Succeeding in a part-time MBA program requires three things: a willingness to change your life, the ability to juggle competing demands, and the ability to focus on your priorities. Those same qualities, says Nick Livingston, are traits needed succeed as an entrepreneur. That’s just what he is doing as one of the founders of Honeit.com.
Nick, an experienced recruiter and graduate of the Evening & Weekend Berkeley MBA Program, was the “non-technical guy” that senior engineers James Craft and Kim Duong were looking for when the three met via AngelList. The Honeit live interview platform helps hiring teams streamline the process of screening candidates to save steps and reduce misinterpretation and bias. “Having been the first recruiter at TubeMogul, I experienced the rocket-ship thrill of a startup taking off and learned a lot from the founders,” Nick says, “but I saw a real opportunity to re-engineer the hiring process. ”
He’s using a lot of his classroom learning on the job. “I had a lot of ah-ha moments in the organizational development course, understanding all the different ways to motivate and reach people. In Teck Ho’s pricing class, I was fascinated to learn how intertwined human behavior and psychology are with what I’d thought of as mostly financial decisions. Holly Schroth’s negotiations class gave me a whole new set of models to use in salary discussions, when asking for resources, and in people management decisions.”
Honeit, an alumnus of UC Berkeley’s Skydeck accelerator, is focusing on customer development and plans to open a seed round. “Knowing where to go, whom to ask, how to calibrate your pitch are challenges,” he admits. “But we thrive on that. I love going to work knowing that every day is different.”
The classes, networks, and resources found at Berkeley-Haas have helped Livingston, and many other graduates, as he says, “put entrepreneurship into practice.”
