COMPASS 2018 - Communicate, Connect and Career

08 Apr 2018

I just came back from COMPASS 2018, the first career conference for Asians in Silicon valley, with some great take-aways. This was an event organized by Leap.ai and sponsored by big names like Google and DiDi, as well as small startups like Anki. There were a number of high profile silicon valley celebrities including SVPs, VPs and directors from Google and Facebook, in the speaker list as well as various panels. It was such a great opportunity to hear them tell their stories of career development, and I felt stuffed coming back from the eight-hour event.

Biggest takeaways for me were: it is important to understand how your work fits into your company’s roadmap; you need to know how to “manage” your manager; managers look forward to people who can lead (whose words others listen and whom others look up to); and it is possible for somebody who wasn’t born in the states to speak perfectly good English (which was an eye opener for me). Nonetheless, I am going write down my full notes because there was just so much good advice from the experienced.

Edit: Came across this great summary from one of the event organizers: https://medium.com/leap-ai/10-takeaways-on-achieving-career-success-from-senior-leaders-in-silicon-valley-fd6efebaac4c

Sridhar Ramaswamy

Sridhar Ramaswamy,SVP of Ads, Commerce and SPI at Google, gave the opening keynote. He reflected on his own professional experience, and shared how to stand out at work:

Passion. It takes 10,000 hours to be an expert in most fields, and that is ten hours a day for almost three years. You need to be passionate about what you do for that long.
Breadth. You want to have expertise, but don’t lock yourself up in your small cell. Great product needs expertise in many facets and at least understanding other related fields will help your growth a lot.
Growth. To grow, you need to understand the context around you, and make yourself helpful to other aspects of the product.
Belief. Managers like people who believe in what they do as a team. But most importantly, you need to be happy about what you do.
Manager expectation. Opportunities favor those who show motivation, who drive things, and who show their willingness to learn.
Being a manager. If you find yourself the smartest person on your team, you are most certainly not a good manager. Enpower people.
Speaking. You may not like it, but to lead you need to communicate and motivate others.
People relationship. You need to be a good peer.

Denise Peck

Denise Peck, former VP at Cisco, talked about how to ACE your career as an Asian, by showing examples of her own success story getting into Stanford business school, switching careers from marketing into IT, and so on.

Myth: Asians are most likely to be hired, but least likely to be promoted.
Leadership mentality ACE: Aspire to more, Commit to growth, and Engage.
Imagining yourself in the role you want to be in helps achieving it.
Consistency. You may be watched the least you expect.
Demonstrate that you can work as a leader.
Take tough career risks -> growth, rewards.
Engage others, and build influence skills.
Soft skills are even more important when you move up.
As an immigrant from China, as I am, she speaks surprisingly good English

Yanbing Li

Yanbing Li, SVP and General Manager at VMWare, told her story from surviving a crisis from their parent company (EMC) to leading in their grandfather company (Dell). Like Denise, she also speaks like a native American, even though she didn’t come to the US until after college, as I did. I didn’t take many notes at her talk, but perceived the importance of being a good story teller for one’s career.

Jia Jiang

This was arguably one of the best parts of the event. Jia Jiang, a Chinese boy born and raised in Beijing, came to the states for grad school and worked as an engineer for his first job like many Chinese do, but he was something special. Instead of spending his life climbing ladders in a silicon valley company, he did something very original that gained him popularity on the Internet, and he now makes a living on public speaking and writing, in English, which I don’t see barely any Chinese immigrants do. His talk was about how to overcome the fear for rejections, which is a common pain for many Asians, and also what made him famous. It was a great half an hour of wisdom, with no short of his unique humors.

His TED talk on 100 days of rejections: https://www.ted.com/talks/jia_jiang_what_i_learned_from_100_days_of_rejection
In the end, rejections are numbers, are opinions. If you keep asking the same thing for enough times, you will get an acception. It’s about how many times you are willing to ask. And for the same request, you may get very different responses from different people. That proves that rejection is not necessarily a problem about you, but of others. It’s an opinion.

Panel: Influencing up and managing up

This was our first panel. It was about how to manage your relationship with your boss, and how to make them believe that you deserve a raise. Panelists were Charles Fan from MemVerge, Chandu Thota from Google, Dawei Feng from Intel, and Eric Rosenblum from Tsingyuan Ventures.

Manage you manager. Prepare agenda for 1:1s, understand your manager’s needs
Framework to help: Align purpose (on what you will do), Getting access (to information or resource through your manager), and Agreeing on value (potential impact, rewards etc.)
Dynamic environment. You need to constantly remind yourself of that reality.
Managers’ expectations. First level: you get your assignments done; second: you do things that save your manager some time; and third: you create something that your manager had never thought possible but benefits your team greatly.

Panel: Taking initiatives

Understand risks and rewards. Take right, balanced, initiatives.
Small things count. Inefficiencies in current systems, processes that help your peers, …
Create a concrete career objective. Yes we are all told that interest should be driving everything, but when it isn’t, you need extra motivation.
When you are not clear what initiatives to take, you are probably missing the big picture. Find a mentor higher up and they can give you more information.

Panel: AI

Panelists talked about trending technologies in AI, and touched on the threats on people’s jobs from AI.

Fact is, there are more job openings that unemployed people. They need skills.
Displacement and not replacement. AI is not replacing human beings, but humans need to evolve into jobs that technology can’t do, just like we always have in history. Continuous learning. Great sense of trending techs are key.
Creativity is hard to replace.

Panel: Women in tech

This was a very special panel and one of the most profound ones I found. Four great women leaders from Google, Facebook and Pinterest shared their stories and gave advice on many good questions from the audience.

Focus on growing skills and not external motivation. For every perf cycle, so to speak, you should set some goals for the skills you want to grow, and not worry about whether you will get promoted at the end of it or not. The former is more sustainable and will help your long term career more.
Work life balance. Work with your spouse. They are the most important teammate/partner of your life. Spread the work, support each other, and you both will have opportunity to have a successful career as well as a happy family life.

Panel: Choose the correct opportunity

This was a panel focused to making the important decision of changing a role or a job. Had some great insights.

First and foremost, ask yourself, why do you want to move on? Answer that before you start looking.
Where should I go for my next job? A good candidate is a company that’s going to IPO soon or has just went IPO. Two reasons: they are new but sort of established, your job won’t go away in a few years; a lot early employees will be cashing in which leaves many seats to fill.
Coffee budget. Set aside some change, and most importantly, time, to have coffee with others and learn from them.
Where you work determines your impact. Environment » individual.
Don’t be afraid of chaos. It is a norm and not an exception, which I shockingly learned was a thing for most Chinese.

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