3/3 - AppNexus Here I Come!

Life at AppNexus

I could not have been more excited to start working for AppNexus. Everything about it was so cool! At Medidata I had a 5 year old Windows laptop with some 15" monitors, and now I had a brand new MacBook Pro & a 24" monitor. There was a kitchen that had unlimited snacks and sodas throughout the week, and free family lunches on Fridays. It was my first introduction to working in AdTech, and the perks were very similar to those at Google. I can't say enough how thrilled I was.

One of AppNexus' core values is 'Learn and Teach'. The industry, as well as the platform are both extremely complex, so new hires are given 4 weeks to learn as much as possible before taking on new clients. At the end of each week, we would be expected to teach the veteran employees what we'd learned. The four topics were:

1. The AppNexus Universe (What are all the elements of the technology stack and how do they interact, who are some key players in the industry for Supply, Demand and External Integrations and walk through the life cycle of an ad call over RTB on the AppNexus Platform)
2. AppNexus' Console Sell Side
3. AppNexus' Console Buy Side
4. AppNexus' Console Bidder Optimization details

The rapid pace at which we were required to learn this information was incredibly exciting and daunting at the same time. The only advice was "mouth open, fire hose in" which was an allusion to the fact that there's a ton of information that needs to be consumed, so just do what you can to make it work. I decided that I would raise the bar on my week 1 presentation, and really went above and beyond in preparing. When I presented in front of my team, they were thoroughly impressed at the depth of understanding that I was able to gain in 1 week. However, I had already been studying a lot of the material before I had started, and was staying up late every day tweaking and planning for this first opportunity to make a real impression. This was very well received and helped to set me apart right away.

I have always loved learning, and the only thing that I enjoy more than learning is teaching. AppNexus was hiring at such a rapid rate (we grew from ~300 when I was hired to 650 while I was there) that there were always new people who needed to learn everything from the basics of the tech stack, to SQL, to how do I organize my time. Word of my excellent week 1 presentation spread, and I became a point of reference for new hires. I started fielding lots of questions, and became well known within the Services organization for either knowing lots of details, or knowing who to go to when I had knowledge gaps.

There were also tons of opportunities to take classes taught by other AppNexians to learn lots of tech skills. I took a jQuery class taught by Sam Mati, and tried to apply what I'd learned to some basic web development, to start streamlining processes as I was learning them for the first time. I wasn't sure if I had what it takes to develop tools that would be useful (outside of VBA I hadn't built anything yet), but it turned out that all of the introductory work I had done made me ready to hit the ground running. My team really appreciated these time saving tools, and loved my enthusiasm, so let me continue to focus on tool building and optimizing process without getting terribly overwhelmed with client work.

I had an amazing learning opportunity from my teammate Brett Woodward. He had built a huge percentage of the team's tools that were available up to that point, and was primarily using Python. I hadn't had the opportunity to learn Python yet, but Brett was very willing to help get me up to speed, and always made himself available for my tons of questions. I started building tools using Python, and simplifying some of Brett's methodology by organizing his code into a series of libraries I dubbed 'anxapi', 'anxdb', and 'anxtools'. These libraries made it far easier for people who were unfamiliar with Python to get started creating value very quickly. Having built these, and coupled with my passion for teaching, I put together a class called "Automate Everything" and offered to teach anyone who wanted to join how to learn Python from scratch, and write scripts that could streamline their day to day. The class was very well received, and gave me a reputation of someone committed to building a truly scalable world-class company.

As this was all happening, the team was growing very quickly. Our manager, Justin was becoming overwhelmed with his responsibilities, offering 1-1's on a biweekly basis for 11 direct reports. It was at this time that I started being considered for a Team Lead role, to continue my focus on building a scalable team, and also help me grow into a leadership role at the company. I was very excited about the potential, and started handling one on one meetings, and sharing in the management workload for the team. After a few months of handling this work, I was formally promoted to Team Lead in August 2013. Justin and I collaborated very closely through Q3 and Q4 on major management projects, and became very close, both professionally and personally. I consider him a mentor and a very good friend.

