Scale AI GM Melissa Tokmak | How to Multiply the CEO (Podcast 610)

I really enjoyed my role at Facebook, but I think inherently when you're working in bigger companies, however much effort you put in, there's still a ladder. I realized that I don't want a ladder, I want an elevator. I was thinking of leaving and founding my own company, but we got introduced via an investor, Alex and I, for a completely different purpose actually. It was not for recruiting. It was about the fields and how to build various products to be able to, you know, support bigger tech companies. And during our conversation, something clicked. And that was really about how we think about the area, like machine learning, and at the same time, our value. And then about a week, week and a half later, he called me and said that he has this special role and he wants to pitch it to me on the phone. And I was like, you know what, go ahead. And that pitch was just so tailored to me. And that's one of my learnings, right? Like now I do the same when I work with people. It really hit it on the spot about the things I care about and why I should join, right, in that role to this company. And I actually moved, said yes, changed jobs within 2 weeks and decided to delay that, my dream of founding a company, because I think it's worth it.

Our guest today is Scale AI's GM, Melissa Tokmak. Melissa is the head of Scale AI's document AI business, which focuses on building fine-tuned machine learning models to process documents at high quality. As the founder and leader of this unit, Melissa supports a team of engineers and machine learning scientists, as well as product operations, sales, and marketing. She's now spearheading Document AI's expansion to serve a wide range of industries, including logistics, financial services, healthcare, and beyond. Prior to this role, Melissa was Scale's chief of staff, serving as CEO Alexander Wang's right hand, and founded Scale's government unit, a key driver of growth and opportunities for the company. As a result, Scale now works with agencies including the US Army, the Department of Defense's Innovation Unit, and the US Air Force. Melissa, welcome to the Second Command Podcast.

Hello.

You guys are doing some really cool stuff, and I have a funny story to kind of lead us into this. My first, I guess, use of high-quality document scanning was 20 years ago. When I was the COO for 1-800-GOT-JUNK, and I had just finished one of the very first core projects was writing the operations manual for all of our franchisees. We only had 12 franchisees at the time. You know, now everyone knows the name 1-800-GOT-JUNK, but no one did back then. And Brian, our CEO, by mistake deleted the server. Like, everything on the server was deleted, except the documents that were open on people's computers. We only had 12 employees. So the only documents that were saved were on their computers. We had no successful tape backups of the server at all. So we lost everything, including the operations manual that I just had completed. But we had one hard copy of it that we'd printed out, and we ended up having this thing scanned and then kind of OCR'd, and it kind of worked. But for years, we'd find all these ridiculous spelling mistakes that the computer had made. So the quality was good enough for us back then, but not to work for the Air Force.

No, no, no, I'm glad. The technology has come a long way since then, definitely, but it's a funny story.

All right, so let's— tell us just briefly what Scale AI's use case is, who your customers are. We— you kind of gave us some of the bigger customers, but who's your, your kind of bread and butter customers, or is it the government large scale?

Yeah, of course. So Scale is, as a whole, is a machine learning infrastructure company. What we do is help other companies to be able to operationalize machine learning in production. So use machine learning to be able to automate different tasks and have data, the high-quality training data to train your own machine learning models. So that's how Scale started. So when you think about machine learning infrastructure as a pyramid, I always think of like the bottom layer as data. So that's like where Scale have built its first products on the data annotation side. And these were machine learning augmented as well so that we could support companies to build their own machine learning models. But once you get very, very good at that layer, it really opens up so many different stacks in that pyramid, right? One of them being building the models themselves, what we call models as a service. So my unit really focuses on that, is how we build these machine learning models for other companies who don't want to build them so that they can really easily plug into it via our API and use it. So Document AI is like the biggest product in this business unit, really helping other customers come in and process their documents, extract key information from complex document types, both unstructured and structured, so that their people don't have to do this tedious, difficult job, right? So the really the great customer focus on usually are placed in financial services, healthcare, logistics, and government. So government is not the only area. Actually, we are much bigger in terms of logistics and financial services areas because these customers are getting high volume of documents, right? Some of them millions of documents in a given year. And their business outcomes really depend on processing these documents at a high quality because if they don't extract the information right, they may be breaking a regulation or they may not be getting paid in the case of logistics, or, you know, it might cause a lot of escalations that degrade customer experience, but also causes 10, 20 days delays and bring various other OPEX costs that come with it. So really the amazing customers are those who process high volumes of documents and need super, super high quality that other off-the-shelf models may not give them. And hence we take the fine-tuned model approach.

