I loved my time in school but it wasn’t until I left graduate school at the University of Washington that my real education began (beyond having learned how to learn). Looking back at it, I’ve had a great career working on Microsoft’s early cloud-computing efforts, founding and then selling my own company, leading software development of webOS at Palm, then engineering at Twitter, and now, investing and advising young start-ups. In each and every experience, I made mistakes, fixed them, and made some more. I may have even notched a few wins along the way.
In school, we are often taught how to find solutions to problems. But in the “real world,” no one’s there to walk you through a problem step by step. My experiences allowed me to carve my own path and figure out solutions on my own. The best education that I ever received was outside of the classroom. I can recall working at SRI for Carol Green (Sr. Director) doing informatics works on human liver enzymes – and having to figure out on my own the right approach and attributes that we would need to analyze to get the information that we would need to report a result (if interesting). Beyond the specific experience, Dr. Green provided my guidance professionally that I still apply to this day – “try again, we will eventually figure this out”.
Last summer, I watched as our Fellows built relationships with my partners, learned from executives at the companies they worked at, contributed to world-changing products, and had fun while doing it.
That’s what I like about the KPCB Fellows Program: it gives students a chance to experience working in the real world and more importantly, at a fast-paced startup in Silicon Valley for the summer. This is the fourth year that KPCB has sponsored students interested in engineering, design and product management at some of the hottest start-ups around. This summer we’ve matched our fellows to companies like Uber, Flipboard, Nest, Betterworks, Spruce, Jawbone and Square. Last summer, I watched as our Fellows built relationships with my partners, learned from executives at the companies they worked at, contributed to world-changing products, and had fun while doing it. After the program, our fellows have gone on to work for our companies full-time or as interns, leaped over to other functional areas, moved over to venture investing, joined notable big tech firms, and even started companies themselves. These students are Silicon Valley’s next generation of leaders and innovators.
This year, we received more than 2,500 applications from hundreds of the top engineering, design and MBA programs. What makes our program special is the exceptional talent we attract from all over the country. Our 2015 class is made up of individuals from Harvard, RISD, Carleton College, CU Boulder, University of Washington, CalTech, Marist College, Arizona State, Bryn Mawr, NYU’s ITP program and more. We’ve seen interest grow every year for engineering fellowships as industry demand for engineering talent increases. We’ve also seen rising interest in design and product management, part of the emerging trend of designing easy-to-use technology for the masses. And this is why I am excited to welcome our 2015 class of fellows to the KPCB family. Welcome to ground zero for changing the world.