The career tree

- So when you're getting strategic about your career and you're thinking about what jobs to apply to you need to do three things. Apply to jobs that you're interested in, apply to jobs that you have some qualifications for, not every single qualification is necessary. And apply to jobs that you can grow into. For our parents' generation, it was very often the case that you find a good company, you stick with it. That company pays for your retirement, gives you great insurance. And you stay with them for 30 years or 40 years. But today there are so many opportunities out there that I think young folks need to take advantage of and find things that they really, really love. Millennials get so much crap for job hopping. We're not committed, we're not loyal, we are selfish, so forth and so on. But the fact of the matter is in order to find a job that you're really great at and you're really happy with, it takes a couple of tries, right? It takes time for you to figure out what you want to do from when you're 21 'till you're 70. And so being open to taking those chances and switching jobs and switching roles, even within the same company, can have a really great outcome. I like to think about it as a tree. Your career is this giant tree and it's going to continue to grow. You've got your big trunk, and then you've got your thick branches at the bottom and then they kind of spread out into smaller branches as you kind of get mature in your career. Early in your career, you are at the thicker branches. So you might go from an engineering role to a product role to a marketing role. And it's better to do those early 'cause once you spend a lot of time on one track, once you start on this engineering branch and work your way out several years, it's much harder to jump to another big branch. And so if you do that early on, you can figure out what you like and then decide kind of what you want that trajectory to be. When I moved to the Bay Area I had a very specific skill set. I was in academia before that, and I was actually in a Ph.D program which I dropped out of. My skillset was in statistics, it was in research, social science research. And so I said how can I use that to my advantage to try something new? And so I started working first at a social service agency doing metrics and outcomes for foster youth, for families who had been involved in the child protective system. And then another opportunity arose where I could either kind of work my way up in that role and become a research manager, or I could switch to doing outcomes and metrics for a sports philanthropy firm. Which is completely different than social services because you've got all these professional athletes who've invested money in these non-profits and they had no idea where that money was going, how it was being spent, what the outcomes were. And so I switched to that because I wanted to see how philanthropy worked. And I ended up really, really enjoying that. And it wasn't until at the end of that role my boss said "you know have you thought about going "to business school?" And I was like, business school? People like me don't go to business school. But the more I thought about it, I saw myself kind of progressing in that kind of field. I would say that was kind of my jump from branch to branch early on. I did academia first, and then I went into social service research, and then I did philanthropy. And then ultimately went to business school and became a venture capitalist which is very different from where I started.