Tennis Server Interview Question – Stats

Your friend is a tennis player and he wants your help optimizing his serve aggression.

In tennis, the server begins play by tossing up a ball and hitting it towards the opponent. If the ball does not land in a designated area, a fault is declared and the server is allowed a second attempt. If that attempt results in a second fault, the point is forfeited and the server loses the point.

 

Your friend has has an aggressive serve and a conservative serve. The aggressive serve lands successfully in the designated area 61.9% of the time and results in a winning point 73.6% of the time. The conservative serve lands 91.1% of the time and results in a winning point 57.6% of the time.

 

How would you advise your friend serve to maximize their probability of winning the point?

Questions to ask if you are in your ideal role

I’ve been thinking about what an ideal job should look like and how I can evaluate future opportunities in life. The “Team and Product” framing comes from a talk I heard from Satya Patel at Homebrew Ventures. 

1) Team

a) Whole self at work – Are you able to be your “whole” self at work? Are you totally comfortable at work challenging others, grabbing people to work on a whiteboard and genuinely liking your coworkers as people and friends? Does everyone pass the “Would you be OK stuck in an airport with them?” test. Are you becoming a better person because of this experience?

b) Strategically aligned – Are you part of a real “team”? Do you feel like your efforts are part of a larger, coordinated effort to accomplish something together? Are the processes for getting things done effective and you feel like the business is getting better through innovation and iteration or are you constantly spinning your wheels? Is the strategy simple enough that everyone understand and explain the strategy in a compelling way? And explain how what they do matters for strategy?

c) Learning – Are you learning more than you could imagine about things you care about? Are there experts or soon-to-be-experts around you that are interested in teaching you? Are you acquiring valuable, marketable skills? Are the people around you crazy smart? 

2) Product

a) Does it matter – Does your product matter to the world? Are you able to wake up every morning convinced that what you are part of accomplishing will make the world a better and happier place? Can you convince both yourself and the people you care about that this is the case? Do your friends say “I’m so glad you are working on this problem” or “That sounds perfect for you”

b) Quality – You can’t put lipstick on a pig. Would people use this every month and ideally every day? Is it so good people want to tell their friends about? Do people feel delight when using the product? Are you truly better than your competition in the areas that matter most for the product? 

c) Growth potential- Are you in a space that is growing meaningfully? Can you envision a future where your product is dominant in the world? Do the people you’re working with understand growth and have an analytical problem solving approach that uses data effectively to make smarter decisions? 

3) Individual fit

a) Passion – Would you run through a wall for this company and the people you work with? Would other people there do the same? Do you wake up excited to go to work? Do you find yourself making compelling arguments and more energized after trying to convince people to join? 

b) Influence – Are you a required part of the team and process? Are your contributions valued and highly sought after? Is what you are doing making you an industry expert in your respective area? If things start going badly, would you be able to right the ship? 

c) Strength building – Do you get to play to your strengths in your role? Are you spending most of your day doing work you love? Are you learning from best in class people?  

Forms of advising

Advising can occur through 3 forms:

Consultative – advising what to do based on experience and logic but not directly accountable to the results and largely given as a recommendation to consider

Partership – collaboration working together with room to disagree but ultimately coming to a decision together

Direction – ordering specific actions with minimal room for deviation with a clear order and executor

The right one is situatuonally dependent but how much of what you are doing falls in these buckets and is that a desireable mix?

Explosive start-up growth review

While scaling a start-up has got to be a lot more difficult than someone could summarize in a few paragraphs, this attempt made me realize there are a few primary tactics:

http://nextshark.com/heres-how-10-startups-exploded-using-creative-marketing/

1) In-product referral (Hotmail, Dropbox, Groupon)

2) Jump on a growing/large platform (Spotify on Facebook, AirBnB on Craigslist)

3) Blogger/Early adopter community (Mint, Uber, Twitter)

4) Viral PR (Mailbox, DollarShaveClub)

Advice for getting summer internships

A Cornell alumni group on LinkedIn had a question about advice for getting summer internships. I think this is super hard and here’s my take:

 

I remember feeling overwhelming, unqualified and confused by the whole internship recruiting campus. I had no idea what I wanted to do. Some of my friends were talking about banking. Others were talking about consulting. I had no idea that those were both incredibly broad terms, what someone in those jobs actually did or what kind of skills I would gain. 

