Todo: Learn to Build a Great Business

Rose Yao
3 min readJul 17, 2017

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Spoiler Alert: I’m joining Google’s Geo team to help build their platform.

I gave some advice about a year ago - career decisions are not life or death. However, regarding my career, I’ve had trouble following my own advice. After leaving Athos, I spend this past year doing product consulting with startups while simultaneously agonizing over my next career move. The consulting was great because it kept me from obsessing too much, and gave me a chance to work with great companies at various stages: 10 people and looking for product/market fit, 50 people and optimistic, 100 people and going through growing pains. I also got a chance to get the inside scoop on different industries: education, e-commerce, and media to name a few.

Thank you to every team (Handshake, Narvar, Educents, DarbySmart to name a few) for giving me a chance to help and teaching me about your world.

As I reflect on the work I’ve done in the last 2 years in the startup world, I realized that I really want to learn how to build a great business. I’ve spent most of my career as a consumer-product leader. As a result, my focus has always been building the best experience for a large audience, or building the best team to deliver that experience. Google and Facebook had such successful ads platforms that none of the products I worked on generated revenue directly.

When I started working with startups, I realized I had a lot of helpful insight on how to answer questions regarding building a great product or team. Questions like:

  • How do you blend qualitative and quantitive feedback to make good decisions?
  • How do you build a good relationship between design and product?
  • How to hire product managers?
  • How do you write a PRD or roadmap?

But it comes to building a great business, I’ve never gotten my hands dirty. So there are lots of questions I didn’t have insight into, questions like:

  • What is the best way to organize sales, product, and engineering to work together effectively?
  • How do you scale from your first million in revenue to a hundred million?
  • How do you balance product consistency with big sale or VIP customers?
  • How do you model out subscription model vs incremental sales or another business model?

So when Jen and Gayathri from Google’s Geo team asked if I was interested in helping them build a platform and a business, I said yes. I am excited for opportunity to build a great business with and learn from some exceptional leaders. I am also excited to bring my consumer product experience and instincts into this role. The real world is becoming integral in our digital experiences. We see examples everyday in delivery apps, social interfaces like Snap Maps, and games like Pokemon Go. And that’s just the beginning. We haven’t even scratched the surface on experiences we could enable when we combine geo data with augmented reality and machine learning.

Now, the greatest thing about building a platform is I still get to work with awesome startups to help make their vision a reality. So if you are a customer of Google’s maps or local APIs or building a company that need Geo data, please tell me what you think.

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Rose Yao
Rose Yao

Written by Rose Yao

I spent the last 16+ years building products mostly at FB and Google. Also a food, travel, and fitness addict. Follow me @dozenrose or on www.roseyao.com

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