made all of those mistakes for years before finally figuring it out.

The current pandemic has turned a lot of us into full-time remote workers. It might seem great at first: You can work in your pajamas. You never have to get out of bed. Happy hour is all the time. But our initial habits are usually as sustainable as binge-eating chocolate cake.

Stanford economics professor Nick Bloom recently related (in this Freakonomics podcast) that the difference between working remote once a week and full-time is like going to the gym sporadically vs. marathon training.

So as we collectively transition from counting our days in quarantine to living in this new reality, here are some training tips for your marathon:

Slow down. People used to think that working from home was a joke. Now we all do it. Joke’s on them. Hands down, the biggest mistake I see in transitioning to remote work is using the newfound time—that we would’ve spent getting ready and commuting and chatting at the watercooler—to work. People work more, because it’s easy to do at first. It’s the same as overcommitting to a difficult exercise regimen on New Year’s Day and doing it for a week before giving up. The trick is choosing a sustainable pace of work. You’re running a marathon—don’t burn out in the first mile.

Establish your virtual brand. It’s not every day that you get to redefine who you are at work. When do you get into the office? How available are you? How responsive? How dominant in meetings? How punctual? Do you wear suits to the all-hands Zoom? Remote personal branding is an opportunity to recreate your office persona in a virtual space. But it functions very differently than in person, because many of the visual cues, interactive spaces, and organic exchanges are absent. By actually planning this out, approaching it intentionally, and being consistent, you can take advantage of your second chance to be who you’ve always wanted to be at work.

Mind your tone. Related to the above: be mindful about text exchanges. In the absence of visual and vocal cues, we’re operating without our usual tonal context, and it’s easy to come across as mean or deaf or indifferent. When you’re talking with people in person, you can mellow out a “no” by easing people into it and finding a good time in the day. When people know you well, they can guess what you meant by something. But simply replying “no” to someone’s request over email, especially someone who’s never met you, can be an affront to their sensibilities. This doesn’t mean appending all of your messages with lol emojis, but it could mean walking away from an email before sending it, coming back to it later, and rereading it with fresh eyes to see if it comes across the way you intended.

Identify the introverts. Also related to branding: figure out what you need to do in order to be counted in virtualized group scenarios, especially if you’re an introvert. When you’re on the phone, for example, you’re just a voice. And if you’re not talking, you’re not there. Phone calls work differently than in-person meetings: you can only hear one person at a time, and how your participants establish speaking order will define the dynamic. Likewise, if you work with introverts, take it upon yourself to engage them, especially if they’re people you depend on. If half the participants aren’t talking, you’ve lost value. Introverts don’t like to interrupt. But that’s often the only way to talk on calls, so if you’re leading one, make room for people to have an opinion—not by asking “does anyone have anything to add,” but by calling on people who haven’t been talking. Facilitate. Make it easier for introverts on your team to get involved.

Have a meeting about a meeting. Okay, this is the one time you’re allowed to do this without being an awful person. But it’s not exactly what you think. This is the preparation for the meetings you’re going to have. And it’s the follow-up afterwards. Virtual meetings are different: You’re going to go over time. You’re going to have plenty of questions left on the table. And it’s going to be more work to get the answers. As a result, the way that you and your team process meetings will determine their success. This is basic meeting stuff, but it’s made even more pronounced by the format of virtual meetings. So take the time—even meeting before or afterwards—to get the most out of them. Make sure everyone knows the purpose and what they’re supposed to be contributing—using a framework of role definition, organization, task assignment, and accountability, like scrum. Also, borrow some tricks from our piece on organizing virtual events.

Be accountable. Speaking of accountability, most people aren’t used to working from home, so things can easily fall through the cracks of discontinuous tracking. Work easily expands to fill the time allotted, then keeps expanding and blows out deadlines. It’s easier to do, because you don’t see Dave on the way to the coffee machine anymore, and he can’t remind you to follow up with the customer. Commit to doing things by a certain time and in communal settings, like group emails and slack channels. It’ll make you accountable to more people. Even if they don’t enforce it or remind you, you’ll feel the pressure not to let things slip. This is the gym membership, exercise partner, and bluetooth-connected scale of working from home.

Track hours. This is something consultants do, because they bill hours. But it’s important even if you don’t, because it allows you to visualize productivity. Track the hours you could honestly “bill.” These aren’t the hours you’re responding to group email threads or reading the internet or texting your mom—which is why it’s going to look like you’re not “working” as much as you normally do. But when you see where your effective time is going, you’ll realize how much of your day at the office is actually spent corresponding with people, coordinating tasks, and doing things unrelated to work. I track time in 15-minute increments. When I started billing hours, I used to schedule a tone that went off every 15 min, and every one or two times that’d happen, I’d go into a spreadsheet and log whatever I was doing. But I ultimately found the tone too distracting. These days, I have a habit of checking in every hour or so and logging what I did in a spreadsheet. There are more refined ways of doing this, like Toggl, which works like a speed chess clock. You can also get all quantified self with apps that monitor your activity, like RescueTime. But however you do it, be consistent and be honest with yourself. FYI: six billable hours is a huge day at work for most folks.

Chit-chat. A few years into working alone, I started talking to myself. This is unnecessary. When there’s no proverbial watercooler around which to gather, make one. Do one-on-ones with colleagues after conference calls. Do virtual happy hours. It not only keeps you sane, it can help foster creativity. Find the time to reach out and talk to the people you work with—about more than just work. Ask about their family. Find out what they did with the non-working part of their day. If you spend all of your time talking about work, it becomes transactional, and you’ll slowly divest of all the nuance and connection that makes a community of colleagues. Don’t lose that.

As we all adjust to this new reality, take it slow, get to know yourself and your needs, and be intentional about the changes you make at work. Soon enough, we’ll be sitting in traffic again, grumbling about those days when we had such balanced and productive lives in quarantine. Until then, work smart, stay healthy, and prepare for the long run.

A Checklist for Community Organizers of Virtual Events

In an attempt to establish norms for virtual events, I’ve created a list of questions to help you think through expectations you may want to set before, during, and after an event. 

Before the event:

• Will invites/tickets be limited?

• Can invites be forwarded?

• Are RSVPs expected?

• Are serendipitous drop-ins ok?

• Will the event start on time or will you wait until a critical mass of participants sign on?

During the event:

• Should participants set their backgrounds to something in particular? (aside: are backgrounds like a new ‘dress code’ for virtual events?)

• If someone joins late, should they enter silently or say hello to the group?

• Should mics be on mute unless you’re speaking?

• Will the event be live/ interactive/ recorded for viewing after the event?

• Will there be breaks between sessions?

• Are there guidelines for interaction? Eg. Should participants raise their hands if they have questions and is there a moderator who will call on people? Should questions for the speakers be sent via text/chat? Are interruptions for questions ok, or is there time allotted for Q&A after the presentation/session?

• If questions are sent over chat or text, do speakers have to answer every question or can they choose the questions they want to answer? Will questions be taken in the order they’re received? Or, is there an audience upvoting process for questions?

• Is the event off the record? 

• What happens if someone violates the guidelines? Should they be kicked out? Warned?

• What if someone shares inappropriate content?

After the event:

• Can participants share screenshots of content from the event?

• Can you publish screenshots of event participants on Zoom? (the norm here seems to be that this is ok but I’ve seen some really unflattering photos of myself on Zoom screenshots)

• Is it ok to contact participants for feedback after the event?

Transitioning from Physical to Virtual Spaces

By Jen Yip 

In the past few weeks, I’ve seen or received hundreds of Zoom links from friends, acquaintances, investors, startups, small business owners, gyms, athletes on Instagram, celebrity chefs, startups, etc. to join virtual events, including workouts, cooking demos, dance-offs, happy hours, and concerts. I could literally fill every hour of my day with free virtual events. In this new reality, where the face-to-face connections we crave are replaced by gatherings on teleconferencing apps, many of us find ourselves thrust into the uncharted waters of Virtual Community Organizers. 

