Redesign Yourself

So for better or for worse, every time I face, like, a juncture in my life, I look down one path and you can see it really clearly. You can see it all mapped out. You know exactly how it's going to go. And then there's this other path and it makes no sense and you can't see anything about it. I always choose the second path. And so I had been pretty comfortable at Google. I'd been growing a lot in my role. I'd gotten to work with some incredible people, and then I chose to leave. And I think I chose to leave because I didn't know what would happen. And I knew that at that point in my life, having been on this straight and narrow path of Stanford and then Google, I wanted to put myself in a position where I'd have to take real agency over my choices and over my life. And I don't know if any of you have had that chance to really be put in a position where the only thing nudging you forward is going to be you taking that step and you kind of making a concrete decision. And so I cut myself off from all the paths and in doing that, really discovered a lot about myself. And I think that probably the number one skill that I discovered about myself was how to design myself and how to redesign myself. And that has been a skill that I use constantly, because as CEO at Leverage, I have to reinvent myself and my job every six months. What it was like in that period was really trying to understand what I valued, what I saw in the world, what resonated, and I think more than anything, the people that I gravitated to and the values we might share together. At that time, I was working with a lot of different entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley on a lot of different problems, just putting myself in situations where I had to see how I'd react and see kind of what I would end up gravitating to. And I ended up falling in with some old friends of mine, some folks I knew from Stanford and Google, and we had kept in touch through the same Burning man camp who would eventually become my co founders at Lever. And there's all these mythologies that exist about how companies get founded, and I'll be super, super honest, like, none of those myths applied to us. When we kind of found ourselves together, we were really just three people. We didn't know anything about what we wanted to do. We didn't know anything about some big vision that we had for the world. But we did know that we were really attracted to a change that was happening in the world. And really, for us at that time, the change that was happening in the world was inside of every organization. We saw this really big shift where you used to kind of work at a job to get paid, and then suddenly people were working jobs to make a difference, and they were working jobs to have impact. They were working jobs to grow. I basically would have conversations with all my friends, and more often than not, we would talk about whether we were fulfilled in our work. And that's a huge change from our parents generation, the generation before that. And really, I think if I zoom out and talk about it from a macro, cultural, macroeconomic standpoint, what we had stumbled upon was there was a literal generational shift happening in the workforce. Millennials were entering the workforce with a completely different set of cultural values. You also saw the nature of work really changing as technology transformed every single industry out there. The types of work that was happening out there, airlines were now software, and logistics companies like hotel chains were now actually experience companies. Work was really changing, and the people doing the work was changing. And that's essentially the kernel of what would become leverage.