I had a couple interesting discussions with my fellow classmates over the week during my trip to Silicon Valley. One concerned picking "hot opportunities" and "hot startups". I want to share some of that discussion and add another thought.A 2nd year friend gave some pretty good advice to everyone around the table. We ended up mentioning the same thing to the people who were asking us about picking startups -- basically, you have to pick something you're really interested in. Or put another way: don't just pick what's hot.
Something I forgot to mention at that lunch was that it's nearly impossible to accurately pick the startups that are going to be successful anyways. Look, if a VC has a view at so many startup opportunities and typically ends up with a 30% success rate, how are you as a first or second year student going to accurately pick a successful startup? It's nearly impossible.
The point is that you shouldn't be a mercenary when it comes to work. Life is too short to just do what's hot and by now I hope I've convinced you that it's hard to pick the successes anyways.
But more importantly, you're not going to be truly great at your work if you're not excited about it. If you're a startup mercenary, you probably won't put in the extra 10% that at the margin is actually the difference between success and failure.
