A biography for Kathryn Minshewhasn’t been written yet.
“I tend to find you have to be fairly vulnerable to get something... to get a perspective worth having. Which can be controversial. But I find telling someone what you're thinking about, what you want, and what you're afraid of can often help them give guidance.”
“Slouching or leaning back may send the wrong signals. When you sit down for a formal interview, lean forward to show interest and active listening.”
“For me, I spent months on job boards in 2010 and was frustrated by the experience. It's antiquated and clunky, and there was nothing about a particular job posting that helped me favor one company over another. You literally get a list of 5,000 jobs that look the same.”
“Launching a start-up, you need to get a lot done quickly. Every day is different. Everyone pitches in with everything. It's easy for the founding team to say, 'We're flexible. We all help out with everything!' But when it comes to making decisions - that flexibility can spell inefficiency and disaster.”
“For almost the first year of The Muse's life, I would do 5 to 8 networking events a week. And I don't necessarily think that's the right path for everyone, but I realized that as an entrepreneur, one of my strengths was finding the right people who could help us. I didn't come into startups with any network.”
“Millennials can be very hardworking, but it's easier to tell the story of the ones who are entitled.”
“Done right, a performance review is one of the best opportunities to encourage and support high performers and constructively improve your middle- and lower-tier workers.”
“It's not just hours and pay that are important anymore. People want to know what the company is like, what the culture is.”
“When I was still a bright-eyed McKinsey consultant, I remember hitting a point where I didn't know what to do next, and someone gave me the book, 'How Remarkable Women Lead,' and I read it and scribbled in it, and it felt like a guide in helping me figure out my career.”
“My first company failed completely. And it failed at about ten months old. I had about 12 months of savings, so when it failed I was thinking: 'Do I go back to work?' And at that point I believed so deeply in what I was doing that I couldn't imagine anything else other than trying to make this business work.”
“When talking to first-time entrepreneurs, I often ask them: 'How do you know that people want your product or service?' As you can expect, the answer is often that they don't yet, but will know once they launch. And they're right. That's why it's critical to launch as quickly as possible so you can get that feedback.”
“Keeping a 'CEO blog' or 'founder's blog' can be a great platform for engaging your users in a nontraditional way, reaching people outside of your product pitch and building rapport without selling them anything except a belief in your ideas.”
“Get your product in front of actual, living, breathing strangers. Your college roommate's approval does not mean there's market demand.”
“When The Daily Muse initially wanted to launch a job board, our first ideas were insanely (and needlessly) complex. We wanted to integrate with social networks, gather rich personal data to build predictive algorithms, and put together numerous cool visualization tools before launching out to the world. We were just sure users would love it!”
“Networking doesn't have to be all about talking shop over appetizers and bad chardonnay - do it in a way that works for you.”
“The Muse should be a trusted destination for answers. A hand when you need one. Someone to talk you through tough decisions or situations. A starting point.”
“We knew when we started the Daily Muse, we wanted a recruiting-focused business model rather than an advertising-focused one. We felt like publishers were being forced to go to more and more extreme lengths to monetize through advertising.”
“Know your career values: Not your parents' values, not your friends', but what you personally value in work. For me, it's things like moving quickly and scrappily, ownership and authority over my work, and flexibility.”
“As a general rule, most recent university graduates know far more about U.S. economic history and 'The Lord of the Flies' than about how the modern workplace functions and how to succeed in it. Yet come senior year of college, it couldn't be more important or more timely to learn the basics of getting a job.”
“I grew up thinking that I would be an ambassador secret agent. From age 14 to right before I graduated college, I was really interested in the foreign service and the United Nations. I learned to speak French, Turkish, and all these things.”