Okay. You're crazy smart. You're also crazy young. When we were talking before we came onto this, I think that was something you and I had mentioned was you and Alex in kind of starting the company or being, you were involved at the very, very early stage. How did you go about attracting talent to work for you when you were so young? How did you go about attracting investors when you were so young?

It's all to, you know, all the credit is due to Alex when it comes to investors and really getting the company off the ground and having all the success. And I joined him actually afterwards, like those like very, very early days were already passed by. But I think you're right when you say, right, like that's a challenge that I face every day, especially growing my team, growing very various teams at the company, not only this business unit, but when I was founding the government business unit as well, that comes up every day. It's not a challenge that I would say I have conquered fully. It will still come up, but my style is, I think I call that the elephant in the room. So when I'm pursuing different candidates, especially in this environment where literally everyone is hiring and the talent is hard to capture, right?

Yeah.

If you look at especially the startup market, Right now with a lot of capital floating by for startups, everyone's trying to hire the best candidates. Definitely, I have the benefit of Skillz brand, right? Everybody wants to work for Skillz, especially if they are in the machine learning area, just because it's the best place to be. That is not enough multiple times. So in those conversations, I just come clean, right? Like I just go ahead and talk about that. What I can support these candidates very, very well, and at the same time, what I expect them to take on might be areas that I may not be the expert in, right? But I really use that as an opportunity to show them how they're going to have autonomy in the areas that they are bringing the expertise, but what I am unlocking for them. So that honest conversation very early on, especially with very senior candidates go a long way, right? Because they see the transparency and they see that partnership and they want to really come and join. The second big part is how much you know about your product and how much of a vision you have and how you can articulate it. I really, especially with the candidates, right, that I really want them to join us, I have these sessions with them where I talk about the vision of our business unit and how that ties to scale's plan, right? Not only now, but in the future, how we fit into it and why it's so important to be able to make this a reality. And that goes a long way too when people see what type of a vision they're gonna be part of.

How did you learn this? Did you learn this from just trial and error? Did you learn this through mentoring? Did you learn this through reading books or through your schooling? Like, Where did you come up with the understanding that that transparency and product knowledge and that confidence, those 3 things kind of layered in were going to serve you this well?

Like, it really comes down to a few things, right? Like one, I always think about it in the sense that what I would want when I was looking to work in startups and like when I was deciding to join at scale, what did I want, right? I wanted full transparency. I had a great job, right? But I was excited to come in to a place where action, you know, like actually is every day in startups. And I always thought, what did I want? I wanted radical transparency about how things are gonna work out because I wanna be prepared for it. I wanna join with a great passion because I know exactly about the highs and the lows. right? So I can get through it. And second, I wanted autonomy because, you know, like, I know that I can do it and I want that space to be able to do it. And lastly, I wanted that partnership, being around people who are extremely smart and will partner with me, right? Like, I will learn from them, they're going to learn from me, that environment, the culture. And you want to know, right? Like, why I already knew a bunch about machine learning, but you wanna really get deep into why this company gonna be successful, why these products. So pretty much that what I would expect really leads me to how I approach hiring other people. And second is like the buck— second bucket is really about the creativity when it comes to the specific candidates, because all of us care about different things in our lives. So you really need to hone in on what they care about and show them if that will be satisfied in this case, which I really pretty much attribute to my journey, right? From a very, very small place in Turkey, I was born like a tiny village and trying to make it to Stanford for the university for college education, and then in Silicon Valley to these positions that I'm holding now. It always required being quick on your feet and the creativity. If plan A doesn't work, what is plan B? And if that doesn't work, what's plan C? So it's pretty much like how the brain is wired if you have to go through it.

