Interview With Sid Malladi

Sid is a Product Manager at Jobox.ai, a stealth startup building a home services marketplace for skilled labor. He likes to build, launch, and scale software products that drive social impact. After graduating from Lynbrook in 2014, Sid attended Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied Information Systems/CS, Human-Computer Interaction, Business Administration, and Physics.

"Generally what makes people successful in the universities is having the drive and the willingness to demonstarte the evidence of exceptional ability"

"There is this fear around , Am I committing myself to certain track and if that is going to set my destiny for entire life. That's not the case. You have flexibility to learn and grow once you reach college. A lot of people use their freshman year to confirm that they are in right place or they need to make a pivot.

"Play to your strengths during the application process if you have multi-disciplinary sets of interest, you will have the opportunity to switch over once you have set your foot in the door"

"I like product development but I also like Human Computer Interaction and user experience design, you can craft your own experience and take courses to flexibly meet the goal for yourself"

"A large part of success in the college application process, internship interview process as well as your full time role is to what capacity can you take leadership and communicate the complex thoughts and bring cross-functional alignment"

"People overindex on competence and underindex on differentiation. If you are one among 100,000 high school students with 4.0 GPA and 1550+ SAT, there is no compelling reason why someone should take up your application and be super excited to have you enroll in their University or company. Focus a little bit less on checking the boxes which we are are all told are important for us to succeed because in reality demonstrating evidence of exceptional ability and a niche that you carve out for yourself is almost always preferred to how you stack up against an arbitrary test or GPA"

"Going through introspection exercises around how do you want to position yourself in your career, like what is the niche you want to carve for yourself and reverse engineer from that to see like here is the milestone and tangible operating tasks that I need to hit in order to tie the story to the bow, that introspection is really important"

"Take more risks, find more unconventional ways to demonstrate your passions and backup a compelling story around intention with tangible evidence around what you did about it"

"A large part of your success in the future is going to be determined based on the quality of relationships that you build and preserve. It matters if you have a good heart and really invest in relationships not just because it is self serving but like is right thing to do and it also comes back to support you in long term"