He led engineers at Facebook, Yahoo, Airbnb. Here are the lessons he learned.

When Mike Curtis got his first engineering job, he knew zero code. He was in high school and used to whip up lattes part-time at a cafe in Virginia.

“I got to know some of the customers really well. One of them, this guy Jason, had a little tech company across the street,” says Mike.

Mike wanted to intern there. But Jason said no, because Mike knew nothing about computers.

Mike knew one thing though, and that was persistence.

“I kept after him. And I kept after him. And I kept after him. And finally I got him to agree to give me the internship.”

He told Jason: “if you hire me, I’ll do computer programming stuff and learn that, but I’ll be the receptionist. I’ll answer the office phone for you. So you wouldn’t have to hire a receptionist and pay for that.”

Mike went on to bigger things. The startup, iAtlas, was acquired by AltaVista in 1999. AltaVista, however, became a footnote in history after losing the search engine battle to Google. Mike moved on to Yahoo and climbed the ladder until he was managing 200 engineers.

He then joined Facebook, witnessed the social network cross a billion monthly active users and list on Nasdaq.

Itching for his next adventure, he met Nathan Blecharczyk, co-founder and CTO of Airbnb, who convinced Mike to join the company as the vice-president of engineering.

And he did all this before turning 35.

Mike was in Singapore at an event hosted by local startup Carousell, to share lessons he picked up in his journey.

How he got hired

Mike observed that those who get hired for a job are those who worked hard to get ready for the interview. They’ve intensively researched the company and thought about its place in the world, and they’ve prepared for the technical interviews.

Despite his high-flyer status, he did not take Airbnb’s call for granted. “When I was interviewing at Airbnb, I prepared – a lot. And it really shines through in the interviews,” he says, noting that folks who schedule tons of interviews with different companies all at once but go in blind tend to struggle.

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