By: Myka Ababon I first stumbled upon Oystir last year while I was browsing the internet for iJOBS blog post ideas. I first encountered a mention of Oystir in Reddit and, after visiting their website, realized what a great resource it was for graduate students and postdocs looking to go into non-academic careers. In short, it was perfect for the iJOBS community. I immediately reached out to Oystir to ask for an interview, and Oystir CEO Rudy Bellani was really enthusiastic about iJOBS and doing an interview for the blog. Not only that, Rudy gave an amazing iJOBS workshop just last April 2016 on how to break into biotech (stay tuned for an upcoming post on this! So let's hear more from Rudy about his experiences in building a start-up, his thoughts and advice on transitioning out of academia, and landing that first job. About Oystir Q: How did you come up with the idea for Oystir? What does “Oystir” mean? 
Oystir was born out of personal experiences of feeling lost after grad school and then again after McKinsey (Note: McKinsey is a consulting company where Rudy got his first job straight out of grad school). Zach (Note: Zach Marks is co-founder and COO of Oystir) and I felt like smart, skilled, capable humans that could be successful at lots of different jobs, but we just had no idea who was looking for what we knew how to do. So, we created a site where you tell us what you can do and we show you all of the jobs looking for you. The name is credited to Resham Gellatly – Zach’s awesome girlfriend and a PhD at UCLA. It is a reference to an old colloquial way of talking about your talents. For example, “making Italian food is Rudy’s oyster.” After that, we just needed the URL to be available – hence the misspelling. :) Q: What do you think is the overall goal/purpose of Oystir? To help people in science find great jobs and to help companies find great science talent. Service Development Q: From the idea to the actual release of Oystir, how long did the development process take? What were the major setbacks? From when we started writing code to when we released Oystir was ~3 months. Asking a startup about setbacks is like asking a scientist about failed experiments – they were everywhere from the start. Starting a first company is so much harder than I ever expected and building something out of a lot of failure and struggle and hustle has been the most personally rewarding part of the experience. Q: What has been the overall response to Oystir since it was launched? Were there a lot of major changes from the initial idea to the actual service that exists now? The response has been amazing – people are incredibly supportive, kind, and encouraging. There has been a ton of viral sharing and we are really thankful for how awesome the community has been. We are still a crappy service relative to what we want us to become, but we’re also incredibly young. As users use the site more and more, we invariably get feature requests and this has led to us recognizing different needs and needing to build new tools to help those people. Soooo much more to do. It’s incredibly motivating - and sleep depriving. More about Rudy 
Q: From doing a PhD in Neuroscience in Rockefeller, how did you end up as CEO of Oystir? Can you describe the journey from PhD training to entrepreneurship? What was the landscape of the job market when you were graduating? I wanted to start a textbook company in grad school but was too broke and felt too inexperienced to do that without real business experience. I ended up a consultant at McKinsey & Company as a total and ridiculous fluke. I thought they were a law firm when I applied. While there, on the side, I helped co-lead PhD recruiting in NY for McKinsey and fell in love with helping interested PhDs make a great transition out of academia. After 2.5 years, I decided to finally make the jump and make helping scientists get awesome jobs my full time career. Haven’t looked back once. Though…I miss the McKinsey-size paychecks! Q: How hard was it to transition? How different is what you’re doing now to what you were doing during your PhD? Can you give an example of a typical day for you? The transition was easy because I had a great friend in Zach to lean on a lot. When Kiran Vajapey and Robert Parks joined a few months later, we then had four guys doing this for the first time to rely on and use as crutches. We worked out of the Rockefeller University library on the DL and, at various points, all lived on campus on couches and blow up mattresses. It was not glamorous, but it was awesome fun, and I’m incredibly proud of what my guys did – and put up with- to build this from scratch. Q: What were the things you learned during your PhD training that you carried over in starting your own business? What new skills did you have to learn? I’ll be honest with you, I kind of hate this question because I think it’s the wrong question. I used to get asked this a lot when I was a consultant and whenever I’m on a career panel, it invariably comes up, and I think it’s because we, as PhDs, are trying to very reasonably understand, ‘what of what I do now is valuable in that career?’ But, this is like asking a baseball player who wants to play soccer, “what did you learn playing baseball that will help you succeed on the professional soccer field?” Personally, I think that the skill carry-over is so small that it’s a meaningless question. The truth is that we have been trained to be scientists – and even more specifically, to be cancer geneticists, serotonin-in-rat-brains experts, etc. Not entrepreneurs, or consultants, or data scientists. If you wanted to be any of those professionals, a 6-year PhD is probably the least efficient way to prepare. I sucked as a consultant when I started at McKinsey and I sucked as an entrepreneur when I started that too. Sure I felt more comfortable with statistics, and I had presented lots of result s in front of critical audiences, but that’s 4% of the job. The question isn’t what of what I do now will be applicable there later, it’s, how much change can I tolerate and be