5 Questions with Ruby Lee

Product Partner at KPCB Edge

Ruby (@roobeelee) is the Product Partner at KPCB Edge, the seed stage investing team at KPCB, where she focuses on investing in digital health, mobile marketplaces, and the future of work. At Edge, she also leads the product team building software tools for early-stage founders.

Previously, she was an Associate Product Manager at Google, where she worked on the Chrome browser and later helped launch Project Fi, Google’s wireless carrier service. Ruby is a sports addict who likes to blog about little-known sports at whoasports.com. She also enjoys playing tennis and trying new dim sum places in San Francisco.

1.When did you know you wanted to be in tech?

When I moved to California for college in 2009, I still pretty much thought Silicon Valley was a place where people mined a lot of silicon.

At Stanford, I was involved with a group called BASES and gradually learned about startups, raising money, all of that. I decided my major would be Bioengineering because their class descriptions sounded the most interesting to me. As I was doing internships and working in the lab, I realized I wasn’t interested in lab work so much as the computational side — genomics, DNA design, etc. That’s why I started taking more Computer Science classes.

When I started looking for jobs, I thought I would go work at a bioinformatics startup. But I randomly ended up at a Google Associate Product Manager info session and thought it could be something fun to try. Long story short, I really loved product management at Google for a couple years, and then I was lucky to end up at a half-product, half-seed investing role here at Edge.

2. What’s a big challenge you’ve faced in your career journey? How did you deal with it?

I think one of the hardest challenges of being a Product Manager is rapidly context-switching from making sure the nitty gritty details are 100% covered to communicating about broader goals and long-term planning. It’s not only switching between the two but making sure you’re devoting the right amount of time to both.

Two things I’ve found work well for me are:

(1) documenting everything so that both details and broader strokes can be easily accessed by everybody, and

(2) making sure everyone has 1:1 time with me (even in a casual setting) to talk about where they see the product going and any challenges that need to be addressed.

3. What’s something you want to get better at?

Powerlifting! One of my really good friends got me into it a few years ago. I think part of the reason I like it is because I can track my progression so easily with numbers. ;) I just hit a 300 lb. deadlift and my goal is to be able to squat 300 lb. by the end of the year as well!

4. Best book you’ve ever read?

I recently read Ready Player One on a flight which I could not put down. Highly recommended!

5. If you could give your 18-year-old self any advice, what would it be?

Two things:

• Just because you were part of groups X, Y, and Z in high school, doesn’t mean you have to be in college. And just because you did X, Y, and Z in college doesn’t mean you have to start your career based on that. In other words, what you’re doing in a year might look completely different than what you’re doing this year, and that’s ok.
• I think I heard this from Marissa Mayer — burnout isn’t caused by the number of hours of work you do or sleep you get, but by resenting the fact that you can’t do the few things a week you really want to do. So make sure you figure out what those things are and do them!