Noam Lovinsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Totally. "I need to tweet, I need to share content to be successful." This comes up a lot in this podcast, that the more you could just stick close to what gives you energy and what you enjoy doing, oftentimes that leads to things you wouldn't expect in a lot of success. Speaking of that, looking at your career arc, I noticed a really interesting pattern and a really diverse set of experiences. So just kind of talking through places you've been. At Facebook, you worked on 0 to 1 stuff. At YouTube, the way I see it as you almost went from -1 to 1. At Thumbtack, it looks like you went from 1 to -1 and then back to 1. So it's like a really unique turnaround story. And then with Grammarly it feels like it's like, I don't know, 1 or I don't know, 5 to 100, or wherever you end up taking it. So I thought it'd be fun to talk through each of these experiences because they're such unique approaches or such unique experiences and see what lessons and wisdom we can extract from your journey. That sounds great. Yeah. Okay, sweet. So I'm thinking reverse chronologically, we start with YouTube, which the way I see it is it's kind of -1 to 1. When you join, my understanding is YouTube was losing a lot of money. When you left, they were not losing money. And I was actually just looking, they're valued apparently at $200 billion today, YouTube as a business. I know you haven't been there for a while, but great work. What lessons did you take away from that journey? What stories come to mind from that part of your career that might be helpful to people? Maybe first to start looking with why hop around these experiences. I always tell people I feel like I'm an IC trapped in a manager's body sometimes. Fundamentally, I like to build, that's why I do this. I like to make things. And so sometimes the more fun way to make things is to start something and sometimes the better way to make things in the situation that I'm in is to try to support teams and lead through teams. And so I joined YouTube through an acquisition of a company I started. In the beginning, what I was doing there is just rebuilding that product on Google infrastructure and for YouTube customers. And maybe the first lesson was actually to look around at what the rest of the team was doing and be really honest and open about the relative priority of the thing that you're working on even if it might lead to your project getting canceled. So one of the things that I remember doing really on is actually talking to the leadership team and being like, "I don't think we should be putting 50 engineers on this project. Looking at the rest of the roadmap and the rest of the priorities, excuse me, I think this team would likely be better served elsewhere. " Even though that was likely negotiating my way out of a job in month three, I don't know, I kind of felt like that was the right thing for the team and for the business. And then that started a very interesting journey because from there, basically the leadership was like, "You're right. We're going to wind that down and build some of those features into the existing product. And now you, you come and lead this focus area, we're calling the creator focus area." So I went from basically rebuilding the product that our startup had built to leading one of the three focus areas at YouTube. There was the viewer team, the creator team, and the advertiser team. And Hunter Walk, who's amazing, was leading the viewer team. And Shishir Mehrotra, who's also very amazing, was leading the advertising team. What an alumni community. There was me. I was sort of like 29-year-old startupy guy working with these guys who were awesome. And YouTube in general, and continues to be, an incredible team. And so I think that was a first really good lesson. That in the right organizations, even in large organizations, advocate for what's best for the team, advocate for what's best for the organization even if that means that it puts you at a particular difficult moment. If it is a healthy team that rewards those sorts of decisions and actions, good things will happen. If it's not, that's good to know too. That's good to know early. So that's one thing that comes to mind. Maybe one other I would say atypical career choice that I made shortly thereafter is then when I was put in that role, I really struggled in that role. I was reporting to the CEO at the time, a guy named Salar Kamangar, who's also awesome, Google's 6th employee and just learned a ton from him, like an incredible strategic thinker. ggled in that role. I was reporting to the CEO at the time, a guy named Salar Kamangar, who's also awesome, Google's 6th employee and just learned a ton from him, like an incredible strategic thinker. But he was asking me questions that I felt like they were from a different planet. I was like, I didn't know what they meant and he just thought in a different way, a different level or different scale and that's still something that I was learning. Eventually I figured it out, but I was really struggling in that moment. I had a really good relationship with both Hunter and Shishir and they really helped me through that. And eventually, I went to Salar and said, "Hey, I think I should actually report to Hunter. I think this would work better if we kind of combined the organizations this way and then we divided and conquered this way." And again, very atypical, no one has ever come to me in my career and said, "I would like you to layer me in this other person." But in that moment I was just like, "This is how I will do better work. This is how I will get better support. I will be happier and more productive and it'll be better for the team." And you know what? For me anyway, I was right. We made that change. Hunter was a fantastic manager and support at YouTube. I learned a ton, grew a lot. And then eventually when he moved on, Shishir took over the organization and then I moved into the viewer part of the organization, which is where I spent the rest of my time there, which was leading and supporting the viewer PM team at YouTube.…

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