This is not meant as a life-changing framework. Rather, it’s a collection of the hacks, tips, and knowledge bytes that helped me move forward and might help you do the same.

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[1] Direction

You don’t need to have experienced a spiritual awakening when touring the offices of your dream company a decade ago, but you should have some solid idea(s) of where you want to end up. This idea should be (1) sharp and (2) bold.

• Sharp so that you can craft your story around it. Go deeper than your field of studies or an industry you like and instead focus on 1-3 concrete profiles, possibly at a specific company. Because no matter if networking, having your CV reviewed, or answering interview questions, everybody is always short on time and attention. You will be forced to compress your story. The sharper the idea, the easier it is to build a clear and concise story around that goal. A story that can be understood in seconds. And a story that’s understood is remembered.

• Ignore any limitations for this step of the story; e.g., if your dream truly is to become an astronaut for NASA, roll with it. No matter how bold or unrealistic it feels, it’s crucial that you don’t limit yourself down this early on. Getting a job has become harder. You’ll need determination to get there - and that’s much easier with a goal big enough to dream about.

Now your story might change along the way, that’s okay. As long as it stems (hopefully at least in part) from a core value of passion about the desired goal, wherever you end up will still be meaningful. So be prepared for that and keep in mind that landing on the moon is still impressive, even if you aimed for the stars.

[2] Execution

Now we have direction. Nice. But direction alone doesn’t get you hired. You have to increase your luck surface area. That comes mainly down to two things:

• “DO” get better at your hard and soft skills (practice, experience, output)

• “Tell” make it visible (your story, your work, your network)

For me, this started at 14, when I was frustrated with the video games my laptop came with. I thought it couldn’t be that hard to build something better.

I was wrong (Turns out building games is slightly harder than complaining about them).

But since then, I learned to code and something (more) valuable: what I enjoy, what I’m good at, and what I want to avoid.

[2.1] DO: Become inordinately experienced

Once you know these things about yourself, you must lean into them. Find your specific niche of things you excel at. Greatness doesn’t (have to) come from being the best in one thing; you can stand out by displaying a unique talent in combining multiple soft and hard skills. For me, this meant merging my love for yapping with my passion for UI / UX design and my existing ability to write code into a story of a “Product-focused engineer”.

So while I’ll probably never be the best coder, designer, or communicator individually. Combining all three gave me a niche where I could stand out. Don’t optimize for being just impressive; optimize for being useful in the specific context of your story.

Also, identify which skills you’re still lacking. In my case, that meant grinding algorithms. I recommend trying hard to discover formats you enjoy learning with (For me, this meant Advent of Code over LeetCode), to ensure you actually follow through.

[2.2] TELL: Become confident in selling yourself

Be public. Have a website, a GitHub, maybe launch a Substack ;)

Create a CV that tells the best and clearest version of your story. Allow yourself to choose boldness over being humble (while staying factual). A good measure here is to have your friends read it over drinks and decide if the cringe level is acceptable or not.

I used multiple CV versions:

• a clean, ATS-friendly format, US style

• a more “creative” version with color and headshot, EU style

• different languages depending on the company (International / Local)

• Role-specific variants (For me, that meant a software engineering focus and a cyber security focus) because you can’t tell multiple stories on one page.

Get your CV reviewed and ask people to tear it apart. That’s the fastest way to improve it.

Volunteer for any opportunity to become experienced in hiring yourself. I’ve reviewed hundreds of CVs and conducted interviews through student initiatives and clubs, and it’s almost impossible not to learn what works when you sit on the other side of the table. More on this can also be found in Learnings from trying to recruit the boldest and brightest.

Finally, entry-level jobs don’t ask for many references, but make sure you know who could vouch for you (and make sure they know too).

[2.3] Become fluent in your industry & network

This means having an interest in what the current challenges and emerging trends are, what the people working your job are discussing, and what companies actually care about. Beyond your technical skills and how you present them, this is what allows you to slightly adjust your story to match the recruiter’s core problem. The better you understand this, the easier it becomes to position yourself as part of the solution. Best to do this by finding a source you like (for the tech/startup scene, I can recommend StricltyVC) and read it regularly.

