How to Succeed as an MBA in Silicon Valley

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick, and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today, we're delighted to be speaking with Chris Yeh, coauthor, along with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman of the Alliance Managing Talent in the Network Edge. Chris is the co-founder of Ally Talent, helping organizations better recruit, engage and retain entrepreneurial employees. In addition, he has co-founded, advised or invested in over 100 high tech startups.

He earned two bachelor's degrees from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Chris, thank you for making the time. I'm really delighted to be having this conversation in the last few years, especially MBAs are more and more interested in Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley seems less and less interested in MBAs.

Chris Yeh: My pleasure. And yes, I think that those two trends, both exist. There are certainly a number of strategies that MBAs can employ to succeed in Silicon Valley anyways, because there are plenty of examples of MBAs making in Silicon Valley.

Anita Brick: Well, I would agree with you when you think about it. Maybe this will give us a starting point and a shared frame of reference when you think of success. How is it different in Silicon Valley, especially for MBAs maybe, than in some other places?

Chris Yeh: One of the things that is very true of MBAs is they generally like to have things that have a good risk reward ratio. And there are a lot of things that MBAs can do, whether it's going to join a management consulting firm like a McKinsey or going to work on Wall Street with a company like Goldman Sachs, or even going to work at a marketing company or industrial company like GE or PNG.

The risk reward ratio is very different than it is for Silicon Valley in most MBA professions. If you're smart, if you work hard, if you're good at getting along with other people, you're going to succeed and make a lot of money. And in Silicon Valley, there are ways to pursue that. By taking the corporate route, a large company like an Apple or an Intel, that's more like a Procter and Gamble than a startup.

But really, most MBAs, when you think about Silicon Valley, are thinking about the startup world and the startup world. You can be all those things smart, hard working, get along with people, and it might be that your company will just fail. It's a very different equation, and MBAs have to decide for themselves if they want to take on that very radically changed risk reward ratio.

Anita Brick: There was an evening student who jumped right in with that analysis and really his thought, he said. Several prominent Silicon Valley founders have actually openly criticized the MBA path. In fact, Elon Musk remarked, he hires people despite their MBA. What advice would you give someone who wanted to leverage their MBA to be value add, and maybe go beyond Apple and Intel and Amazon's and really jump into, if not a pure startup, maybe even an adolescent startup?

Chris Yeh: You know, certainly the attitude that Elon Musk expressed, there is something that's been around for some time, I think that Silicon Valley arose on the backs, or rather the hands of the various techies. And I can remember a number of years ago attending a dinner where we were honoring the late Steve Jobs. This was actually a Harvard Business School dinner honoring Steve Jobs.

You know, Steve talked about how he really didn't value MBAs. He said, well, I guess somebody has got to actually do the accounting for when we actually run our product out there. This is not a new attitude, it has certainly been around for a long time. And it dates back to the countercultural origins of Silicon Valley. I think that what people are reacting to is not truly what MBAs are about, but what in their mind MBAs are about.

So in their mind, the technical founders and leaders don't have as much experience with MBAs. And so they think this is going to be some smooth talking person in a nice suit or pants suit who is going to be good at talking with people but isn't actually going to do any real work and doesn't have a deep understanding of the technology.

There are many ways where MBAs can actually add a lot of value, even at very early stage startups, but they have to approach the situation with some humility to understand that there are some biases against them going in. Now, if you're an MBA and you want to add value to an early stage startup, there's actually a ton of things that you can do.

Surprisingly enough, a lot of founders who are technology wizards may have worked for a technology company at some point in time, but they literally have almost no understanding of the outside world beyond Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is a very insular place. They may not understand how procurement processes work. They may not understand what different industries look like and how an investment bank is different from a retail bank.

These are all the kinds of things that are very important, especially for an enterprise company that's selling to businesses where MBAs can add a lot of value, because we have a broad background in business and really understand some of the issues that are going on out there. I think the other thing is, most of the time, founders think about MBAs, slick talkers, and they're really focused on sales.

