Every single job in my career, from my first family office gig to DCM, I got by doing the job before I had the job.

Here’s what I mean.

Sophomore year of college, I was cold-emailing and messaging everyone I could find in investing. By everyone, I mean literally everyone - Babson alumni, high school alumni, people from my hometown, etc.

Most went nowhere. The responses were usually some version of "we don't do internships, but stay in touch" or "let me connect you to someone who might be more helpful." And occasionally, a flat no.

But throughout all of this, I kept asking myself: how do I actually stand out? Everyone's sending the same cold emails. But what could I do to make the person hopping on a call with me feel something, so that when we hung up they walked away thinking “I want to help this kid.”

So one idea I had: what if I just did the job? Like, actually did the work.

So that's what I did. I wrote two 15-20 page company analysis reports (pre-ChatGPT!). They were not perfect by any means, but I felt confident in my work. And then when I got someone on a call, I’d casually mention the reports and send it over if they were up for it.

This simple gesture landed differently than anything else I could have said. People were blown away by it and saw how much I cared. Without doing this, I would’ve never landed at Knollwood, my first family office.

I played the same cards when moving back to VC from PM at FanDuel.

While going through the DCM interview process, ten rounds over a few weeks, I was sending them deal flow constantly. Companies I was actively tracking, founders I knew personally, or ones in my network who were raising, each paired with a quick take and my recommendation.

This did two things. It built trust with the DCM team around how I thought about companies, for better or worse. And it put me meaningfully ahead of everyone else in the process.

That mattered a lot for me. I don’t have a harvard.edu email or a 4.0. But I could make the people I wanted to work with feel how much more I wanted the opportunity. And more importantly, show them I could actually do the work.

And this same process can be applied to any field, beyond investing.

For startups or just operating roles in general, find the role you want. Figure out what someone in that role would actually produce. Then go build it and show them. This can be a literal website or app, or a quick deck breaking down exactly how you’d accomplish the task at hand.

With AI, this is easier than ever to execute on, but you cannot slack on quality. Because if everyone can do it now, the standard has went up. You can't just ship a half-baked output and call it initiative. It has to be good. It just matter how bad you want it.

The effort is table stakes. The quality is what separates you.

You'd be surprised how few people actually do it.