My brother recently proposed the following framework for thinking about career choices or rather, choices “for your next gig.” It is a capital-oriented framework where traditional capital (money, equity) is just one part of it. He defines five different types of capital:
- Financial capital: traditional capital falls into this category e.g. How much money will you make? How much equity will you get? What will the equity be worth?
- Knowledge capital: what you are going to learn / what will you know when you leave this position e.g. People management? Project management? Ruby on Rails? Running a consumer website? Consumer marketing?
- Social capital: who are you going to build relationships as a result of your work e.g. Do you meet other marketing folks? Strong technologists? CIO’s in financial services companies? VC’s who could be potential future investors?
- Brand capital: how does this opportunity fit into your larger narrative and how does it develop your personal brand e.g. I have built deep infrastructure companies all my life and with this opportunity, I did it in the consumer space. I had spent a lot of time selling traditional enterprise software and now moved over to selling SaaS.
- Happiness: No capital suffix attached to this one e.g. Will you be happy when you come home everyday? Will you like the people you work with? Will you find what you do fulfilling? etc.
Rating my various opportunities against these categories and how much I would grow in each has been helpful as I think about what’s next for me.
Comments 2
My criteria:
Is the vision gigantic?
Do I have an illogical passion for the vision?
Am I surrounded by brilliant people who execute?
Everything else is secondary.
I also recommend Marc Andreessen’s career advice:
http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/09/the-pmarca-gu-1.html
http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/the-pmarca-guid.html
http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/the-pmarca-gu-1.html
Posted 22 Dec 2007 at 6:01 pm ¶Looked through Marc Andreessen’s excellent posts. His suggestion of thinking of your career as a portfolio and as each choice carrying its own risks and rewards makes sense and is a good place to start as one thinks at a high-level of the various choices worth pursuing. Nivi’s criteria similarly are appropriate to begin thinking about what’s next.
The capital framework described here is specifically useful once you’re down to a collection of choices and want to compute the risk/reward/value of each one so that you can “measure” / compare them against each other in a meaningful way.
Posted 14 Jan 2008 at 11:45 am ¶Post a Comment