Virtual spaces accommodate communities in surprisingly wonderful ways, but fall short of enabling some of our most basic social instincts around community. By being attuned to the ways space shapes our behavior, we can use technology to create spaces that accommodate the rich spectrum of human interactions.

For all of the community curators, event organizers, and hosts who find themselves adjusting to this new reality, I’m offering some advice – inspired by the events I organize In Real Life (IRL) – on how to build virtual communities.

Borrowing from some relevant lessons I’ve learned from community building in physical spaces, I think it’s particularly important for organizers of virtual communities to:

1. Curate event attendees 

2. Facilitate intros with some context

3. Set expectations for attendance and participation

4. Direct traffic and conversation

5. Ask for feedback during an event

I’ll elaborate on each of these below, with the (rather large!) caveat that I’m still in the process of shaping my own habits.

1. Virtual events still benefit from curation

Physical spaces lend themselves to curation. I have 8 seats around my dining room table, which limits the number of people I can invite to dinner. Other physical event venues have costs associated with renting space, chairs, AV equipment, food and drink. The physical constraints of a space impose a forcing function on organizers to choose their guests carefully.

The new tools to host virtual events make it easy and nearly free for organizers to be inclusive -- but this isn’t an excuse to forgo curation.

Think back to the events you’ve found most valuable in-real-life (IRL). Content may be what draws you to the event, but the impression you leave with is very much shaped by the people you meet.  When I organize a community event with content, I hold myself to the bar of ensuring the experience isn’t the same as if I were to watch a video on YouTube. Communities aren’t built around passive consumption. They’re built when you, as the organizer, treat ‘events’ as moments to get out of the way and let great people meet each other. A successful event is one where your community members start conversations they look forward to continuing after the event. 

Invite people who have enough in common with each other that they will want to get to know each other. Just as IRL, curate your guest list to include people who should meet because they can be helpful to each other given their overlapping interests, passions, curiosities, or experiences.

Even if it doesn’t cost you anything to add more people, you should think of your ‘space’ as a room you want to fill with the right people. Borrowing from best practices of an in-person event, curate your guest list and be cognizant of the optimal group size for achieving your intended purpose.

2. Set expectations for attendance and participation

When I organize offline events, I communicate an expectation that the guest list will be highly curated. Attendees need to register before the event, there’s usually a wait list, and last-minute cancellations are discouraged.

At the event, I set rules for interaction: events are off-the-record to encourage open discussion (no blogging, no tweeting), and participants are free to raise their hand to ask questions at any time.

Norms haven’t yet been established for virtual events, so community organizers need to set explicit expectations around the invite process, attendance, and interaction with presenters or fellow participants.

I’ve created a list of questions here to help you think through expectations that you may want to set before, during, and after an event. 

3. Facilitate intros with context

Facilitating intros in virtual spaces is something I’m still struggling with. This week my friend Minn Kim hosted an Icebreaker, a virtual block party that facilitates intros between new people. Run the World has a similar feature where hosts can match participants for 1:1 conversations. I enjoy meeting new people, but the matching experience feels like speed dating. Being set up with a stranger isn’t the way I’d normally meet new people IRL.

At in-person events, I’ll typically start a conversation with someone I know and if others drift over to join us, the appropriate intros will be made. Or, if I’m hosting the event, I’ll make it a point to introduce people and set context for why I think they should meet. Once I introduce people, I can even walk away and often, they’ll continue chatting with each other.

Instead of relying on a platform to match participants for 1-on-1 conversations, I’d love to have the ability to facilitate intros between people I know in a virtual space – and it’d be even better if other participants could do the same. 

Some ideas to consider around facilitating intros in virtual spaces:

• Should participants write profiles/ complete an introductory survey to share with other guests during the event registration process?

• Should participants introduce themselves to everyone when they arrive at an event? Is there a format for intros? If so, what about folks who arrive late?

• Will you, as the organizer, be responsible for facilitating intros between guests during the event?

• Do you set context for an introduction that’s only relevant to a couple of participants with the entire Zoom room present? Or do you facilitate intros over private chat?

• Will there be breakout groups? Will people choose their own groups or be assigned to one?

• How do people exchange/share contact info if they want to stay in touch after an event (eg. shared Google sheet for contact info, emailing the host, etc.)?

Has anyone found a way for hosts to help guests meet each other in ways that more closely mimic organic, IRL introductions?

4. Direct traffic

I’ve hosted several virtual happy hours this week and as the host, I feel a lot more pressure than I would at an in-person happy hour.

As the host of a virtual happy hour, you’re at the hub of the discussion and it’s your job to direct communications. Anytime someone speaks, it’s one person broadcasting to everyone. Every word you utter is heard by everyone else.

By contrast, given the boundaries of a physical space, a conversational voice will only travel a few feet. This imposes a natural limit to the number of people involved in a single conversation at a given time. In-person happy hours tend to break into several conversation threads among 2-3 people each.

One of the tools I want in a virtual space is a way to organically mix the two types of interaction. I haven’t experimented with Zoom breakout rooms but I wish you could easily slide in and out of small group conversations in a happy hour without one person having to direct traffic. Paul Davison and Rohan Seth are building a platform called “Clubhouse” that enables simultaneous side conversations. But until this exists, as an organizer of a virtual community, it’s your job to direct traffic, make sure everyone feels included, and keep the conversation rolling.

5. Ask for feedback during, not just after, an event

I recently completed my first live Zoom workout. The instructor whipped through the first circuit and I found myself unable to keep up. It wasn’t totally his fault that he misestimated the timing since many of us had our videos off. The instructor did ask for feedback – but only at the end of the class-- at which point, several of us chimed in to say the class felt rushed.  

As the organizer and host of virtual events, I’m sympathetic. In virtual spaces, it’s more difficult to take the pulse of the audience. In real life, we rely on audio and visual cues like laughter, applause, the sound of people shuffling restlessly in their seats, or the sight of people texting on their phones to give us insight into whether an audience is delighted or bored. 

When you host a virtual event, the lack of audio and visual feedback from your audience is disconcerting. In a virtual room, your audience will probably have their mics on mute unless they need to speak.

“A lot of laughter during our virtual meetings happens on mute. It’s kind of sad. You can see people laughing but you don’t get the emotional high that comes from hearing that communal joy.” - Justina Lai

Television producers use synthetic laugh tracks in their programs for precisely this reason -- hearing other people laugh actually keeps us emotionally engaged. And, if the content being presented isn’t engaging, it’s easy for you to covertly turn your attention to other open windows. It’s possible to completely lose an audience in a virtual event. Leaving a physical event means you actually have to get up from your seat and head to the door. In a virtual event, with no comparable social pressure to stay, leaving is as simple and stealthy as closing the Zoom app. 

Both Facebook Live and Run the World let audience members send feedback to content creators and event organizers through emojis. But relying on this form of intentional signaling absent of other ambient cues makes it more difficult to determine how engaged the audience is.   

There’s a greater and more frequent need for verbal check-ins in virtual spaces. As online spaces evolve, we may see more tools like Dory to capture feedback from an audience. But until we create more nuanced feedback tools to replace the audio and visual cues we’ve come to rely on IRL, remember to pause and ask for feedback during -- not just after --  a virtual event.  

In conclusion…

 “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us”

- John Culkin

The ‘spaces’ in which we gather will change the way in which we interact. Space influences our interactions, in the same way that our language influences our thoughts. 

As community organizers, we can optimize existing technologies to build and strengthen relationships by:

• Curating our virtual communities despite the lack of physical constraints, both in terms of geography and scale

• Facilitating intros to nurture ‘community’ rather than deliver a passive consumption experience

• Setting and communicating expectations for safe, productive, and engaging interactions

We can also drive conversation about the ways in which virtual spaces can accommodate a fuller, richer spectrum of ways we socialize offline. Even if we, as community organizers, are not the ones building these tools, we’re on the forefront of realizing their limitations. 