Being part of the industry also means building a network. Besides having a public presence, this boils down to doing things you enjoy that are at least somewhat related to your field, and being a good person while doing them. Join clubs, go to hackathons, and work on projects. Over time, you’ll naturally meet interesting people in the space. When the time comes, let everybody you run into know what you’re working towards and where you are in the process. Never solicit a referral. Instead, ask for feedback on your profile and if they know of any open positions. Most people are happy to do that, and it gives them an easy out if they can’t help further.

[2.4] Stay unstoppable

I failed my first coding interview. Hard. My hands were shaking. I couldn’t remember how to write a simple Java loop. I did not pass.

But I didn’t stop because of it. Instead, I spent more time on LeetCode than before and enlisted as many friends as were willing to do mock interviews with me. Three weeks later, I passed my Google coding interview.

The process comes down to cracking each stage. Above, we focused mostly on the story, which is crucial for getting your foot in the door (and deciding which door to knock on). But even with the best story, the coding interview stage is best mastered by, well, practicing coding interviews (can highly recommend Cracking the Coding Interview for getting fluent in this).

So now that you have your story, skills, and process figured out, the thing left to do is to (relentlessly) apply.

One of my favorite quotes from How Google Works is:

“Eric doesn’t adhere to Satchel Paige’s advice to ‘dance like nobody’s watching.’ When you’re a leader, everyone is watching, so it doesn’t matter that you dance poorly, it matters that you dance.”

While this was meant for leadership, I like to use it broadly. When you apply, people(recruiters are also people) are consuming your CV and with that your story. So it doesn’t matter how ready you feel, the story will never be perfect - but luckily it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to exist.

You will apply a lot, fail a lot, and get ghosted. Don’t take it personally and keep going until you reach where you want to go.

[3] Stay Hungry

You got the job, congratulations! Now what?

Early in your career, your main advantage is simple: you can afford to say yes more often than others.

Take on the unclear problems, the things outside your comfort zone, the tasks that are messy. You can afford to fail. You can afford to not know the answer.

A good rule of thumb is to regularly ask yourself: what would someone one or two levels above me do in this situation? And then try to do that. Take ownership where it’s not explicitly given.

This can be as simple as stepping up to organize the team lunch or pushing to present your project during the big meeting instead of behind closed doors.

In the end, the mode of operation stays the same as in the chapter above: keep Do-ing, Tell-ing, and remember that in the end, it usually doesn’t matter how well you danced, it matters that you did.

What followed was months of thinking about one question more than any other: how do you identify people who excel under pressure?

Here’s how we answered this on our search for the craziest participants for InCube 2025.

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[1] Why do you need driven people?

InCube brings teams of five into a 5×5m glass cube for five days to live, work, and solve real-world problems under intense constraints (think minimal sleep and maximum exposure, quite literally “building in public”).

The format is extreme by design, which makes recruiting the right “cubees” (as we affectionately call them) critical.

[1.1] Why we started with scale (and what the hell is a BHAG)

For this year, we wanted to go bolder than ever and ensure we got the best smart creatives out there. So how do you increase your chances of finding the best? More applications, from more places.

To do that, we set ourselves a BHAG, a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (a concept I picked up during my time at s2s.vc). Like most goals of this type, the point wasn’t necessarily to reach it but to set a bar high enough to shape our behavior. Last year, InCube received a bit more than 300 applications, so this year we set 1000 applicants as our BHAG.

“Aim for the stars so you can land on the moon”

Sounds cliché, but that’s exactly how we treated the 1000-applicant goal. It gave the team something concrete (and slightly uncomfortable) to aim for.

[1.2] How do you reach the most driven people?

Now that the goal was clear, the hardest part began: Execution. In a huge team effort, everybody from marketing to logistics and our own program division came together to distribute flyers, reach out to old and new partners around the globe, and spread the word in as many chat groups as we could.

In the end, we reached around 700 applications, more than double the previous year.

