Mixpanel raised $10.25 Million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (see Peter Levine’s post), and that is fantastic — my congratulations to Suhail and the gang for building a kickass product and team. I know they’ll continue to find success!

I have a personal story to share about Mixpanel, about being the wrong person at the right place at the right time.

The background

Last August I was an intern at Google working at their San Francisco office — just a fifteen minute walk from Mixpanel’s abode. I had a single semester of school remaining back in Canada and I was thinking about future employment. I responded to one of Mixpanel’s frequent hackernews job postings, and received a response from Anlu not long after.

We set up a time to come by their office, and I ended up a block away by mistake, so I showed up fifteen minutes late. They didn’t seem to notice — nothing but a warm welcome. I was quickly greeted by the team and went into the meeting room (it had a table in the middle; hence it is a meeting room) and we started the interview process. Everyone on the team took a turn, which is a great idea! They all need to be confident of a person’s skills before committing to work side by side with someone for years.

Over the next few hours, I grew to understand that these were smart, funny, friendly people who loved what they did. Suhail spoke often about how important it is to have passion for what you’re doing. I did my best to yield valid responses to their questions, and while I think I came off as a nice guy, I didn’t deliver world-class chops. I was largely unfamiliar with javascript, missed a simple solution to keep a dynamic ordering of a set of objects, and took my sweet time to write a full answer to a problem Suhail gave me.

Their ad had asked, “want to learn how to scale?”, and suggested they needed a back-end person. I like to play with *nix, but had no idea about the tools or processes involved in building scalable web applications or doing high volume data processing, so it appealed greatly. At the end of the day, Suhail asked how I felt about working on front end stuff, or whether my passion was for working on infrastructure related things. I told him (as I said just now) that I don’t really know javascript. That I don’t have design experience and can’t make pretty websites — but I’d love to learn how.

He told me that I simply made too many mistakes to work on infrastructure in their fast-deploying environment. Their philosophy (at the time, I have no clue now) was to ship as soon as what you have is better than what’s out there. He asked again if back-end work was my passion, and how I felt about the front-end. I defended my ability to write solid code, and echoed my willingness to learn, and I might have even said that cliche “I don’t know what my passion is yet”, because really, I don’t. Then we shook hands; a few days later I got confirmation that they’d moved on in their search, and a thanks for coming in.

That was an ego hit, but I am very thankful that Suhail gave me the advice. I made a lot of mistakes in that interview, and I saw that he was right in the larger sense: I probably would have made some mistakes and shipped code soon after at some point. Infrastructure code is too mission critical for to be incorrect. Until I improve, I have to work slowly and surely.

The Lottery

There is a stance that I could take regarding Mixpanel’s recent seed round (which is the sort of successful growth I expected from them when I interviewed). That stance is that I missed a winning lottery ticket.

I’ve been thinking about my long term plans lately. Down the road, I might want to end up in the startup game, stay secure in the working world, or return to academics. An acquaintance of mine recently got into YCombinator, raised money, and appears to be doing great — I admit to feeling envy — so I’m going to indulge in a story: Imagine that I sold Suhail on my passion for the front end.

Back to that conversation we had: he’s asking if I’m more passionate about infrastructure, and I told him that I don’t know the front end, but I’d be willing to learn. Instead of that, let’s pretend that I mustered very fine words and drove home to him that come hell or high water, I’d write the best damn front-end code anyone had ever seen. Clean, efficient, beautiful, and fast. I would make it my life, because I had a (just-ignited) passion for it. The next element of the real story is the handshake and the “too bad” notice — instead now it’s a high five, and a confirmation that they think I can kick ass along with them.

Fast forward to now, imaginary timeline: I’ve learned a ton, helped them with their front end, taken some charge — maybe made a few mistakes, but didn’t cause severe data loss — and I’m living the California startup life with a small bit of equity in a fantastic, growing company. As they hire people, my front-end veteranship naturally brings me to lead the front end team, and 5-10 years down the road they have a public offering and I end up a millionaire. My dreams of financial independence and starting my own startup then come true! All because I displayed sufficient passion that day.

This has all the earmarks of classic stories. Shirking the big company to work for a little guy. Doing something impossible “because no one told me I couldn’t”. Riding on passion alone and “doing what I love every day of my life”. The great tech-magnate tropes.

Except it’s hogwash.

Skills

While the tropes I just mentioned have value (especially “don’t tell yourself what you can’t do; the world will stop you if you actually can’t”), to think that saying something different in that one conversation is similar to ‘missing out on the lottery’ is not just naive, but downright stupid. Here’s why:

I am a junior developer.

There are some people out there who finish college as fantastic programmers. They know design and code and code-design and they whip out complex, correct code like lightning. That’s who Mixpanel needed, and I am just a mediocre programmer who is learning his craft.

I could not have fired on all cylinders and magically made up for missing skill with passion. Suhail was looking for passion because it’s probably a good signal for skill and work-ethic. If I had acted differently in that situation and delivered on passion, it would not have changed my lack of skill. I would have ended up failing their team by coming into the situation learning instead of knowing.

The bottom line is that learning and developing your skills is not something to be ashamed of, and it’s also not something that can be skipped. Instead of pretending to be awesome already, I now work with talented people who know way more than I do and I’m learning from them while contributing. That’s where I should be. (though, it is perhaps the sort of experience I should have had during my internships; I’ll write about that some time.)

This is not a Lottery

The second major takeaway from my imaginary story is that it wrongly trivializes what the team at a company like Mixpanel does. It is built on the false assumption that a great company is a thing to ride, instead of something to carry.

People who work at small companies have to work much harder than people at large companies. It is not an easy life, it doesn’t often lead to riches, and it’s certainly not a magic ticket to success. Let’s imagine that I not only had the passion, but also the skill to be worthy of a first-10 hire when I applied: Any success I might have had would be the product of great coworkers, extremely hard work, long hours, luck, and intelligence over a great period of time.

Once again, my best to the team at Mixpanel. Keep it up.