Pick your next startup job after applying The Twitter Filter.
The Twitter Filter is comprised of two items:
A. Is the founder on Twitter?
B. Are they sharing their thoughts/ views in public?
A. Is the founder on Twitter?
- Selection effect: My own opinion is that people who are on twitter are more curious, more hungry to learn from the best, and friendlier in general than people who are not on Twitter.
- The role of a founder is to be the Chief Evangelizing Officer for the company. They need to be hyping up their company all the time- to customers, investors, partners, potential employees. This is especially true for consumer focused companies where brand matters a ton. If they’re not doing it, then it is a red flag.
B. Are they sharing their thoughts/ views in public?
The best founders are doing this. Go and see all their tweets, likes and replies in their profile. By doing this you get to see how the founder thinks: what is their vision for their company? What interests and excites them? What is their life outside work like? Use all the info to see if that aligns with your own values and interests. This is sort of like a replacement for Glassdoor reviews.
You can also replace ‘founder’ with ‘person you will work with’ and the same considerations should largely apply.
Of course, there will be many instances where you can find good opportunities that don’t conform to this heuristic. But, in a vast and overwhelming world with lots of opportunities and huge information asymmetry, The Twitter Filter is a great way to narrow down and select the next place/ person you want to work for.
Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash
Woah moments 