I also went about this process very inefficiently and feel incredibly fortunate to be where I am now 2.5 years out of college. I used the blanket application process to apply to anything and everything I could apply to. My stats on CareerNet were probably 0/20 freshman year, 1/30 Sophomore year, 2/40 Junior year (worked at The Nielsen Company in Operations) and 3/60 Senior year. So 6/150 or 4% overall.That ended up worked out for me because I applied to some jobs that few others were looking at and were actually great opportunities. For example, Vistaprint sells physical products like business cards to small businesses. Does not sound very sexy, but had a great culture, was located outside Boston, challenging and interesting work and taught me the highly sought after skill of analytics. I got super lucky and that luck was enabled by finding extracurricular activities I loved and was good at. 

What I would recommend: Think about what you will be getting in return and find something you are willing to work hard for. Keep the corner of your eye on what no one else is looking at because it is at the very least a higher chance of getting interview experience. Try to find the few companies and roles you really want based on your research and talking to upperclassman and then hone in. 

1) Do your research. Have a damn good reason for why you want to work somewhere and both what they could do for you and what you could do for them 
2) Make sure you are heard – try and squeeze any way you can in through employee referrals, connections to the recruiter, anything. Stand out from the pack. I know that’s hard so I just made sure to go really early for the information sessions and chat with the recruiters and other employees on campus. If you really want that job, you will have enough to talk about and it won’t be awkward or a waste of time. 

Advantages of SF over the East Coast

A friend asked me to compare living in SF with living back east and give my top 5 reasons for why its better in SF. Here you go:

1) Weather – 50s – 70s all year round with basically no rain so you always can be outdoors exercising, hiking, exploring the city and just generally enjoying the outdoors (I used to say that mankind built the indoors for a reason so I’m going to enjoy it and I say that way less often now)

2) People – Since there are so many east coast transplants here, everyone is familiar with not having any friends when they moved so people are quite welcome to let you enter social circles, which generally are less strict and defined than back east

3) Work – The tech wave is obviously impossible for me to avoid and I think that’s generally true for most. There’s a new start-up everywhere and so many great engineers that if you want to build something or just enjoy what is being built, this is the place to be. Also, rewarding, challenging work is the norm and not a luxury. Other luxuries like free food, free transport, high compensation are, for better or worse, generally assumed

4) Out of city attractions – You probably never leave NYC/Boston other than when work makes you but people leave SF all the time for a weekend in Tahoe, a summer vacation in Seattle, a day in Napa/Sonoma, Big Sur, LA weekend, party in Vegas, etc.

5) Acceptance for who you are – there is a pressure everywhere to conform and there are of course expectations and norms but there is a real acceptance of who you are. You can wear what you want, date who you want and it is encouraged to spiritually figure out who you are and accept it

Resolve mistakes, don’t regret them

We all make mistakes. As I was running late to a meeting I knew I should not have been, I realized that feeling frustrated and strayed off into a thought of “what ifs” like “what if they talk about … before I get there?!” is totally unproductive. Regardless of the mistake, the ensuing emotions of frustration and self-deprecation are inevitable.

 

This time, I realized all that and immediately thought, “what can I do about this?” First, I had to resolve the issue. How could I make anyone affected feel special that day and demonstrate that whatever mistake was an oversight and not one of disrespect.

Second, I had to make sure that mistake would not happen again. What had I failed to consider when I first made the mistake? Was there a miscommunication? Was I just being lazy? Is there some kind of underlying frustration that I was venting? 

Lastly, move on. If we’re talking about a big mistake, someone is going to be pissed and that is inevitable. After completing the first two steps of trying to make up for as best as reasonably possible and understanding what can be done to prevent the problem going forward, its not worth the energy to harp on this.

1) Make mistake

2) Minimize the amount of time spent pining and focus on how you can make up for it

3) Dig in later why the mistake was made and what kind of processes might be necessary to prevent it going forward

4) Move on

Moving to a new city

I moved from Boston to San Francisco a little over 4 months ago with 2 bags of luggage carrying mostly clothes and hit the reset button on my life starting a new job in a new city with few friends. Here’s what I advise looking back:

Advice before you get there:

• Use Facebook graph search to see friends who are already live there “My friends who live in San Francisco” and reach out to them to schedule phone chats 
• Reach out to everyone close to you and let them know about the move. It is a pretty interesting bit of news so they will all want to hear about it. If they ever happen to be visiting the city, they will now keep you in mind. Ask them if they happen to have any good friends in the area that they could introduce you to. The network speak for this is to turn secondary connection into primary connections. 
• Learn as much as you can doing research online and through phone chats about areas to live, how people find their apartments and generally what to keep in mind about the area (e.g. need to have a car, sketchy areas, fun stuff people do on the weekend) 
• Find a place to crash near where you would actually want to live so you can walk around and get a feel for the area. If that’s not possible, use Airbnb.

