We spoke with Tristan Walker, MBA ’10, VP of Business Development at foursquare. Before taking his current role, he worked at Twitter (when it was 15 employees) for 7 months. Loves his job, product, and culture of company. He mentioned that they have only lost one employee thus far. Unique.
foursquare is a geographical location based social network that incorporates gaming elements.
Tristan spoke about how he read an article about foursquare, got very excited about the company and then emailed the CEO of foursquare 8 times. His blog about the experience.
Growth
- 20 people in SF office, plan to have 50 by the end of year. 80 total overall (SF/NY), want 150 by end of the year.
- Business Development team includes 9 people, 3 are undergraduate interns from NYU and Columbia. The team works on strategic partnerships that will “mainstream the brand”, while Tristan focuses on partnerships that are “industry changing” (eg, the partnership with American Express).
Roles for MBAs
- Merchant Relations
- Media
- Monetization
- Business Development
Chris Child ’12 is Product Management Intern. Foursquare posted a role in early May. It was sent over the GSB Blast. It took Foursquare 3 days to hire. They are very fast at bringing the right people on board. Foursquare hires for the skillset, not the MBA; your background is more important. As it grows bigger, the MBA will likely become more of a screening device than it is now.
Advice
- Tristan feels that you can get any job if you really want it. You should be so enamored with the product you’d be willing to work even if you didn’t get hired to do it.
- Make sure you use the product or service
- Focus your search – only those you are really excited about
- Don’t assume needs of a company without research. Figure out what are the big needs that aren’t resourced.
- You can be agnostic to industry, but love the product
- Have some humility
- Silicon Valley is small. Talk to everyone. Tristan spoke with people at 20 different venture capital firms. When you do meet with people, offer to help them in return.