In October 2013, Judith and I decided we wanted to move closer to the PATH train and closer to Layla's day care, since we both were working so many hours, and we had far too many stairs (and Layla with all her strollers and gear was getting heavy!). We found a great apartment at 50 Columbus Drive, which met all of our requirements, but it was significantly smaller from a square footage perspective. For this reason, we were trying every avenue we could find to get rid of some furniture. One thing Judith tried to do was sell our black couch on an internal message board at Google. To her surprise, the guy who responded happened to be a Technical Account Manager at Google, Eric Birnbaum. Coincidentally, he had the same title that I had when I was hired at AppNexus. Judith decided we should get in touch and compare notes on the role. I reached out, and he let me know he'd be very happy to get on the phone and discuss the role. When we spoke, it was clear to me that the role was extremely similar to the one I had held and was promoted from at AppNexus. He suggested that I forward my resume along to his manager, Dev Gogate, and have another informational phone call.

I took Eric's advice and Dev scheduled a phone call for us. I didn't realize it at the time, but this would be my first phone screen for the Technical Account Manager role at Google! The conversation went very well, and the next thing I knew, a recruiter reached out to me to start scheduling official interviews for the role at Google. They were pursuing me! This was a bit unsettling, as things were going so well for me at AppNexus. The timing didn't feel right, I dreaded telling Justin that I would be moving on, should Google make an offer, and I felt so established at AppNexus, and I didn't know whether I'd be able to replicate that success. In any case, I had to see what opportunities were available to me so that I would know that I'm not selling myself short.

After those initial 2 phone screens, 2 video "Hangout" interviews (one coding and one to evaluate client facing skill), 1 day of in-person interviews (meeting Dev in person and another coding interview) and 1 more follow-up Hangout interview, Google was ready to make their offer. I crossed my fingers and got on the phone to hear what they had to offer, and sure enough it was too good to pass up. That was a Friday, and I had an awful weekend keeping the news to myself, wondering how Justin would take the news. I was literally sick to my stomach just thinking about it. Monday came and I broke the news first thing, and it was shocking and painful. I had to explain myself many times, and found that I didn't really have a great reason to leave, besides the fact that Google's offer was as strong as it was. I gave my 2 weeks notice, which overlapped a 2 week vacation, so 2 weeks turned to 4. Justin would be travelling on vacation for 3 of those 4 weeks, so we only had 5 more days to work together in person. Eventually, we all came to terms with the decision.

Friday, January 10th was my last day at AppNexus. We had a massive going away party, where we knocked off a handle of Jack Daniels, finished a bottle of Maker's Mark, as well as a bottle of Oban I had received as a gift from Criteo. All this drinking was before we even made it to the bar! We had enough people come out to the bar that we filled the entire top floor. It was a wild event, and I was honored that so many people cared enough to come celebrate with me.

Today is January 14th, and we're about to head to Jamaica for a vacation. I'll be starting at Google on January 27th, and can't wait to see what the future will bring!

2/3 - My First Technical Job

Life at Medidata

My first opportunity as an employee at a tech company was a Technical Specialist at Medidata Solutions. We were living in Briarwood, Queens at the time in an apartment that I owned, and the commute to Edison, NJ was extremely daunting. We started looking for apartments in Jersey City, and found an amazing duplex in historic downtown. The move-in date was immediately before my start date at Medidata, so everything was falling into place at just the right time.

I started New Hire Orientation in July 2011, and was scheduled for 2 weeks of training before I would join the support group and take on RAVE, Medidata's primary software solution. It turned out that my start date coincided with all of the employees from a company called Clinical Force, which was recently acquired by Medidata. I didn't know this yet, but Clinical Force had no technical support team outside of the principal architect and engineers who built their Clinical Trial Management System (CTMS) from the ground up. I also didn't know that I would be pulled out of orientation before completing basic RAVE training, and would be assigned to support CTMS along with one senior member of the support group.

CTMS Training

The president of Clinical Force, Les Taylor spent about 3 hours per day with Pramod and me, walking us through all the details of the CTMS front end. Without any clinical trial experience, and without any support experience, I had no idea what I needed to retain from this training, and found it very anxiety inducing. At least I had Pramod there... It wasn't long before I realized Pramod was not bought into the idea of supporting a product beyond RAVE. For this reason, I took ownership of Les' knowledge transfer session, and tried to learn as much as possible as fast as possible. This was out of pure necessity and fear of the unknown. I took copious notes, and hoped what little I could do would be enough to get me started in supporting CTMS clients.