Advice for once you get there

• Try anything and be diligent about reaching out to your future friends. Go on adventures and make sure you say yes way more than you say no. I was never a fan of hiking back east but now I’ve gone hiking a bunch of times and got some awesome pictures, hung out with cool people and spent at least some time away from a computer.
• Rekindling old friendships and starting new ones takes effort so make the necessary investment sending emails during the week to set up dinners, drinks after work and plans for the weekend. Trying to figure out your Friday night on Friday afternoon is a luxury you won’t have for a while so plan ahead. You have to be the one to send emails and set up plans so don’t wait on other people to remember to invite you.
• Be bold and plan stuff yourself. The best thing I did was organize 50 person wine tour 2 months after I got to the city because I got to meet a bunch of new people who quickly became friends. 
• Look out for existing resources. San Francisco has “funcheapsf.com” and every city probably has some site that showcases free events, museam deals and other fun activities.
• Make sure to keep in touch with your friends from where you moved. It will be difficult and people will fade but prioritize who you really need to stay in touch with and make sure to set a good cadence (weekly? monthly? quarterly? semi-annually?) and stick to it. Sundays are basically my catch up day but I go out of my way to make sure I maintain my network.

Your last week at work

The senioritis of the real world: that magical final week of work when you have something new and exciting coming up and you and transitioning out. Here’s my advice

• Really think about everyone you would want to keep in touch with and get some time with them either, preferably outside of the office so they can really be honest
• Schedule time with your manager and anyone relevant in your management hierarchy to have an honest conversation about what you bring to the organization and where you need to grow and why ultimately you chose to leave the company
• Search for anything that is not confidential that you would want to take with you (e.g. personal development, performance reviews, hilarious emails)
• Think about anything that you really care about (I organized technical talks, an internal newsletter, etc.) and offload it to the right people so it lives on
• Figure out what’s happening with your going away party and try to minimize people feeling like they got left out 
• Really try to prioritize anything regarding documenting and see if you can push off any real work because I found documenting to be more fun and more important based on how much mental energy I was willing to expend

Advice on getting an interview with the tech elite

From when I was a little kid hearing about the perks to 6 months ago, I would have fallen over myself to have a chance to interview with a company as selective as Facebook or Google. Out of some incredibly good fortune, I just had the opportunity to interview with both and just accepted a role at Facebook. I got asked if I had any advice for getting an interview given my experiences and thought I would share:

 

Background:

I was pretty content with my role for 1.5 years as an e-commerce marketing analyst for Vistaprint focusing on making business recommendations by drawing insights from the data, leaning heavily on SQL. I graduated in 2011 from Cornell in Operations Research Engineering.

 

LinkedIn:

I was actually sent a LinkedIn message by a Google recruiter. How exactly that happened is a mystery but my guess is the skills and experiences I noted. Make sure to have enough detail and try to look at the specific skills asked for in job descriptions you are interested in and relate those to what you do. Let other speak for you. Write down some relevant “Skills” that you have and then go to your colleagues and endorse their skills if you genuinely believe they have them. In turn, some of them will endorse you back and you know have their reputations willing to back you up. Everyone’s profiles at Facebook and Google I have looked at have them. The best time to get these recommendations is when you are changing roles or leaving your company. It may feel awkward but if they really like you, they will be happy to do it. 

 

Alumni of your company:

Take advantage of turnover in your company. Make sure to touch base with people as they are leaving to see what they are doing and how cool it sounds to you. It is really difficult to keep in touch with them because you have to go out of your way to see them but it is totally worth it. Just grabbing dinner or drinks with former coworkers every quarter or so will give you a wealth of stories about your current company and how decisions really get made. In addition, they will keep you in mind when they need to hire and you are perfectly qualified because you share their qualifications. Especially If they are doing well in their new company, their recommendation will carry a lot of weight. My network at Facebook was instrumental during my recruiting and interview process.

 

In summary, make sure your LinkedIn is as good as you can make it incorporating skills and recommendations because poaching from the top companies and some start-ups does happen that way and make sure to keep in contact with alumni of your company.