But in the very early stages of a company, it's not about sales. It's about being able to bring in a few individual users to talk to them, to really understand their needs. And I think that MBAs, with their generally higher IQ or emotional quotient, can do a good job of that if they're observant, if they take the position of, well, I'm going to listen to what people have to say, and I'm going to distill it down. I'm going to be a translator for my team, as opposed to saying, well, I'm going to sit back and use some of the frameworks I learned and drop a brilliant strategy that will guarantee success.

Anita Brick: I would say that the way Booth is categorized, certainly there is the sales side. We have a very popular entrepreneurial selling class at Booth. People are known as a quiet, deep analysis, deep quantitative. When you think about that, what are some things that someone with that kind of background has, heavy analytics, a heavy quant, although not just that. What do you see as a potential entry point for someone like that?

Chris Yeh: Well, I think if you start to look at things on the marketing side of the world, especially in Silicon Valley, the ability to deal with quant, the ability to understand data, the ability to really work well with numbers becomes more and more important. There was this old notion of marketers coming in, you know, with a liberal arts background, really were storytellers, touchy feely, emotional type people.

And increasingly, the world of marketing is about hard numbers, understanding, you know, what the cost of customer acquisition is. Being able to carefully tune and optimize advertising in campaigns that are running not on television with a 32nd spot, but on your mobile phone or on a website. So that quantitative element of marketing, that really practical. How do we drive traffic? How do we drive leads is actually an area where MBAs are suited to excel.

Anita Brick: Well, there was an alum who asked a related question, and his background happens to be in marketing, both traditional. I don't even know what that word means today, but it's traditional.

Chris Yeh: Marketing.

Anita Brick: And digital marketing, he said. I want to transition into a tech company, not a care startup. Something has to be around funding. I have stepped in marketing, including digital, but no tech industry experience. What advice would you have for someone like me?

Chris Yeh: Well, there's a couple of different paths you could pursue. In that case, the first path, which is probably the easiest and most straightforward path, is to go ahead and figure out which of your contacts, friends, classmates, former colleagues, mentors, etc. might be working at a company like an adolescent startup or a tech company. The thing that you're trying to do is you're trying to convince someone that they should take a chance on you, that you have the right skills, even though you don't have a tech background.

Now, the problem is the same problem you have applying to a top business school. There are tons and tons of people with probably close to a perfect score on their grades and their GMAT and everything else, and you can't accept them all. So you have to find a way to stand out. And so rather than just relying on your background, you have to rely on personal relationships.

So that's a fairly straightforward thing. But what if you're in a situation where you go through your network and you think to yourself, oh, I don't actually know anybody like that. Well, you can network into that. You can start asking friends, hey, do you know someone at one of these companies? Can I be introduced and start developing a relationship?

But that obviously takes some time and it is very indirect. The other method you can use is to say, well, let me do this. Let me prove that I actually have tech experience. And here's where being able to find some of these very early stage startups and helping them essentially for free comes in most companies at the early stage, these startups have no money, they're not going to be able to pay you, and you're just going to have to accept that they will often accept free help.

These founders need someone who's willing to come in and help them out for free. And the point is, when you talk to someone about your technology experience, they're not going to ask you how much you got paid. They're going to ask you, what did you accomplish? So if you can rack up actual accomplishments, even if it's by working for free or helping out a friend that's going to help you breakthrough.

Anita Brick: I agree, I think it's very, very important because having the experience we had at this conference and that was a big question that came up over and over again. One expert after another said, yes, of course, it's great to get paid, but I really care. Can you do it for me? Are you able to step up and provide what I need? But there's also competition in terms of even being able to provide free help to startups. There wasn't exactly a student, she said. I live in Asia and have never been to the Bay area. What would you recommend I do before getting on the ground?

