Nikhyl Singhal

Your listeners are spending time focused on like, 'Well, one day I will be X. I will be that vice president. I will have more money. I will have built something. I will have started a company.' But they don't think about what happens next, and when it happens, when they succeed, their North Star, their entire way of wiring their career, themselves, it has been around getting to that place.

Ensure that the story you will tell about the work you're doing today is meaningful for your skip job. So if you sit down and you write down, 'In six months, in 12 months, in 24 months, when I achieve or finish this role, here's the paragraph I'll write. Here's a problem I solved. Here's the skill I built. Here's the headwind I faced. Here's what I did to overcome it.' Use I in the sentence, do not use we.

The two questions you ask yourself the day after we listen to this podcast is, 'Hey, are we scaling a product? We have customers that love us and we have a tremendous sucking sound? Or are we trying to find that customer sucking sound?' And if the answer is, 'We're still trying to find it,' and then you're like, 'Is your evaluation hundreds of millions or tens of millions?' and if the answer is hundreds or more and you're still trying to find that sucking sound, you're an ex-growth company.

There's these large number of growth companies who have raised substantive dollars. So they're not going to run out of capital in 2022 or 2023... My fear is, from a career point of view, so many tech professionals are in these organizations or joining these organizations with the expectation that they'll make money on their equity.

Always think about not the next job, but the one after it. Maybe think about not your boss's job but your boss's boss's job and what do I need to think about to get there.

The more diverse career you have, the better builder you are. And that usually comes up being satisfied. But the idea of just doing that because you think it's going to make your chances better for the next job maybe scares me and it feels very much in service of some future dream that is not build oriented.

Promotion is our system at this company to see you moving forward. And it's pretty clear in terms of levels and what you're doing and what the process is and who makes the decision. But in reality, if you're thinking career, you're thinking about the sort of long term arc.

You need someone to see the magic in you to be promoted. There is many of your listeners who have that magic but maybe have a manager or a promotion team, it doesn't always have to be the manager itself, who doesn't see said magic. And in that case, if you have the magic, you're in a bad setting and you just need to change.