My personal wishlist for technology to build virtual communities include:

• New features to catalyze fortuitous encounters or enable friends to facilitate intros between friends

• More ways to accommodate fluid social interactions -- not only one-to-many in the same room, but in freeform groups that expand and contract depending on the participants’ interest in the conversation at hand

• Creative ways to signal our pleasure, displeasure, curiosity, or confusion

I'm excited about how technology will evolve to address challenges in community building, and create new opportunities to deepen our relationships with our most cherished communities.

===================================

Thank you to David King, Ralph Lin, Jonathan Lai, Minn Kim, Justina Lai, Alizeh Iqbal, Jeremy Carr, and Leon Lin for contributing thoughts and feedback to this piece. 

Our Finest Mentorship Moments

By Alizeh Iqbal

International Women’s Day - perhaps not the kind of holiday you’d make dinner reservations for, fret over gifts, or buy a card. But, we hope, perhaps the kind of day you might join us in recognizing some of the women who have elevated and supported us, the women of Renaissance Collective.  

Although IWD isn’t a holiday in the traditional sense, there isn’t an accomplished woman who hasn’t found a gift in someone believing in her. None of us — the smart, ambitious women operators in tech — would be where we are today without support from the women and men in our lives who’ve encouraged us, taken chances on us, and carved opportunities for us to grow and succeed. Today, we celebrate those who have championed our successes. Those who wedged their foot in the door to make room for us. And we hope to do so by sharing specific stories of advocacy and support featuring small, meaningful — and highly doable — actions that can elevate more women operators in tech. Specifically, we want to share examples of creating “mentorship moments” — occasions to share expertise or opportunity in a specific, targeted setting. 

What is a mentorship moment?

Early in our careers, many of us are advised to find a mentor to accelerate our professional development. Formal mentorships, defined by a committed and ongoing “mentor-mentee” relationship between two people, seem too archaic, structured, and inorganic to be useful, particularly in the context of fluid and fast-moving careers in tech. 

What seems appropriate to the times are more nuanced relationships crafted around “mentorship moments” where specific problems are tackled with someone of trusted expertise. These moments crop up frequently and organically, and provide an opportunity for outcome-oriented collaboration. These mentorship moments don’t require the long-term commitment of traditional mentorship arrangements, but can provide just the right insight and perspective when it is acutely needed. 

Mentorship moments for brief, tactical exchanges of knowledge

Jen Yip, a community organizer, met Mallun Yen at a women’s dinner hosted by Bloomberg Beta. Yen, Founder and Partner at Operator Collective, listened as Jen explained the challenges of pricing strategy for her company’s newly launched product. With the ease of flipping a coin, Yen said to Jen: “I’m great at pricing, and happy to chat further about it.” 

Jen didn’t need to be told twice. She followed up with Yen, who warmly offered to meet in person and shared advice from her own experience. Jen found Yen’s advice so profoundly helpful that she wrote all her notes into a document and sent it to Yen, so that Yen could share her own advice at scale in the future. Jen describes this brief moment of mentorship as “magical” — a discrete exchange with a disproportionately wonderful outcome.  

A mentorship moment is a timely, effective transfer of advice and knowledge that empowers the “mentee” and offers flexibility to the “mentor.” Kali Borkoski, Product Manager at Berbix, describes how Beckie Wood, former VP of Content Programming at Pandora, offered a few mentorship moments to help Kali as she transitioned to a new product role. Each of their meetings focused on tactical ways that Beckie could help Kali propel her career: in one meeting, they discussed whether to index on title or company, in another, Beckie helped Kali conceptualize the first 90 days at her new job to ensure Kali’s growth and progress around a few core competencies.

For both Jen and Kali, mentorship moments enabled access to women with remarkable expertise in a way that was direct and flexible for both parties. At their finest, these relationships should be constructive and opportune — in other words, a bit like magic.  

A mentorship moment can be as simple as really listening

When Minn Kim, an investor at Bloomberg Beta, graduated from college, her head wasn’t in the clouds — it was above them. A 23 year-old data analyst based in New York City, she nursed a fervent interest in space and satellite startups — the space was in an exciting, nascent period, much like her career. The thing was, she didn’t know how to break into the startup scene. Buoyed by her passion, she managed to land a meeting with Angela Sun, COO and Partner at Alpha Edison (though then at Bloomberg LP) through a friend of a friend. “I didn’t realize at the time, really, who she was,” recalls Minn, at the time unaware of Sun’s eminent 10-year tenure at Bloomberg. 

 Minn didn’t realize the extent of Sun’s strong reputation even meeting her for the first time — Sun carried no airs, and the two hit it off over conversation. Sun’s aim wasn’t to size up Minn, or grill her against a set of predetermined criteria. Rather she posed a single question — “what do you think people should be talking more about?” — simply to take a pulse of Minn’s passions. This was a mentorship moment — an opportunity for Sun to really listen to Minn, with the potential to provide feedback to her specific needs. Their conversation ran the scope of NYC’s tech scene, Minn’s burgeoning interest in startups, and of course, satellites, and Minn shone hungry and curious and perceptive. She was hired. And to her surprise, hired to a team consisting largely of former management consultants and investment bankers from top-tier firms. She initially felt out of place because of her dissimilar background, but Sun bolstered her with a studied balance of direct support and autonomy, providing her space to launch. 

Ultimately, what Minn recalls most is Sun’s generosity. She didn’t hire Minn for her background, but for her potential. She didn’t use the weight of her accomplishments to make Minn feel smaller, but instead helped her grow and feel bigger. She offered Minn a space to voice what she hoped to become, and used her resources to help her become it. 

When people are generous enough to go a little bit out of their way for colleagues — especially young women — they can play an astoundingly large role in helping build incredible careers. The gesture can be as large as hiring a newcomer to the field, or as small as making a quick introduction. And ultimately, this generosity comes from an abundance mindset — believing that there’s enough room and opportunities for everyone who applies themselves to succeed. 

A mentorship moment can be an act of advocacy 

While mentorship can provide meaningful opportunity for growth, sometimes all you need is someone to go to bat for you, or to put you in the right room (or email) with the right people. 

 For Jen, an advocate is something of a catalyst — a person who creates great reactions between people and opportunities. When she met Amanda Kelly, co-founder of Streamlit, she was struck by Kelly’s flair for a well-timed intro and desire to pipe up on behalf of others. Kelly is the kind who looks out for other women. Once, after interviewing a talented candidate who didn’t happen to be a good fit for her team, she sent Jen a note immediately following the interview — asking if Jen knew of other companies looking for promising junior talent. She wanted to back this woman who she believed could flourish under the right guidance and leadership, and moreover, wanted to ensure that this woman would land at a fantastic new team. Amanda’s follow-through and thoughtfulness toward others who cross her path are qualities we should all aspire to demonstrate: extending your network doesn’t require continual effort, but can create a ripple effect of positive outcomes.   

In honor of International Women’s Day, we’d like to express our immense gratitude toward those who’ve supported us in a myriad of ways — through advocacy, generosity, moments of mentorship, or otherwise. And while IWD isn’t celebrated with the traditions of other holidays, we hope you might revisit this list and renew your dedication to the small, meaningful ways all of us can enable women in tech to succeed. For all those whose moments of mentorship rendered outcomes that transcended all expectations -- we encourage you to pay it forward.

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Special thanks to Jen Yip, David King, Minn Kim, Kali Borkoski, and Emily Hughes for their contributions to earlier drafts.

Evaluating Early Stage Startup Opportunities

Advice from Stripe’s Gloria Lin, Opendoor’s Ryan Johnson, and Notion’s Camille Ricketts

A Renaissance Collective x Bloomberg Beta Panel, Moderated by David King

By Jen Yip and Minn Kim

At Renaissance Collective, many of our members are excited to join startups as early operators -- as the first marketing, first operations, or first business development hire. For smart generalists, joining something early lets you shape the product as its being created, and, as the team grows, you have outsized impact on the company culture. You get all the excitement of rolling up your sleeves and creating something alongside the founders in the earliest innings of the game. 

However, the flip side of this potentially massive upside, is the outsized risk of failure. The earlier you join something, the less likely it is to be de-risked, and the more likely the trite-but-true “99% of startups fail” will haunt you. 

