Breaking into Investing & Product Management with Aditi Maliwal (Google)

This week, we’re excited to share our interview with Aditi Maliwal. Aditi works as a Product Manager at Google on the “Next Billion Users” team, where she is driving Google’s efforts in consumer technologies in emerging markets. Google is strategically investing and partnering with local companies in these markets, and Aditi is collaborating with these companies to co-create localized payments, logistics and ecommerce products.
Prior to her current role, Aditi worked on the corporate development team at Google, as an associate at VC firm Crosslink Capital, and as an investment banking analyst at Deutsche Bank.
We spoke with Aditi about how she developed an interest in tech, her strategy for sourcing deals at Crosslink and at Google, and her tips on being a successful PM with a non-technical background.
You studied Psychology and Economics at Stanford — can you tell us about how you decided what to major in?
I took a gap year after high school to work with students with learning disabilities at my old elementary school, and I came to Stanford thinking I wanted to work in behavioral psychology. I’ve always been interested in people’s stories, their ambitions and the qualities that make them who they are. At Stanford, I took a variety of Developmental Psychology classes but I was also interested in business, so I took a few Management Science & Engineering classes.
During my junior year, I took a class called The Spirit of Entrepreneurship led by Heidi Roizen. Guest speakers came in to talk with us about their experiences founding and investing in companies, which was a great way to start getting immersed in the tech world. I started going on regular 1–1 walks with Heidi, and she told me that I should consider getting into tech, specifically being a VC given my interests. I leveraged the corporate finance and accounting courses I had taken to go into investment banking, specifically working with technology companies.
How did you transition into VC from investment banking?
I was a part of the technology investment banking team at Deutsche Bank, and worked on a variety of technology company IPOs and M&A deals. I also started to get to know VCs through attending drafting sessions, roadshows and closing dinners. I used these opportunities to network with the founders as well as their investors.
Networking can be unsettling at first. At the first few events I attended, I didn’t say much and mostly listened to others around me, but I soon realized that I should use the opportunity to share my thoughts. I also began tapping into the Stanford alumni database, which is an amazing resource. During my second year in banking, I sent cold emails to 100 Stanford alums in venture. I got 60 responses, which turned into several interviews.
How did you make the decision to join Crosslink Capital?
I evaluated a few other firms, but I really liked the team at Crosslink and felt like it was a good cultural fit. I started as an associate, spending most of my time on sourcing and deal execution. I focused on theses around marketplaces and the future of work. During my time at Crosslink I sourced two deals and worked on three others.
For me, building relationships was both the most enjoyable part of the job and key to my successes. The first deal I sourced and led, PowerToFly, came from my relationship with Andrea Hippeau at Lerer Hippeau. Andrea responded to a cold email that I sent her when I was trying to build my VC network in NYC. We became friends and set up a monthly call to discuss companies that we were both interested in. Lerer Hippeau had incubated and funded PowerToFly and introduced me to the founders. I loved the team and the company’s thesis of matching female talent to remote work. We eventually went on to lead their Series A in 2015.
I also sourced my second deal, BetterUp, from another close friend and mentor, Jenny Lefcourt from Freestyle VC, who I had cold emailed when I first joined venture. When we would catch up every couple of months we would often talk about the personal coaching space — we saw how large the L&D (Learning and Development) market is and that there were very few tech enabled solutions in the space. Jenny introduced me to Alexi Robichaux, the CEO of BetterUp, and I eventually ended up investing in the company’s seed round with her.
How did you transition to your role at Google?
During my second year at Crosslink, I heard about a new group at Google from another VC friend, Joanne Yuan. Maria Shim, director of Corporate Development, was starting a team within corporate development to find new opportunities for acquisition and product creation for the company. I saw this as a great opportunity to get experience inside a larger company and work on big problems with a great team.
We spent a lot of time putting together strategies and thought leadership pieces — we analyzed the tech ecosystem and found companies and trends that Google’s senior leadership should keep an eye on. Once a month, our team would sit down with different product area leaders to share a perspective on trends, entrepreneurs, and companies that were relevant to their sector. It was an awesome opportunity to think deeply about what Google should be focusing on.
Through my time on the corporate development team, I started spending more time working closely with Google’s “Next Billion Users” (NBU) team. Being from Southeast Asia, I had always wanted to focus on more global products and eventually wanted to build for users in emerging markets. I got involved with some of the international deals and got to know the team further.
Google has been strategically investing and partnering with local companies in emerging markets, and I joined NBU as a product manager to co-create localized payments, logistics and ecommerce products with these companies.
Do you have any advice for someone trying to enter a PM role without a technical background?
At a place like Google, the APM program is very competitive, and most of the roles are filled by candidates with technical degrees. However, you can start connecting with the product teams even if you aren’t working in a product role and provide constructive feedback on features. All PMs want feedback, so they’re usually very receptive to this!
If you eventually want to move into a PM role, it’s not necessary to be very technical, but you need to know how systems are designed and how they function. Get a copy of “Cracking the PM Interview” and “Cracking the Coding Interview” and start learning the skills you do not already have.
It’s important to not let the fact that you don’t have a technical background hold you back. A lot of people think that without a computer science major, they’ll never be a PM. As long as you can work effectively with technical teams, bringing a different perspective can be really helpful. Teams that build products need to understand how people behave, how to scale, how to take the product to market profitably. Highlight the skills you have and learn the ones you don’t, and you can contribute in a product function.
We’d love your feedback on this post and other career questions we should cover — you can reach us on email at twins@crv.com or on Twitter @venturetwins.
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