Okay, what's the size of Scale today? How many employees do you have?

I believe we're coming close to somewhere around 400 and going to 500 soon.

And are you the second in command to the CEO on the whole company or on one of the major divisions of the company? Where's your— where do you fit in the org chart?

question. I joined actually second in command to the CEO for the whole company, and then afterwards, and during that time, have built the government business unit and really got that bug, you know, I want to build more business units, and then started this document AI business unit separately. So now I'm fully focusing on that, trying to make that one of our biggest offerings, but that's how I started and moved to build specific business units and products myself with my own team. Okay.

Can you tell us how old you are?

I just turned 27.

Okay, so 27. So you're not a puppy, you're not just outta college.

No, not at all.

But you haven't even, you haven't even hit your 30s yet. You're, and, and when Alex started the company, he was 19, you'd said earlier.

Correct. And I joined actually, so I joined 2 years out of college to Scale.

Okay.

So right out of college, I started working at Facebook and then quit after 2 years and joined Scale and have been Okay.

Can you talk about that transition and why would you leave Facebook for Scale? And then what do you think it was that had Alex say yes to bringing you in? Because you came into a pretty senior role very early.

Yeah, yeah, of course. It's actually a funny story. So first of all, I really enjoyed my role at Facebook, but I think inherently when you're working in bigger companies, however much effort you put in, there's still a ladder. Like, not everybody has to be like this, but I am an extreme hard worker and I take pride in it and I want to be like that as long as I can. And I realize I have been putting in so much into it in my role, and I want to be around people who do the same with me because I think that really multiplies the output in a way that you cannot imagine. And when I put in so much from myself into it, I want to get back, right? Whether it is, you know, more challenges and whether it is the role and the scope or like the things I get to influence. And I realized that I don't want a ladder, I want an elevator. And that's what brought me to thinking about startups. And actually at the time I was thinking of leaving and founding my own company. But we got introduced by an investor, Alex and I, for a completely different purpose actually. It was not for recruiting. It was about the fields and how to build various products to be able to, you know, support bigger tech companies. And during our conversation, something clicked. And that was really about how we think about the area like machine learning and at the same time our values. And I got this call. We kept meeting up to talk about the issue more and more. And then about a week, week and a half later, he called me and said that he has this special role and he wants to pitch it to me on the phone. And I was like, you know what, go ahead. And that pitch was just so tailored to me. And that's one of my learnings, right? Like now I do the same when I work with people. It's really hit it on the spot about the things I care about. And why I should join, right, in that role to this company. And I actually moved, said yes, and changed jobs within 2 weeks and decided to delay that, my dream of founding a company, because I think it's worth it.

Okay, so he saw something pretty good in you. He tailored that role or really spoke to you in terms of that role. And that role was the chief of staff role?

Correct.

So what was the chief of staff? I mean, it's a term that we've heard tossed around a lot over the years, but what was it, you know, when you got involved?

Honestly, chief of staff means so many different things today when you look at the industry and it's like in a full spectrum, right? Like someone who might assist you as an assistant versus really, right? Like what we see not only with the government, but like Amazon and various like investor firms, really the company second in command. For that case, he was really looking for somebody to multiply himself, right? Like the company was going through rocket ship growth, and as CEO, you can get so many things done, but at some point, right, you really need to effectively hire people that can step in as you in various areas that you want them to. And that was really the role, and it was vague. in the beginning. I don't like vague things in the sense that I'm happy with the ambiguous projects and taking down challenges, but I think in terms of expectations at a high level, every party needs to agree. So what I did after that pitch, and I really enjoyed the pitch, I actually wrote my own definition of what I want to be in the company and what are the areas that I want to help with that I see necessary as someone looking from out to in, and of course it's not 100% correct, and some of the areas I don't know about and still I would want to take on and get down and build. And we had a dinner, and it was a long dinner because I walked through absolutely every bullet point in my definition and really asked for an opinion from him and whether it's— this is something that he sees the role take on or not. And we did not move to the next item until we came to an agreement about the item at hand. So that really set the stage about what he should expect from me, which is a lot. Like, he should expect a lot from me, right? Like, if you're bringing somebody to that role, and what I would expect in return, which was all about, right, the opportunity, the transparency, and the partnership. Right? How we could handle, celebrate the highs and go get them, but also like handle the lows, get back into it and continue building it.

