How to Enter Side Doors by maja (Velvet Noise)

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Maja writes Velvet Noise, a Substack about careers and navigating the world with more specificity than most people think is safe. She wrote this essay for a class of final-year students she was teaching. It is also a reflection on her own job search. It landed at 6,400 subscribers. The full essay is at velvetnoise.substack.com.

  1. “Job” is not a thing. It is a bundle of problems someone will pay you to solve. Maja draws on Henrik Karlsson’s essay “How to Walk Through Walls”: Karlsson grew up thinking jobs were listed on boards. A more precise view: the economy is billions of people trying to solve problems. Getting a job means finding someone with a problem and convincing them you can solve it. That reframe makes the world bigger.

  2. The front door is crowded to the point of uselessness. Thousands of applicants, AI-polished resumes, the same keywords from the job description. The system is “lossy, saturated, and weirdly bad at detecting human signal.” A company posts a role and gets hundreds of near-identical applications. From both sides, the front door is failing.

  3. Side doors create a different kind of signal. Instead of sending your resume into the void, you notice a person or company with specificity. You study what they are doing. You make the smallest useful proof of your thinking. A short memo. A teardown of their onboarding. A thoughtful response to a founder’s essay. The goal is “a small, undeniable unit of signal.”

  4. Two categories: outbound and inbound. Outbound is cold emails, specific outreach, offering a perspective or artifact. Inbound is making your signal visible enough that the world can find you: writing in public, building tools, publishing essays, leaving evidence of how you think. The best careers contain both.

  5. Specificity is the highest form of respect. In a market full of generic AI applications, a message that shows you have actually looked and formed a real view is itself a signal. You are not spraying need into the world hoping someone converts it into opportunity. You saw something specific, you had a reaction, and you put it on the table.

  6. The examples read like a collection of improbable doorways. Maja got her first consulting role by sending a long, earnest, “unhinged” email to the CEO of Calm at 18. She got an internship at Blackbird Foundation through a cold LinkedIn message to someone whose career path she admired. Her friend Jae published a critique of taste discourse on Substack; the CEO of Eucalyptus saw it, they got coffee, he got hired. Ethan published “The Traveller’s Guide to Latent Space” in a Notion doc, got a Discord message from someone in Australia, became his technical cofounder at Leonardo.ai, later acquired by Canva. Julia made a viral video asking for an internship at Shopify. They had no openings. They made one.

  7. The worst version is entitlement disguised as boldness. “I admire your company, can we chat?” sent to fifty people with the same dead-eyed phrasing is not a side door. It is noise. The better version is grounded in generosity: you study, you form a view, you create a small proof, you offer something useful before asking for something.

  8. The process works even when it does not immediately produce a job. You stop refreshing job boards. You learn the terrain, make things, talk to humans, discover which parts of the world respond to your particular frequency. That information is useful whether or not it converts into a role. “It can make you forget that the economy is not actually made of hiring portals. It is made of people.”

  9. All it takes is one person. One person who sees the signal and has the problem you can solve. One person who reads the essay, replies to the email, takes the call, invents the role, opens the side door. “If someone takes a bet on you, honour it. Do the work. Become worthy of the luck.”

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