Chris Yeh: I think there's a couple of things that you can do, even if you aren't yet able to travel to Silicon Valley. I'm assuming this person does intend to eventually travel here in terms of things that you could do remotely, there are a couple things. The first is to start networking with and talking with people who were in Silicon Valley, but are now in your area.

You can meet with them face to face. You can get a sense from them of what their experience is, where you can ask them about what they experienced when they were in Silicon Valley, that's the first thing. The second thing is you can begin to tap into your network and find people who are currently in Silicon Valley. You may have to wake up at a very strange time of day or night in order to have the conversation, but you can certainly ask them and start gaining some flavor that way.

Finally, one of the things that I tell people is it's important to read things that nobody else is reading, and read things that everybody else is reading. And what I mean by that is it's important to find new insights and to find new things that you could bring to the table. But it's also important to know what everyone else is talking about.

And so the way you can do that in terms of Silicon Valley is to look at a couple of different sources. There's probably two sources that would make it easiest. Obviously, blogs like TechCrunch and Recode that have been around for some time. I actually don't recommend reading them because they just put out so much content you'll feel overwhelmed.

Instead, I look at two different sources of information. The first is a website called Tech Meme. It's run by a single guy, Gabe Rivera. He's been running it for over a decade. Just a single guy running this thing. It's his own business and tech name is an aggregator that does a good job of aggregating together all the most important stories that people in Silicon Valley are talking about.

So tech meme with.com is a great place to start. Another place is Hacker News. So Hacker News is the news site that is run by Y Combinator and Y Combinator, of course, is the extremely influential leading incubator that produced companies like Airbnb and Dropbox. And Hacker News is the place where the hackers go for their news. And I think in some cases they go to the news to their own detriment.

They're suspicious of the mainstream media, and they go down all these strange pathways and they develop a very particular worldview that isn't always correct. I'm not telling MBAs to read this in order to say, this is the gospel truth. I'm telling them to read it so they know what everybody else is reading in Hacker News. You can just look it up.

It's a hacker and a computer hacker at the news. I happen to use a service called Hacker News Daily. It's a website that just, again, some individual person put together every day, displays the top ten stories on Hacker News that weren't previous to the display to Hacker News Daily. So I use that as a way of just reading the headlines and getting some ambient awareness of what people are talking about.

Anita Brick: That makes a lot of sense. If you are on the ground as one of the MBA students who I believe lives in the Bay area, she asks, what are some recommended events for local networking in the Valley?

Chris Yeh: There are a couple things you can certainly do there as well. The first thing I would do is I would go to a website called Startup Digest, and what Startup Digest does is it's just an aggregator, another aggregator. It's amazing. Given the relatively small size of the ecosystem, it's only 7 million people in the Bay area. Clearly, not all of them work in tech.

Given the small size of the ecosystem. There's all these different little services around. Startup digest is an aggregator of events, and they send out an email newsletter at the beginning of the week, each week telling you about some of the events that are coming up, some of the bigger events. You can also, of course, go to Eventbrite, which is a ticketing site.

Most events are actually run off of Eventbrite if there are tickets at all. Part of it is that Eventbrite allows you to do ticketing for free, as long as you don't charge people money for attendance. If you go to those two sources, you can probably see a lot of different events. What I get the most value out of I've done speaking engagements for a variety of organizations.

I'm on the board of an organization called the Silicon Valley Forum that does a number of fantastic events. It's a nonprofit organization that promotes Silicon Valley way and technology and things like that. Many service providers, be they law firms or some of the accounting firms, we'll have event series as well. There's a whole set of things that you can go to.

And then finally, of course, there are the larger conferences. Those generally cost a lot of money. I have a policy that I don't go to conferences unless somebody either waives the fee or pays me to go, that's me. If you're just starting out, you may have a more flexible approach to it. And so the biggest conferences, of course, are TechCrunch disrupt. But there's a number of other conferences as well, even smaller ones like Jason Lemkin, Sastre conference, SARS, TR, which again offer you a chance to meet with a lot of interesting people.