In the following days, I was put in contact with Pete Gilchrist, who was one of the two creators of the system, and would be my primary escalation point, and trainer for understanding the back end of the system. He would be working from South Africa, and we would primarily keep in touch via Skype. Pete definitely had an engineer's mind set, and had extremely high expectations of me. He was very reluctant to explain a concept twice, and did not seem particularly sensitive to the fact that I was literally brand new to this line of work. There was certainly a communications gap, and I was left primarily on my own to figure things out. The amount of requests I had to handle was overwhelming at times and I had made requests of my management to allocate additional resources to the CTMS product. I found out that this doesn't happen overnight. Eventually, however, I had my first trainee in Greg Carolan, and when we shared the workload it was certainly manageable. 

Additional Training Outside of Work

At the same time I was being thrown into the deep end at work, I continued to pursue additional education outside of work. In October 2011, I simultaneously took introductory classes at NYU in C#.NET, Javascript and Java for Programmers. Having access to 3 great teachers certainly helped with some of the technical challenges I'd face, and the learnings from these classes would often come in handy filling in the blanks at work. Needless to say, I was fully immersed in code and technical challenges day in and day out.

At some point, I was lucky enough to find a new escalation contact in Chris Broderick, who was the other principal architect of CTMS. With his guidance, I came to understand as much of the code as I could, and over time became extremely confident in my abilities supporting this product. I was promoted to a Production Support Engineer (Tier 3) in February 2012. Around the same time, I started a course called "Java Programming Intensive" at NYU, which would supercharge my understanding of Java, but also added a large amount of work to my already full plate.

Life at Medidata with Layla

In July 2012, Layla was born and I would be taking 6 weeks off to help raise her. In anticipating this, Medidata was able to hire another CTMS support specialist named Michael Goldsmith. Greg and Michael became proficient in supporting clients on the product, and upon my return, escalated to me far less frequently than they had in the past. With my new found free time, and tech skills, I developed some features for CTMS that seemed like they could be a great help. However, this was not particularly well received by Product or Engineering, and was a bit frustrating for me. I was able to contribute to the custom report development effort, however, which was fun, but not a full time opportunity for me.

Time for Something New

By September 2012, I recognized that I was becoming too comfortable in my role, which I had learned means it was time to look for more. I started asking around about opportunities at Medidata, including Product Management and Software Engineering. It looked like I had the possibility of becoming a business analyst, which wasn't the exact direction I wanted, and also started interviewing for a Ruby on Rails developer position (despite having no Ruby experience). While going through this search process internally, a totally random opportunity presented itself.

Finding Out About and Applying To AppNexus

Judith and I are friends with a couple named Lauren and Tom, and had them over to meet Layla and hang out around October 2012. Tom was super enthusiastic about his new job at a company called AppNexus, and suggested that a technical guy like me (:-D) should consider opportunities there. At first, I didn't take this too seriously, as I felt that I was too new to tech, and wouldn't have a good shot at such a cool NYC startup like AppNexus. Judith insisted that I at least check it out, and I found that there was a Technical Support role that seemed comparable to my experience at Medidata. Sure enough, I asked Tom to refer me and passed along my updated resume.

Time passed, and I was surprised not to have heard anything from AppNexus. I decided to get in contact with Tom to see if he could find out why I wasn't being considered. It turned out since I listed my current continuing education at the top of my resume, they assumed that I was still in college, so disregarded my application. Tom was able to clarify that my school experience was in addition to my current work at Medidata, and they immediately set me up with a phone screen with the head of the Product Specialist team, Wade Ware.

What Led Me To Technical Account Management

As luck would have it, Wade became unavailable at the scheduled time of the phone screen, so Justin Pines called me in his absence. We immediately hit it off, and asked me if I'd like to be considered for a Technical Account Manager role on his team, instead of the Product Specialist role for which I'd originally applied. I told him I would certainly be open to it, and we scheduled a day of interviews.

