Asana’s new CEO says getting a job in Silicon Valley isn’t harder for Gen Z than it was for him—he shares his own ‘donut box’ hack for getting hired

Getting a job in Silicon Valley is so cutthroat that some ambitious unemployed twenty‑somethings are literally hand‑delivering donut boxes stuffed with their résumés to founders’ front desks, hoping it will make them stand out for the hottest tech roles. But that’s nothing new, says Dan Rogers, the new CEO of the $1.8 billion workflow software company Asana.

Although Gen Zers are facing layoffs, hiring freezes, and AI anxiety at an unprecedented rate, landing a job at the HQs of Apple, Meta, and Alphabet “has always been a long shot,” Rogers warns. 

He would know: Rogers is one of the few British Silicon Valley CEOs. He started out in the small town of Grimsby—better known as the butt of a Sacha Baron Cohen movie than as a tech launchpad—and worked his way up to the top job in San Francisco via stints at Dell, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and more.

“I don’t remember it being easy back in the day, honestly,” he exclusively tells Fortune of breaking into Silicon Valley. “For me, for example, it was never going to be possible that I’d go straight........

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