What advice do you have for job seekers?

(upbeat music) - So when I first got to Silicon Valley, you know, had grown up there so you'd think hey this is easy, there's all these startups everyone needs a bright person who knows lots of math and data and is saying data's gonna be this next thing and there's lots of great stuff that can happen, and so I went out and I interviewed at Google, and Yahoo and everywhere else and everyone said thanks but no thanks.

So went to startups, and the early stage startups and they were like hhm, seemed interesting but this data thing, eh you seem more academic. Well what do you do, so couldn't get a job. Took me six months to land a job, the way I got my job, my first job at eBay was my mom happened to be at a cocktail party with the president of Skype at the time and she harassed him into taking a phone call with me and literally was able to convince him, like say hey maybe I could show you something that you could offer and value and then when I finally got to meet the team and I was like hey there's all this stuff with data, they were like yeah that's great.

That's interesting but there's all these other things. So what was interesting about that is most of the time and the mantra that I've always had, it's not a no, until it's a yes, (interviewer laughing) and if you just have to keep pushing and keep trying and trying to iterate your value proposition it wasn't like I kept saying oh this is what I do. I had to figure out how does that value proposition align with the key goals and at eBay the primary key goal of where could be massively used at that time was dealing with fraud and security issues.

And so there was a value that could happen there, moving from eBay to LinkedIn, LinkedIn had kinda stalled at that point, the growth had stalled and there was this question of you could do things. But there was this very interesting thing of LinkedIn had the beginnings of interesting data, but what could we turn and use that data for? Like how could you actually turn that and add value, how could you build something with data in a unique way, that is going to offer a disproportionate value for the user, and that's where we realized like hey there's something new there's something fundamentally new in the way that you can approach this and I guess it's something that I've always been trying to work towards, is how do we use data and all these other things together to collectively say, how do you add value? But not just add a little value, how do you add value where data is literally a force multiplier to the problem set? And that shift has been one that has taken not just me, it's taken a lot of people collectively to slowly erode the barriers, we haven't just broken a barrier, we had to erode the barrier by constantly showing the value proposition that this could be better.

That's that shift, that had to happen where people are trying in unique ways to not just advocate the use of data but how to actually make that, deliver that value proposition. (upbeat music)