I'm 35 years out of college. I spent my twenties thinking that I wanted to be in academia. I started a Ph.D. program and my thesis advisor took his research team to NASA Aims, here in the Bay Area, which is how I got to the Bay area. I spent a number of years of my twenties thinking that I wanted to be in academia and I published in papers, you can look me up on Google Scholar and I did machine learning back before it was cool, long time ago when it was much more of an academic discipline and was not something that was in demand in industry and for a variety of reasons, I decided that I wasn't interested in the academic rule and we can come back to that a little bit more, but I decided that I was more interested in applications and then I found it not as satisfying as I expected to as to present a paper in an academic conference, that kind of an abstract thing. As I said, machine learning was a bit abstract and not applied back in the late eighties, it's a long, long time ago. So I decided that I was interested in the industry and I was in my late twenties and knew that I had no experience, and I was actually through somewhat randomness, I found it on a used net, but it was a job board, it was a very stealthy, anonymous request to hire people for a very stealthy company that wouldn't tell who they were online and I jumped in the start-up and it worked out really well for me. I often get asked whether to do start-up or big companies when you're early in your career. For me in particular, that worked out really well because I learned a lot very quickly. I was sort of willing to raise my hand to do anything, and I tried a little bit of everything. I was everything, full-time engineer to I did pre-sales and post-sales work. I worked booths at a trade show. I went on-site and some of our customers and did consulting work at a very small company. That was a really neat bootstrap for me because I really got to see a lot of different things. You don't do that when you go to a large company, I often tell people in their twenties to get a small company experience and get a large company experience and you get very different things out of it. At Google, you get incredible mentorship, you see best practices, you get massive impact. you know what your product does because Google has a billion users for a lot of products and things like that. But you get kind of put in a very particular niche. Whereas if you're at a 10 person startup, you put on as many hats, you put on 20 hats in a week. But I spent my thirties on a series of small companies, first of which was a net startup I founded my own company Web0.0 in 1999 when no one really understood what the Internet was and was not for. We got venture capital funding and again, I learned a lot from that experience, different kinds of things, some of which is you never use again. I learned how to rent office space which you don't use in those companies. But I learned a lot from starting a company from scratch, trying to figure out what the idea was building the first part of Prototype, asking for funding, hiring the first people, etcetera. Did another company and then I joined Google in 2004, just before the IPO and I spent 12 years at Google, doing a variety of roles, all in the ads team. In the last six years, I was in YouTube ads, which was a very rewarding experience. After 12 years, I decided Google was long enough, and I wanted one more intense operational job and so I took a job in uber three years ago and spent the last three years of Uber, which I recently left, leading their pricing and matching teams. So there's a lot of different ways of answering what instance and experiences shaped my career path and we could spend longer on that, that was sort of 35 years in four minutes. I didn't see it like when I was 25, I certainly didn't imagine being a VP at Google when I was 50. I never probably looked for more than two or five years in the future, and I don't know that's the right choice or not, but that is what I did. I think more in terms of good decisions, it's impossible to know if you made all the right decisions. But I made reasonably good decisions that each mean pivot point and some of those pivot points are whenever you're looking for your next job. When I switched from company extra company, which happened maybe five times in my career and I think those are the big decisions, it's when you decide to leave one company and then you decide which one to go to, and all you can do is really just get as many different offers in front of you as possible and make the best decision you can. You can never see the future perfectly. I'd love to say when I joined Google in 2004 that I knew what Google was going to become. Google was already reasonably well known, actually, quite well known. It was the world's largest search engine, but it wasn't an operating system, it wasn't day browser, it wasn't displaying ads, it wasn't Cloud, it wasn't a fallow, and it wasn't even Gmail yet. I think when I had my offer letter, it was a search company. But I had an instinct that it was a good company and I jumped at it. I think things like that it's you got at each main sort of pivot point, make the best decision you can and I think the other big decision I talk a lot about when I'm talking to people earlier in their career is the decision that I made at a certain point, whether to be on the individual contributor track or the management track about 3 years into the startup idea that I mentioned earlier in the nineties, I was in my early thirties, relatively new into my commercial career.I was a good engineer, I was a good programmer, I was able to make a lot happen in a short period of time, but I had the opportunity to try a leadership role, and that was again one of the things that I think was good about being in a start-up is that bad opportunity availed itself because that startup was growing, and I stressed about it immensely. I think I spent several months kind of try and decide whether to do it. But then finally someone said, Just go for it. You know, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work and I did try management and I think that was the right career path for me the last 20 years, I think, it more is suited to me and I don't think everybody should be a manager and I tell to people that all the time. I have a lot of people come to be three years out of college saying I want to try management and my answer was that you are too early in your career, too early in your life to be managing responsibly for other people. There are exceptions to that but I think that's broadly speaking true, and I think it's good to get experience as an engineer before you try to manage engineers. But I also think there are some people who don't want that responsibility and it doesn't match their personality well, I think it did match my personality well. I spent the last 20 years of my career managing other people, and I really enjoyed that experience.