So as a smart generalist who is considering joining something early, how do you sensibly evaluate the opportunity versus risks? How do you cast your lot with something great?

We decided to ask a few friends who joined successful startups early and developed their careers in a meaningful way as a result of those experiences. We are grateful to Gloria Lin, the first Product Manager at Stripe, Camille Ricketts, the first marketing hire at Notion, Ryan Johnson, the first employee at Opendoor, and David King, founder of Highlighter and early PM at Google, for sharing their experiences, perspectives, and candid advice with us. 

For those of you who missed this event, we’re excited to share their advice with you here.  Below are some of the most tactical takeaways from the evening -- on everything from how to connect with people in the startup to find a job before it’s even posted, what to dig into during your interview, to how to set yourself up for success from your very first day.

1. A warm intro puts you on the radar: “People can get you on the radar at a company you don’t know. Go to “see all connections” on LinkedIn to see if you have a warm connection. Explore that to the fullest extent. Even if it’s a second order connection, having a warm intro really helps.” - Camille

2. If you don’t have a warm intro, send a thoughtful cold email: “The secret here is to ping the person in the company that no one else is pinging. The number of people who ping the CEO is enormous. At Opendoor, I really appreciated the people who took the effort to write to me. One of my best hires of all time sent me a cold email – he connected to me and the idea of Opendoor in about 250 words. The worst cold emails are the ones that say, “Can I get some time?”  - Ryan

3. Grab their attention by figuring out what they need. A good bet? Someone to manage internal tools: “There’s a big opportunity to connect with a company through the biz ops of internal tools. This is very similar to product management: internal tools are always needed and it’s a great foot in the door to solve really core problems. If you’re really excited about a company, try to imagine what kinds of internal tools they’ll need and document it.” - Ryan 

4. Don’t be afraid to backchannel the founders: “When you’re interviewing, ask the founder a lot of questions, but also, don’t be afraid to backchannel. Ask founders for the names of people they would be comfortable with you talking to. Then go ask those people what insights they have into how to work with that person. I’ve found that the best question for back-channeling is: “what advice would you give me to have a successful relationship with this person? This positive framing lets the reference share something constructive, like ‘when this person gets stressed out, this is how to navigate it.’ The right type of founder will readily give you names of people to talk to -- and respect the fact that you want to understand them in a much fuller light.” -- Camille

5. Dig into the company culture by researching these 3 things:

• How do they run all-hands? “Ask about the all-hands format – how often do they have an all-hands, what’s the cadence, how does Q&A work? Is there an upvote culture of Q&A? This will tell you how readily a CEO will share what people are actually interested in versus what he wants to communicate. You’re looking for whether you’ll have a lot of input and how transparent a culture is.” -- Camille

• Who’s already at the company? “Look at the backgrounds of people who have already been hired. You can learn a lot about the culture that way.” – Ryan

• How does the company communicate with its users? “The culture at Stripe was the thing that surprised me the most. Everything was so thoughtful and intentional. All the thinking was written down and shared across the company: “Here’s how we talk to users and here’s the voice we use.” It was incredible to see how thoughtful these founders were in thinking about things, seven layers deep.” - Gloria

6. To set yourself up for success once you’re at the company, gather as much information as you can from people both internally and externally.

• “Set up 1:1s very quickly. If you don’t do it quickly, then it’s weird. Get it out of the way.” – Ryan

• “Ask people, ‘what do you think I should be doing?’ That will tell you a lot, especially if your role is to help evolve the internal org.” – Gloria

• “Ask to connect with end users and figure out how they feel about your company and product. When you start, you probably have the internal story that’s repeated by everyone who works in the company, but your customers probably perceive a different version of that. Get to the bottom of how they feel.” -- Camille

 7. Hit the ground running. Pro tip: Document and suggest improvements for onboarding to add value on your first day:

• “Onboarding for me was “this is where you sit.” Onboarding will not exist or it will be insufficient. This is a good opportunity for you to yield learning for them immediately and suggest an onboarding process.” – Camille 

• “At Google, I did a bunch of onboarding stuff and they asked me to document it. Their onboarding docs were really out of date because no one had updated them recently. My joining was an opportunity for them to change that. Onboarding documentation is a shareable artifact that helps every person in the org that hires someone. As the person who wrote the very good onboarding doc, you’re the person building bridges across the org.” – David King

8. If you want to be a founder and your goal is to maximize applicable learnings, join a hyper-growth startup:

• “In retrospect, joining Stripe was so directly relevant for being a founder/CEO today. When I joined, I wanted to optimize for learning – it was early in my career and I was less than 5 years out from school so my thinking was, ‘these people are really great and super experienced.’ But when I look back, I learned so much. Things like: When you’re the CEO how do you establish trust with your team? How do you run internal comms effectively? How do you make sure everyone is direct with each other? How do you manage a situation when you have reports that are smarter than you and they want to take the product in a different direction that you deeply do not feel is the right direction -- but they have more domain expertise than you? How do you communicate all of that? I learned to navigate all of this at Stripe.” - Gloria

• “When I was at First Round, I had the privilege of seeing a diverse set of companies. There were founders from Google and Facebook who had lots of domain expertise. Other founders were passionate first-time founders. I also saw founders who had been part of later stage hypergrowth startups previously. These were the founders who had an advantage because they could see around the corner. There comes a moment at startups where product design has to give way to organizational design and founders have to make the shift. People who have witnessed this transition directly, had a leg up.” - Camille

If you missed this event, and are curious to read more of the advice that was shared, our co-host Minn Kim, an investor at Bloomberg Beta, has an excellent write-up of the evening here. If you are working on something new and want someone to jam with, reach out to Minn here.  And if you’d like to participate in future events like this, apply here to join us at Renaissance Collective. 

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Special thanks to Minn Kim, James Cham, and the entire team at Bloomberg Beta for helping us grow this community and connecting us with their network of talented founders -- many of whom connected with smart generalists at this event! We are grateful to our speakers Gloria Lin, Ryan Johnson, Camille Ricketts, and David King for their insights, and to all those who read earlier drafts of this piece, including David King, Nadia Eldeib, and Henry Su. 

Three Paths to Product for the Smart Generalist

By Nadia Eldeib, Jen Yip, and Jonathan Lai

In our last blog post, we discussed optimizing for company growth, not title, when looking for your next role. When optimizing for growth, we encourage smart generalists to fairly consider all kinds of startup roles, from business development to operations to product management. 

In this post, we focus on what to do if you decide product management is right for you. We’ll explore the different flavors of product management as well as three different paths that a smart generalist can take to become a PM.

Where you fit in

If you want to be a PM, you should first figure out which type of product management best fits your skills and interests.

Elad Gil — investor, entrepreneur, and author of “High Growth Handbook” — discusses four types of product managers: the business PM, the technical PM, the design PM, and growth PM. While some people may function well as more than one of those types, others thrive as one particular type of PM. Identifying your “type(s)” within this framework can help you effectively position your skills for a given position or to future hiring managers.

Some PMs are product "visionaries.” They focus on developing an inspiring, long-term vision for a current product and building excitement around future products. They may draw upon a marketing background or a storytelling superpower to articulate a strong product value proposition and communicate users' desires to their team. Other PMs focus on growth. They are extremely data-driven and often use analytical skills to help scale the org. They focus on A/B testing and optimizing every possible detail in the user experience to improve metics and drive growth and love incremental, methodical tweaking and iterating. 

As a smart generalist, you might come across job descriptions that sound “technical”—describing someone with an engineering degree or deep technical subject matter expertise that you don’t have (at least not right now). We’ve all seen PM job posts filter for folks with “an engineering/technical background” and/or “5+ years of product experience at a fast-growing startup.”

Don’t be discouraged. Being a successful PM is seldom about having a technical background—rather, it’s about the ability to communicate effectively with, and, perhaps more importantly, to earn the trust of technical people. 

The Three Paths to Product Management

Here are the three main strategies we recommend for smart generalists making the transition to product management.

