Excess Introductions at Top Companies

I spent my first weekend in the bay area… away from the bay. A friend and I jetted off to Santa Cruz (backdrop of the video below) for the weekend to enjoy beaches, margaritas, and garlic fries. Week one at Google offered me a chance to live in “excess”: an excess of free meals, an excess of bright people to work with, and an excess of introductions. Hence the inspiration for this video, which looks at basic strategies when meeting engineers at top companies:

Here, I will take a moment to comment on Ivy League schools and other top-rated universities across the globe. If you did not attend one of these (like this lowly University of Colorado graduate – ha!) then you are also probably blissfully unaware of the subtleties of the different Princeton “eating clubs” or implications of attending Stanford instead of Yale for computer science. There is a world of culture around this. Thus, my solution is what I tend to do with all topics that may lead to a dramatic exchange… avoid it like the plague. While I recognize that many people attending these institutions may have a tremendous amount of personal pride in their university (I do too, by the way), it seems appropriate to drop any extra ego at the door when entering a building like Google. Everyone made it here through the same process, so perhaps let’s annihilate the defensive lunchtime banter about why Carnegie Mellon has more modern teaching practices than Olin. Why? Because it leaves us more time to plot about taking over the world…just kidding. Kind of.