Career advice Sitting down this afternoon with a widely traveled friend I realized that there is a lot that we now know and take for granted that we didn’t know as fresh graduates. Simple things like the specialized courses we should take, the career focus we should build and the jobs that we should turn…
Tag: Mentoring
Finance Careers: A tale of two startups.
You will never know how wrong you were till you actually do it with your own hands and fail. If you are really lucky you get a chance to compare your performance against a benchmark that you can relate to. I was wrong and I was lucky. My first two ventures were inspired by Luke…
Career choices: From banking and consulting to Startup land in southern California
New York 1999. I am a business school student with a combination of dangerous ideas, irrelevant experiences, incomplete education and out of control ambitions. In any other country I would be institutionalized. In New York City, I am the startup guy, the dude with the business plan. While a few leads from Goldman and an…
Career Choices: From Columbia to Goldman and back – Switching from consulting to investment banking …
So here I was with an offer letter from Columbia, no job (I quit) and no money to cover my Ivy League business school tuitions. Back in 1998 these were days where your email account only caught a handful of emails every day, unlike the raging horde of spam that lands every morning in my…
Career choices that I made – early professional consulting career – lessons learnt
Career Lesson One – Opt for computer science The reason why I have such a soft corner for computer science is that I don’t think it is an optional undergraduate degree. I think it is a mandatory skill set that teaches us how to think and approach problems and then gives us an opportunity to…
Startup Guide: Darden Reboot Chat – transcript of the EVC, DSAS event
Thank you very much for showing up for my chat. My name is Jawwad Ahmed Farid and I am a failure. Before I became a member of Failure anonymous, I always wanted to be a winner. I wanted my own world record; see myself where you see Mr. Usain Bolt; ideally with a medal or…
Startup Mentor: Darden Reboot DSAS, EVC event
It takes a lot to fill up an empty room. Specially with smart people, who are paying good money to get a great education at a top ranked business school and have already had a roster of highly ranked speakers appear before them. But the Darden EVC and DSAS societies managed to do just that…
Startup Guide: CEO Club session at Columbia Business School
Thanks to Hasan, Carolyn, Ben and the CEO and SABA members for first arranging the session at Columbia Business at such short notice and then showing up in strenght at 8 am on a Monday morning. I was pleasantly surprised by the size and the enthusiasim of the audience. And as Hasan and Carolyn put…
Startup Guide: The startup crash course in 7 posts or less
For the last four weeks I had been thinking about putting together a basic reading guide for mentees that would help them move forward and remove me as a bottleneck. A collection of short to the point posts that introduce them to a basic framework that many of us take for granted and most of…