since leaving msft and joining ka, about a dozen friends or friends-of-friends have asked for advice as they make similar searches and transitions into the non-profit world. the ups and downs of life are unpredictable, but with effort and luck, fortuitous things may sometimes occur. here are a few notes that i’ve accumulated after bumbling about.
- the lowest hanging fruit is to ask your friends. people know people who know people who know people! at least one person along the chain will have some helpful nugget of information. i actually first heard about ka’s job post from a friend-of-a-friend, and i’m forever grateful to our mutual friend for thinking of me and connecting us! an unrelated email came a few days later from another friend who encouraged me to check out ka.
- to facilitate these serendipitous conversations and emails, it helps to know what field you’re interested in and to engage with people in that space. if in college, those student groups/clubs are stupendous! you get to meet lots of cool classmates, and as in the case of social-e asb, you get to visit a solid bunch of social enterprises, meet their founding teams, and learn about their work.
- if the above two bullet points don’t seem to help, remember that you live in the age of the internet. i looked at nearly every relevant foundation (one good but non-exhaustive list is here), and i clicked through to all the interesting people or organizations they had supported. for completeness, i skimmed through all the typical vcs’ portfolios. upon finding an interesting company, i checked whether they participated in any cool conferences. if so, who else was at that conference or, better yet, who else was on the same panel as them? for example, sal recently gave the morning keynote to summit 2011. if you’re interested in education + entrepreneurship, their program would be a great resource to check out. countless hours of clicking, but well worth it. how else do you hear about something that you didn’t know existed?
- finally, here are a few interesting places to kickstart your search. i don’t know much more about them past the average googling, so please don’t ask me for more information! :) partners in health and their emr system, frontlinesms, txteagle, ushahidi, sparked (microvolunteering), kiva, vittana, code for america, and global health corps.
- okay, one last point. to frame the search: start with a wide net, get a sense of the space, then focus on (or figure out) what you care about. narrow your search to places that fit those criteria. when considering life post-msft, i knew generically that i wanted to “do good” at a “small organization”. i eventually narrowed down “organization” to mean a non-profit, of which there are over 1.5 million (did you know that?). many of them focus their efforts internationally, which is a bit too nebulous for someone like me (with no relevant experience) to grasp. after more rumination, k-12 education was the thing for me — it was important to me that i had prior experience (having lived through k-12 as a student and teaching and tutoring a tiny bit afterwards), and hearing about ka provoked immediate empathy and conviction. “small” started at “smaller than msft” and later shrunk down to less than 15 people, with the requirement that not everyone was a recent graduate. i think you get the picture. :)
if you’re looking, good luck! thanks for tuning in.