happy. And, the answer to that question is much more interesting, and of course more personal. My very strong belief is that PhDs become experts at learning to how to learn; a trait is incredibly helpful when you have to completely morph into a different kind of professional. For that reason alone, I always feel confident placing a bird hormone scientist as a product manager. Do they know how to lead teams on building technology products because they guided their research in a zig-zag fashion for 6 years? Absolutely not. But, can they learn how to do this? Absolutely. And quicker than most. Lastly Q: What changes in the PhD programs have to be made in order to better prepare the graduates? My personal view is very different from most. Should dance schools also prepare their students to be developers because in the likely case they don’t make it to the stage, they can have a high probability of getting a high-paying job? I personally do not think so. In that way, I think gradate programs should spend more of their resources training students to be better scientists, instead of leaving it just to PIs. Creating great scientists is the program’s mission and becoming great scientists is why we all signed up for 4-7 years of working on the bench. It’s a shame so many of us get a poor leader as a professor who barely directs us and we flounder not only in our science but also in our personal development as scientific thinkers. Of course, the labor structure in academia unquestionably pushes many of us out of our desired career track – like dancers. So what do we do about that? I would love to see 4 big changes:
- Schools being radically transparent about career outcomes from their programs. National statistics are not good enough. The percent of PhD graduates that go on to become tenured professors is different in different programs. We should know what we’re getting into.
- National models for student/postdoc-led career groups. There are a lot of consulting interest groups popping up in grad schools, but some do an incredible job of getting people ready (e.g. Yale) and others are still figuring it out. Why? We need these groups to teach others. Personally, I would LOVE to see a national conference bringing these student groups together so they could teach each other. Stay tuned for this. (And, if you’d be interested in helping put something like this together, email me at Rudy@oystir.com)
- NIH BEST or SBIR-style grants awarded to for-profit companies. Right now, there is a movement underway in the graduate career office space in terms of working to help figure out how to help PhDs find non-academic jobs (check out http://gradcareerconsortium.org/). The work these folks are doing is pretty incredible and I’ve been personally inspired by a number of career counselors that have become friends. However, I think that the answer can not lie with jus them. There are too many PhDs for any campus career office to handle, and big room events are too impersonal to give a single person great direction. Technology will have to be built, tested, iterated on, and innovation maintained. Career officers are great as local field agents that can be of help to you, but they are not technologists with global views of the labor market or emerging opportunities. Help from the NIH to companies trying to help this space from a different angle and skill set would be immense. Or, as our perhaps soon to be overlord would say, YUUGE.
- Culture change around data and presentations in science. Every scientist should be using R or Python for their statistics. You will be a better statistician (are you co-factoring out variables? Doing power analyses to know group sizes you should have?), a better scientist, and coincidentally, you will be also better positioned for the job market. I didn’t realize it until I got to McKinsey, but we don’t know how to use Excel (do you use pivot tables? Macros?) or Powerpoint (our slides suck at conveying structured thinking). We need classes on this more than we need molecular biology labs or intro to genetics courses – we learn all of that stuff in our research anyways don’t we?! These skills will have significant impact on our abiity to do great science but in building foundational business skills.
Q: What advice do you have for PhD graduates and postdocs about to embark on their job-search journey? Have a resume, not a CV. Have a great resume (oystir.com/resources for guides on how to do this and a downloadable packed of great resumes to copy). Have lunch with every human you know who is already a professional somewhere to just catch up. Meet with your local graduate career counselor – why wouldn’t you?! Join your local biotech/consulting/alternative-careers club as these are great folks in the same boat as you to get to know. Find 3 careers you might be interested in, and send your resume to 10 open jobs. See if anyone bites (maybe you’re a good fit there?!), then potentially double-down in that area. Don’t just focus on prestigious places (Google, Uber, McKinsey, BSCG, etc). Go to small little companies – you can be a larger fish in their applicant pond. Be patient. Know that the process sucks. It gets 100X easier the next time around. Still, be comforted by the fact that the unemployment rate for PhDs is less than 1%, so you will get a job. I feel certain about that. We just don’t know what job yet… What makes Rudy and Oystir unique, from my perspective, is that Rudy went through exactly what we are going through as we finish up in grad school and look for to land that FIRST JOB outside of doing a postdoc or staying in academia. And Rudy decided to make a career out of helping other people through that hard initial transition, and Oystir was built to address that need specifically. I for one earnestly support Oystir’s goals and I am looking forward to great things from this company. I’d like to thank Rudy for answering questions posted by myself and my fellow iJOBS bloggers. I hope our readers took away some useful information that would aid you in your own job search. Best of luck to all of us!