Anita Brick: Oh yeah, it could be really a lot of fun, as long as you know, really how to not just connect in whatever way you do, but to actually build the relationships.

Chris Yeh: Let me add to that, because one of the things would be, well, if you go to one of these events, what do you do? There's two things that I would point out. The first is that consistency in staying power matters. I sometimes give a talk called How to Become an Insider in Silicon Valley. In that talk, I tell a story that I think is kind of funny, but gets people thinking.

And what I tell people is, listen, Silicon Valley is really still driven by face to face contact. It's not all just Twitter and Facebook and mediums and blogs and so on and so forth. And seeing people face to face continues to be important in Silicon Valley. You can become an insider pretty quickly. So I tell people, the first time you meet someone, you might say, oh, hi, I'm Chris.

Oh, you're Anita, great to meet you. What are you working on? Then the next time we see each other about, you know, a couple weeks later, I say, hey, Anita, write. Yeah, I remember. Oh, so how's that thing that you're working on going? There's a third time we see each other. Maybe a month or two down the line.

I'll be saying, hey, Anita. Oh, my God, it's so good to see you. How is that thing going? I've got a couple people who are interested. It usually gets a laugh because it's like, really meeting people at some party three times and all of a sudden everyone's enthusiastic. That's kind of the Silicon Valley way. The other thing I would say is, when you are networking with people, when you're talking with people, I think that the usual principles apply.

You want to do less talking and more listening and understand what's important to them. And then you want to say the following words, which I probably say 20 times a day. And I hear people say to me as well, which is, oh, what can I do to help Silicon Valley as a place? It's really based on this notion of helping people, paying it forward.

I hate that phrase, but that seems to be the term of the art. If you want to participate in the ecosystem, you have to be not just a taker, as Adam Grant over at Wharton would say, but also a giver. Being a giver is really important in order to fit into the ecosystem and be accepted as part of the network.

Anita Brick: I totally agree. I think the other part I had the opportunity to chat with Adam a couple years ago when it came out, is that be the giver who can identify the takers and run in the other direction.

Anita Brick: Yeah. When I read the book and you said givers are the lower the lowest quartile, and I'm like, well, then I don't want to be a giver. And then I read on and he said, they're also at the top quartile. And the difference is your ability to see through the takers. And I think it's an art to do that. Don't you think, Chris?

Chris Yeh: Absolutely. Game theory would also say that the classic tit for tat strategy would apply here. And the classic tit for tat strategy is you're going to give people the benefit of the doubt until they cross you, after which you don't. And it's a very simple strategy, but it's proven over time in many, many simulations to be the dominant strategy.

Anita Brick: I would agree. I know that it seems a little counterintuitive, that face to face would be the norm, and the preference I have found to that is really the case. A related question to kind of go to the other side for a moment and an evening student asked. He said, when you think about social media, the hiring manager would automatically go to, in addition to LinkedIn, what are the top two platforms? Should I use up my visibility?

Chris Yeh: excellent question. Again, I do want to emphasize that I am an old man at this point. I actually have a son who's in high school. It may very well be that for some people, doing everything on Snapchat is exactly what they need to do to work with their hiring managers. However, I think most hiring managers are also mature, shall we say.

And so as a result, the advice is probably good advice. So obviously, as the student mentioned, LinkedIn is the first and foremost the most important because it is the default resume. I don't think people even have resumes anymore. I know I haven't created a resume in many, many years, but LinkedIn serves that purpose. I think that medium is an up and comer.

That's the website and blogging platform and community that was really created by EV Williams, the creator of Twitter and blogger. Seems like he's doing it again and doing a good job. So the medium seems to have become a great place to actually go ahead and express your thoughts. But in general, even though I think a lot of people are less excited about blogging than they once were, I still think that that's important.

I think you need to express yourself and demonstrate to the world what your thought processes are like and based on that, the hiring manager is gonna have a lot greater comfort if you are a technologist. Of course, there's things like GitHub on the marketing business side, there really isn't. So I think that the best thing you can do is to write about your professional experiences and demonstrate the way you think about solving problems.

