When I put together the Founder Conference (August 17th in Silicon Valley, in case you haven’t heard yet), securing a line-up of great speakers was very important. I am trying to help as many aspiring entrepreneurs build the best startups possible. If you are like most entrepreneurs, you’ll be focused on what is being said on stage. There is great insight to learn that way.

Waiting in line at WWDC

However, you almost certainly make a very common mistake: you’ll ignore the other people in the room, asusming that they are not as interesting as the famous speakers on stage.

You’d be wrong. If I told you Steve Jobs was sitting next to you, I bet you’d have a heart attack. Transport yourself back to 1980 (virtually of course). Steve Jobs was around. He just wasn’t famous yet. But I’m sure he was just as smart as he is today.

Conferences for entrepeneurs self-select their attendance: everyone in the room has the passion and the ambition to build something great. 5 years from now, the newbies of today will be the stars. Why wait? Get to know them today, genuinely, for who they are, before they become famous. You will learn just as much as watching the stage.

I have met many people like this, who at the time I liked, and were nobodies. It’s not about gaming the system and networking for the sake of networking. You should genuinely be interested in the other attendees: after all, they share your passion.

Your resume can tell.

I know, it sounds weird. Resumes are for corporate jobs. They are a boring list of previous employers and university degrees. A lot of great entrepreneurs don’t even finish college or get a first corporate job before starting their first company.

Still, their resume can tell.

How? The key is to understand what makes a great entrepreneur:

Entrepreneurs are the ones who do when everyone else is talking about what should be done.

Really, it’s that simple. Most of us are smart enough to notice when something should be done, when something is not quite right, or when there is an opportunity. However, inexplicably, only a handful of people actually do something about it.

The few who take action are the future great entrepreneurs.

Back to your resume. Extracurricular activities are the key. Did you contribute to an open source project on the side while in college? Did you run the student organization? Did you do some crazy stuff that no one asked you to do? See, that’s the trick. As long as your resume only shows accomplishments that others asked you to do, you are not showing signs of an entrepreneur.

Those of us who went the extra mile and did cool stuff without asking for permission or without being told to do so, that’s a major sign.

By the way, starting a company as part of an entrepreneurial class is not entrepreneurial. Why? Again, because you were told to innovate. You just followed orders. Stepping out of this comfort zone (the classroom) and going beyond what was expected, now that would be the sign of a great entrepreneur.

PS: after reading this, there is no need to revisit and tweak your resume. Either you had what it takes, you had great side projects and were proud of them already, in which case you already had them on your resume, or you haven’t really done anything extra, so there is no point in pretending.

Great. Now try this: write an iPhone app and put it on the App Store. What will you learn? Marketing, customer support, economics, PR.

By the time you graduate with your CS degree, that little App Store adventure may well be what sets you ahead of all the other candidates to land your dream job.

What does it cost you? You need to pay $99 to Apple to become a registered iPhone developer. And you may even recoup some of that investment if someone buys your app.

Strike that. You will know that you passed the class when you recoup that investment tenfold. How many other classes you took offer such direct, undisputable grades?

What you will learn:

• Marketing: How do users hear about your app? How can you create some buzz to attract more people? You will learn that having an amazing technical product is nothing if you can’t communicate its value.
• Customer support: You will be forced to look at your product with the eyes of your end user. Is the app really intuitive? How come every user seems to be making the same usability mistake? You will learn to respect your end user and project yourself to code for what they need, not what you think is neat.
• Economics: By now you should be having fun. Some money is coming in. You’d want more. How can you manage that? Maybe it’s time to bring on board another student to help with support or graphics. How much will that cost you? Is that a good return on investment? You will learn to make your own business decisions.

Granted, an MBA teaches more than what I just listed above. But nothing beats hands-on experience and the App Store today is the quickest way for a CS student to get it.

I know the pain. I was a new grad once. It was horrible: it took me 10 months to find my first job.

Back to 2009. One student showed me her resume: it showed perfect GPA, lots of classes with impressive-sounding titles. But no summer job, no internship, no side project.

Another student showed me a less than perfect resume, but it had all kinds of extra-curricular projects and activities, showing exposure to technologies, people and business challenges.

I have been a hiring manager long enough(1) to tell you the one thing we look for: relevant experience.

Which by definition, being a new grad, you don’t have.

We don’t care much at all about GPA or extra-curricular activities. In 20 seconds or less, we decide whether to discard the resume or not.

Don’t get me wrong. You need a good GPA. Think of it as a pre-requisite. But you need to go the extra mile. For an idea of how far you can take this concept, check out this post from Jason Calacanis. While I don’t agree with all of it, it should pour enough fire in your belly to get you moving.

Experience for the Inexperienced

So what can you add to your resume within a few months, that will make a difference?

A favorite is joining an Open Source project. Go to github or Sourceforge and pick up an existing project. It will prove that you can contribute to a large piece of code and work with others.

The Mini-MBA

But there is an entire dimension that is usually ignored by both university curriculum and open source projects: Business. Will anyone spend money on this product? Who is my customer? Being business-aware and customer-centric is a major skill that you might as well acquire early.

Allow me to suggest one example of a slightly different kind of project that will give you such exposure. Join one of our Fair Projects. Even going through the list of projects and figuring out for yourself which ones are likely to succeed commercially is a worthwhile exercise.

Alternatively, write a $0.99 iPhone app. Those 99 cents make all the difference. Will someone buy your product? That’s exciting but it also teaches great business lessons. Can you triple your number of customers? How? Then go ahead and try. The beauty of the iPhone store is that you can iterate and learn extremely quickly.

I am not a big believer in MBAs, but early exposure to business issues is very important. Think of this as earning your mini-MBA.

Resume Help

I’ll be happy to provide free feedback on the first 100 students who e-mail me their resume (PDF please). I won’t find you a job, but I’ll tell you how you fare on the side-project-o-meter. Contact me ‘Alain’ at SoftwareBillofRights (dot org).

(1) My advice applies to small and mid-size corporations. There are still a few very large corporations (IBM, Google…) that hire quotas of new grads with 0 experience, because they are willing to train them internally.