Kyle Forster: Opportunities in Obscurity

And when I think about my early career breakout moments, they weren't from being a general business leader. They were actually from being an expert in some possibly very arcane corner of technology. My first company at Science, there were five of us that had this kind of semi professional hobby of doing mobile development. And you see Palma west here. This was like way before mobile development was cool. We had enough customer demand within the company that the management team decided to formalize a practice around this. And I wound up leading that practice. And it wasn't because I was in any way qualified. In fact, I was very unqualified for it. I wound up managing a team of 50 engineers, frankly, because I was one of only five people that knew a lot about this technology. And of the five, there were really two of us who we kind of went all in. This was something we just talked about to all of our colleagues and were very excited about, really showed a lot of passion around, and we were just a few months ahead in terms of our expertise and in terms of our experimentation than everybody else. So on your kind of path, from where you sit today, whether you're going into an internship this summer, or whether you've got a job lined up for the fall, or you're kind of thinking about anywhere in between, I'd really encourage you to spend a little bit of time thinking about not a linear path into a leadership role, but think about an area of expertise that you can develop where you can be your organization's most valued expert, or ideally the industries, because there are opportunities there for exponential leadership growth.