Tom Brunskill

Obviously, if you think about my experience, like I used to work in big law and now work in early stage environments.

So the stories are quite different across those different industries and different companies.

But typically, the stories that I see happen is like where someone goes off and builds something tangentially connected to where they want to end up and it kind of catches the eye

of a founder or of an executive within a startup and, you know, they're like, wow, like I need to meet this person.

And, you know, more often than not that person can be like an 18, 19, 20-year-old.

So like I even think about like our team at Forage, some of our earliest employees,

interns when we first started.

We're now 45 employees, but I think our first or second intern had gone and built an app that would create a community overlay over our programs.

He was 19 years old and

We were just super impressed and, like, the ability for someone to go and, like, roll up their sleeves, build something of value to us, like, just spoke volumes about the particular candidate.

And when it came time to bring someone on, it made perfect sense to hire them.

So I would say in, like, early stage technology space is, like, going off and building things and showing that portfolio of work is...

the most compelling way to stand out in the crowd.

I know another story with another company that I went through an accelerator with, they'd found a way, this person really wanted to work at this company.

And this young guy had found a way to create a waitlist for this particular product.

And like the company hadn't asked them to create a waitlist.

So it was slightly risky, but when he created a waitlist and managed to get, I think it was like 45,000

people onto this wait list and the company had like maybe like 100 000 users by that point and was like hey i've gone off and like found you 45 000 users i haven't spent any money you know i'd love to get them on your product but as part of it i want a job with you um and so you know it's about like taking those kind of calculated bold risks to kind of stand out from the crowd and be like a

a broken record today.

But as I said, it's about how do you show value to the company that you want to work for before they're even thinking about hiring you.