So if you were to describe to your, you know, your grandparents, what is a chief of staff? Like we know that the chief, you know, the chief marketing officer is the head of marketing and the, you know, a VP of sales, the head of sales. What's the chief of staff in layman's terms?

I would Well, I think it's very important to define the stage of the company. When I did that for this company, we were definitely a lot newer and like smaller. So in, in, for that company size, you define it as like somebody who can mold into the role of CEO in the areas needed. So for that, sometimes it meant, right, like for me, there is an issue.

Mm-hmm.

who can I deploy to go fix it and not worry about it? Or 2, some, you know, this person, like when I was looking into building the government business unit, sees an opportunity and take— can take it off the ground with pretty much no help, right? Or sees another opportunity and make a plan and pitch it to build new business units like I'm doing with document AI now. So in layman's terms, for early companies, it should be people who can mold into the role of CEO in the areas needed.

Yeah, it's a really fascinating role for sure. All right. So when have your growth areas been in terms of the couple of years that you've been with Scale now? Where have you really had to continue to grow as a leader, as an executive there?

This becomes very handy as a chief of staff. So you have to handle 1,000 different things at a given time and make sure that all of them end in success. It's literally the life of, you know, being able to handle anything that might come up, and they really change in terms of topic and the scope. Like, some of them is literally building something from ground up to another one solving some management issues or like people issues. I felt very good at that. Like, I felt like I am absolutely thriving and love that high stress, uh, lifestyle. It's just like makes me thrive. But one area that I felt like I need to get under my belt is what happens when you have to focus on one area. If everything you want to live and breathe is about that, whether it's like that business unit or that product, everything about it. Of course, underneath it, there will still be 1,000 areas, right? From how you build the product to engineering to marketing, et cetera. But everything is still about that. And I thought that would add a lot to my life. And that actually what also prompted, right, as I have been building other business units, and in this case, everything I live and breathe is about my business unit right now. I grew a lot in that sense, being able to focus, like kind of my internal selves, right? Like if I see a problem, I'm like, I want to go and solve that. But no, I need to live and breathe right now making this unit a success and building the state-of-the-art models to be able to achieve this for various industries. So that definitely was one of the areas that I grew a lot on. And secondly, I would definitely say hiring, right? You brought this up a lot, building teams. You always see the highly entrepreneurial people, young people who are hungry, they excel at execution and of course strategy, but like they want to do everything, right? And they can pretty much, right? I would also, if you force me, I will not sleep until that is done and successful. That is a great skill, but when you're building organization, it's also important, even more important as you grow, to be able to build standing organizations that can do it, not depending on always your help or, and your ability to pick things up. And as a leader, you should always be able to pick things up in any area. Like, you, you should be working harder than anyone in your team. But building that organization is so important and hiring is the biggest part of it. So I would definitely say I always fight that urge in me. Okay, like, do I just pick it up and kind of handle it? No. How do we build this organization so that it's multiplying its output and thriving in this industry with the people that we're hiring?

Does that— do you think that changes when you haven't been able to raise money? If a company is not, you know, VC funded, does that mentality of continually hiring, continually replicating, continually like focusing on growth, do you have a different lens on that, do you think, or a different filter or?

Yeah, I would say definitely change it, but it doesn't even have to be about companies that don't receive VC funding. You know this, I mean, Scale has received incredible VC funding, doing very well in that area, but from the beginning, Scale really has been a company that values building and getting to success with a lean team. And I think that's very important, especially like early on, because you're setting the culture of achieving impossible things with the smartest, hardworking people that you can bring together and building the best products, right? Like at such a culture, it really forces prioritization. For the right things and makes you agile to pivot if you need to.

