KATHRYN MINSHEW OF THE MUSE

“Be specific, proactive, and creative. In the old way of working, there was often a sense that there were these linear career paths—you join a company, get on the track, and then it sort of carries you along like an escalator. However, the modern workplace is really rewarding people who are more intentional, specific, proactive about what they want, and those who are willing to be a bit creative.”— Kathryn Minshew

Kathryn Minshew is the CEO & Founder of The Muse, a career platform used by over 75 million people to research companies and careers. The Muse was recently named one of Fast Company's 50 Most Innovative Companies in the World and #3 Most Innovative Company for Enterprise.

Kathryn has spoken at MIT and Harvard, contributed to the WSJ and HBR, and appeared on TODAY and CNN, among others. Kathryn worked on HPV vaccine introduction in Rwanda with the Clinton Health Access Initiative before founding The Muse and was previously at McKinsey & Company. Her first book, “The New Rules of Work: The Modern Playbook for Navigating Your Career” (Crown Business, April 2017), was a Wall Street Journal national bestseller.

Can you talk about your journey up until founding The Muse?

I had a pretty winding career path. As a teenager I thought I was going to be an ambassador or a CIA agent— partially, in retrospect, based on how much I enjoyed the TV show Alias as a kid. Luckily I had the chance to work at a U.S. embassy in Nicosia, Cyprus, in 2007, but it wasn’t what I expected and that threw my whole potential career path into question.

I ended up getting recruited by McKinsey and moving to New York City to work as a management consultant. I learned a lot at McKinsey, but I didn't love the work. I felt a little trapped. I was using sites like Indeed, and Monster.com— this was back in 2009 and  2010— and they were just these terrible laundry lists of job listings with no information about why I should want to work there. I've always been very sensitive to the culture and work environment of a company. I want to work with people that I like and respect. I want to do work that I feel like matters.

When I left McKinsey, I wanted to give international relations one more try. So as you mentioned in my bio, I moved to Kigali, Rwanda. But it still didn't fully light me up in the way like when I got into entrepreneurship and started The Muse. Starting this company was the first time I felt like: “Oh, I get it, I could do this for the rest of my life.”

When I worked at McKinsey, one of my best friends there was Mark Ramadan, who was in the early stages of founding a condiment company called Sir Kensington. I got this front row seat to a close friend conceiving a business and then starting to make it happen. I just loved the fact that he could think of something and then do it. And so Alex (co-founder of The Muse) and I were really close and we started thinking, “Well, what do we care about?”. We were trying to build something that would answer the questions concerning career choice that we had in our day-to-day life—which is, by the way, I think a great way to get into entrepreneurship: solving a problem that you personally experience because you really can speak to the consumer's needs. 

This was before The Muse. My first business I started in 2010, with three other cofounders; it was called PYP and it was sort of the precursor to this idea that eventually became The Muse. When I quit my job to work on PYP full-time, I promised myself that I would fully invest six months into it - emotionally, financially, everything - and if we weren’t where we needed to be or if we were unable to financially support ourselves at the end of that time, I would return to a corporate job. It didn’t end up working out like that at all. What's funny is that six months in, we definitely weren’t making any money. Some aspects of the business were further along than I had expected, but the partnership between the four of us co-founders had just totally degraded. Alex and I on one side, the other two on the other. Differing ideas about a ton of stuff and differing values about how to handle it all. We had a horrible co-founder breakup, and I was almost out of money and instead of going to get another job, I decided to start over and found The Muse. So I wouldn't say that I hit any of the benchmarks that I had set for myself, but I, at that point, was much more deeply convinced that there was a business opportunity here, I deeply wanted to pursue it, and I was just like, you know, “Fuck it, yeah, I've got to do this.” And so I dove in, and I ended up actually going a bit into debt when I was starting The Muse. Alex and I just put the early business together and kind of jumped off the cliff and trusted that we'd be able to find revenue or investors before we totally ran out of cash. And luckily, we did. 

Can you talk more about your experience navigating business disagreements when building a business with other people? How do you approach difficult topics with business partners?

My first piece of advice is to make sure that you go into business with people who share your values. With the first co-founder set, we didn't proactively opt in to being co-founders. All four of us worked at McKinsey and were passionate about the women's career community. However, it turned out that we had really different ideas about what we wanted the site to be like. I really wanted it to be a supportive guide for every woman’s career aspirations. I think on the other side, there was some desire for it to be like the corner office, the designer clothes, the Birkin bag.  