So as I said, I left this job four weeks ago, but we'll use the present tense. One of the things I loved about my role as head of marketplace engineering and uber was that I led a 400 person engineering team that was cross-functional, about 600 including data science and product management and other roles that didn't report to me and one of the things I loved about getting to that level and it's pretty different from a job where you're a first-line manager of an eight-person team, which is a lot closer for people early in their career. But I like the variety. Things were just different 20 times in a single week. There was no one thing I did a lot of, some of it is personnel when you run a 400 person team, there's always something, there's always someone who's unhappy who you're trying to make happy. There's always two people who can't see eye to eye on some personnel or technical issue. There's always one person who you hire that maybe you shouldn't have. There's always someone who has a family reason that they're not able to put their all into work in a given week. I only had maybe eight or nine or ten direct reports, but the more difficult problems bubble up to you, no matter how much you try to delegate things and trust your leadership. There's a lot of personnel things around running a 400 person team. It happens, I just was talking to my successor a couple of days ago, where there's an annual performance review cycle where we decide who gets promoted or not, and who gets what size raises and who gets what size bonuses and that's probably no managers favorite part of the job. It's a painful thing, but at the same time is incredibly important to do those. So there's a lot of just personnel work, and anybody who thinks management is all about power and not responsibility should think twice and or if you experience it, it's quite different. There are always some challenges in that area, but the areas I really liked and probably enjoyed, got the most satisfaction out of were where I was responsible for a very large, functional team that could make an enormous difference for Uber's customers. I lead as I said, it'd probably three or four main areas, the core trip flow of uber, so the system that ran the state machine for both the riders and drivers who were in the process, either driving around his drivers or riding his riders. I led the pricing team trying to decide how much to charge the rider and how much to pay the driver for 20 million rides a day and a matching team, which is assigning riders to drivers. It does a full scan of every city every five seconds roughly and does a big matching problem. In all those places, there are a lot of technical decisions to be made, and leading a 400 person team as a VP, you should be making a few technical decisions as possible. You should be relying on others but having a good enough sense of what's going on in all those areas that you can have a sense of when things were going well, when things were not going well, like if you run 10 teams just for the sake of argument. There's always going to be 6 projects that are going great, three projects that are going OK and one project that's floundering and your job is to understand which project is not going well, understand when you need help, not necessarily dive in and make decisions, but, support the team, unblock things but a place like uber, there's a lot of policy issues. We're constantly dealing with regulatory challenges that a lot of different cities around the world London just change the rules in one way, California change the rules in another way, and sometimes my value-added, just going to a lawyer and saying, You've been thinking about this for three weeks. We need to get past that point because there was a recent situation. I can't go into detail where we have three months before some regulatory rule went into place and the lawyers were taking two months to decide what to do, leaving the engineers like an hour and 1/2 to actually build it on. And I had to sort of help unblock those kinds of things. I would do a lot of project reviews, that a lot of one on ones and my job was to really the first proclamation to know everything that's going on in my organization. So I knew where I could help and also and sometimes help men. Like I said, direct intervention and then sometimes it's coaching people. A lot of my product as a VP is the team, and my product is my five director, six senior staff engineers, and 30 front line managers, and helping them all to be successful because I can't do everything, but it's knowing enough to know how you can help other to be successful. It says that it discusses weekly hours, so first from philosophy perspective, I am a very strong proponent of not counting how long people are at work. Some of the most successful people at both you and whoever I worked with but I think this is different to start up. I think to start up, you're forming a team. There is a very tight timeline. I think everybody being in the office for a lot of hours matters a lot more, but we're in a large company it's distributed, it is like engines are in Bangalore and engines in Seattle and engines in Toronto. There are people doing videoconferences from home. There are people working off-hours, etcetera. I told people very early on I would not put a premium on how often you're in the office. I showed up every day, by all means, but I was probably in the office seven or eight hours a day. And then I did a lot of other time, I would roll out of bed in the morning and check email to see that something had happened after I'd gone to bed or overnight. I would check mail before I went to bed, so I was working often.

