Giuliana Vetrano, T’16, grew up outside Philadelphia before heading to Boston for college. (As a lifetime East Coaster, she especially enjoyed the Silicon Valley Boot Camp.) She studied history and French as an undergrad at Harvard, and immediately after graduation taught those same two subjects in Connecticut prep schools. She finally left academia when she changed careers and moved to New York to work in a Brooklyn digital marketing firm. Starting out at Tuck, Giuliana is excited to return to New England and to crew as part of the Rowing Club. She is also an avid writer (quickly catching up on all things quantitative), cyclist, and squash player.
“Wait, have you guys even started school yet?” a patient alum asked us in the middle of her presentation. The answer was no. The 38 of us wide-eyed, business-casual T’16s were having our first Tuck experience—3,067 miles from Hanover.
This past August, I traveled to San Francisco and the Bay Area for the inaugural Tuck Silicon Valley Boot Camp. In addition to the customary pre-term programs, this year Tuck offered the incoming class an opportunity to explore careers in technology in the very heart of the industry.
Tech recruiting at business schools has increased significantly over the past few years, but the hiring process remains less structured and more ambiguous than say, traditional banking and consulting cycles. Recognizing this, the Career Development Office (CDO) wanted to give those of us interested in everything from startups to established firms like Google a head start in strategizing our job search—and a chance to see the distinct Silicon Valley culture and environment firsthand. And that’s exactly what we got with the inaugural boot camp.
In this post, I’ll give an overview of the trip—where we went, whom we met, and what we covered.
Day 1: When in Rome
The four-day trip began with an orientation and welcome at Byington Winery, a vineyard in the Santa Cruz mountains now owned by Tuck alumna Amy Madsen T’96 and her husband, Benny Madsen. Byington was an appropriate place to kick off the boot camp, not only because viticulture is such a key feature of Northern California, but also because Benny is himself a successful tech entrepreneur.
In addition to an in-depth lesson on winemaking, one of the most fascinating parts of that first night was when we all introduced ourselves and explained why we were interested in tech careers. Among our group of 38, we had students from China, India, Spain, Italy, Canada, Kazakhstan, Brazil, and even a local from Hanover. We had as many engineers, financiers, accountants, and consultants as we did startup and digital marketing veterans—not to mention military veterans just completing their service in the Army and Navy.
Day 2: The Great Valley
Our formal Silicon Valley touring began, naturally, in the eponymous geographic valley south of the San Francisco peninsula. The logical starting point was the Google headquarters in Mountain View, also known as the Google campus or the Googleplex and perhaps the most iconic tech office space in the world (iconic enough, that is, to be featured in the recent film “The Internship”).
Led by Tuck alums Kelsey Stratton T’13 and Philip McDonnell T’12, we walked through the core buildings and courtyards of the Googleplex, checking out the outdoor arena where Larry and Sergei present their weekly TGIF talks, studying the casual dress of the Googlers on foot and on bikes, and pausing for a minute to gaze at the volleyball court and water treadmill (a mini lap pool with a self-generating current). In the exhibit space where engineers can display their latest side projects, many of us got side-railed into the immersive Google Maps experience, where we were able to virtually visit Tuck via Street View across five human-scale screens.
We spoke with Kelsey and Phil about their respective positions at Google and how they came to work there before hearing from the University Programs office about the recruiting process. Afterward, Ben Renda T’08 presented on the topic of digital content from his perspective as director of operations and head of global scaled services at YouTube.
The afternoon took us to nearby Redwood City, where Electronic Arts (EA) is headquartered. Claudia Carbonelli T’10, who is a senior finance manager there, gave us a glimpse into one of Silicon Valley’s oldest (founded in 1982) and most successful companies. EA has dominated the gaming space for decades and, as creative director Richard Hilleman related, is now adapting its products to the era of Internet-connected consoles and mobile devices.
Day 2’s programming concluded with a talk by Ted Wilson T’09, a principal at Pinnacle Ventures. Ted gave an outline of the venture capital space, including how hard it is to enter, and highlighted the seven areas of tech where he believes there will be the most growth: the “shared economy,” cyber-security, SaaS, FinTech, EdTech, smarter homes, and health care.
We spent our last hours out in the Bay at the University Club of Palo Alto, where eight alumni from the classes of 2005 to 2014 joined us for cocktails. It was great to meet and make connections with Tuckies from Deloitte Digital, Intel, Intuit, Symantec, Castlight Health, and other firms well before arriving on campus, and the alums made it clear they were more than willing to stay in touch with us as our internship and job searches progress.
Day 3: The San Francisco Treat
For the remainder of SVBC we visited with companies and alumni in the city of San Francisco. While office space in the city is ever more limited, a large number of well-known tech firms as well as emerging startups call it home. Salesforce.com was kind enough to arrange for us to use their offices in the city’s financial district as our base.
It was there that we heard from Blair LaCorte T’90 about his retrospectively impossible-to-plan yet illustrious path through the tech industry: Blair’s career in operational, management, and investor roles spanning both the dot-com and the startup booms enabled him to shed light on almost every aspect of the tech world, and convey a whole lot of well-earned wisdom.
Next, a group of recent alumni, including some T’15s currently completing their summer internships, formed a panel about the tech job search. It was extremely informative to compare the experience of a T’15 entrepreneur to that of her classmate who ultimately took a strategy internship at Intel. Maggie Misztal T’14’s determination to find a position at the intersection of tech and health care impressively landed her at 23andMe, and she reiterated the importance of an early start and perseverance when it comes to tech jobs.
In the afternoon, we shifted gears towards the investment side of the tech world, hearing from Jesse Lau T’11 who consults on private equity deals for Parthenon. Jesse’s presentation helped us understand the various players when it comes to buying and selling companies, and illuminated the role that consultants play in the Bay Area ecosystem.
We then took a short walk over to the San Francisco offices of Zillow (their headquarters are in Seattle) where Elissa Kline T’11 told us more about what product managers do and how MBAs can pursue such positions. Over snacks in the very employee-friendly kitchen, Elissa also stressed the benefit of getting involved in the Technology Club and the Center for Digital Strategies while at Tuck.
Once again, even more alumni joined us in the evening for dinner at the trendy Chambers restaurant. The T’16s split up by interest, sitting with grads working at Zynga, Walmart.com, Box, or Twitter, or with some familiar faces from Zillow and EA.
Day 4: I Left My Heart In...
For the final day of boot camp, we began by taking a closer look at startups. Another panel of alumni came together to share their experience finding jobs and working at firms such as LendingClub and Square. One had even just gone through an acquisition (by Yahoo), a fairly common fate for tech startups.
To witness startup culture in action, we walked to the nearby below ground offices of BoostMedia, where we saw signs of Agile methodologies at work (read: neatly organized Post-its on whiteboards) and learned more about AdTech.
The last stop of the trip was OpenTable, where, appropriately, we had lunch. Recently acquired by Priceline and quickly acquiring smaller firms like Copilot, OpenTable is in a very exciting phase. An interaction designer took us through the evolution of OpenTable’s just-launched mobile payments product, and an analytics expert showed us the new data platform the company is offering its business clients. Leela Srinivasan T’06 recounted her career in marketing at some of the Valley’s top companies, and her plans to develop the marketing function at OpenTable.
As you can see from this unintentionally, but justifiably long blog post, we covered a whole lot of ground during the Silicon Valley Boot Camp. We left with both a much clearer idea of what it means to work in tech and a realistic sense of what it takes to get a job in Silicon Valley. What’s more, the trip proved a great way to meet new classmates and Tuck alums alike, making the move to Hanover and the beginning of the job search that much easier.