1. Internal transitions: Taking a product-adjacent role and transitioning to product management

2. Early believer: Joining an earlier-stage startup as a PM 

3. Structured programs: Joining a later stage company as an Associate Product Manager (APM) or Rotational Product Manager (RPM)

Each of these paths has a unique set of benefits and tradeoffs. Let’s dive into each to help you identify what approach(es) might work for you:

1. Internal Transitions 

When you join a company in a product or product-adjacent role—such as marketing, operations, analyst, or business development—you can leverage your existing expertise as a foundation for product management. You will develop a firm understanding of the product and its customers from a vantage point that allows you to bring unique insights back to the product team. If the company is growing quickly, there will be an ever-expanding frontier of opportunities. When you have a strong understanding of the product and its customers, you'll be well-equipped to make the transition. 

If you take this path, you can position your current experience as an additive benefit as you build a natural bridge to product management. In most companies, it’s a myth that the PM ‘owns' the product: building products is usually a very collaborative experience, so you can have meaningful product impact as a non-PM. Depending on how roles are defined, ops or marketing may even own some PM-type responsibilities as part of their core job. For example, if you’re in marketing, you’re already deeply invested in understanding the customer, their pain points, and the messages that resonate with them. You’ll be well-versed in product positioning and defining the value props for the product. Consider ways to have product influence -- like testing a specific product value proposition with a segmented audience to build buy-in across the team of product leaders.

When you explore product-adjacent roles, look for opportunities to add value in the product development cycle. Be curious and develop a deep understanding of your users, tech stack, and key metrics. For example, one of our community members who was working in growth at a startup led the strategic shift and development of several new products after impressing the founding team with her deep understanding of key metrics and their target users. Earn trust and build relationships within the organization, particularly with the tech team and key stakeholders in engineering, science, and design. This way, people will proactively look out for opportunities for you to move into PM and advocate for you as a good PM. You may even get to know your (future) hiring manager—if someone on the product team already knows you and thinks you're amazing, it’s potentially a win-win situation for both of you.

Some risks to consider and dig into before choosing this path are whether:

• A product-adjacent position could typecast you in a non-product role (the book “How Women Rise" isn't about PMs, but there’s a relevant discussion about how being too valuable in a role can actually limit mobility.)

• The org or leadership is biased against internal transfers. Sometimes leadership won't support internal transfers into product either on principle or the team won't have the budget / headcount / leadership experience to take a "risk" on you.

• You’ll earn less than someone hired directly into the company as a PM since the comp of your role at time of hire affects you as long as you're at the company. Your initial base + equity grant is typically the anchor for your comp, and your total comp package is likely to be lower for a non-tech vs. tech role (product is considered a ‘tech’ role). 

2. Early Believer

As a smart generalist, it’s certainly easier to join an earlier stage company as a PM. That said, recall from our previous article that you should be slightly wary of an organization that’s willing to offer you a PM title when you lack prior experience. 

Choosing an early stage company that you believe in leverages your passion for a given industry or process in a high-growth environment that can give you the opportunity to build the role you want. It includes lots of hands-on experience and opportunity for self-directed learning.

One of our members who recently joined a seed stage startup as their first product hire says, “Two things contributed to my decision. I learn best by getting my hands dirty. So I was looking for a blend of trial-by-fire and support, which I was able to find working with a CEO who has deep product knowledge, and within a highly collaborative team. Second, I've been with a startup that has grown from Series A to C before, and felt confident that I'd enjoy the early discovery work, and that working on product at this stage would push my current limits as a leader and as a product thinker. For me, going to a young company actually felt optimal.”

It’s important to dig into whether the company has the runway and resources to support your shortcomings and allow you to navigate and course-correct on the job.. For example, a C-level exec with a PM background may not have the time to own product in their upgraded role, but may be able to provide you with the vision, mentorship, and guidance to assume that role in their company. 

The tradeoff is if the startup fails, merely having PM experience at a startup that no one has heard of won’t set you up to be competitive for a PM role at a fast-growing startup. 

3. Structured Programs

A few larger tech companies have established Associate PM (APM) or Rotational PM (RPM) programs that are often designed for people, including smart generalists, who want to pivot into product. These programs are newer at earlier stage companies and are often hyper-competitive, but this is a fairly direct path if you "know" you want to be a PM. If you're okay with taking the level hit (which you should be if you're willing to do another role altogether to get to PM), these paths often give you mentorship support and resources that can help you join a high-growth company  at a later stage. 

Other benefits of an APM or RPM program include building your network alongside a strong peer group within your program and the company. One former Facebook RPM noted, “You grow by finding the intersection of working on impactful problems and learning from talented people. Developmental PM programs offer both by giving you stewardship of hard product problems (that often have huge scale!) and mentorship from the industry’s best product people.” You’ll be exposed to different products, teams, and perspectives in a short time span. And, if you’re not thrilled with the company when your program ends, you can leverage the experience you’ve gained there to find a PM position at another company.

You’ve got this

There isn’t one right path to product for the smart generalist. We’ve had several members and friends of the Renaissance Collective community successfully move into product management via all three of these paths. If we can support you as you navigate your own journey into product, please reach out and apply to join our community.

We believe in a world where the diverse perspectives and unique backgrounds of smart generalists help create tech products that serve everyone. We also believe that smart generalists have the creativity, resourcefulness, and communication skills to excel at building products, and we’re excited to help you succeed.

So, what are you waiting for? You’ve got this!

More resources that we recommend: 

• “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager” by Ben Horowitz. Old, but classic read.  

• “Building a great product management organization” by Elad Gil. 

• Tactical advice specifically for non-technical folks who want to land a PM role

• Another “paths to product” read by Nancy Wang, founder of “Advancing Women in Product”

• “Cracking the PM interview”: helpful for interviews but also goes into some of the different PM flavors / attributes.

• “Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love": personal stories and interviews with some of the most successful tech product leaders 

• The Sprint Book: note – there are certain, often wrong, connotations for what a "sprint" means for product / design in tech. Don't judge this book by the word ‘sprint,’ just read it!

• Product-related pieces written by Paul Graham, Andrew Chen, or Alex Schultz

• Blogs and/or newsletters: Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, Nathan Baschez’s Divinations, First Round Review, a16z, and GV’s blog (especially anything on Sprints and Michael Margolis on talking to users)

• A list of APM/RPM programs

Thanks to David King, Vidushi Sharma, Kali Borkoski, and Henry Soong for their insights and contributions on early drafts.

Seek Growth, Not Titles

By Jen Yip and Nadia Eldeib

In the pecking order of startup roles, “Product Manager” ranks right up there with ‘founder’ or ‘engineer.’ It’s become such a highly coveted title that product schools and online courses have cropped up all over the country to cash in on the demand – with promises to teach you how to build and ship software solutions from end-to-end and “mastermind great products.”

It seems like these days, everyone wants to be a PM. Everyone wants the PM title.

I’m not here to tell you that you don’t want to be a PM. But Smart Generalists optimizing for the vaunted PM title often overlook a much more crucial factor in deciding whether to join a startup: company growth. 

Growth is the single most important selection filter for startup roles, because it not only contextualizes the job opportunity—it is the job opportunity.

At Renaissance Collective, we advise smart generalists to join a startup that’s on a high growth trajectory and offer to solve the most pressing problems for the business, regardless of title. This is the oft-quoted advice that Eric Schmidt, then-CEO of Google, gave to Sheryl Sandberg when she was job hunting: “Get on a rocket ship. When companies are growing quickly and they are having a lot of impact, careers take care of themselves.” 

Optimizing for company growth

The entire startup ecosystem is predicated on growth: All of the best resources gravitate towards things that are growing, including talent and venture investments. If you want the best opportunities for professional growth and development, join something that’s growing.

Growth creates a frontier of new challenges and needs that emerge every few months. Product opportunities are organically created in growing startups.

There will be new feature launches and new product lines. If you join a high-growth startup to solve its marketing, customer success, or ops problems, there’s no reason why you can’t move to product when those opportunities emerge.