So I interviewed leadership roles more than I did individual contributors because of the sort of role I had. But I think that the answer is similar. And I did interview, quite a few senior individual contributor candidates in my time at both Google and uber. Attitude matters at a tremendous amount, it comes across in Google especially, we got the best crop of candidates anywhere in the world. But we would notice a lot of people who came in with an attitude, people who came in arrogant. If in a 45-minute interview, you already give indications that you're not somebody I want to work with, and that's when you're supposedly on your best behavior versus when under a very difficult situation at work, Google would try, it would generally spit those people out in the interview process, and that wasn't my intent. The rule that Google was if you didn't want this person next to you in your cubicle on your team, you couldn't recommend and you can't say, 'Well, that's a great asset for Google. I don't want to work with him or her. But, boy, I'd really love him working somewhere else.' and I saw a lot of really talented people getting rejected that way and google is not perfect, any interview process is imperfect, it's human but attitude really comes across, I think, humility, a mindset, meaning just evidence that you still think you should learn. I think that our industry is so accelerated nowadays that everyone thinks they are senior software engineers four years out of college and their staffs offer engineers five years out of college and if they're not a CTO before they're 30 they are a failure. There's a little bit of that feel in the sort of bay area hypergrowth mode that we've been in because we've been in a boom for 10 years straight. Anybody under 30 has never seen anything but a boom.I know I sound like a little bit of an old guy talking about millennials, but I think that it comes across sometimes that there are people five years out of school who think they've already learned everything there is to learn and they have it. I often tell people that I'm still trying to learn now and I was trying to learn six months ago when I was in my final job. There's lots of things I wish I was better at that comes across a lot and I often counsel people too early in their career and by that, I mean sort of 1st 5-15 years. You should be optimizing for experience and learning and not for money. I told a story recently and was speaking to some high school students, I was trying to close a candidate to join uber, I think a year ago and he was trying to side between us and lift, and whatever decision gets made is fine, but I'll make up a number. But like, roughly speaking, it felt to me like he was basically if we offered him $50,000 a year and Lift offered him 50,000 and $1 per year. He would go to lift. I mean, he was completely stacked ranking on compensation and money doesn't matter. But early in your career, so much more and I really almost wanted to withdraw that candidate. It was so clear that his focus 1,2,3 and 4 with compensation. He didn't ask you what manager he was going to be. He didn't ask if the work was going to be impactful. He didn't ask what the software stack would be, he didn't ask what kind of organization I was trying to run. He didn't ask about uber's future. It was like, Tell me my calm and like making more And I just was so turned off by that candidate. In fact, that candidate did go off the lift, as it turned out because they offered him $500 a year more which I mean, it's not anything, but in the great scheme of thing is nothing for somebody four years out of college. What matters a lot more is you building your career for the future so, I look a lot for those kinds of things of someone who wants to contribute meaningfully, wants to learn. I see a lot in the market nowadays of people's hopping jobs every 18 months. And the fact is, you can get awarded by that usually going to get raise when you switch jobs. But if you're 26 you've already been a four companies, it really feels to me like you've never had long enough to really become an expert in anything. And you might have made your compensation more about your resume looks a lot worse. I know exactly what the right sweet spot is and everybody once goes to a company that's a mistake and leaves after six or 12 months, and that's okay. But if like, I interviewed, a guy wants you literally spent, like two years at Pinterest and then two years at slack and then two years at Airbnb and now is applying an uber and I'm just like, you know, I don't want to hire you here to be here for two years and a day. In terms of hard skills, again, I'm less the person who's asking you to code on the board, but a lot of how we look and in an interview is an artificial process, and you get a lot of people to argue about how an interview should and shouldn't be done. But, the software's a team sport and if someone can express their thinking process, when given a problem, ask clarifying questions, think in front of a whiteboard, explain the assumptions they made and said, 'I could do this, but I think you know, I got it right here, I do that,' that sort of thing matters almost that much is whether you can write in tactically perfect c++ or job or whatever that stuff like ideas, convicts like everybody makes angle bracket, failures here and there. Somebody's going to forget the order of arguments on STRLEN under the pressure of an interview, those things matter a little less to me, especially in a world where so much is available online. It's your thinking process and your evidence that you can communicate because you'll find in most real job situations, the percentage of its work that you do that is interacting with other primates as opposed to interacting with a keyboard is, I think, more than a lot of people understand from their academic experience.