IT’S ME, HI, I’M THE PROBLEM, IT’S ME

Today, I start an uncomfortable journey of writing about things “I know” and that I “have learned.”

I’ve always - and still do - struggle with a blinding amount of imposter syndrome. She often rears hear nasty head in the form of self-doubt around the value of the lessons (cough mistakes cough) I have gathered along the way in my career. But as my mom always said, “Do one thing a day that scares you.” So here we go…

I am currently the Chief of Staff and VP Growth at a privately held B2B SaaS company in London. I have worked in tech start-up and scale-ups for >10 years and have gone through my fair share of spectacular failures along the way.

After graduating from Stanford University, I started my career working for JP Morgan and then Starbucks - two very stable, reliable, consistent, blue chip companies. I was paid well, I never had to explain what my company did and everyone was instantly impressed when I casually dropped a household brand name as my employer. And yet, I was bored out of my mind. I was never satisfied, and felt like the path ahead of me was lacking the fast paced innovation that I had grown up in around Silicon Valley. And so I left. First, from JPMorgan, and after another 2 years, I resigned from Starbucks.

I decided to explore a path much closer to my heart: food and entrepreneurship (or what I have now realized is a love of building and scaling companies). I joined a Series B food tech company. We were one of the hottest kids on the VC block at the time, competing amid dozens of other venture-backed businesses trying to be the market leader in on demand food delivery. We raised an eye watering amount of money, launched across the US, struck partnerships with Michelin star chefs, and I got to sit at the center of it all. If you drew a Venn diagram between the operations, marketing and product teams, there I was. I touched every part of the business, responsible for making sure the most important initiatives were progressing, that teams were communicating, supported, and getting the resources they needed; I was a sounding board, therapist and confidant for senior leadership; I was playing block and tackle between the C-suite and the junior teams on the ground. It was the coolest experience. I was responsible for everything … but owned nothing.

I went on to help found a mobility & travel company and then to lead the UK market and global ops for scale up fintech. Both incredibly nebulous, ill-defined but highly influential roles at the epicenter of decision making and power.

This has become the consistent theme in my career. It’s been the single source of my greatest self-doubt as an operator. But it’s also become one of my most valuable professional superpowers: I am a specialist at being a generalist.

I listen more than I speak, I internalize everything at an obnoxiously deep level, I grease wheels across teams and get the right people to talk about the hard topics (I’ve found I am especially good at this in semi-dysfunctional - chaotic - environments) and at the end of the day, the teams I support behind the scenes deliver exceptional results.