This content was created by Tim Draper. This content was uploaded by Tim Draper. This is a YouTube video titled "How to Land Your Dream Job | JUMP Investors Founding Partner, Randall Kaplan" (posted 2019-09-20). It features a first-person talk by Randall Kaplan (co‑founder of Akamai Technologies and a JUMP Investors founding partner) recounting his early career and how he proactively landed meetings and roles through an intensive letter‑writing campaign to CEOs. He describes printing articles on 300 CEOs, securing ~80 meetings, persistent follow‑up (calling an office 37 times), meeting Eli Broad, intensely preparing for interviews (studying annual reports and memorizing footnotes), creating unique bound application packets, and taking jobs that built his career. The excerpt is career/advice oriented—covering networking, interview preparation, persistence, the importance of titles, and encouragement to believe in yourself and take entrepreneurial action. Several people (Eli Broad, Steve Bollenbach, an assistant Ophelia Reese) are mentioned but do not speak in the clip.
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And I printed out every article on 300 CEOs that I wanted to meet. I got 80 meetings. And by the way, when I started this and I told friends this, every single person told me, nobody's gonna meet with you. And I said, we'll see. And when somebody tells you something that can't be done and you have a passion for it, do not believe them no matter what. If you believe in what you're doing, it doesn't matter. Hi, I'm Randy Kaplan. I'm an entrepreneur and a venture I am a co-founder of Akamai Technologies, and over the last 20 years, I have invested in more than 70 early and late-stage companies. To become an entrepreneur, please enroll at Draper University. I took this job. They offered me to be a tax lawyer. I had no interest in tax, but I thought, people will think I'm smart. And I thought, okay, I'm gonna use this to get another job. So again, I wasn't happy, and now I was just trying to pay my rent. And I ended up staying for 18 months. And around 8 months after I started, on my 26th birthday, I made a commitment to myself. I'm gonna get a great business job. I don't have the funds to go back to business school. And I thought about it, and the opportunity cost for me at that point, I was making $80,000 a year, and I still had rent. I didn't have a lot of having gone to Northwestern, I would have probably had to go to Stanford or Harvard for it even to be possibly worthwhile from an opportunity perspective. And I weighed the pros and cons. I said, I'm just gonna try to get the kind of job that I want anyway. So I did something that was very unusual. I started a letter-writing campaign. And I said, I'm gonna write CEOs of huge companies asking for informational interviews. That's a bold move. I did not write letters asking for jobs, because I knew those letters would go in the trash immediately. And I originally focused on people who were lawyers who are now CEOs of big companies. It turns out that in the studios in Los Angeles, many of the people running them were former lawyers. Many CEOs of large companies were former lawyers. Lawyer. So I thought, all right, I'm not going to write an ordinary letter. I'm going to write a unique letter. There was no Google back then, by the way. So my firm had a LexisNexis subscription, and I used it for biz dev, and I printed out every article on 300 CEOs that I wanted to meet. I got 80 meetings. And by the way, when I started this and I told friends this, every single person told me, nobody's going to meet with you. You'll get no meetings. And I said, we'll see. And when somebody tells you something that can't be done and you have a passion for it, do not believe them no matter what. If you believe in what you're doing, it doesn't matter. I was looking for one. I was looking for one position. And it's a numbers game and it's a research game. So I printed out in my second bedroom, it was a letter writing factory. I had a job working 60, 70, Hours a week. And I would print these things out late at night at the law firm. I'd take them home and I would read and highlight every job these CEOs had ever had. Steve Bollenbach, who ended up CEO of Marriott, his first job was selling ice cream at Disneyland when he was 16. And those are the kind of factoids I put in my letter. I listed every single one. And then I put a cover page with a quote they had said at some point in some piece written about them. I spiral bound it with a cellophane cover, and I had tabs in the letter. My transcripts from law school, an article about me in college from the Michigan Daily newspaper, and some other very interesting things. And I got these meetings, and I followed up on them. Steve Olenbach, I called his office 37 times. once a week, and his assistant, Ophelia Reese, I still remember her name, and I were friends. She finally called me and said, Randy, Mr. Bullenbach is going to call you. So to make a long story short, I met Eli Broad through this process. Eli is one of, I think, 2 or 3 people who have started 2 Fortune 500 companies from scratch. One of the great entrepreneurs of all time, one of the most successful people in Los Angeles. And I did my research before I went in there. I went in there and I knew there was an assistant to the chairman position. It's not advertised, by the way. And that was the position I wanted. So I went in, I prepared for the interview like it was a final exam. And we have a lot of interns. I have 36 interns this summer working on my new company, Sandy. And I tell everybody, that you should research more for an interview than you do for any final you've ever had. I cannot remember calculus, anything about it. I know I got an A, but honestly, I never use it and I don't need it. But my Sun America job, I researched that and I studied 20 minutes for that, or 20 hours for that job interview. I made an outline of the annual report, the 10-K. I memorized footnotes. I made a cheat sheet that I kept laminated in my suit pocket because most of the CEOs run late and you're sitting there and you're nervous. And I just wanted to go through, these are the questions I'm going to fire. And they were not softball questions, right? And in every meeting, people said, how did you find that? How did you write this letter? How did you know that? It was different. It was unique. They had never received a letter like this. This was entrepreneurial. I still have never received a letter ever, of the thousands I've had over the past few years, of anyone doing anything, earning the opportunity to meet with me. Now, I take a lot of meetings from people who don't write letters, but I've never seen a letter like that. And I want to tell everybody here, if someone's not hiring, they're hiring. Everyone wants to hire somebody awesome. Everyone wants to hire someone who does things like that. Who doesn't want a great employee who's entrepreneurial, who's working their tail off, who's working at a law firm and staying up till 2 in the morning and researching and memorizing this stuff? Who memorizes footnotes in a 10-K and sounds intelligent? So make a long story short there, Eli asked me to take one class, enroll at UCLA. I left his office, went to UCLA, got an extension catalog, Went home to my apartment, wrote a thank you letter, had the catalog back in his office in an hour. And he said that was huge, right? The desire to show that you want something, right? I didn't wait a day, I didn't wait 2 days to think about it. I wrote a letter and I dropped it off. And that was a huge thing for me to get that job. I stayed in that job 3 years. Eli asked me, do you want the assistant to the chairman title or a managing director title? And I said, I don't care. And he said, you should care because titles matter. You're going to be dealing— it was an investment banking job in-house. You're going to be dealing with the senior partners at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. And people, if you have an assistant to the chairman title, they may think that you're my assistant getting me coffee. But a managing director title, they're going to respond to you. An assistant to the chairman title had a different interpretation inside the company. It wielded a little more The best advice I have for any wannabe entrepreneur is to believe in yourself, don't listen to anybody else, and to just go do it right now.
