AfroTech, Airtable, and how to use constant change to accelerate your career

You are either getting better or getting worse. You never stay the same.

In college, our coaches did their best to impress ideas like the above on our team. Some lessons landed in the moment, others made more sense in reflection.

As I've now been out of college for as long as I spent in college, I occasionally think back to moments where our coaches highlighted how the skills we developed on the court would translate to our lives off the court. In my career so far, no lesson has stood out more than the one on change.

They taught us that success at the highest level required us to embrace change, not just accept it. While basketball teams and technology companies play in different arenas, they share many of the same fundamentals:

• A highly competitive landscape
• A collection of talent that aspires to be greater than the sum of its parts
• An irrational belief in the ability to achieve statistically anomalous goals

We had to take comfort in knowing that everything could change in an instant. A key player could get injured, or a team could outperform expectations, and we had to adapt in the moment or risk defeat.

Startups face a similar challenge. They have to consistently redefine themselves because the success patterns that get them to point A will not get them to point B. At least once per week I speak with someone interested in moving into startups and I always let them know the following:

At high growth companies, the rate and magnitude of change persistently accelerate.

In other words, you should expect bigger changes, quicker.

Moving from LinkedIn, which had ~16,000 employees at the time that I left, to Airtable, which had ~45 when I started, I expected my adaptability to be tested. As my first job out of college, I loved the foundation LinkedIn set for my future. I had a front row seat to world-class leadership and a mission that inspired me. I had a program that was meant to help me successfully matriculate into the company and the professional world.

When I decided to pursue my next play, and especially at such a nascent company, I did not expect to have the infrastructure to enable my success, and I was ok with that. Therefore, when I arrived on day 1 to a thorough 6-week onboarding plan that spelled out the exact goals I needed to achieve each day, I felt validated that I came to a special place.

Many people think that finding a company with a shot at achieving a successful business outcome is typically all you can hope for when looking at early stage companies. While Airtable checked that box for me, what stood out to me most as I began my journey were the company's values: the shared ethos within the company to think from first principles, prioritize long-term customer success in our decisions, and lean into the change required for us to reach our next stage. If these values resonated with me, I believed they would also resonate with people like me.

Within months of my arrival I had the chance to attend Blavity's 3rd annual AfroTech conference. I attended the previous conferences, seeing the audience grow from hundreds to thousands of participants. With many companies in attendance focused on recruiting, I saw an opportunity to be a student to the strategies other companies pursued, and synthesize those learnings into something useful for our team.

It is no secret that within tech, as with many industries, systemic challenges exclude marginalized communities from accessing opportunities. In my experience, many companies today are doing the work to make inroads on reversing those systemic issues. That said, the one commonality I hear from leaders at those companies is that they wish they would have taken action sooner. Without a foundation rooted in diversity, equity, and inclusion, introducing those values after a certain scale is challenging. At our scale and with our values, I felt motivated that we had the opportunity to learn from the companies before us and create the foundation of people many aspired to have.

Fast forward a year and I've seen progress that makes me confident in future efforts. Not only have we expanded our investment in events like AfroTech with executive support, but we also understand that sustained progress requires inclusion to be baked into the fabric of the company and tied to business priorities, not to be relegated to ancillary programs. We are building the playbooks and partnerships now for us to execute as we scale, and we've already gotten started with some.

As a product, Airtable is a modular software creation platform that enables anyone to design the tools they need to achieve their best work. For us to achieve our goals, we need people who think in a modular fashion, taking loosely connected experiences and stitching them together to create something great.

While there is still much work to do, I believe the efforts of today will pay dividends tomorrow. Much like my college coaches, people at Airtable often say that change is the only constant in our world. I'm excited about the changes we've made so far and the ones to come.

#AfroTech #Airtable