Ami Vora

Mentorship can be a collection of insights from many leaders rather than a single formal 'oracle' relationship.

"I think we tell women things like, you need to find a mentor and you need to find a sponsor, and that's just another set of hoops... I had the extreme generosity of so many wonderful leaders who helpe..."

Prioritize intuition and cultural fit over rigid five-year plans when choosing career moves.

"I realized that probably the most important thing is to just acknowledge that that is true for me. That I'm not going to be a person with a plan, and actually the thing that has consistently served me..."

Use emotional simulation to evaluate if a potential role is the right fit.

"I try to just put on the coat of the job. When I wake up in the morning, I'm like, what would it be like if I were doing this job? What would I think about on my commute? Who would I have lunch with?..."

Getting a foot in the door at a high-growth company often requires networking and a willingness to take non-traditional or lower-level entry points.

"I convinced one of them to introduce me to everyone at the office. I'd made a trade, I said, I'll buy you a fancy coffee at Coupa Cafe in downtown Palo Alto, and in exchange just introduced me to ever..."

Approach deep professional disagreements with genuine curiosity to dismantle defensiveness and find common ground.

"Working with Ami, it was like watching an alien because she could have the most profound disagreement in the world with somebody and they would say something that she thought was not just wrong, but c..."

Executives need concise, opinionated recommendations because they lack the bandwidth to process all the raw data themselves.

"Assume that executives have a little tiny dinosaur brain. We all have a little brontosaurus brain and we can really only hold three facts at the same time. We will never be able to go deep in the way..."

Build a high-trust relationship with a CEO by proactively sharing provocative strategic observations.

"With Max, I also wrote a parallel document of hot takes. So once a quarter or so for the first year, I'd write a document that was just like, hey, for sake of provocation, if we wanted to fundamentall..."

Senior leadership decisions are often about choosing the best possible 'suboptimal' path among difficult trade-offs.

"As you get senior, the only problems you'll see are ones that are fundamentally unsolvable because otherwise, someone would've solved it before they got to you. And so all you're doing is choosing whi..."

Use emotional metaphors to create a shared vision that guides decentralized design and product decisions.

"If we all agree that the feeling of something should be, I'm sitting in Dolores Park with my friends on a sunny Saturday, then people will just naturally build something that feels more consistent. Yo..."

A vision or strategy is only successful if it results in a tangible change in team prioritization or product behavior.

"For strategy to be useful, it actually has to change our behavior as a team to create better customer outcomes... What's the change, or coming out with a strategy that'll align people because we have..."

Avoid 'toddler soccer' (everyone chasing the same metric) by detangling goals into specific input metrics for each team.

"Maybe instead of motivating everyone on GMV, you motivate them on GMV per surface and you divide up the surfaces, or maybe you motivate them on actually different goals that underlie... Can you goal o..."

High-quality execution is the only way to validate whether a strategy is actually correct.

"Execution eats strategy for breakfast... if you have great strategy, perfect strategy but poor execution, you don't win because your strategy never makes it to the market. And what's even worse is tha..."