Anita Brick: It's a good point, and this is a related question from a weekend student. And he said, I have a lot of technology experience, and now I'm getting ready to graduate, and I want to use my MBA to pivot to the business side, particularly in strategy. How would you advise an individual wanting to make a similar move? Where should I start?

Chris Yeh: The first thing that they've done that's very smart is go ahead and get an MBA. You go through a program like Booth and you come out of it backed by the brand of the school itself and the alumni and all the processes behind it. So the first thing I would say is, listen, you know, take advantage of what you've got.

And again, I always tell people for any school, the folks at the Career Center are hardworking, smart people that just wish more students would actually use their services and you can be the person that they help. I think that the other thing that you can do, in terms of pivoting to the strategy side is, again, same as we discussed before, for people who didn't have technology, hey, what kind of strategy experience can you have?

Even if it's a volunteer project working for a nonprofit, can you get staffed on something where you're developing a strategy for an organization where you can prove your strategy chops? You can say, here's a final report that I wrote. I've scrubbed off the names, but you can take a look and see how I think about these things. It's always better to demonstrate that you've already done it than to try to convince someone, well, maybe I can do it.

Anita Brick: Oh, totally agree. People want to. They want a data of zero when they hire. And the more things we can do to ratchet it down to lower risk, the better off both sides will be. It's our responsibility. Whomever is looking for the role, looking for the job, looking to make that pivot. It's kind of our responsibility to make the case.

Chris Yeh: And I think that I look at it as if you were pitching a startup to a venture capitalist. You have to do two different things. The first thing is to establish the upside, but you also have to mitigate the downside. Everyone's always taking a risk. If you fund a startup, chances are it's going to go out of business.

If you hire someone, there's probably only a 5050 chance they work out. Everything that you can do to de-risk the situation increases either your chances of getting funded, the valuation at which you're funded, the chances of getting hired, the salary which is higher, the position in which you're hired. It's all about limiting the risk and then demonstrating the upside.

Anita Brick: Got it. Well, there was an even student who actually was asking about the investing side, and he said when raising a seed round, is there a rule of thumb regarding how much equity to give up and how much per round? That's a really complicated question. I mean, if you think about it, you know, it's pretty simple in the words but complicated in the answer there. Any way to think about that?

Chris Yeh: I will refer back to something that the great Bill Salmon, who was one of my professors at HBS, told us in our entrepreneurial finance class. He said he talked to one of his friends who was a venture capitalist, and asked him, how much equity do you take in a company? And he says, a third. And Bill asked him, well, why a third?

It doesn't matter how much the company is valued, what the business is like. Well, we've been doing this a long time and a third seems to work pretty well. This has evolved over time. It's not necessarily a third anymore. I think increasingly, because we are in a market where it is a seller's market as opposed to a buyer's market, at those times it becomes more like a quarter or a fifth.

But really, if you think about it from the standpoint of being a private investor, like a venture capitalist, you need to have enough ownership to be meaningful. You're probably not going to go under 20%. And on the other hand, at least professional experienced investors understand that if you take too much of the equity, there's no motivation for the entrepreneurs who are the ones doing the actual work.

So it's never going to be the case to take more than 50%. If somebody is trying to take more than 50% of your company, they obviously don't know what they're doing. You shouldn't take it. So it could be anywhere from 20 to 50% and again, a third, a quarter, a fifth somewhere in that range probably just makes sense.

Anita Brick: Got it. So do you have time for a couple more questions?

Chris Yeh: Absolutely.

Anita Brick: Okay. Wonderful. Along the lines of the whole investor and some people would say the really hot market in Silicon Valley and evening students asked for two years. VCs have warned us of a private localized bubble in Silicon Valley. Why haven't we seen it pop?

