We spoke on the phone and she sent me a take-home assignment which seemed straightforward enough to do.Įmail for the Take Home. My answers here. The referral worked on getting an email back from Jac, a recruiter. I likely won’t last long at a company so big for more than 3-6 months anyway, but at least I’ll have my visa.” I thought to myself, “Let’s get the job, get the visa renewed, and then see what to do next. I needed my visa and time was running out. He referred me for a different, and more analytics-focused, role. I told him that if the PM I had met wasn’t interested in the next step, I’d still be interested in other roles. I was later told that the PM thought I was smart, but also thought I spoke too quick. To say that the interview didn’t go well would be an understatement. Once there, he introduced me to another PM who was also working the weekend and left us for an impromptu interview…surprise, surprise. I swung by the office at 116 Montgomery on a weekend to meet with him. You could say the demo was interesting-ask him about it. ![]() Some backstory: Simon and I originally met in 2014 when he was working at Robinhood doing PR and I was running LA Hacks where the founders ended up showcasing their app for the very first time publicly. On LinkedIn, I noticed that I knew a few folks who worked there, including Simon who I had last met in NYC when he was fundraising for his company at that time. I looked up the company and at first glance, it appeared to meet my three criteria. Serendipitously, Vedika, my sister, who was then working at Stripe told me she swung by the offices of a hot new startup where her friend Logan worked at a place called Opendoor. There were a bunch of companies with interesting roles, but nothing really matched all three. Reading books or medium articles were not a substitute here. This was something I needed to experience first-hand. Scale: I hadn’t worked at a place yet that found product-market fit, scaled, and needed real management.Talent & Culture: I wanted to work at a place where people I knew and respected worked.Joining a full-stack startup: Having grown up around operations heavy businesses in India, I wanted to spend time working on a project that would have the whole stack-build the software and use it too.Instead, I established criteria of what I thought was important to me knowing it would help me make a decision. However, a role itself didn’t seem like the most important pillar when looking for the next opportunity. As I thought about roles, I had experience and was excited to work on products, analytics, and growth. I didn’t know what role I wanted…I didn’t have any specific career goals other than being entrepreneurial and having an impact. Back when I initially left Polymail I emailed a few folks asking, “If you see something interesting, let me know” but it was time to ping people again. In general, job searches aren’t a particularly fun experience but I got started on mine. Because this threw a wrench in my plans to start something new again, I needed to find a job (and quick). I had only until Jan’17 left in the US unless I found a job that could sponsor my F-1 visa’s STEM extension. While I was dreaming about the next big thing to build, I also had a constraint- my visa status- that I hadn’t fully grasped the impact until an international student counsellor at UCLA reminded me, in November, that I had under 90 days left on my existing F-1 visa. My notes/sketches show me all the things I thought were interesting: another productivity app □, a food-related consumer brand, something blockchain-related, a smart factory, and new retail experiences. I spent most of October 2016 thinking about would follow. So when I left Polymail after we raised our round post-YC, with no plan, the first thing to do was figure out what should I build next. Starting things is my default, whether it was thinking about how to capitalize on the fish wire craze in middle school or starting companies with friends after college. Looking at my notes from Nov-Dec’16, here’s the story. It’s been almost 2 years since I joined Opendoor and what an incredible ride it’s been.
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