How I “grew up” in China
I had to go through a major pivot in my career at the age of 37;
— resetting my expectations and my ego is one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done, but it has positively contributed to my life and career.
In college, I studied a combination of Chinese history and economics, with the expectation that I would eventually go on to a PhD program in developmental economics. By the time I received my AB, though, I was ready for a break from studying, and decided to spend a year in China.
14 years later, I was still in China, at that point running my own company, married to my college girlfriend and raising two young kids.
I felt lucky to have “grown up with China” — I had moved to China in 1992, and got to build my career as China’s economic growth was skyrocketing, and there were no limits to my opportunities. My wife and I were determined to stay in China for the long run.
However, our son was born (in 2002) with multiple serious birth defects —
and my mother — back in the States — was diagnosed with advanced stage cancer in 2004. Trying to fly back and forth to the States for treatment for both of them while trying to run a company in China was not feasible.
We had to find a way to get back to the States.
Neither my wife nor I had ever worked in the States before, and it wasn’t even clear what I was qualified to do.
I had founded and run (as CEO and COO) multiple successful companies in China, but what do you do with a China-focused mid-career start-up guy?
I had a stroke of luck when a Google recruiter called, looking for a Director of Product Management in China. After I explained that for personal reasons, I would not be moving back to China,
I had another stroke of luck
— that the same recruitment firm was also looking for a Director of Business Operations and Strategy at Google in Mountain View.
I had been running start-ups from the age of 28, in a highly hierarchical atmosphere — my Chinese employees were excellent, but not prone to challenge “the boss”. Execution speed was valued above all other attributes, even if it meant cutting some corners around planning.
At Google, I had to learn to listen and compromise:
the place was highly consensus driven, and placed great confidence in grassroots decision-making. Furthermore, my job involved helping different teams at Google work on their own strategies.
At first, it was a shock to my system and my ego.
I didn’t want to appear like I didn’t know what I was doing — especially because I was hired at a senior level. I wanted to swoop in to various teams around Google, get data on their performance, and magically produce recommendations.
I was worried that if I couldn’t do that, I would be exposed as an imposter.
Two things happened that changed my manner of approaching my job —
First,
Googlers — across the board — were highly welcoming and transparent. I had expected territorialism and resistance to a new hire who was suddenly being asked to “help” their group. I got the opposite: Googlers were eager for help and would be enthusiastic to have a partner.
Second,
there were clear role models in the groups where I was sent: people like Patrick Pichette (Google’s CFO at the time) and David Fischer (Google’s head of Online Sales at the time), modeled this behavior to their own teams, and in their working relationship with me. They were aggressively open about what they didn’t know, and what problems they were trying to solve. Top-to-bottom, their teams embodied transparency and cooperation. These were not isolated leaders: all Googlers of a certain vintage had internalized what it means to be “Googley”.
I discovered that I would get good results only after reciprocating:
— that I also had to be highly collaborative and transparent with my staff and partners. I embraced setting “real” goals with OKRs (by “real”, I mean goals that I might struggle to achieve… not just goals that I knew that I could easily look good by hitting). I would be honest in my “snippets” (weekly progress summaries) about how I was doing against my goals. I would be transparent with my struggles and lack of knowledge.
I’ve seen other styles —
In Silicon Valley it is generally not acceptable to be an overt jerk, but people will play subtle political games with each other to establish dominance, territory or credit. They will spin their progress reports, they will set easily-achieved goals, they will carefully manage who gets to be “in the room” for demonstration of status and power, and will spend a lot of time and energy on who gets credit for success or blame for failure.
I’ve also played this game (and am often tempted by this path).
However, I was fortunate enough to have had role models at a point in my career when I was open to a wholesale reinvention of my own working style.
Since leaving Google, I have tried (with varying degrees of success) to reproduce this attitude and working style. I have still found that it works for me — it has made me happier, calmer and more effective.
Eric Rosenblum is a managing partner at Tsingyuan Ventures and was an exec at Palantir Technologies. Prior to joining Palantir, Eric was COO for Drawbridge, served as Director of Product Management and Director of Strategy and Business Operations at Google. He’s is a graduate of Harvard and MIT. Eric lives in Palo Alto, California, with his wife (and college sweetheart), Titi Liu, two kids and a giant dog.
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