Today’s guest, J. Kenton Kivestu, graduated from UVA with a BA in economics and history in 2006. Upon graduating he joined Google in product development and worked there for 3 years until he moved to Hanover New Hampshire to attend the Tuck School of Business and earn his MBA. He interned at BCG, but returned to mobile product development as a manager at Zynga when he graduated from Tuck in 2011. After several promotions, he joined Flurry. Immediately upon graduating from Tuck, he began work on RocketBlocks, where he is now full time.  We’re going to learn much more about RocketBlocks and Kenton’s journey to date. Welcome!

What is RocketBlocks? [1:28]

It’s an interactive, skills-based platform that helps students prepare for consulting case interviews. We started it in 2011, and I recently started working on it full time.

What are the interactive elements? [2:05]

If you think about what a case interview is, there are variations among the consulting firms, but ultimately they’re all looking for certain skillsets: the ability to do mental math easily and comfortably; the ability to interpret charts and data; the ability to structure a nebulous problem.

When we say it’s interactive, it means we take the skillsets needed for a case interview and build interactive drills to help you build your skills.

Can you give an example? [4:05]

Take case structuring, for example. Our drills will allow you to go through a series of case style prompts and answer how you would address the problem. Then the system will give you a suggested answer (from a former consultant), so you can compare your answer with theirs. You can also compare your answer with anonymous answers from other students.

Are those student answers rated? [5:40]

Right now they’re curated. We’re thinking of a rating system.

How did you create RocketBlocks? [5:50]

During b-school, I did an internship at BCG. Ultimately, I didn’t pursue consulting, but on my return to Tuck I helped students prepare for the case interview. My friend and I saw that a lot of students used books to prepare, and memorized frameworks. It was very different from how I’d prepared. My friend at McKinsey saw this as a problem, too, since people sometimes tried to fit things to the framework and sounded stilted. So our approach is to focus on skills.

You need to get good at assessing a unique situation and pull out tools from your toolset.

How did you choose the name RocketBlocks? [10:25]

The working version was called Blocks – because our approach was geared to teaching students the building blocks to succeed. When we wanted to register the domain, we wanted to keep that theme. We chose “rocket” because of the sense of launching a career.

There are other resources to help students prepare for case interviews – books, career services, etc. What makes RocketBlocks unique? [12:03]

Career centers are great resources to help students navigate the process, but they tend to be narrow teams. They don’t tend to get too deep into specialized interviewing, and they often have too many students to do really specialized mock interviews. They’re focused on education about career paths, companies, recruiting, etc.

And case books tend to be focused on frameworks and systems, and teach students to memorize those systems.

We’re focused on skills.