Hi Michael! Would you give us an introduction?

My name is Michael and I am currently a small and medium sized business Account Executive at DoorDash. So essentially what I'll do is I'll talk to merchants that are already on the DoorDash platform and work with them to potentially add a virtual brand to their business for additional revenue. 

What did your into tech look like? 

I didn't go to undergrad. I was living in the Central Valley of California at the time. Think Stockton, Modesto, Fresno, Ripon, et cetera. There's not a lot of career opportunities. There’s a lot of blue collar work where you're going to max out somewhere between $60 and $80K. 

I worked retail at places like Expressman's and another store called The Buckle. I looked around and realized that I could grow faster somewhere else.

I looked at the Bay Area and saw that there were a plethora of jobs available. I came to the Bay Area about six years ago with nothing but the clothes on my back, hopes and dreams. 

In the Bay Area I was transitioning through a lot of different jobs. Everything from being a server to a sales associate to a courier for UPS. 

But I would drive through the city at night, passing the financial district and I would roll down my window and the sunroof and just think: “I'm going to work here one day.” 

Eventually, my foot in the door to tech came when I was working at Facebook as a valet. 

At the time I was a valet for a lot of the Facebook employees who would drive around nice cars, so I'd ask some of the customers about their cars. 

One gentleman, a Sr. Director of Software Engineering, told me about this internship that Facebook was doing through this program called Year Up.

I applied, and got the internship. It was a competitive program with 200-300 applicants. I was 1 of 38 chosen. During the internship, I worked in strategic partnerships and operations, social impact for Facebook. We would essentially help Facebook world crises like Yemin and George Floyd and raise money for social impact organizations. This was my first foot in the foot in the door for tech. 

How did you secure a full time SDR role after your Facebook Internship?

I was trying to figure out where to take my career after that and stumbled on the SDR role in a conversation with a recruiter from the Year Up program for Salesforce. She primarily recruited people in the go to market function (sales and marketing). I told her about my career plans and she said, those are great options, but I really think you should consider becoming an SDR. 

I had no idea what an SDR was. I did some research and talked about it with a bunch of people that I knew. And at first I didn't understand the role. I thought it was like something along the lines of telemarketers, that I would just be calling a bunch of people pitching. I quickly learned it was much more than that. And that the SDR role is a great entry level sales role in tech with pretty good pay. 

I took this back to a mentor/career coach and through his connections, we were able to hear about Okta’s Business Development Associate program, which was a pilot program at a cybersecurity company called Okta that welcomed “untraditional” talent. An example of untraditional talent might be, for example, someone with a high school diploma. 

I was one of the first four or five business development associates ever because the BDA program was a pilot. Spent three months there, got promoted to a BDR inbound and spent six months there. Got promoted to a sales development representative in the strategic vertical, spent a year and a half there and decided to move on to another company. 

You said from the Facebook internship, you actually got a career coach that helped you get into that BDA program at Okta.

Can you tell me more about that? How did you find the career coach and how did you find the BDA program at Okta?

So I was actually really blessed. My career coach, his name's Manny Duenas. He's one of the top voices on LinkedIn with 20 or 30, 000 followers. 

He was actually a part of the Year Up staff at Facebook during the internship program. 

A lot of people at the internship took it at face value and said it’s just going to look good on my resume. Whereas I would take the initiative and speak to everybody individually and see not only how they could be a value to me and maybe my future projection, but also how I could be a value to them in any capacity. 

Manny was somebody that I had met at Facebook and we had hit it off because he had a knack for dressing nicely. He was a very dapper young man and we would just chat about that.

And then I had no idea what he did probably for the first couple of months. And then after the fact, I reached out to him for a coffee chat and he was willing to help me. 

What helped you land the Facebook internship and the initial Okta BDA role despite your lack of corporate experience? 

I believe it was my interviewing skills.

They were all in part, in person. Each time I showed up in a suit. 

When people asked me, “what do you want from this?” I was very decisive. 

I said, “I want to be in Business Marketing or Finance, I want to take whatever experience I can gain from this and be an example for people that look like me from the communities that I come from and hopefully show them you don’t have to limit yourself to certain fields or trades.”

Since I’ve always been in retail, I’ve been able to get really good at engaging with people and making the interview into a dialogue.