Imagine you joined a couple founders on their journey right after they released a successful product 1, which is now scaling. You joined to help build out a process for customer success/ experience around product 1. Now, it’s time for the startup to invest in products 2, 3, and 4. Well, the context you’ve built by working on customer success for product 1 combined with the trust you’ve earned with the founders make you well-positioned to lead or launch one of the upcoming products. Ideally, you’d explain to the founders when you join that this is what you’d like to do down the road, but for now you’re just going to pour yourself into whatever they need to make product 1 successful.

Take Salar Kamangar, a bio major from Stanford, who joined Google as its 9th employee. He had no experience or background in tech. He joined Google to set up the legal and finance functions for the company, then he went on to create the company’s first business plan, and from there, he became a founding member of Google's product team, and years later, the CEO of YouTube. Phenomenal company growth created opportunities for him to move into product, despite having a generalist background.

Day-to-day, your job will almost certainly be more interesting if you take a non-product role at a growth company versus a product role at a stagnant company. Growth also generates momentum around solving these problems as a team. When everyone is busy and aligned towards a common goal (growth), the entire team becomes more productive together and not as worried about individual recognition. 

Problems of stagnation: lack of resources, internal politics, and adverse selection

If you’re only solving for a title role, you may find more problems than opportunities.

Companies that aren’t growing struggle to attract the best talent and raise capital. They lack an ever-expanding frontier of opportunities to parachute into. And when there isn’t enough to do, it can create an unhealthy dynamic within teams, where individual contributors compete for visibility and responsibility around fewer impactful opportunities.

Another reason to not be overly focused on getting a product title is that you’ll adversely select for startups that are willing to give you an important sounding title to recruit you. If these startups were really growing, they would be able to attract product leaders with an existing track record. A growth-stage startup will likely choose an experienced PM from another growth startup or, if they do take a chance on a smart generalist, it might be someone from their trusted friend or professional networks.

If you join something before it’s working, you could be really lucky and it could hit hyper growth after you’ve joined, but this is an unlikely bet. Remember: Having a cool title at a little-known startup won’t get you closer to that role at a fast-growing startup.

How to find a startup that’s growing

If you’re now convinced that you should be optimizing for company growth in your next career move, you’re probably wondering where to find these fast growing startups. 

The short answer is: through people networks.

Follow the money: You can get some signal on a startup’s growth potential by digging into the investors around the table. Sign up for the Termsheet newsletter by Fortune for info on deals, exits, etc. If Benchmark has invested, it is almost certainly good. Other great investors are a16z and Sequoia – but keep in mind these firms place lots of bets, so use their investment as one datapoint. Investors who saw the deal and passed on it are also a good source for backchannel diligence. Investors who passed on a deal aren’t published, but if you know the right people, you can and should try to get this intel as well. Angel/seed stage investors that have well-regarded reputations and good deal flow can also be excellent sources of what’s really working, even in the early innings before anything’s publicly disclosed. 

Use people signals: There are some exec-level operators – and you can probably identify them on Twitter – that you can use as high signal if they join something. These are people that could get a job anywhere given their past experience. For example, Mike Brown, who was the GM for Uber in Asia, recently joined Newfront as their COO. Camille Ricketts who built her reputation leading First Round Review joined Notion as their Head of Marketing. Allison Barr Allen spent 5 years at Uber as Head of Global Product Ops and recently joined Fast as a co-founder and COO. Operators who are well-respected leaders will usually flock to startups that are working. Since these operators are plugged into exclusive information networks, they will have heard of or been referred to these opportunities through people they know. These are people who could literally write their ticket at any high-growth startup. Follow their lead. 

Use Breakout lists: Lists of breakout startups such as Breakout List or Wealthfront’s annual Career-Launching Companies list can be a helpful starting point to developing a candidate set of companies to dig into. The folks at XPO send out a subscription-based newsletter called “Breakout Startups” that targets engineers looking for their next career opportunity, but the companies they feature in their memos are highly curated and well-researched. One caveat: not all lists are created equal. Some lists are more reliable than others: Forbes’ 30-under-30 is definitely more of a popularity contest while the Breakout Lists we mentioned above are more legit. 

If you don’t know who to look to for signals or how to gather that intel, Renaissance Collective may be able to help you (apply here to join us!). As a community, we work together to do due diligence on startups by tapping into the information that flows through our combined people networks.  

Parting thoughts to the smart generalists out there: 

If you’ve never fit the mold or chosen the easy path, let us remind you that a title isn’t meant to define (or limit!) your potential. It does not define the scope of what you’re capable of or what you’ll accomplish during your tenure at a startup. Nor does it limit the types or depth of professional relationships you’ll forge within an organization. So don’t make the title the focus of your career search.

Optimize for joining a growing startup even if you have to be title-humble when you join. If you do want to move into product, be upfront about your desire to take on more product responsibilities, and relentlessly drive towards opportunities to learn about and contribute to product. Build friends and allies across the org. When it comes time to advocate for more responsibilities – along with a commensurate title – be able to articulate your impact in a way that demonstrates product experience and aptitude. In startups, as in life, you own your story.

Thank you to David King, Henry Su, Jonathan Lai, and Robby Huang for all their contributions and feedback to this piece. 

PS: In writing this piece, we found that we had so much more to say about how to navigate to product if you’re a smart generalist. If this is a topic that interests you as well, stay tuned for our deep dive on 3 credible paths to product in our next blog post!

Examples of Effective Email Blurbs

By Henry Su, Jen Yip, and Robby Huang

Part 1 of this 2-part series covers why an email blurb is so important, what you’re trying to accomplish with a blurb, and some important do’s and don’ts for writing them.

In Part 2 below, we propose blurb structures that we’ve seen to be effective for Renaissance Collective community members.  Keep in mind that the most effective blurbs aren’t one-size-fits-all and should be carefully tailored to provide a strong incentive for the reader to take some action on your behalf. 

We propose a 3-part blurb format: 1. Introduction, 2. Body, 3. Conclusion

1. Introduction

The introduction should succinctly summarize the opportunity and why you are excited to learn more about it.

Good:

Thank you for offering to connect me with John Doe at Company X regarding this role <link>. I’m very excited by the vision of Company X to connect communities by providing convenient, cost-effective, and eco-friendly modes of micromobility.

Better, more personal:

I appreciate your connecting me with XXX for a potential role in [TEAM NAME] at [COMPANY]. When my fiancée and I moved in together a few years ago, we chose an empty Parisian flat, as we wanted to furnish it ourselves and make it truly our own. But that meant investing in costly staples: a bed, a sofa, and a table. As we were just entering our first jobs, we had to ask our bank to get consumer credit. We faced a long and painful process - as a result, we did not get our bed until several weeks later! If [COMPANY] were in France, I’m sure moving in would have been a more seamless experience. I’m enthused by [COMPANY]’s mission to enable people to buy any costly item immediately, with reasonable credit terms. It’s a real step forward in people’s day-to-day lives, and I want to contribute to it.

Better, more succinct: 

As an endocrinologist and digital health enthusiast, I’m very excited about XXX’s analytics-driven approach to chronic disease management.

Comments:

• These three examples demonstrate that, to some extent, how you introduce yourself and your interest in the company is a matter of taste. All of these blurbs demonstrate a strong understanding of the vision and mission of the companies to which they’re directed.

• In the ‘more personal’ example, the blurb demonstrates a well-researched enthusiasm for the product and the value it creates -- which can make the recipient more excited to meet you. More personalized examples can also be more memorable.

• In the ‘succinct’ example, the member introduces herself and her background and displays her understanding of what the company does all in a single sentence.

2. Body

The body of the blurb should accomplish two things:

1. Identify the opportunities to add value to the company or individual.

2. Given your experiences, prove how you are positioned to add value.

It’s important not to get hung up on specific titles (this is especially true when applying for early stage startups, where roles are less clearly defined). Instead, the focus should be on “what pockets of opportunity exist where I can add value”.