Chris Yeh: Excellent question. So there are two answers to that. The first is, to some extent it has popped or at least deflated some. So if you talk to folks in Silicon Valley, they will tell you that the standards for financing a company have changed radically over the past 18 months. If you just think about the papers, 18 months ago, all they could talk about were unicorns, unicorns, unicorns and all these amazing companies.

And since then, we've seen plenty of those companies go out of business, be marked down, run into trouble, and so on and so forth. It's sometimes funny when I look at a book or an article talking about these high fliers, and it can shift with shocking suddenness. Two years ago, show me over in China is unstoppable the world's most valuable privately held startup.

And now what we read about is, well, their phone sales are actually declining. But there's a lot of things that are cyclical, and it's hard for people to necessarily just keep growing all along. And I think that there is an increasing recognition of, hey, you know, everything's not just going to go up forever. We have to actually distinguish between these things.

So I think that there has been some deflation, but I think the other reason we haven't seen it, pop, is there are other trends that are keeping it going. First of all, the companies that are highly valued, they actually have revenues. They actually have a business. Even a company that's famous for losing money, like Uber, is losing money.

Strategically, Uber is losing money in order to enter new markets. But they tend to at least, say, and I tend to believe them, that they are actually cash flow positive in core markets where they've been for a while. It's a mature business. A lot of these companies are not the.com crazy valuation. No revenue companies of all these are companies that have significant revenues and significant businesses, whether or not they're worth the extremely high valuations they've received.

You can question that, but you can't say, well, they're worthless. In contrast, I remember back during the.com boom, there were companies like the globe or perhaps even Comdex, which went public, was worth $2 billion, had trailing 12 month revenues of 600,000, again, 600,000, less than a million. You could go public and be worth $2 billion. So a different situation.

I will say that there is another factor that's interesting, which is that Silicon Valley has become more and more prominent. You know, in the 1980s it was sort of a niche. And in the 1990s it became a lot more famous because of the internet and web 2.0. I think that Silicon Valley has gradually been on the upswing, largely because its products are becoming part of everyone's everyday life.

In the 80s, there's some rich people who had personal computers. In the 1990s, most people had access to the internet, and today everyone has a smartphone. Everyone has what's essentially a supercomputer in their pocket. It affects everyone's lives. So as a result, you see a lot of old economy companies. At least that's what we call them. Back in the dot.com days, jumping in, there were a lot of existential threats.

People are worried and so they're willing to pay to make those worries go away. And you can see that in General Motors, buying a company called Cruze that was designed to do self-driving cars hadn't released a product GM bought them for $1 billion. Uber understands that it needs to get self-driving cars, right, because if it doesn't get self-driving cars right, its business will evaporate.

It's an existential threat. So essentially hired the entire Carnegie Mellon University computer science and computer vision department and also bought a company called auto, which is going to do self-driving trucks created by a number of folks who used to be at Google doing their self-driving cars, bought them for 800 million before they released a product. I think they finally ran a truck just recently, but they bought them, you know, 6 or 9 months ago for 800 million.

So when people are afraid, when they say, wow, I am worried about existential threats to my business and they can make these purchases, then they go ahead and do that because they say to save themselves, this is insurance. This is a way to counteract things that could go very wrong. Walmart paid $3 billion for Jet, an e-commerce site that most of you probably never heard of.

And it's because that's the only way they can get the talent to compete with Amazon, whether that will succeed or not, I'm skeptical, but Walmart believes that they don't respond to Amazon. Amazon will eventually defeat them, and they have to take whatever chance they can, whatever the cost, in order to head off that possibility.

Anita Brick: Well, we could talk about this for hours. This is very interesting, very exciting. And we don't have crystal balls. You're giving us a good picture of where the trends are and where they're converging. Very interesting stuff. Very exciting. Yeah, it's a little scary, but very scary for the firms that are not going to be around. Things come and go so much faster than they did even during the dotcom, the late 90s in the.com era. Nothing, right?

