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).
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.
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.
