Breaking Into Startups

Melissa has been teaching negotiation tactics for the last 22 years. Today, Melissa Hereford is going to teach us how to negotiate, not only in terms of salary, but life in general - deadlines, relationships, friendships, etc. She's going to give you actionable strategies you can use to negotiate a higher salary with your manager. Previously, Melissa worked for BayGroup International, the biggest negotiations consulting company in the world. She's worked with huge clients like Cisco, At&T, Oracle, GE, and several pharmaceutical companies. Stop selling yourself short! You’ve got to ask for more. But the biggest question is how. Negotiation can be scary, but it doesn’t have to be. You just have to know how you can prepare for it!

Jason is widely known as a global brand director for the Jordan Brand at Nike, where he led and contributed to the creation of several shoes for athletes and cultural icons including Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, Russell Westbrook, Derek Jeter, and Michael Jordan. Following his 13+-year stint at Nike, he started several things in tech at Accel and as an advisor for Stanford’s Design School. He then co-founded a startup with Stephen Curry and eventually creating his very own startup called Super Heroic, a tech-enabled system of play for kids starting with shoes that help them discover that they're actually superheroes. Contrary to what many people think that San Francisco is Silicon Valley, but it's not. In fact, it's not a place. Jason is therefore doing a lot to make sure they're able to leverage this platform to do a ton of educational work in places such as StreetCode Academy and collaborate with other teams like Black Jedi ZULU, and so much more. Jason is the founder of Trillicon Valley, a community of entrepreneurs, athletes, designers, and creatives.

Ghazal Asif is the heading Channels Sales at App Dynamics and she shares her path into tech!

Ana Díaz-Hernández is the Head of Sales at interviewing.io, a platform for engineers that set technical interviews and land jobs at top tech companies. Sacramento-born, Ana talks about how she leveraged online communities to get into Stanford, break into startups, how she went through an acquisition process, hustled her way into venture capital at Kapor Capital. In addition to that, she also led business development and online education platforms like Udacity. She founded the Women of Color in Tech - Bay Area. She is a member of the Diversity Advisory Council for Code.org. She is in the Board of Directors for Chicana Latina Foundation.

Prior to her current role as a rockstar product designer at Headspace, Vicki Tan holds an impressive portfolio having worked previously at Lyft and interned at Google. She has worked in the HR and also used to be a research intern and research coordinator at Stanford University School of Medicine, doing studies in Pediatric Oncology. Find out more about Vicki’s transition from the academic realm to the tech space, along with some nuggets of wisdom along the way.

Gary Vaynerchuk does not need an introduction. For those of you who haven’t heard of him yet, he is not only a rockstar entrepreneur, he's an author and a speaker. He's a four-time New York Times bestseller. He now runs a 800-person media agency, VaynerMedia. He is also an early investor in Twitter, Snapchat, and Uber. Big on giving back and making people happy, the one legacy he wants to leave is that he has given more than what he has taken.

A San Jose-native, Heather Swan is the Chief Happiness Officer at Zoom, a video conferencing tool that works on any device. She started as an employee #15 and now Zoom has grown to over 700,000 clients worldwide, she has worked in every sales role within the company and has consistently hit her quotas. Heather has previous experience in the retail sales space, particularly for Tory Burch shoes and medical devices. Today, she shares the perspective of founding a startup from an employee perspective and some qualities a great salesperson must have.

Southern Californian-native, Ian Harriman is a rockstar salesperson. He started as a sales development representative until he rose up to the ranks of being a mid-market account executive at Checkr, a background check community that utilizes software (instead of people) to complete a majority of the parts to the process. Ian also talks about his leadership role in the Bounce Back to Work Program at Checkr, where they help both applicants and companies through their background screening process. We talk about how most companies fail, his experience at a failing company, and how he actually bounced back to where he is now.

Today, we take a closer dive into getting internships and how you can leverage those to get full-time offers. Kyle Woumn is a fullstack engineer on the messaging experience team at Twilio, a cloud-communication platform that integrates communication into apps. A Georgia Institute of Technology graduate, Kyle did internships at GE and Twilio. He's also part of the National Society of Black Engineers and he is currently building an app that fosters an online community for Black Greeks.

Born in Germany, Marco Morawec is the co-founder of The Firehose Project, an online coding school that helped over a thousand people learn how to code remotely and become engineers. They also got a 1-million dollar grant from TechHire to help more people from under-represented groups to gain tech skills. Marco got his undergraduate degree and Master's in Public Policy and Management from the University of Constanz in Germany. He formerly worked as a Product Manager at an advertising firm called Jana. A self-taught software engineer who is big on networking, Marco believes people should not be coding in isolation. Listen in as he talks more about their programs and how people can learn how to code no matter who you are, or where you are.

Jon Deng is a mentor who has helped several people break into tech. He is widely known as a software engineer at Snap Inc. Prior to tech, he was actually a platoon leader in the U.S. Army with 40 men reporting to him. He was a captain and a field artillery officer. In this episode, Jon walks us through his transition from the military into tech, his thought process, and how he essentially prepared himself for the coding bootcamp at Hack Reactor. He also talks about how he got through his job search as a veteran with zero work experience in coding as well as some resources available out there for veterans who might be interested in jumping into the tech.

Dan Burrill is not just the inside sales boss at Twilio but he's also a seasoned executive having spent time with other amazing companies including Box and Honeywell. A man who’s big on commitment and the power of listening, Dan admits coming to Twilio for one big reason - market opportunity. Twilio operates in the telecommunications industry that has been around for decades and it's fast-forwarding the space into the future. No wonder it’s his favorite among all the companies he’s worked at.

Adam is a co-founder of MissionU where he is building a school for the 21st century. He is also a founder of Pencils of Promise that has built over 400 schools around the world and provided over 70k kids with an opportunity to learn! At MissionU, Adam is building a school for the 21st century! Millions of people are either themselves effected by college debt or know someone in their family who is effected by it. College loans are also the only kind of debt you cannot default on. To fix that, Adam and his team want to give you a world class education, debt free. When he first started, Adam went on a listening tour. He spoke to over 200 people, including students, educators and CEOs of publicly traded education companies to figure out how to solve the problem. As the result, MissionU partnered with companies like Spotify, Uber, Lyft, Warby Parker and many others to understand which base, skill-sets, a student must have in order for these companies to hire them. Afterwards, Adam and his team went back to the drawing board and designed a program where they will teach you the needed skills for a year, completely free and you’ll pay them a percentage of your salary once you get a job and you're making over fifty thousand dollars. Their program is a year long, it’s full time and because they realize that not everyone can afford to not work for a year, the program is meant to accommodate a 20-hour a week part time job as well.

Nick Caldwell is the VP of Engineering at Reddit and has been in the game for over fifteen years. He has worked for impressive institutions including Microsoft and NASA. He is also heavily involved in the community, having worked as a facilitator for organizations like /dev/color. If you haven’t heard, Reddit is the fourth most traffic website in the United States, and seventh in the world. With about 320 million monthly active users, Reddit is home to several communities with 1.1 million active communities on their platform.

Bangaly Kaba shares his story on how he broke into product management from a non-traditional backgrounds in Education and Finance. Originally from the East Coast, Bangaly is now considered as one of the best PMs in the Bay Area. He previously worked at Facebook's growth team until landing his current product management role at Instagram. You probably first heard of Bangaly's name back on Episode 13 when Elaina Koros mentioned his name on the show referring to him as a great mentor. From working in Switzerland, to starting a men's fashion business, working at Facebook and finally handling product management at Instagram, Bangaly sure has crafted his own success story.