Since a lot of people on the forum helped me out a lot, I'm still posting this report even though I ended up getting rejected, which is a shame.
Behavior: The usual three — success, helping others, and failure. Remember to prepare detailed examples, there will be follow-ups.
DC: I made slides, mostly focused on visualization, since at my current job I present to an MD every day so this felt familiar territory. They didn't interrupt me at all the whole time, just kept nodding along. Remember to speak slowly and pause to leave room for questions. The final follow-up was which part I liked best, and what I'd do differently if I did it again.
Case 1: The classic glasses/eyewear question from the forum. 1) What factors to consider when opening a store. 2) What to consider when converting to a physical location. 3) Given the data, calculate profit — remember to clearly lay out every revenue and expense line. 4) Break-even. 5) Different prescriptions have different costs; if profit stays the same, what's the ratio of low-prescription to high-prescription customers — an expected value problem. None of the calculations were hard overall, but you really need to be careful, careful, careful.
Case 2: Venmo. I couldn't find the original question on the forum, so I wasn't prepared for this one at all... I got stuck on this second question for a really long time, and the recruiter later told me this was the reason they didn't move me forward.
The question was actually: 1) You're given two products, credit and debit. Debit doesn't make money — calculate the profit, which comes out negative. 2) Calculate how many more customers you'd need to break even. I couldn't quite follow the interviewer's accent and overcomplicated it, so I spent a huge amount of time on this... Really you just needed to figure out how much extra profit each customer brings in, then divide the amount you were losing by that. 3) Finally they asked whether this is realistic and how you'd change it. You'd need 6.7M+ customers, which isn't realistic, so you'd need to change the P&L.
Overall the interview experience wasn't bad, except the interviewer on case 2 had an accent — though that question was actually pretty simple, I just got my own assumption wrong... too bad. The company atmosphere seemed pretty good. Good luck everyone 🤞
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