Delphina’s Post

Don't focus on building experience. Build judgment instead. How can it be that so many outrageously successful startups had founders with virtually zero experience? Think Zuck at Facebook, Gates at Microsoft, Sergey & Larry at Google. Early in my career I felt it must be mostly luck — those folks stumbled on to the right problem at the right time. Luck is certainly part of it. But as I’ve grown, I’ve realized I was thinking about it totally wrong. Judgment matters vastly more than actual experience. Judgment is the ability to read the tea leaves and make the right call. That judgment trumps experience is obviously true once you think about it — who cares if you’ve done the thing before if you can make the right decision regardless. And building judgment is obviously the only way to hyperscale your career: getting lived experiences take too much living! Founders like the ones at the top built judgment super fast. Different functions have particular kinds of judgment that are especially important. In data science, you need to build a sense of smell for when data doesn’t make sense, and also for what kinds of problems ML and AI can solve and which they can’t. If you don’t have good judgment on these issues, you won’t go far. In many ways judgment is easier to build than experience. Here are 3 things you can do: 1/ “Pretend” you have a bigger job. At Uber, I liked to play a game in my own head: Whenever I was in a review meeting with Dara, I’d ask myself, what question should he ask next? When he inevitably asked something different, I’d ask myself, why was that his question? 2/ Find a mentor who is 1-2 steps ahead of you. These folks can give you a download on their problems — you can probe the hard judgment calls they’ve made recently, how they made them, and what they learned. 3/ Read complex books. Biographies and deep novels are a great way to see lots of new, hard situations. Again, ask yourself — what would I have done in that context? Self-help / business books are less useful, since they abstract away complexity in favor of simple takeaways. Would love to hear what resonates, and what other tricks I’m missing? #datascience #machinelearning #jobs