Welcome to the fourth issue of The Commons digest!
This is our bi-weekly round-up of community news, relevant content and anything that can help us level up together. As always, reach out if you have any feedback or if you’d like anything featured in here. Now onto the update 👇
Insights we’re pondering 💭
One reason career moves are so scary? Opportunity cost. Time and money are finite resources. We can only invest so much of both in the pursuit of a career move. And when it comes down to actually making that change, you want to be certain it’s the right one. But how? Wafic, one of our founding mentors, had a great post about this recently.
He likes to think about minimizing opportunity cost in terms of Explore & Exploit. This refers to a problem in probability theory called the explore-exploit dilemma (Wafic was previously a data scientist). One simple example is the act of finding something to watch on Netflix: how do you balance browsing the endless number of titles (explore) with just watching something already (exploit)?
When it comes to your career, most people will tell you to explore when you’re young through things like electives, internships and job changes, then exploit via specialization and expertise as you grow older.
Wafic’s perspective is that you should explore widely, and for as long as you can. That new field that’s adjacent to yours? Find an excuse to conduct research into it as part of your current role. Bitten by the entrepreneur bug? See if you can moonlight as a founder without quitting your job. And if you really want experience with a new skill set like data analysis? Put your money where your mouth is and find some freelance work.
Once you feel like you’ve acquired enough skills and gained a sufficient understanding into what a new role entails, you can look for full time gigs. This strategy is genius in that it minimizes your opportunity cost twice over. First, by increasing your likelihood of actually picking the right thing to focus on. And second, by minimizing the risk that if you do get bored in your current role, you’re not beholden to it forever. The best part? You never have to stop exploring.
Check out the full article here. It’s the first in a series, so keep an eye out for the others.
Community Spotlight 💡
Today we’re featuring Luis Martinez-Moure. Luis is a Strategy & Operations Manager at DoorDash, focusing on merchant revenue and pricing. He’s also a founding mentor at The Commons. In fact, Luis was one of the first people we spoke with when we started the Strategy + Operations Program back in 2020.
Luis began his career in commercial strategy at Delta Air Lines before joining the BizOps team at Instacart during a period of hyper-growth. He knows a ton about moving from massive enterprises to fast-growing tech companies. Luis is also the co-host of Need to Know, our podcast. He’s passionate about sharing ideas, he always seeks out new perspectives and he’s an inveterate lover of podcasts. He’s also deeply empathetic and a great storyteller, which is probably why he is such a good interviewer.
Fall’21 Applications are Open! 🎉
We've just opened applications for the next cohort of our Strategy + Operations Program, which begins on October 30th! This will be our 12th cohort, and the last of 2021. One humble ask: meeting other great learners is incredibly important to us. Could you take a few minutes today to identify any friends for the next cohort? Anyone you refer to us can bypass the application and interview with me directly. They'll also receive one of our select community scholarships, which entitles them to 30% off the cost of the program. To show our gratitude, we'll send you a gift of your choosing from our new merch shop 🙏
Events @ The Commons 📆
- Tuesday October 5, 2021: We held our latest Pitch Yourself workshop. We loved hearing all of your elevator pitches. Thanks to everyone who came out!
- Thursday October 7, 2021 (TODAY): Part II. of our Unpacking Venture Capital series. Join Kris and Juan-Diego for a collaborative roundtable where we’ll chat about their lessons from working in the space, how the VC business model works, what the current funding environment means for startups and more.
- Thursday October 21: Our primer on Strategic Finance roles in tech, led by the inimitable Sean Newman. Considering a pivot from banking, accounting or corporate finance into tech? Sean did that 3 years ago when he joined Uber. He’ll break down different types of StratFin roles, what they’re actually like and give candid advice on making the jump. Many of you asked for this session and we’re delivering! Friends outside of The Commons community are welcome 🙂Sign up here.
The Commons gratitude 🤝
Thanks to everyone who has been posting in the #gratitude channel. We’ve loved reading about the ways in which all of our mentors and alumni have had an impact on each other’s lives and careers. Please keep them coming ❤️
#community-wins 🥇
Congratulations to our alumni of Cohort 11 of the Strategy + Operations Program, who wrapped up the cohort last weekend! They did a phenomenal job on Presentation Day. Here’s some of us on the kickoff day a few weeks ago:
We also celebrated some hiring announcements:
- Becca (Strategy + Operations Program, Cohort 9) recently started on the New Verticals team at DoorDash in San Francisco, joining over 15 other community memberds at DoorDash! 🏃
- Strachan (Strategy + Operations Program Cohort 8) landed a role at Synctera 💸
- Janet (Strategy + Operations Program, Cohort 11) recently started as Operations Manager at Properly 🏗️
- Kelly (Strategy + Operations Program, Cohort 11) just joined Rappi 🚲
Please be sure to reach out to them with a word or two of congratulations!
Job Opportunities 💼
- Ada is hiring a Chief of Staff.
- Gopuff is hiring for over 40 roles in the US.
- Notion is hiring for its Business Operations team.
- Yelp is hiring for its BizOps team. Reach out to Fernando if you’re interested
Head on over to #job-openings in our Slack community to see more openings like these!
One (fun) last thing
Alex Palmer recently met up with Oni and Rebecca from her team in Cohort 8 ❤️
Meeting up with fellow community members? First round of drinks or coffees are on us. Simply DM us before your meetup 🍻
That’s all for this issue ✌️ If you’d like to access more news and content before the next update, you can hop on over to Slack. P.S. please give us a follow on Instagram - we’re bringing the community to your IG scroll :)
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