Chris Yeh: Well, you can see for example. Yeah, for quite some time Yahoo was the most powerful internet company on the planet. And as we know, it's just gone away. It had essentially a 20 year run from industry titans, also ran to eventually being shuffled off to Verizon. That's not atypical, right? What's atypical is a company like Amazon, which has had essentially the same run and has built itself into an unstoppable retail force.

I think somebody said somewhere that approximately a third of all retail sales in the United States are somehow facilitated by Amazon, which is astonishing to me. Or maybe it's a third of e-commerce, but it's a ridiculous number. Again, nothing lasts forever. Do I believe 300 years from now all things will be purchased by Amazon? Probably not. The old saying goes. all good things must come to an end. Because if they stayed good, they wouldn't.

Anita Brick: Excellent point. So one final question. What are three things that you believe someone could start doing today if they want to be an MBA and succeed in Silicon Valley?

Chris Yeh: I think the first thing is something I mentioned before. They should start reading. They should start taking in information and understanding what their context is. We used to live in a world where the credential was enough. Hey, you have an MBA from Booth, you have an MBA from Harvard Business School. That's enough. That's enough to open the door and get you in.

Now you have to demonstrate that you really understand the context you're in. As we've touched on, that context is constantly changing. The world of venture finance is totally different today than it was 18 months ago. And the only way you can know these things is by continuing to take in information reading first and foremost, because that is something you can control, and it will provide you with a very broad set of information sources.

In addition to that, the second point would be you need to develop relationships. You need to be out there talking with people that things don't end up in the paper because they're on the cutting edge, things that are out of the paper because they bubbled around for long enough, and the press finally said, wow, we can't ignore this anymore.

You need to get out in front of that. And the way to get in front of that is to talk to as many smart people as possible. It's not just talking to smart people because they're super important, are world famous. That helps if you can manage that. But just talk to people who are thoughtful, who are doing their own thinking, and not just outsourcing it to the press.

It's important to know what everyone else is thinking, but then it's important to develop your own thoughts and to really try to find things ahead of the curve. The final thing I would say is in Silicon Valley, there's a lot of uncertainty. Nobody really knows what's going to work. I just saw today that Verizon was buying a vessel. Vessel is a company started by Jason Koehler.

He was the guy who created Hulu. He had raised $150 million from the smartest people in the world, top tier venture firms, Jeff Bezos, you name it, to create the next online video giant. And today it was sold to Verizon. They're going to shut down the service in another month or two. That's just one in a giant line of examples of companies where they have the greatest management.

They have people who've done it before. They have money from the smartest people in the world, and it fails. And you can look at this list going all the way back to, you know, web band back in the.com boom. If even the smartest people in the world are wrong most of the time, what do you do? You have to experiment.

You have to try a lot of things. And MBAs are very tempted to go into paralysis by analysis. And the notion is, hey, I am so smart. I will figure out exactly the right thing to do, and then I will do it. And the answer is, okay, even if you were that smart by the time you figured out exactly the right thing to do, quote unquote, circumstances would have changed.

It would no longer be the right thing. You'd have to then say, okay, I kick off another project to figure out what to do, and then two years later, you wouldn't have done anything. But the best thing to do is, as the Marines would say, execute your plan. That is imperfect, but with aggression, with energy. And that's going to get you a lot farther than coming up with a perfect plan that's coming up too late.

So try things, do things you know, the things that seem to work that you enjoy. Do more of them. The things that don't work that you don't enjoy, do less of them. And over time, hopefully that will shape the arc of your career.

Anita Brick: That's wonderful advice. It is to the point that action over overly overly overly extended analysis clearly is what works. Thank you. Thank you for sharing this time. Your career arc is continuing to rise, so thank you for carving out a little time for us today and sharing your wisdom with us.

Chris Yeh: My pleasure. Obviously, as an MBA myself, I have a lot of sympathy for today's students and I just try to pass that along and take that pay it forward stance as best I can.

Anita Brick: And you did it quite well. So thank you so much.

Chris Yeh: Thank you Anita.

Anita Brick: Thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.