Elizabeth Stone: preference

Transcript context

…I was looking at your LinkedIn and looking at your career over the years. It seems like you've had a meteoric rise at four different companies. And I'll just walk through them briefly. So at your first job, you went from associate to vice president in three years. At the next company, Nuna, you went from manager of data science to COO in two years. At Netflix you went from VP to CTO in three years. I think that's really rare. I'm curious what is your secret sauce to being so successful at so many places and especially in the context of what advice can you share with folks earlier in their career? This is one of those questions that sparks the reflection that I wouldn't normally do, so that's great. I really don't think of it as a secret sauce, but maybe I can walk through some of the things that I think have been instrumental. As you listed that out, it sounds like the two to three year point is the real sweet spot, so maybe there's something about that timeline. But I think some things almost feel trite in how I would say them, which is I'm very dedicated to the work and to the teams I'm part of. It's been part who I am for a long time that I give everything I've got to the job that I'm in. And I think that dedication and that I get joy out of that has mattered. It matters because I enjoy what I'm doing. I do the best work I possibly can, less so for myself and my own ambition and more so because I think of myself as being part of a team and so I really need to deliver for that team. I think that framing in my mind and that motivation has helped me in a few fronts, which is the way in which I build partnerships with people I work with that I really care about setting other people up for success and being someone that people want to work with, so I learn from them, they learn from me, and we get better outcomes for the business together, I have found that part of that is being someone that people can leverage to translate from technical to non-technical and non-technical to technical. So that I do think has been a relative advantage in my role. So while I was often sitting in more technically-oriented teams, a lot of the advancement in my career was to roles that required that type of communication fluency. It grew out of being able to partner with people across the businesses who didn't necessarily have the same background, but where we needed to really connect spaces so that we could be more effective. That was something that I think really the training for that came from analysis group where it was a very quantitative set of work that we had to find a way to communicate to judges and juries for economic cases. So that was something that was trained in other roles and I think I've been able to leverage. I'm a relatively introverted only child, so I observe a lot, which means that I learned from other people. And in each of these roles I have tried really hard to watch what other people are doing, think about how could I learn something from them, whether it's the thing that I want to be able to do myself or it's the thing that I think, "Oh, that doesn't quite fit or feel authentic with my style." And I do a lot of that introspection. So I have been surrounded by amazing people in all these roles and I have a feeling that I learned a lot by osmosis and observation and then have been able to leverage that to be stronger in the roles I was sitting in. I took a few notes here. A few things you mentioned is just like, dedication, essentially working really hard and taking your work seriously, being part of a team and setting other people up for success, translating complex tech language and problems to non-tech people, and then being really good at observing and learning from other people around you. Is there an example or two that you could share of some of these to make it even more concrete for people? Like dedication. Is that just like working many hours, being part of a team? Anything along those lines to share a story maybe to help people put this into practice.…

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