The challenge was that the most driven people are usually busy. If you can’t reach them directly, the next best thing is reaching their friends. So, beyond our in-person team effort, what worked well (and had a huge cost-benefit ratio) was personal referrals. We asked applicants to recommend someone they thought would be a good fit, and automatically sent an invite email to that person. This alone generated over 300 applications, at the cost of an email template and a Zapier automation.

Another major boost came from partner organizations activating their communities. Special shoutout to the IE Entrepreneur Club, the HackJunction community, and all other partners, alumni, and communities who helped spread the word in and outside Switzerland. Here we learnt that a few close partnerships are far more valuable than many cold reachouts.

Once the application window closed, the real work began.

[2] The application stages

We learned from past years that the process had to be low-friction for applicants while still giving us unbiased, high-quality signals for selection. This boiled down to the following stages:

0. A minimal initial website application

1. More in-depth CV, quiz, and video submission

2. Profile screened by the team

3. Group interviews

4. Individual interviews

[2.1] Screening for motivation and commitment

After keeping the initial barrier to entry deliberately low in stage 0, the next stage did the opposite. We increased the effort required to filter for motivation. Applicants were asked to submit their CV alongside a personality quiz and a 60-second video, with the latter two acting as an effective commitment filter, as we estimated up to an hour of time needed to complete this stage well. Around 450 candidates completed this stage.

[2.2] Profile review: When volume turns into work

At this point, a huge shoutout to Francesco is due, who led recruiting for the program team and designed and led large parts of this process. He carried an outsized share of the work and significantly improved on the already solid process from previous years.

Almost everyone who submitted on time in stage 1 qualified for the next stage, where the intensive screening by our team began. In total, reviewing applications alone took 422 hours (all volunteer work). It was also at this stage were we got to know a lot more about the applicants. The applicants came from 329 different universities covering 136 countries, with their backgrounds being as diverse as the applicants themselves.

At this stage, we scored candidate profiles based on a defined set of criteria focused on their experience, entrepreneurial tendencies, and overall quality of their application package.

To make the process as robust as possible, we introduced a few safeguards:

1. Each profile was scored independently by two judges to reduce bias.

2. We normalized scores based on individual judge tendencies, ensuring fairness despite any underlying differences in strictness.

The personality quiz and video were used primarily in borderline cases, when additional context was needed.

[2.3] The Interviews

After all CVs were reviewed, we had a bit more than 200 applicants moving on to the third stage. The third stage consisted of group interviews (a new stage Francesco came up with for this year), where applicants were tasked to complete a small ideation case study. Group interviews turned out to be one of the strongest predictors of success. In a setting where five people are locked together for 108 hours, it turns out that collaboration matters almost as much, if not more than, talent.

In the final stage, we matched the now around 70 final candidates to challenges and teams, taking great care to ensure all cube teams had a diverse mix of backgrounds, working styles, and perspectives. This last step of screening and scoring was done in a classic individual interview format. Summing up the last two stages, 312 Interviews in total were conducted.

Then, in a final, very late-night session, we reviewed all final scores, and once the team was confident in the decisions, we sent out confirmation emails to the now selected 30 cubees.

[3] The Results

Looking back at the application stages, accepted applicants consistently performed best when it came to motivation, creativity, initiative, and a willingness to step up when it mattered. We saw little to no correlation when it came to background or study level.

After the process came “gameday”, with an overall positive result: OutCube set the tone early on, where teams met in person, built trust (and hopefully some inside jokes) before things got intense during InCube. Seeing how teams leaned into the experience rather than pushing against it stood out.

And while conflicts happened, they were manageable, and teams stayed functional under pressure. More importantly, several teams are still working on their ideas after the event, which, for us, is one of the strongest indicators that the process and overall experience worked.

We are extremely proud of what the 30 Cubees then achieved during InCube.

Huge thanks again to everyone involved, this experience really showed what a true team effort looks like.

One of the hardest parts of this process was saying no to many exceptional people, often for reasons entirely outside their control. Many of this year’s cubees had applied before, and I genuinely hope to see many familiar names again in the future.

So looking back, finding the most driven people came down to designing a process that let ownership and creativity show, long before anyone ever stepped into a glass cube.