Four Ways the ICS Alumni Network Helped Me
March 24th, 2008 by tj
(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
Loading ...Given that this is an site for and by alums, I figured it be only appropriate if I posted my first blog by listing the four ways the ICS Alumni networked helped me in my professional career.
1: Summer 2000
I joined Net Toaster networks, a now defunct startup, as a application developer thanks to some great recommendations by fellow anteaters Nick Sauer, Chad Ata, and Scott Murphy. I took the offer over a more conventional offer at an established company and it paid off manifold in terms of skills and experience.
2: Fall 2000
Kris Ko, then an intern at IBM, assisted by others–all ICS alum, pitches my candidacy at IBM. Fong Hsu, CTO of IBM’s Santa Monica Innovation Center, despite a company-wide hiring freeze, agrees to consider me for a full-time position. My first round of interviews are conducted by Diego Ronchi and Irene Ho, both ICS alum as well.
3: Fall 2007
I leave IBM to join fellow alums Vijesh Mehta, Dinesh Ravishanker, Punit Shah, and Komnieve Singh at CallFire.com–a web VoIP startup. Vijesh and I were both teaching assistants while undergrads, and I was Punit’s TA, proving yet again that this is small world. Vijesh later tells me he approached me to join their startup because I was always holed up in the ICS 360 labs so he figured I could at least code.
4: Winter 2008 (Present Day)
CallFire.com brings on Henry Kim as the first member of its executive advisory board. A former VP of Network Operations at United Online (owner of NetZero), Henry too is an ICS alum (graduated 1993) and is currently advising us on our overall corporate strategy and helping us manage our partner and carrier relationships.
Net-Net
I suspect I’m not unique in my experiences and that every one of us have some stories about how someone with nothing but a shared experience of ICS helped them somewhere. These four instances are merely my anecdotal stories. These stories taught me that you don’t need to be a master networker to have a dependable network.
I have also learnt there’s no secret to networking. A genuine interest in people and the willingness to connect and share can go a long way in creating a strong, dependable network. I mean, seven years out of school, and I still see these guys on a regular basis even if none of us look like the people in this picture!
On a side note, who knows, perhaps CallFire’s first round of funding could come from an Anteater…..zot!
Quote of the Day
Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.
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Hello,
The nice quote you have at the end is from the book “Families,” published in 1998, by Transaction Publishers, written by Jane Howard, an “informal” anthropologist who visited dozens of families to show that they are “alive and well” in the US. She has also written on feminism and the human potential movement, and is, perhaps, most famous as the biographer of Margaret Mead. She died at age 61 yesterday, and her obit is in today’s NY Ties.
However, the link you have to Wikipedia under her name is to Elizabeth Jane Howard, and English novelist, who will be 85 on Wednesday. Somehow I don’t think she would be honored by the confusion.
Correction. The anthropologist Jane Howard died June 27, 1996. “Families” was first published in 1978 by Simon & Schuster. From the NY Times obit:
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Ms. Howard’s earlier books were “Please Touch: A Guided Tour of the Human Potential Movement” (1970), “A Different Woman” (1973) and “Families” (1978).
“A Different Woman” was an examination of the feminist movement. For “Families,” Ms. Howard visited dozens of households and concluded that, contrary to superficial wisdom, families were not dying but “in flamboyant and dumbfounding ways they are changing their size and their shape and their purpose.”
At her death, Ms. Howard was under contract to Simon & Schuster for a nonfiction book, tentatively titled “Heartland,” on the Midwest.
Between books, she taught writing at several universities, including the University of Georgia and Yale. She participated in the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. Most recently, she taught a graduate class in nonfiction at Columbia.
She once described her religious upbringing as “knee-jerk Congregational” and said she felt most intensely religious in the presence of nature, “where the air is fresh and there’s something to look at other than rectangles.”
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http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D04E7D71239F93BA15755C0A960958260
Hi Frank,
As we discussed via email earlier, thank you for pointing out the error in the link. I knew that she had said the quote in relationship to families, however I took some blogging liberty in applying the quote to social networks as well (as in everybody needs one).
As for the link, that was an error in assuming Wikipedia was the be-all and end-all of information, and since there were two Jane Howard’s and the first one lived in the 19th century, the other Jane had to be the real one.
I’ll be removing the link shortly.
Cheers,
TJ