PEOPLE CONCEIVED US AS COMMODITY, BUT THEY WERE MISTAKEN TO THINK WE CANNOT DIFFERENTIATE
DREW’S ADVICE TO HBS FRESH GRADUATES: DON’T SPEND TOO MUCH TIME ON MAPPING THE PERFECT PATH What would be your advice to students who are graduating from HBS, who are either looking to start tech companies or join other tech companies in key roles? Don’t spend too much time on mapping the perfect path or checking off all the boxes. Some Some think they need a whole portfolio of experiences before they’re ready to start something of their own - but that’s not true. In fact, the earlier you start the clock the more advantages you will have. The best training for starting a company is to join a startup, particularly a small startup, where the learning experience is much more steep. That would get you much closer to starting a company than working at a large company like Google. But, these are not ‘hard and fast’ rules. For every rule, there’s always someone who didn’t follow it and still succeeded. What is the grand vision for Dropbox for the next ten years? We see a big opportunity to re-imagine management and how team works. If you make tools better - you make teams better. Even today there is a lot of room for the everyday tools that we all use - emails, text messages, online documents etc. What tools will we have tomorrow, that will make today look like madman? That’s what we’re spending a lot of time of - better tools, better systems.
Itamar Zur (HBS '17) is the co-founder of Veho Technologies - a crowdsourcing platform that enables anyone with a car to become a delivery driver. He decided to become an entrepreneur after co-producing Startup Camel Podcast - where he interviewed some of Israel's top startup founders and learned from their experience about entrepreneurship.
In his free time he is a huge dog fan and an avid follower of the NBA.
Pippa Lamb (MBA ‘18) worked for the British government in Beijing and Shanghai before transitioning to J.P. Morgan in London and Hong Kong, focusing on tech and consumer investing. Pippa is a Fulbright Scholar under the British Friends of Harvard Business School Program. You can follow her on Twitter @pippalamb.
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