Jess Lee: Learn by Working in Large Organizations

So going back to the decision to go to Google, I suppose a lot of people wonder, do you go to a startup or do you go to an established company? I know before Google was not yet public or about to go public.

It wasn't public at the time.

Okay, so slightly before. Slightly before, but probably you knew it was going to be a good company. Tell us about that decision and whether or not in hindsight you think it was the right. The right move. And I guess along those lines, mentors you found at Google and how they impacted your career.

Sure. So I actually, when I finished, when I graduated, or right before I graduated here with a degree in computer science, I thought, hey, I'm going to be an engineer. That's what computer science majors do. And I didn't even know what a product manager was at that time. So I got an offer from Intuit and I was going to go be an engineer there. And then I got a call from a Google recruiter saying, hey, we have this thing called the Associate Product Manager program, which I highly recommend if anyone's thinking about that path. And it was sort of. But it was a program to train product managers straight out of school, and it was created by Marissa Mayer, who's now the CEO of Yahoo. And so I thought, okay, I'll give it a shot. I don't know what PMs are. So I went to the interview, not really knowing what to expect. And I remember I actually was so green at the time that when I spoke to Marisa, I was like, hey, I don't know if I really want this job. Like, this is very. You know, I never imagined that I would do this. And she explained to me that all the best decisions she had ever made in life, when she had to choose between two things, she always chose the path that was more challenging. And so I thought about that and I decided, hey, you know what? I've always planned to be an engineer, but this PM thing sounds really hard. I have to lead teams of engineers who are much older than me, who knows they know their stuff and I don't. I'm fresh out of school. So I decided to just try it based on her advice. And she did become a mentor and has sort of. We've kept in touch all these years. And she was a big, big influence on my entire career path through Google. I look back on that and I think, well, I could have started maybe at a startup out of school. But the great thing that being at Google provided was, well, there's a few things. One, I got to meet a lot of really, really smart people, some of whom have gone on to do amazing things in Silicon Valley, and some of whom I've gotten to join Polyvore because we work together. So you sort of build your network at a larger company. The other thing is just the experience of being at a larger company and seeing all the benefits, which are having infrastructure. There's an IT guy to help you when everything is your computer, everything is broken, the network's down. The great perks of the culture, the food, all that stuff. I got to experience that. And Google does have a really, really great culture. It's very engineering driven. But then I also got to experience the downsides of a big, like, red tape bureaucracy, having to work the system to get launches approved. So I got to see both sides. And then I was able to take that experience and apply it at Polywar. When we were creating our own culture and our own sort of infrastructure, it made me really able to appreciate how nice it is to be on a really small team where you just get stuff done really quickly. There's no communication overhead, you know, everybody, you know, everyone's significant others. Like all the great things about startups that are small, I, I was able to appreciate that so much more because I'd been at a larger company.