Good:

I saw roles open in Business Operations and Product Management in which my toolkit of strengths could play into. As Company X grows, I suspect you may be facing growing pains such as ___. At ___, I led project ___ to success metric ___. Through this experience, I strengthened my abilities ___. I’d love to help Company X scale its efforts in ___ through ___.

Better Example 1:

I saw roles open in product management and business operations and have strengths that could play into each [VALUE TO THE COMPANY STATEMENT 1]. I think I could help [COMPANY] work on projects with diverse stakeholders—politicians, citizens, technologists, developers, etc. I could also build partnerships (e.g., with companies whose tech could benefit future car-free cities) and communicate [COMPANY’s] story to gain grassroots support [VALUE TO THE COMPANY STATEMENT 2]. I’ve conceptualized and managed several multi-stakeholder projects, including a global nonprofit, a web startup, a sustainable university food co-op, and university academic programs. Each involved earning allies’ trust, making collective decisions, anticipating/addressing frictions, and communicating our vision to the public [EXPERIENCE STATEMENT THAT DIRECTLY RELATES TO THE VALUE YOU PROPOSE TO CREATE FOR NEW COMPANY].

Better Example 2:

 I could see myself operating very effectively as connective tissue between different parts of the business at [COMPANY] and ensuring alignment between company strategy and execution. Business ops is certainty appealing to me. I would also be open to some kind of program management for cross-functional strategic initiatives. [VALUE TO THE COMPANY STATEMENT]

I've been with [XXXX, name of current employer] from Series A to Series C, and I have implemented a number of process and product improvements. Two quick examples: (1) As we started to outgrow our original process, I initiated and owned process improvement across Sales, Success, Support and Product to implement better product feedback loops which has had strong adoption. (2) I also gathered data and presented to our Chief Customer Officer on the bottlenecks affecting on-boarding and supporting our largest customer segment; those efforts resulted in re-prioritizing our product roadmap, decreasing on-boarding time by 30%, and freeing up significant internal resources to operate more effectively at scale. [EXPERIENCE STATEMENTS THAT DIRECTLY RELATE TO THE VALUE YOU PROPOSE TO CREATE FOR NEW COMPANY].

Comments:

Both of the ‘better’ examples work because: 

a. They highlight what the person believes their strengths are and ties those into how he/she may help the company achieve its goals.

b. The writers have clearly researched the teams and open roles ahead of time -- this is great in connecting the dots for the receiver. The founders can now forward this blurb to the hiring managers of the appropriate teams.

c. The writers don’t just claim they can do those things they proposed -- they show how they have done them in other roles held in the past.

3. Conclusion

Make a specific ask to meet a key stakeholder in the company.

Example: I would love to chat with Jane Doe about her vision for Company X and discuss areas where I may be able to contribute.

Blurb Bonus Points:

Selectively incorporating the following pointers could make for an even more compelling blurb:

• Add a short, relevant personal anecdote that ties directly to the company and/or its industry. This is an effective way to show why the opportunity has personal significance to you. 

• If you’ve written about the topic that the company works on, link to the public work (tweet, blogpost, etc.). This shows sincere interest in the topic and gives the company another data point on which to evaluate you. If you haven’t written such a piece, now might be a good time to consider developing more of a public body of work to showcase your thinking.

• You may want to include some general context about yourself that highlights your proudest accomplishments and demonstrates general aptitude and intelligence. Keep in mind that content that is less relevant to the opportunity should be deprioritized, kept short, and moved to the end of the blurb. Avoid reiterating your CV in your blurb. Your resume will have your other experiences listed if you want to dive into them in an interview. 

• Choose 1-2 experiences to describe with specifics to land your points. Being more specific gives the reader more context and allows them to more fully understand the impact you have made. Giving just a bit more color/nuance will help you stand out from others who exaggerate their individual contributions.

At Renaissance Collective, we make dozens of intros every day to help our members connect with interesting opportunities. The advice that we share with you here is a culmination of our community’s learnings over hundreds of email introductions that we’ve made. If you’d like to accelerate the development of your professional network, consider learning more about Renaissance Collective by signing up for our newsletter below.

Thanks to David King, Marisa Cruz, Pierre-Loup Lelasseux, Vidushi Sharma, Nadia Eldeib, and Kali Borkoski for contributing thinking, writing, and editing to this piece. As with all our work at Renaissance Collective, every contributor brought his or her own unique insights and sharp thinking to this subject, making this piece stronger than any one of us could have written on our own.

How to Write a Great Email Blurb for Introductions

By Henry Su, Jen Yip, and Robby Huang

In the Renaissance Collective, we leverage our combined networks to find and connect you to exciting career opportunities. If you’d like a community member to connect you to an external opportunity, we ask you to write an email blurb that they can forward along with a short note of endorsement. In this 2-part blog, we explore why we write email blurbs, what we hope to achieve with a blurb, and what an effective email blurb should look like.

Part 1 (below) explores 1) why an email blurb is so important and 2) what you hope to accomplish in a blurb, along with some do’s and don’ts for great blurb writing.

Part 2 proposes a blurb structure that we’ve found to be effective in Renaissance Collective and provides several examples from our members.

1. Why is the email blurb so important?

In tech (especially the SF Bay Area), warm intros really matter. This is because the best opportunities flow through exclusive networks of people, many of whom have spent decades working together, investing in each other, and building long-term relationships.  An intro from a trusted source can set you apart from thousands of applicants for a position.

Your blurb is your first impression on the reader and sets the tone and context for the rest of your conversations. There are several reasons why a well crafted blurb is important:

• Your blurb is your pitch for why someone NEEDS to meet you. You want to make it easy for the receiver to say ‘yes.’ Make it clear how you fit into what they are trying to accomplish. Show them you understand their problems/mission/vision and how you can deliver value. Don’t simply reiterate everything you’ve done (which is already on your LinkedIn or resume) and expect them to connect the dots to figure out where you might fit into their organization. The more a person needs to think about why you can be helpful, the less likely it is that you’ll get an immediate ‘yes.’

• As a business generalist, your writing is your calling card. Being able to write succinctly and clearly demonstrates the quality of your thinking. 

• These intros are not just about you: the quality of your writing also reflects on the person making the introduction. By extending their relationship to you, this person is putting their reputation on the line, and it’s important to make them look good by positioning yourself well. If you don’t put your best foot forward, you aren’t respecting the intro-er’s reputation, and may affect potential connections they can make in the future.

• When you position yourself well, your writing strengthens the brand of Renaissance Collective. It not only reflects on you as a member of the community but also helps the community build trust with various players in the ecosystem (founders, investors, etc.) in the long term. Renaissance Collective represents a premium brand. Years from now, we expect you will still think of this as a professional network with which you’re proud to be affiliated!

2. What are you trying to accomplish in a blurb?

When you write your blurb, it’s important to keep your ultimate objective in mind. In general, the goal should be to secure a meeting with a key stakeholder who sits on the other side of the opportunity. Keep in mind that this key stakeholder might be several hops away from the person making the initial introduction. This has several implications for ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts.’ 

DO:

• Provide enough detail on who you are and your ‘ask’ so that someone reading without any prior context can quickly figure out how to help you. 

• Keep the blurb succinct  and have a clear call-to-action (end on a question or with a clear, concise request). Assume your reader is very busy and receives many emails like this. Long essays listing your accomplishments are rarely received with the gravitas with which they were written. 

• If relevant, be as specific as possible about the role, company, and industry to show you’ve done your homework. Link to an existing job description if there is a relevant one posted publicly online. It also helps to make it clear why connecting to this specific person is mutually beneficial and that you’re uniquely excited to meet them, versus just a generic person at their company or in their industry or role.

• Write like you would speak. Remove language that you wouldn’t say to someone. Big words and weirdly stilted sentences don’t impress anyone or make you sound important. That said, you should use complete sentences and avoid using passive voice. Aim for a conversational tone that you might use with a respected colleague.

• Proofread for typos and spelling mistakes before sending it. This reflects on your attention to detail. The person making the warm intro shouldn’t have to do any additional work to make sure your email is clear, concise, and typo free. 