Furthermore, a contract is essential! Because we did not have contracts in that first business, it was really hard to go back and hold anyone accountable to the commitments made. So Alex and I, even though we were super close, when we started The Muse together we had the legal docs and the hard conversations up front. 

You have talked about not fitting in the archetype of being entrepreneur—”the Mark Zuckerberg type,” male tech dropout—and about The Muse being dismissed by investors initially as a “project.” How does being a young woman shape your experience as an entrepreneur?

I was raised with a lot of “Girl Power” messages and I was told that I could be anything I wanted to be. When I started my business, I was floored by the way people treated me. I know other 20-something guys in New York, and they were like having coffees and getting funded and people were mentoring them. For them, it seemed fairly straightforward. For me, I met a huge number of people who either patted me on the head or tried to date me, or behaved in inappropriate ways. I had an investor call The Muse a project when we had more than a million dollars in recurring revenue and twenty-five employees. I didn't feel like I was also in a position to call out most of that bad behavior because I was really worried about being stigmatized as difficult. 

At the same time, I just kept going and kept working on the business, because I was so passionate about the idea. I tried to understand why some people perceived me as “too nice” to be a successful entrepreneur, even going so far as to test different outfits to see which clothes changed people's first impression of me. I noticed that if I first met someone in a pitch competition when their first exposure to me was on stage, they tended to take me more seriously. If I met them for coffee, then they tended to take me less seriously. It was much easier in a coffee shop or a casual context for people to stereotype me as young, female, not as backable versus onstage where I think people were more able to recognize my drive and grit. 

What also helped is that I built a community of other women in entrepreneurship. We would swap notes on who behaved inappropriately. We would talk to each other, support each other, share information, and share introductions. When The Muse started to get bigger, I then felt I had the platform and the voice to start talking about misogyny and to start creating more accountability in the industry.

If you rewind and find yourself back in college, how would you use The Muse to find career opportunities? How can college-aged women use it to find jobs or connect with other professionals?

I was only exposed to a limited set of careers, and I wish that I had been able to use a tool like The Muse to learn about different careers and companies before I was even necessarily applying for jobs. On The Muse, we have profiles for many companies. Employees from various departments record short videos about what they do on a typical day, and what it's like to work there. The sales and marketing team of a company, or the whole tech team, will talk about their culture and the work environment. I wish I had exposure to more of these little glimpses inside different career paths, different jobs, and different companies earlier on! But that’s what has been extra fun: getting to build the product that I would have wanted back then.

What advice do you have for college-aged women interested in working in corporations or big companies? What are 3 simple rules we can remember when it comes to work?  

There are two clear things I urge people to remember. First, start with your values. It can be very tempting to just jump into the job search or to think about what everyone else is doing, what's prestigious, or what pays the most. In my book, I talk about the Muse Grid. List your values on one axis, list the opportunities or the companies or the career paths you're considering on the other. If you are clear about what matters to you, ask the right questions, and assess opportunities in an informed and intentional way, you're more likely to end up with something that you're happy about. 

Secondly, be specific, proactive, and creative. In the old way of working, there was often a sense that there were these linear career paths—you join a company, get on the track, and then it sort of carries you along like an escalator. However, the modern workplace instead tends to reward people who are more intentional, specific, proactive about what they want, and those who are willing to be a bit creative. This can mean going to your manager or your boss and saying, “Hey, I really want to learn x, y, z. Is there a project I can volunteer for, or a stretch skill you can help me develop?”

Quick Take One: What is one self-care act you practice routinely? 

Reading in the bath. I read about 30 books a year and it helps me calm down and decompress. 

Quick Take Two: What is one opportunity in NYC you think everyone should know about?

Show up to the incredible meetups in New York City! Listservs like “This Is Going to Be Big,” aggregates a lot of events in the city. Every time I show up to something, I challenge myself to have at least 2 to 3 great conversations (don’t feel pressured to talk to everyone if you’re not feeling it— but 2 to 3 feels manageable to me!) because other people are the best sources of intel and introductions.

Quick Take Three: Who is one woman you look up to?

So many answers to this question! Heather Hartnett comes to the top of my mind. She is the head of Human Ventures, an early-stage venture fund based in New York City that pioneered a different approach to investing that’s all about investing in great humans. I’m a big fan!