The Day of the Interview

I was super excited for the opportunity to interview at a company like AppNexus, especially because the company represented my goal of getting into a high visibility, high tech startup in NY. I was also nervous, because even though my interview at Medidata had gone well, I did not have many positive interview experiences under my belt. The interviews were a lot of fun, but became exhausting by the end of the day. I met with members of the team who mapped out the entire technology stack upon which AppNexus runs, and asked me to figure out where there might be problems. I met with 2 team members at once, who quizzed me on logic and probability problems. I met with Justin, and we had our second opportunity to talk shop. I met with the head of Services, Brandon Atkinson, who wanted to see if I would be a good fit for the values that he had outlined for the Global Services organization. When the whirlwind of a day had finally passed, all of the interviews had gone very well, and I couldn't wait to hear back from the Talent Acquisition Group.

The Offer

Sure enough, within about 1 week, I did hear back with an offer that I could not refuse. I came back to Medidata with the news that I would be moving on, and they were disappointed, but not very surprised. I didn't realize until later that I was still being considered for the Ruby developer role that I had interviewed for weeks earlier. In fact, the hiring manager told me that they were in the process of putting together an offer. Oops? In any event, this decision concluded my 1.5 year experience at my first technical job. I could now officially say that I had established a career in technology, and had finally gained the confidence that I can now interview successfully, with the professional and educational experiences that future employers would want.

1/3 - How did it start?

What is this about?

My name is Ken David, and I started my second career after spending 6 years in diamond jewelry production. The purpose of this blog, will be to share my experiences while trying to find the next step in my career, including the challenges and successes I had encountered along the way. Let's jump right in!

Early Life

From a young age, I was set up for educational success by my parents. They had a great reverence for the value of education, and taught me to read before I got to elementary school. This was a huge benefit, as I was able to enjoy the earliest years of school, and found the work to be easily handled. I was able to get excellent grades, with a strong focus on education, and my parents consistently shared their pride in my scholarly achievements.

This commitment to quality school work carried me all the way through High School, and helped me get into Cornell University. While there, I realized I would be able to get A's without putting forth an excess of effort, which seemed great at the time, but derailed me from a quick start to a real career. With the extra time I had available to me, I committed the majority of my energy to learning the intricacies of poker, taking numerous casino trips & partying as much as I possibly could. I have a feeling that a lot of college students come out of High School without a sense of purpose that college can satisfy, which is a great shame. I think I could have captured a great deal more value from college if I had started working straight out of High School, then gone to college when I knew what professional direction I would have wanted to pursue. That said, things tend to happen for a reason...

When I graduated from Cornell a semester early, I had not yet begun the job search in earnest. I attended a couple of finance sponsored recruiting events, but was not able to make a connection with any of the representatives that had been sent to our campus. My next thought was to interview at Bloomberg. My cousin had been working at Bloomberg for many years and was able to put in a good word for me, and I felt that my business background was a perfect fit for their new graduate program. I was called back for (at least) 4 interviews, but for some reason the process did not seem to be moving forwards, and they wound up not choosing to offer me a position. This was painful, and I didn't feel like I had many good options. That said, I didn't look for what options could be available, and just decided to stick my head in the sand and hope something would come along. I think this had something to do with the autopilot mentality that came along with being "successful" for 16 years of education.

Without a job offer, and feeling as though I would not receive any favors, I tried to make poker my profession while living at home. After all, I was able to consistently make some money, and I didn't need anyone else's permission to pursue it. After a few months of this, my Mom became extremely frustrated with me. She felt I had so much potential, and was wasting it sitting in my room and at casinos playing poker all day. She appreciated that I did not have much luck interviewing up until this point, and her primary concern was that I had literally no social life. For this reason, she insisted that I try my best to get onto a Birthright Israel trip. After some arguing (I was in the habit of always saying "no"), I agreed to try to get on the trip, and was granted a spot.

This trip was the best thing that could have happened to me at the time. I met lots of great people and made some lasting friendships. One of the people that I met even invited me to her sister's graduation party in Connecticut. Since I had no job and no social life, I thought, "Sure, why not?" It was on this trip that I met Eli Savransky, who turned out to own a diamond jewelry company in Manhattan, and had had great success hiring Cornell graduates. At this party, we had the opportunity to speak for a bit, and he offered me to come in for an interview sometime in June 2005.