• Send the forwardable blurb in a CLEAN EMAIL. Here is the definition of a clean email. You want to make it very easy for the person who offered you a warm intro to connect you. Note: Assume the person making the warm intro is doing so in a mobile environment. 

DON’T

• Send a generic blurb with your background and accomplishments without a specific ask for a specific person at a specific company. We do not write and forward generic blurbs to our network.

• Use overly informal or colloquial language, since the person reading your blurb likely doesn’t (yet!) have a warm relationship with you. 

• Copy and paste a blurb or parts of blurbs you’ve written before into your email without checking formatting, font size, and color. Chances are it will render funny -- copied text will often be an odd size and purple in color. Make sure there is no weird formatting in your email. Clean means it’s formatted to be forwardable. Use that ‘unformat’ text icon in Gmail to remove formatting. 

Continue to Part 2 for examples of effective email blurbs

Thanks to David King, Marisa Cruz, Pierre-Loup Lelasseux, Vidushi Sharma, Nadia Eldeib, and Kali Borkoski for contributing thinking, writing, and editing to this piece. As with all our work at Renaissance Collective, every contributor brought his or her own unique insights and sharp thinking to this subject, making this piece stronger than any one of us could have written on our own.

How Karen Wickre Takes the Work out of Networking

By Jen Yip

Karen Wickre compares networking to farming. In the age of collecting new ‘connections’ on LinkedIn and counting ‘likes’ on Facebook, Karen, Silicon Valley communications maven and author of the book “Taking the Work out of Networking,” encourages us to take a patient, long-term approach to cultivating authentic connections.

Last week, at Bloomberg Beta’s Book Breakfast, Karen, in conversation with Camille Ricketts, Notion’s Head of Marketing, shared some of her top advice for making meaningful connections.  

Camille and Karen at Bloomberg Beta

What was unique about this particular discussion was that both Camille and Karen are self-professed introverts. The tenor of the conversation between the two was down-to-earth and warm. It was tactical enough to be genuinely helpful without any sense of bravado even though both women have formidable reputations that precede them. Camille, as the creator of First Round Review, has interviewed hundreds of noteworthy Silicon Valley startup founders, creating a virtual encyclopedia of knowledge, insights, and advice for founders. Karen has been in Silicon Valley for over three decades, and was formerly Twitter’s editorial director, following a decade at Google. Watching the two of them engage in comfortable banter, you could almost see Karen’s advice in the works.

 Below are some of her key takeaways on who to network with, how to maintain relationships in a light-touch way, how to frame communications, how to approach networking events, and finally, how to fit networking into your busy schedule.

1.    Build your network with people you actually like and find interesting

On the face of it, this point seems obvious, but I really appreciate that Karen spelled it out in no uncertain terms. To the question of “who should I be networking with?” Karen recommends that you build your network with people you actually like and find interesting versus networking with people you think are the most important or people you think you should know. Cultivate relationships with people you’re genuinely interested in.

She also dispelled the common myth that it’s most important for you to network with folks around your next job opportunity. Instead, she underscored the importance of building relationships in your current job. Making connections across the org, regardless of your role, helps you understand the entire business and develop relationships that are an asset to you as an employee. It can also help you explore your own preferences for a future role.

2.    How to network: Start giving

Approach relationship building and maintenance with a spirit of giving. For Karen, who calls herself a news junkie, the easiest and most natural way for her to give is to send friends bits of news and information she thinks they’ll find useful or interesting. Since she browses Twitter every day, she’ll often surface news that’s relevant to someone in her network. Emailing a link to a tweet or article is a lightweight way for you to show your friends and professional contacts that they’re top of mind for you.

Other ways you can practice lightweight giving include sending personal emails to celebrate birthdays or job changes. Use Facebook and LinkedIn to alert you of these occasions, but avoid the canned messages suggested by these platforms. Instead, opt to craft and send personal notes via email.

One key point here – and some good news for introverts – is that the giving style Karen recommends is a 1:1 activity. It’s not about broadcasting generic messages. It’s about actually knowing what someone cares about and when they’ve made a life transition, then reaching out with a personal note that says, “Hey, this made me think of you.”

3.    Pro tips for networking communications:

• Double opt-in is the law: Set context for the conversation. I really appreciated that Karen emphasized this. We’ve all been victims to less-than-thoughtful intros. Don’t be that person.

• Keep your ‘ask’ casual: When you make an ‘ask,’ Karen recommends keeping the language casual and giving the person you’re asking an ‘out.’ For example, “Someone I know has a question; would you be the right person to ask? Or if you think someone else could help me instead, please introduce me.” Karen’s point is to take the pressure off of one person. I also like to add to my emails, “No worries if this isn’t a fit” or something to that effect to give the person an easy out. 

• Remind yourself that it’s just coffee: An astute observation from Karen and one that I’ve noticed in Renaissance Collective as well: women are more hesitant than men to take a conversation without doing a lot of research and over-preparing. They’re more likely to say, “I’d love the intro but not right now because I’m not ready.” If you find yourself worrying about whether you’re prepared to have the conversation, take some of the pressure off by reminding yourself, “It’s just coffee.” Not all interactions have to start with a carefully designed agenda and lots of preparation.

• Follow-up quickly: Timing counts. Don’t wait too long between the gathering or event and your follow-up, even if you just send over a quick note that says “It was great to see you. I enjoyed chatting about X and I look forward to more. If it’s ok, I’d like to follow up with you later.” Especially during the incredibly busy holiday season, “later” can be sometime in the new year, whenever things are less busy for the both of you.

4.    Parties are an opportunity to show you’re a team player

As much as we introverts dread networking events or, as apropos to this season, holiday parties, consider it a work obligation. The point of these parties, according to Karen, is to be seen by a few key people, have some brief exchanges, and participate in a team activity. No one wants to have in-depth conversations in front of the bar. Show up, circulate with a drink in hand, say hello to key people, and when you’re tapped out, gracefully make an excuse to exit. She has more tips for surviving holiday parties here.

5.    Manage your networking time

As someone who organizes communities, I often find myself inundated by requests for meetings, introductions, or connections. Karen’s advice on this is to prioritize requests and make sure you respond to time-sensitive requests first. When you’re the one making requests, Karen also recommends letting recipients know whether it’s time-sensitive. This was a great reminder to constantly reassess priorities.

As Roy Bahat noted, we have all found ourselves in situations with folks who take more than they give or, in my experience, folks who send frequent, persistent requests for help. Karen’s advice on this delicate subject is to respond with the “polite decline,” in which you let the person know “This is the limit of what I can do or what I know” and end your note with “Good luck out there!”

To turn down a meeting request, you could simply say “My next couple months are packed, so my best advice is…” For extremely persistent asks, slow down your rate of response. :)

Another tip I found helpful was to refer people to your public writing and offer to answer any follow-up questions over email. Sharing your knowledge in writing helps you protect your time.

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At the end of breakfast with Camille and Karen, I was convinced that networking doesn’t have to be an anxiety-inducing activity. As Karen observes, while hunting is short-term and transactional, farming is a long-term, nurturing activity. And, in heartening news for all of us introverts out there, much of it can be done online. Building your network is about maintaining relationships over the long term -- listening, observing, and giving -- just as you would water, weed, and prune a garden. I left that breakfast with Karen’s book tucked under my arm and an ever-so-slight spring in my step, excited to channel some of her advice and passion for networking into my own life. As we build the Renaissance Collective community, it’s my greatest hope that the connections we make here will be the seedlings for productive professional relationships and friendships that members will cherish and invest in for years to come. 

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A huge thank you to Karen Wickre for so generously sharing her time and expertise with us, and to the ever-gracious Camille Ricketts for keeping the conversation tactically focused and surfacing these gems of wisdom that inspire us all to invest our time in cultivating meaningful professional relationships. 

As always, thank you to Roy Bahat, James Cham, Minn Kim, and their team at Bloomberg Beta for hosting yet another amazing conversation and being such ardent promoters of knowledge sharing in the startup community.

Thanks to David King, Jonathan Lai, and Henry Su for reading early drafts and providing feedback to improve this piece.