West Coast State of Mind
The path to success in Silicon Valley looks a lot different from the one on Wall Street—a distinction critical for emerging leaders interested in giving a career on the West Coast—particularly one in technology or venture capital—a shot. In this interview, Bill Long, ’86, executive-in-residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures, a venture capital and private equity firm in San Francisco, Calif., discusses the differences between the coasts and offers some tips for achieving professional success.
You're originally from the East Coast. How did you end up in the Bay Area?
When I graduated from Loyola I landed a job at Alex Brown and Sons, an investment bank that helped many well-known healthcare and tech companies raise money through IPOs. They had developed a strong franchise with emerging companies and their investors had a strong reputation on the East but over time the company realized that many of the younger businesses with which they would do business would be based on the West Coast, and in particular, the San Francisco Bay Area
After a year with Alex Brown in Baltimore, an opportunity arose for me to move out to San Francisco to work with their Investment Banking Group, so I had the benefit of moving here with an organization. My feeling at the time was that I was pretty lucky to have been presented this opportunity. I couldn’t pass it up. Having grown up in Baltimore and having not been exposed to different business functions or technologies at this early point in my career, I knew this move west would provide an opportunity to learn new skills, meet new people, and advance my career.
How did your Jesuit education help you succeed in the venture capital world?
My undergraduate degree was a real cornerstone to my early professional life. It’s what gave me the curiosity, practical skills, and motivation to come out here and succeed in a constantly changing environment.
At the time I moved to the Bay Area it was 1988 and the investment banking and venture capital community there was quite small, so I began networking with some very successful people early on. After a couple years at Alex Brown in San Francisco, the natural progression was to go to graduate school or seek some practical industry experience. The next step for me was to work for the chairman and CEO of a medical products company, a position I appreciated because it gave me exposure to the executive team and that helped me gain knowledge and become more comfortable in the world of senior operating executives. From my first operating role, I moved on to other more traditional, “skill-based” roles in finance, marketing, and business development. This progression helped me develop my business skill set as well as a ground-level view of how businesses make money and grow in a competitive environment. From this early, hands-on experience my career progressed to a successful tenure at a San Francisco-based investment bank, and finally into the venture capital industry.
From my perspective, working with and for a number of emerging growth companies, I believe you will experience many successes and failures during your career. Choosing a less defined career path, you won’t necessarily be leading a company in your 20s, but you will rapidly build skills and a broader business acumen. One of the keys to progression is having the vision and confidence to go to the next company and build on your experience and professional network. My well-rounded education at Loyola gave me a solid foundation in personal character development, the knowledge to be nimble, and the motivation to achieve in an unchartered business environment.
After working with so many different companies and navigating the business environments on both the West and East coasts, what kind of differences have you seen when it comes to career paths?
Successful careers here in Silicon Valley have more of a zigzag. You may acquire skills and experience from a larger company, and then be very valuable early in your career to an emerging growth company, but it’s not linear or “plan-able” as it has been for many of my classmates back East. You could go from a consumer software company to business enterprise software company and assume more responsibility in the career move. There’s a very healthy environment for testing new ideas and applying your business skills in new ways.
What sort of unique opportunities are available on the West Coast?
Over the course of my 20-plus years in the Bay Area, one of the trends that has sustained and now increased the amount of innovation is the role of the “angel investor.” Angel investors have historically been successful entrepreneurs themselves and want to help other entrepreneurs fund early stage companies and turn ideas into new products and services. The development and depth of the angel-investing community is somewhat unique to this area. They play into the dynamic of the currently rapid cycle of launching a business and getting the financial and technical resources you need to experiment. These early seed stage companies are the beginning of the next Microsoft, Google, or Facebook—but they go through a number of evolutions before most people hear about them. For example, a company like Salesforce.com was an early developer of sales and marketing software. Now its product is enabling an entire new class of smaller customers to deploy the same marketing functionality as a Fortune 500 company in a fraction of the time and cost. Their tremendous growth came through trial and error of many sales and marketing tactics that they’ve refined over time. There’s so much testing and failure here that it also allows people to develop new products and services, which sometimes take years to migrate across the country.
To put the current environment in the Bay Ares in perspective, there are likely 10 times as many opportunities for young entrepreneurs there than on the East Coast, particularly in healthcare, technology, and social media. There’s a surplus interest from these young startups developing new products in hiring bright, young, business-savvy minds; you can find those opportunities and be helpful for companies at a relatively early stage. For recent graduates and young professionals considering a move from the East, my view would be to first find a company stable enough to give you a runway to learn and build your career. More developed companies have accumulated business intelligence, tested pricing models, evolved lead generation capabilities, and have begun to build out their customer relationship management functions. These are areas where companies need the kind of young, innovative minds who can learn rapidly, contribute to the bottom line, and eventually lead. Many of these companies are smaller and can’t necessarily bring in a high-level executive. They like folks who will take a little risk by developing new ideas and testing them. And, in addition to career development, there’s also the opportunity to take equity in these startups in the form of stock options.
It’s an ecosystem of young companies that have established a business model and have stable revenue, but need young people to adapt and take a little risk. There’s not someone there to teach you, you need to absorb what the company is doing and what their competitors are doing. The key ingredient in shortest supply for these employers is savvy technology and business professionals who are able to develop the businesses that the entrepreneurs create.
What advice do you give to business students looking to succeed in this area—or anywhere?
Don’t undervalue the impact your business skills can have on other industries—particularly in technology. Business students can really help tech companies. These kinds of companies are looking for thoughtful people who can think through issues over time at a high level, not just for students with specific skills. The key is to understand successful business models from established companies as you go into these smaller companies. When you land at a company, learn how they make money. What are the tactics? How much does each customer generate? What does it take to get a customer to your website or engage in your marketing process? The combination of the ability to see business from the top down and developing specific skills will take you far. If you can understand how companies like Google and Facebook make money, you can be invaluable.
Now, I’m not expecting every business student to buy a plane ticket here, but there’s a lesson in this type of path to success in risk and reward and having an eye for where technology and media is going. Business skills, regardless of your background, are valuable but you’ve got to figure out how to apply them in innovative ways. Even through the gut-wrenching financial ups and downs over the past few years, there are hundreds of companies out here that are figuring out how to develop profitable businesses. In general, develop some insights about an industry of interest. Find a role in a company that will give you access to senior executives. Look for the intersection of technology and business, which is generally known as the business model. This experience will give you a top-down view of where the opportunities might lie ahead of you very early in your career.
Do you see this type of business environment on the East Coast? What about young executives back East?
There are companies on the East Coast that have taken this entrepreneurial development approach—new, innovative startup companies growing at a fast rate. There are plenty of them east of the Mississippi—it’s just not concentrated and in the same business geography. If you are a young, motivated executive and you’re interested in this type of career progression on the East Coast, find companies like Allegis and Under Armour in their early stages and understand how those companies evolved and grew. Seek out their earlier employees and talk to them about what it was like when these companies were much smaller. Venture portfolios of the venture capital and private equity firms such as ABS Capital, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), JMI Equity, and Questmark are good sources to find those companies. These portfolio companies are always looking for talented young executives to help them grow in rapidly evolving markets.