Allen Lau went from junior engineer to head of engineering in four years, making mistakes that taught him leadership skills he'd later use building Wattpad to $660M. He calls it roughly 1,500 days of compressed experience.
Let me explain. I was on a rocket ship and the career was moving very fast. Literally every year you got to do something else. And more importantly, increase my responsibility just increased almost every year too. And that gave me all the management experience, all the leadership experience on a fast track. So I became the head of the development team, head of the engineering group of the entire Toronto office at the end. That took like four years from almost like a junior mid level engineer to become that. And how much you can learn in literally 1500 days, right? In hindsight, gave me a lot of tools in my toolbox when I became CEO, because I made a lot of mistakes. I was very, very young. I was so inexperienced, I had no clue how to lead. I think at that time, maybe 50, 60, 70 engineers, it was pretty big group, multiple levels under me. And if you ask people who work for that group, they would probably say I was a terrible manager because I was so inexperienced. And I think that one thing super, super helpful down the road, perhaps 10, 15 years down the road. When I started Wattad.