That was actually a question that I had for you. Wasn't on the agile, was on how do you stay focused when you have so many opportunities? How do you— like you talked about that kind of singular focus, that singular lens in terms of even building your business area or the company. How have you been allowing yourself to say no to certain opportunities or so that you do stay focused? Because there are so many different places you could be spending your time and energy.

That's actually very hard, right? Because especially even in the role of if you're doing this for the whole company, hopefully the role of chief of staff a little bit takes that because as a founder, founders should always push the whole company to be able to do more, right? That's their mindset. It should be their mindset. But however, you want to really surround yourself with people who can bring that great trade-offs for you. And also mention, you always know the trade-offs, but as a founder, you should always push your team to be able to conquer more. But those people can really talk through the different trade-offs and also sometimes draw the line, right? Like, we may not be able to do that, and here's the reasons and why that's not the greatest way. I take a similar approach in my unit. It's very hard to say no to other things if they are right there, right? They're shiny objects. I try a few different things. One, from— you can learn a lot from just researching a different area, talking to customers, and understanding their needs, right? Once you find a need, you're also looking at, okay, is this a very lucrative business area, right? Like, is it gonna grow in terms of the captured TAM, right? Once you found those areas, it's very important that you still don't immediately go after it with everything you got. You have to make sure you're funding enough experiments to find other areas like that because guess what? Not every time everything works out. according to what you heard from customers or, you know, like user interviews or like your research, but you have to try it out in action, right? If you are really going ahead supporting the key customers, you have to get those few customers. How is that going? Are they actually receiving value? Are they raving about the value that they're receiving from you, right? And if not, you have to be always in tune about the why, because those are the areas you keep tuning the product. to get to success. But at the same time, I always fund those other like experiments, right? Like make sure a person or like my, some of my time goes into understanding other industries and problem areas so that they're cooking, right? Whether they can be the next product or if something happens to this, that they can help in the understanding of where to pivot to and why. So, That's a good way of thinking, I think, as operator.

Do you turn it off?

I don't, but I think it really depends on what you need as a person. I have noticed that I don't like turning it off and it doesn't help me. It actually makes me feel more anxious. But what I realized sometimes it helps, like, to change the environment. So like, I might not turn it off, but like, make sure I'm in a different place or city, or like, make sure that I made time to do other things, right? Like that week. I think you just have to understand yourself the best, and for some people, turning off is the only way that works. For me, I realized that actually makes me feel worse.

So you like being completely engaged and immersed in the business?

Yes, and I think it's also a little bit about the feeling of responsibility. When I think about my team, like, I'm asking something very hard of them. I'm asking them to build incredible products, ambitious goals with a lean team. And I feel that responsibility that if I am not ready to do that, how can I ask that from my team? And this was like definitely one of the reasons, right? When I think about my experience working in bigger companies or even like at scale, right? The reason what fueled me always when working with Alex extremely closely I never thought that he ever asked me something he wouldn't do himself harder, better, and like in longer hours, right? And seeing that, that brings the partnership, right? Like, and I felt like I want to do more because I'm in an environment where we really care about the outcome of this and we are ready to be fully immersed. And I feel the same about my team. Like, how can I ask them to be immersed? If I'm not.

Yeah. What are you looking for and where do you find your team? Do you find them through traditional channels? Are you poaching them? Are you working with an HR or recruiting department?

We have an awesome recruiting department and I work with them closely, but I actually don't believe that, especially building lean teams for new products that have— that are working like startups, right? Like in this case, my unit is working like a startup, needs to be successful startup within a startup. you as an operator should not only lean on recruiting because you as like the founder of that unit or like as the operator building the team, it is your duty to be out there and talking with the customers, finding the best fit from both sides, but at the same time convincing them, right? We talked about the market, hiring market, and it's very hard, right? Like every startup seems like there are many startups trying you know, looking like they're doing well. And it is your duty to be able to make that person feel so passionate about joining this team. So I work with our recruiting team. They're amazing in helping me hone in on exactly what I'm looking for. And once we do that, right, like helping me with sourcing if we need, but I do my own sourcing as well. Like I go ahead, I have over the years have built an incredible group of people friends and colleagues and peers and more from the previous companies I have worked with, but also from school, right? And the community I have built in Silicon Valley, I tap onto that a lot. Once can I have candidates as well that are looking good, I take an active role talking to them as the first call and chiming in and coming in looking at as they're meeting with the rest of the team, what's going well, what needs they're bringing it up. Or what concerns, and always check in with them till being able to close them as well.