First Job

I made the trip to 555 5th Avenue to interview for a Production Manager role at Sol Savransky Diamonds in June 2005. By the next week, I had received a phone call letting me know that I was being made an offer! I happily accepted, and found out the office would be closed for the week of July 4th. I started the following week, and my first paycheck even compensated me for the week of vacation. I was on top of the world.

During my time at Sol Savransky, I was able to learn:

• How to communicate with clients via phone, e-mail and in person
• How to manage a production queue, and work with suppliers to hit key deadlines
• How to leverage VBA within Excel and Access to automate otherwise tedious tasks
• How to work with software developers to streamline process and make the day to day as automatic as possible

All of this learning is fabulous, however, I learned everything I needed within the first year or two. At this point, I became comfortable, and settled in. What I didn't know at the time, is that comfort in your job is the fastest way to get nowhere in your career. I was happy to receive my modest annual raises from my entry level salary, and take on whatever additional responsibility I was presented with.

In the background, the company struggling to compete with various factors such as vertical integration of diamond companies selling direct to retail, high quality jewelry being made available from numerous vendors, the fluctuating prices of gold and diamonds, as well as the massive pressure that companies like Sam's Club are able to apply to smaller jewelry vendors. Since this was a small, family owned operation, the pressures fell squarely on the shoulders of Eli, and it made life in the office stressful at times.

This difficult industry continued for my entire tenure at the company, and led to layoffs, pay cuts and the fear that the company would one day be forced to shut its doors. I stuck around, however, because I had a great fear of the unknown, and a track record of 0 success when interviewing with large companies.

In mid 2008, I met Judith, who came to understand my work situation, and thought it urgent that I seek other opportunities. My anxieties about trying to apply to other jobs, interviewing and my dream of one day becoming a poker pro all prevented me from taking action on her urgent advice. This led to numerous arguments over time and put a significant strain on our new relationship. I occasionally dabbled in the idea of pursuing an advanced degree, but I didn't see the value in an MBA, and wasn't fully committed to Computer Science, especially without any real technical experience. This led to me waffling back and forth without a clear direction, and no real path forward.

We were married in 2009, and the arguments continued on an irregular basis. In 2010, Judith hit the accelerator on her career by pursuing and receiving a job at Google. This made me extremely jealous, and I felt strongly that I would never have the opportunity to work anywhere as wonderful. My 'stuckness' got even worse, as I wanted my next step to be a job at Google, but I was not at all qualified for any technical role there, and Sales was certainly out of the question for me. I actually did interview at Google for a couple of roles in 2010, but my severe lack of any relevant technical experience held me back from being considered for an offer.

Though I had given up on my own career possibilities, Judith would never give up that easily. In February 2011, while juggling her immense workload, and pursuing her MBA at NYU, she had a brilliant idea to help me out. She discovered that NYU has a School of Continuing and Professional Studies, which offers classes without requiring an application process or any prerequisites. You just pay the fee and show up. She found a class for me called "Database Design and Development" which immediately piqued my curiosity and I signed up right away. As soon as I sat in the first class, I knew that this was the missing piece in my career puzzle. This was the first opportunity I had to directly apply my "book smarts" and technical aptitude to an endeavor that could open up career opportunities in technical roles. That night, I was so excited that I decided to sign up for another class starting later in the week. I was choosing between Python and PHP classes, but chose PHP since the Professor was named (believe it or not) Ken Davidson!

Within 10 weeks, I had completed both of these classes and loved every moment! I had learned enough to both understand databases and start creating database driven web applications! This was a lot of fun, but it also meant that I could actually have a shot passing an interview for a technical role. I developed a great working relationship with Professor Ken, who wanted to get me a job as a developer at Pepsi Bottling Group. At the same time, he referred me to Michael Hornby, who was a recruiter in the tech industry. Ken was able to set up an interview for me at PBG in Somers, NY, and Michael was able to find me an interview for a support position at Medidata Solutions in Edison, NJ. At this point I was really seeing the light at the end of the diamond jewelry tunnel.

Within a couple more weeks, I had a hard offer from Medidata and a soft offer from Pepsi. I made the decision to move on from Sol Savransky, and decided to go with Medidata, as it appeared to have more opportunities for growth and learning. In July 2011, I started as a Tier 2 Technical Support Specialist at Medidata and could not have been more excited!