Ada Chen Rekhi: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. It's a beautiful product. Yeah, it's a beautiful product, much more beautiful than what we built at the time. It was such a great learning experience to discover what it was like to be a founder of a company and an entrepreneur. My personal learning out of all of those things was really just that I was continuously optimizing that I loved marketing. I loved being a founder. I really like small teams. There are pros and cons to this corporate life, where maybe things are really slow paced, but the scale is really important. So that was really what carried me through a lot of my early career. After Connected was acquired by LinkedIn, I moved into this exploit mode. So I was at LinkedIn for a period of time while I was investing, and I really wanted to be intentional about the time that I spent there in terms of how I wanted to exploit it. So unlike a traditional path where you're really focused on trying to get the biggest title, a big team, set yourself up to run a big org, my role at LinkedIn was really explicit. I even told my manager this when I first came in, "I'm here to learn to be a better founder." So there were a lot of things when I started connected, which I didn't know how to do very well, I didn't understand growth. I was fair to middling at pricing. I really didn't understand how to build a subscriptions business and how to price it. So if I can make my LinkedIn experiences match to that, that would be a huge win for me independent of promotion, or compensation or a whole bunch of those things because the plan afterward is actually to go off and start another company. So I managed to get into this great role leading gross marketing for LinkedIn, working with their growth team from a hundred million to 200 million members, read every experiment brief that I could, spent a lot of time with the team, really understanding their process, and then shifted into the subscription side where I worked on LinkedIn subscriptions and ran their sales subscriptions business at scale through the online channel. And saw how all of those pieces and worked together from a financial planning and analysis stage to all of the optimizations that they did. It was just such a rare opportunity, but I wouldn't have gotten those opportunities if I just let them promote me or I followed a strategy where I was just focused on trying to get the biggest title. Instead, I was focused on those learnings and those experiences. Ultimately, the fact that I was a startup founder. I had big company experience. I had growth experience, and I had subs experience. And I was a product marketer. That was actually the winning combination that caused SurveyMonkey to send me a LinkedIn InMail, start a conversation and ultimately bring me in as their head of marketing at the age of, I think I was 27 or 28 at the time. Because their rationale was, you have all these experiences that we really need and you don't have the management experience, but we have plenty of that. We're happy to teach that to you. I really like this framework. I've never heard it described this way. Explore and exploit connects a lot with what I always recommend which, early on, is to optimize for a variety of experience so that you can figure out where you actually have a good time and what you're interested in versus getting stuck on the first thing something. I don't know if you'll have an immediate answer to this, but I'm curious. Many people don't know how long to stick with something that maybe doesn't feel good but may lead to something. Like, someone may be in a job right now, or just like, "I really don't like this job, but I feel like it'll lead to something great. And I don't want to give up too quickly." So I guess the question is, what are heuristics that tell you to stick it out and stick with something that you think will lead to something great versus hold the recording and get out?…

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