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Stanford business student
Greg Yap
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I SAID EARLIER that I have no current offers. But I
have had two offers from prior employers, and I’ve managed to turn them
both down. Each had great people, challenging projects and probably better
pay than anything else I’ll find. Sometimes I think I must be nuts. But
let me try to explain.
Almost everyone
I’ve met in my job quest asks me why, after having spent a summer in
venture capital, I’m not going back into the field full-time. After all,
venture capital, especially for drug development and health care, is going
strong. Sometimes I feel like I’m bucking the trend—so many M.B.A.s are
taking these types of jobs that I spent a half hour with one venture
capitalist before realizing that he had assumed I wanted a VC job. A
friend, also a venture capitalist, told me she gets several calls a week
from M.B.A.s asking about jobs in her field (of which she knows few) and
hardly any about jobs with biotech companies (of which she knows several).
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Don’t get me
wrong, I loved working for a VC firm. The lifestyle was reasonable, the
pay unlimited and the company’s outlook matched my own—what’s not to like?
But when they asked me to come back, it came down to a simple choice: Do I
want to make stuff, or do I want to fund other people so they can make
stuff? For me, the answer is simple: Right now, I want to make stuff. As a
VC investor, I’d be watching portfolios and staying above most of the
details. My time would be occupied with troubled investments, rather than
major successes. And I think more operating experience would make me a
better investor and adviser. So, for these reasons, I chose not to take
the job.
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Diary of a Job
Hunter |
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A Stanford B-school
student on his 21st-century job search |
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Day 1:
The Current
State of Affairs |
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Day 2:
What
Matters Most |
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Day 3:
Where the
Grads Are |
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Day 4:
Decisions,
Decisions |
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Day 5:
Biotech
Bound |
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The
next offer was also appealing. The consulting firm I worked for gave me a
loan for business school that would be forgiven if I returned to work for
them after I graduated. We’re talking $70,000 worth of debt, miraculously
wiped away. Plus, I’d be working with a burgeoning biotechnology group
along with two of my favorite mentors and a few of my closest friends. But
my decision came down to the same thing: Do I want to make stuff or to
help others make stuff? Many of my classmates enter consulting because the
broad exposure helps them to decide where to specialize, or because they
can try working in a new industry in order to see how much they like it.
Having chosen biotech already, those reasons don’t hold for me. Consulting
is like parachuting: you dive into different companies and situations, get
up to speed as quickly as possible, solve problems, then get out of the
way. At the end of a project, I believe that the clients, not the
consultants, should lead. I want to own the project and to be responsible
for its results. I’ve never taken on so much debt so fast, but I closed
off consulting. Now its just a matter of finding the right job for me.
Greg Yap is a native of Silicon Valley who was briefly but happily
exiled to the east coast at Princeton University, where he graduated with
an A.B. in molecular biology. Since then, he has held positions in
business development at Affymetrix, a Silicon Valley genomics company; in
venture capital at Bay City Capital, a San Francisco health care merchant
bank; and in management consulting at McKinsey & Co. He will receive
his M.B.A. degree at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in June.
© 2001 Newsweek,
Inc.
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Looking Beyond The Dot Bomb (Newsweek Magazine, 28 April 2001)