Yeah, I wouldn't let you anywhere near the front door of my company if I was a CEO, because I know you'd be snagging all the really good people. You just, you have that kind of fierce competition about you, which is amazing. Do you find that when you set such a high bar for new hires that it actually attracts them? It doesn't turn them away?

Yeah, I think you have to set a high bar. for new hires because the culture is very hard to create. And once you do, you have to guard it so that nothing degrades it. And it's not even only about keeping the high bar, like, only for the company's sake, but also for, like, the candidate's sake, right? Like, it really has to be a fit from both sides for them to thrive and actually get to the results they wanna get to. So we really try to replicate that in the interviews, in the conversations, So that it is a mutual fit and this person is gonna thrive when they come in here. I also usually keep my hiring manager interviews extremely transparent in that sense. Like, talk about, look, this is what I care about as a manager and supporting you in any way that I can, especially for your priorities in life. But here are also the things that will come up, and I need to know that you're coming in with open eyes and excited and want to put in that effort and the time. And it really attracts, I think, the right type of candidates.

I mean, you know this because you worked inside of Facebook, and I think there's 2 types of people that work for these, you know, these large tech companies. There's the entrepreneurial spark people that, like yourself, that just have that, you know, I'll go start my own company tomorrow. I can work with a startup. I can get it to go. Or there's just the corporate drones who are there and they're just, they're, they're playing the politics, they're doing the corporate thing. They're— when you're outside of that and you're building a company and you're looking to hire people, how do you know which ones, like what are the behavioral traits or what are the things that you look for to know that you've got the right people versus the corporate political?

Uh, that's a great question because obviously always the interview cycles are like, uh, right, still however many interviews you can do short. So it's very hard to get to the bottom of it. But a few tactics that I found work. First of all, across the board, I really focus on the results that they have produced in their jobs, in their lives, like results or the challenges they took on. Doesn't only have to be in the job market because especially for newer junior candidates like who are dried out of school or like one year into work life, you may not see that exactly in their work life. So I am trying to understand, does this person value learning and using their learning in practice? What have they built with their own hands, right? And doesn't always have to be, okay, I shipped this product. Like, obviously that really helps. But apart from that, what have you built in your life? And one of it could be your life. Like, how have you built your life? And every answer that I hear, I really try to dig into the why and the how. That's where it comes up, right? Like, it's very easy to hear from especially those like more corporate kind of people who are valuing politics more and spending their times with that. Like, they might just say, I have built this, but it's like a whole team's effort, right? And they might not be able to do anything. So you really need to dig in into what parts that they have built and what parts They have gotten help and how, because none of us can really build anything only by ourselves, like to a great degree, right? It's also important how they worked with people when they were building that. So I try to go like why and how always.

What did you do your undergrad and what were you at school at Stanford for?

I studied computer science.

Computer science. So you're not taking business courses, you're not sitting there learning organizational behavior and interviewing. And where have you learned this stuff?

Well, I think I took like one or two classes around— Stanford does a good job even when you're studying computer science, you know, you can take interesting courses. I don't know, to be very frank with you, like these are things that just appear in my mind, like when I see a challenge, okay, this is exactly my first step and second and third, and if the first step works well, I kind of keep doing it, or doesn't fully work well, I kind of tune up the second step. I would definitely, like, when I think about it, have to come up with a reason. Like, genuinely, how I approach my life has been a guiding principle, right? Like, how I have learned English in high school, and my parents don't speak English. They have never done anything related to tech. I mean, they didn't even— my whole town didn't know what Stanford was until, you know, I joined.

Right.

