How Four Years at Airbnb Shaped My Career and Perspective

A few months ago, I celebrated my 4-year work anniversary at Airbnb. I feel incredibly fortunate to have joined such a mission-driven company and even more grateful for the opportunity to work alongside so many talented, compassionate, and genuinely inspiring people.

While honing technical skills has always been a top priority for me, I’ve also developed a growing fascination with collecting sound career advice—from both the online world and real-life experiences. I shared some of these insights on Twitter not long ago, and in this post, I’d like to expand on that thread and dive deeper into the strategies that have shaped my career at Airbnb.

Broadly speaking, these strategies center around the following principles:

• Hone your craft, be patient, and let compounding do its magic
• Be so good that people can’t ignore you
• Focus on what’s uniquely authentic to you and build your niche
• Capitalize on your niche to escape unnecessary competition
• Don’t maximize optionality—commit deeply to something that aligns with your values and goals
• Plant the little acorns from which mighty oak trees grow

While it’s difficult to measure exactly how well these strategies have served my career, one thing is clear: I’ve become much more intentional about how I approach my professional growth. That intentionality, I believe, has made all the difference.

Hone Your Skills And Let It Compound

Source: 1-percent rule, by James Clear

The margin between good and great is narrower than it seems. What begins as a slight edge over the competition compounds with each additional contest. Winning one competition improves your odds of winning the next. Each additional cycle further cements the status of those at the top. We can call this The 1 Percent Rule […]

The 1 Percent Rule states that over time the majority of the rewards in a given field will accumulate to the people, teams, and organizations that maintain a 1 percent advantage over the alternatives. You don't need to be twice as good to get twice the results. You just need to be slightly better.

Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You

Source: Cal Newport’s Blog post, The Steve Martin Method. He even wrote a book using this title.

People often ask [Steve] Martin about the secret to making it in the entertainment industry. His answer often disappoints. It does not involve any tricks (or, as we might call them: “hacks”). No insider path to getting an agent or special formatting to get your screenplay read. Instead, it’s all built on one simple idea:

“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”

With Specialized Skills, Build Leverage

Source: Erik Torenberg and his idea on Personal Moats

“What are the things that if you do, today, make it easier for you to have the career opportunities and resources you desire, tomorrow, in a way that compounds and is defensible?”

[…] There are four different types of career loops (or assets):Specialized Knowledge / SkillsFinancial Capital ($)Brand / Legibility (ability for your skills/assets to be widely recognizable)Unique Network Access/Strength

These loops are reinforcing. Having one of each affords you more of the other. But not all loops are equal. […] Knowledge / Skills is the best loop to attract the other loops. It's not that the other assets aren’t really important. They are. They’re just easier to get once you have specialized knowledge. To be sure, however, you don’t want a lack of these other career assets to be constraints

Find What’s Uniquely Authentic To You

Source: Naval Ravikant, and his epic tweetstorm “How to get rich without getting lucky”

You need to be careful about competing in status games, and get trapped in the wrong game because you are competing. The way to escape competition is to find what's unique to you and through authenticity. Obviously, you want to find product-market fit, where you and your offering, is the product.

Generally, the typical mistakes people make is that they focus too much on the competition, and don't spend enough time searching for their true authentic-self.

Remember, Competition is For Losers

Source: Peter Thiel, and his talk in Stanford’s CS 183B

The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: If you want to create and capture lasting value, don't build an undifferentiated commodity business […] Tolstoy famously opens "Anna Karenina" by observing: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: Each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: They failed to escape competition.

If You Are Young, Avoid Optimizing Optionality

Source: From Mihir A. Desai and his address to Harvard MBA students

While the serial option and lottery ticket buyers seem like different creatures, they are, in fact, close cousins. Both types postpone their dreams and undertake choices that they think will enable their dreams. But they fail to understand that all of these intervening choices will change them fundamentally—and they are, in fact, the sum total of those choices.

The shortest distance between two points is reliably a straight line. If your dreams are apparent to you, pursue them. Creating optionality and buying lottery tickets are not way stations on the road to pursuing your dreamy outcomes. They are dangerous diversions that will change you.

Instead, Commit to Something and Commit Hard

Source: Jean Yang’s Tweet on “Commit to something and commit hard”

[…] Been having many conversations with people in their 20s about the paralysis that can arise from having too many life choices. My advice: commit to something and commit hard. Doesn't matter if you switch later.

It's easier to prove yourself if you've had to do it once before. The quarter-life crisis can go on for quite a while--and you don't want to come out having little to show for your self-exploration. You learn just as much, if not more, about whether you like something by actually doing it, rather than thinking about if you might like it.

At one point in my mid-twenties, a friend observed that we were nearing the end of getting opportunities because of our potential and would soon be evaluated on what we've actually done. This was a real turning point in my thinking on how much space I should take to find myself.

Plant the Little Acorns From Which the Mighty Oak Tree Grow

Source: Richard Hamming and his speech ”You and Your Research”

Somewhere around every seven years make a significant, if not complete, shift in your field. Thus, I shifted from numerical analysis, to hardware, to software, and so on, periodically, because you tend to use up your ideas. When you go to a new field, you have to start over as a baby. You are no longer the big fish and you can start back there and you can start planting those acorns which will become the giant oaks. You have to change. You get tired after a while; you use up your originality in one field. You need to get something nearby […]

I'm not saying that you shift from music to theoretical physics to English literature; I mean within your field you should shift areas so that you don't go stale. You need to get into a new field to get new viewpoints, and before you use up all the old ones. You can do something about this, but it takes effort and energy. It takes courage to say, “Yes, I will give up my great reputation.”

Above All Else, Build Resilience

Source: Marc Andreessen and his career planning guide

In my opinion, it's now critically important to get into the real world and really challenge yourself -- expose yourself to risk -- put yourself in situations where you will succeed or fail by your own decisions and actions, and where that success or failure will be highly visible.

Why? If you're going to be a high achiever, you're going to be in lots of situations where you're going to be quickly making decisions in the presence of incomplete or incorrect information, under intense time pressure, and often under intense political pressure. You're going to screw up -- frequently -- and the screwups will have serious consequences, and you'll feel incredibly stupid every time. It can't faze you -- you have to be able to just get right back up and keep on going.

I plan to dive deeper into each of these principles and share how they’ve influenced some of my key career decisions. If this topic resonates with you, I’d love for you to subscribe to my newsletter to explore more insights together!

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Exploring the intersections of data, engineering, and product management

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