First, I want to quickly go through my career journey up to this point and that I can share a few of the key things that I helped me along the way and also the lessons I learned. So my undergrad which I did in China and my major was a Control Theory. And when I graduated from undergrad, I came to the U. S for my PhD research, my major was computer networks. Then when I graduated from my PhD program, I got a job in Microsoft and I went to Microsoft for about three years doing building the Microsoft Payments platform. And then I switched to Google and spend 10 years in Google Building and working on the Google search ads products and mostly focusing on both from the back end machine learning components. Eventually moving towards overall products in the front end. And then I left Google because I wanted to start my own company. But at the time, I was looking at all my experience of Microsoft Google, the smallest company size I've seen is 10,000 people. So I basically asked, what do I know about a startup? So applying a machine learning approach to this specific problem, to maximize my chance of being successful in starting my own company, I decided to first join a late-stage start-up and so that I can learn from the inside. So I went to a company called Sumo logic and at that time it's about 300 people and it's one of the upcoming rising companies. I went there and clearly said I want to learn how to start my own company. They agreed and I joined them. I stayed there for about six months. They were very open and teaching me. And then there I was ready to start my own company. It worked for three years. I was working only the AI, and then eventually we learned, even though we would build a good product, good technology, we didn't do very good in the user acquisition perspective. And so we eventually got acquired by Facebook, and I joined Facebook to learn how Facebook has done the user growth component. And, so now I'm working on the job product on Facebook. I've been there since February of this year. There are a few key lessons I've learned in this way. One of the top things I will say is to be open-minded about the opportunities available to you. So I'm gonna use my only experience of when I graduated from the PhD program. I was very narrow-minded thinking that the only thing I want to get it's become a professor and published papers and do research. It turned out to be that year, the industrial economy was not very good and this affected all the faculty positions open, and I couldn't I didn't get even a single interview for faculty position. So I have to go to the industry and eventually got to Microsoft. When I joined face of Microsoft, I was still thinking that this is only short term stick for me, and I will eventually return to be a professor. It turned out to be that I realized I enjoyed building platforms, building real solutions for real people, way more than I enjoyed research and publishing papers. Even though I never really took that step. If I had a faculty position I probably would have been teaching at some university. I probably would've been very happy, but it was sort of fate to give me a different route. And I turned out to be realizing that I enjoy the other route way more than what happened. Similar things happen again and again many times that I wondering with certain things and knowing what I want to do and fate gives me a different opportunity and took it and realize this other thing is also very interesting. And so at some point, I started to really question and challenge myself to what you actually know about the things that actually enjoy doing. What I really learned is there's always a learning opportunities of something, and we, as human beings, never fully understand exactly what we're good at or what we actually mostly enjoy. So one of the key lessons that I would give out to the students is really to be open-minded about what opportunity might be available to you and some things you've never experienced before. You might overly narrowly think about what you want to do. So be open-minded and assess what made you happy instead of what you think will make you happy.

So my key responsibility is I currently work on the job product at Facebook, which helps Facebook users to find jobs. The main responsibility and decisions that we make are about product strategy and team directions. Most of the tech companies have very flexible work hours. For me. personally, I prefer to be in office because I think the interaction with the team members is actually one of the key parts. Even though the company policy allows, for example, every Wednesday everyone can work from home and I prefer to come to the office even on Wednesdays because the face to face interaction is still a critical part of our happiness at work. And it's also communication is more effective when you see each other in person. So other than that, we have very flexible work hours. Very flexible work travel if needed.

The interesting thing here is I don't have a strong purpose. The main reason is things just moved too fast. Whatever we're currently using in a year or two, probably no longer be the best tool. This applies to either the program, the frameworks, all the algorithms because the industry will always move towards a better tool whenever it's available. So constantly learning new things and adjusting is important. More important than getting very specific, like emotionally attached to one thing and not evolving. That's much less preferred than evolving with what's the best out there right now.