I think it's that really mindset when you have goals and you really want to get to them, how are you thinking about the steps? And if something is not going to work out, how would you come up with it? Because you know that there is no help to lean on if something doesn't work.

Is that how you see everything as kind of the playbook or the system, like the steps to do, whether it's getting up in the morning, there's a series of steps or hiring a team, there's a series of— do you see things that way or do you think through and then do you iterate as you continue to go? Like you keep refining those systems.

Yeah, I think I definitely, for every problem I see, I approach it from first principles, right? Really getting to the core and understanding, okay, like, what is this about? That being said, like, you can't solve every problem with a system that you have, like, especially according to how it's working out. When you approach it from first principles, like, it might give different results. So I think you develop intuition from just like yourself, but it's very important to know, like, be self-aware when you can trust your intuition versus not. For example, I really found, right, like, I do trust my intuition when it comes to people and like really that reading the room and like building relationships and those dynamics. And I just have found that I can trust that intuition. So like I go. For many people, they may not and they shouldn't. They should keep it more database. So I would say the trick is really, at least for me at work, start from first principles and think about like what needs to be done to make this success. And then along the way, do rely on my intuition and like the group of people who are surrounding me in an amazing way, right? I think there's so many things I'm learning here and the way to learn them is you put in the effort. Like I'd like to just go in the heart of the fire and learn by doing, but at the same time, It just have an amazing group of both colleagues and mentors, many of them peers actually, because I think you learn better like from peers who are going through the same problems and tap on them when it's needed, right?

Interesting. Where are you working on in terms of your skills? What are you working on now for yourself?

Well, in terms of at work, I would definitely say it's still what I was mentioning about fighting the urge of doing things, uh, relying on yourself only versus building organizations is still something I'm learning a lot. In that manner, like, I really try to hone in on my skills on how to think about the structure of a team, but at the same time, I think that's not enough because especially at startups, they're just so— there's not much hierarchy, right? Everyone needs to be able to pick up anything they want and go ahead, and that excites people, uh, including me. So it becomes a lot about thinking on the goals and the metrics, right? Like I kind of always continue to grow on those. What are the right goals and how can you tell? And what are the indicators that show that you're getting to it or you need to make changes? So I spend a lot of time on there. And secondly, it's learning about the industries that I'm supporting, right? You would say, I haven't spent 20, 30 years in these industries, but I take it it is my job to know about them as much as I can because I'm supporting those people to become more efficient, get value. So if I don't know, if I don't understand, why should they trust me? So I spent quite a bit of time in my personal life as well, free time, in learning about financial services, logistics, getting to the bottom of it. Like, what does it mean? What are they trying to do? and even go like meet people, like specifically operational people in those areas to understand exactly what they need to do to get their job done so that I can help them.

I love this. All right. I want you to lean back a little bit to when you were just graduating from Stanford and you were just going out for your first kind of career job. What advice would you have liked to have known back then that you know to be true now, but you wish you'd known a few years back?

I optimized the decision a lot, right? I have thought about it and exactly in multiple different ways and how to be able to get to the best thing. And it's stressful, especially for seniors in college, like to go through that. But I think at the end, what it comes to when I look back, as long as you're trying to go to a place that is growing, it didn't matter in the sense that like exactly A or B. Right? Like, there are very simple decisions you need to make. One, can I go to a place that's going to continue growing? And I am going to have a responsibility where I can learn a lot. And a lot, I don't mean like you feel like learning kind of every week. Like you feel like learning every day, every hour, and you're feeling like, wow, you know, like I don't know this, but I guess, okay, I'm going to figure it out. this hour and the next hour I'm going to be able to do it. So I think as long as you are checking those boxes, I would definitely say like it's going to be okay, especially for your first job out of college. Yeah. And then sit back and really enjoy the hustle of learning and really appreciate that.

Love this. All right, Melissa Tokmak, the general manager from Scale AI, thanks so much for sharing with us on the Second Command podcast. Really appreciate the insights, the Inspiration, the lessons. Yeah, this was really great.

Thank you so much for hosting me.

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