Gina Gotthilf: commitment

Transcript context

…It all makes sense looking backwards, as he said. Totally. I was dropping out, being like, yes, this is exactly the path. No, I was miserable. I thought there was no path forward. And when I finally went back and graduated, the college counselor looked at my curriculum and said, "What have you even done with your life? There's nothing to show for." And it was shocking. Because I was always the overachiever who wanted to do the maximum curriculum, and ace all of my classes, and do whatever. I did three diplomas in high school, the international, the American, the Brazilian. My one learning there that has stuck with me, and I think can work for other people too, is that it's not just about doing things that actually matter, and learning. It's about being able to tell the story, and it's about understanding what other people perceive as valuable. I'm not talking about net value. But I'm talking about, if you want to grow in the world, it's understanding that psychology of how humans react to what you're showing them. So that was one lesson. But then I went on to, I applied to a hundred companies. I didn't hear back from most of them. I finally got an internship at kind of like a tier B-slash-C digital marketing agency in New York City, because I wanted to live in New York so badly. And they forgot to apply for my visa on time, so I lost my visa and had to go back to Brazil. And then I ended up leaving that organization to go work for another one. And I won't even go into the details of the shadiness of that company that I worked for, but then they ended up laying me off. So I lost my visa again, had to go back home. Found another opportunity, got fired that time. So there was just a lot of rockiness in my start that I don't think you would imagine when you see someone up on stage leading a conference for 5,000 people. That, I think, is important. And even when I started working for Tumblr, I was like, this is it. I made it. This is a really interesting company. This is going to work out. That was super rocky because it was an early stage startup. So for example, they couldn't figure out how to wire money to Brazil. So I was not paid for six months. And at one point me and my colleagues were trying to get money out of the teller to pay contractors, because we had no money to pay them. And we borrowed money from people. And finally they also laid me off because they decided to sell to Yahoo. And then I had to figure out, what am I going to do? No one's going to hire me. I've been fired and laid off so many times. This is all before I started an agency to help US-based tech companies and startups grow in Latin America, because I figured I was in this really great place to make that happen. And it eventually worked for, well-known companies such as Duolingo. At the time, they weren't well known. They were a tiny little startup. They didn't have an Android app. And that's how I started working with Duolingo. rked for, well-known companies such as Duolingo. At the time, they weren't well known. They were a tiny little startup. They didn't have an Android app. And that's how I started working with Duolingo. Because their head of marketing connected with someone they had worked with at Flickr and said, "I noticed Tumblr grew a lot in Brazil last year. Can you recommend a company or an agency to help?" And they said, this girl. And I was 26. And so that's how they connected me with Duolingo, and I started helping them grow in Brazil as a consultant. They were like, this is great. Can you help us grow in Chile, Argentina? And I was like, yes. They were like, how about Mexico? And I was like, yes. Did I know anything about these places, Lenny? Did I know people there? No, but you can figure it out. And then they ended up asking me to come on full-time, do that across the world. In Japan, China, Korea, Turkey, Spain, France, et cetera. And then to own growth, which ended up meaning communications, social media, government partnerships, anything to grow. And then eventually became an AB testing growth engine with engineers, and PMs, and designers of which I knew nothing about. And even after that, I left Duolingo five years later, didn't know what to do with my life. You'd think, oh wow, you have it figured out now. You left Duolingo, you have the world in front of you. And I'm like, maybe I can finally go work for nonprofits, which is what I actually wanted to do in the first place. Tried my hand at that, had a couple of experiences before going to work for the Mike Bloomberg campaign. Working for the Mike Bloomberg campaign is impressive, but you know what? Mike Bloomberg didn't win. He's not the president. So that was not a successful campaign, if you really look at it. And yeah, latitude seems like it's a really promising path. But there's A days and B days. So it's just a lot of that, and just staying resilient, and believing in yourself, and getting back on the horse when you fall on your face.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.