Operator Spotlight #31: Jonathan Bruce, Senior Operations Coordinator at Datasaur
Frederick Daso
MBA Candidate at Harvard Business School | Senior Investor & Head of Platform at GC Venture Fellows
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Jonathan Bruce is a Senior Operations Coordinator at Datasaur, a data labeling platform in the NLP space; this professional's journey started with a passion for public speaking at the University of the Pacific in the Speech and Debate world. Now they’re building the complete Customer Success journey for a startup, helping customers adopt Datasaur for their complex NLP requirements. With a keen interest in AI, Jonathan has leveraged his expertise in communication to streamline customer success.
Frederick Daso: What was your journey to becoming a Senior Operations Coordinator at Datasaur?
Jonathan Bruce: I love communication and creating relationships. My journey begins with public speaking. I love the challenge of explaining something complex and making it simple. When you’re able to teach people something complex in simple terms, seeing the “aha” moment on their faces is the most sensational feeling in the world.?
The love for this feeling drew me toward collegiate debate. During my competitive course through debate, my only goal was to become a national champion. I failed in this endeavor. However, I stayed at the same school for my Master’s and coached the debate team. The rhetoric of politics was my area of study; however, I was slowly growing an interest in technology.?
During this time and through my research about world issues, I became oddly obsessed with studying artificial intelligence. It was such an obsession that I kept it to myself. Seldom I would mention to someone my interest in the topic. After college, I recruited for technologies teams at Microsoft, Wells Fargo, and a few other companies. This was about the time I discovered Datasaur: a data labeling platform for organizations to build their NLP and LLM models.?
I heard they had a need for a customer success specialist who could help maintain and build relationships with customers. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to work in the field of AI and offer my knowledge of communication to help support Datasaur.?
Daso: There’s a lot of conventional career advice about being a successful customer success expert, but are there any unorthodox lessons you’ve learned through experience or been taught through mentorship that more of your fellow customer success professionals should know?
Bruce: Give your customers value in each exchange; communicate something of value in every message to your customer. I have messages that go out to each of our customers regularly. On my end, I want to know how they are doing and make sure their experience is going well on our platform. However, it would be rather annoying if my message was repetitively inquiring about their experience. So I make sure that each time I check in, I include valuable information: features that may be helpful for their use-case, congratulating them on their company’s milestones, offering training sessions for any new employees they may have, etc. Yes, on my end–I need to know how they’re doing–but I also need to make sure they see my messages as valuable for them.
Do you see the theme? Personalize your messages as much as possible. Contextualize information in a way that is useful exclusively for that particular customer. Each of these messages will then give something of value to your customers.
Daso: What’s the toughest project (professionally or personally) that you worked on as a Senior Operations Coordinator or in general? What were the most important lessons you learned from that project?
Bruce: The toughest project during my current tenure was learning about the NLP space. During my first six months, I was dedicating many hours each week to merely learning about the industry and its respective terminologies, concepts, and technologies. Debate taught me that you could only succeed if you know what you’re talking about: content, content, content. Content is the driver of successful communication. I would have to know our product and where it fits in the market in order to be effective; this knowledge had to be obtained quickly. Learning is the most significant and impactful challenge; this truth was no different in this position.
Pace yourself while you learn. In the beginning, I felt immense pressure to learn everything as quickly as possible (pressure that I created in my head). This led to me working unrealistic hours each week. My mind was burnt out; I was losing the ability to focus, to read, to write. If you overwork yourself, you will no longer be competent at even your core tasks. Prioritize your top 3 tasks for the week: get those done. Once you’ve completed your core tasks, then begin your learning objectives. Keep it all within your usual working hours. Keeping healthy boundaries around your working hours is not a refusal to work hard but a necessary protection against burn-out.?
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Prioritize. Slowly and effectively learn.?
Daso: Who are some of the most inspirational people you’ve gotten to work with during your career in tech??
Bruce: My co-worker Nadya has inspired me every month. Nadya is our product manager at Datasaur. She began at Datasaur as a labeler, and she has constantly proven to be incredibly valuable and important to our team. She and I were the only two individuals that did not have a technical background. Despite her lack of technical know-how, she has learned with incredible efficiency. Her knowledge of the NLP space and ability to debug coding has been immensely impressive to me, as she learned everything during her tenure at Datasaur. She has inspired me to learn more on a daily basis.?
Daso: How would you define your company’s culture, and how does it create an environment where you can do your best work?
Bruce: Datasaur has the best culture I have experienced. We are fully remote, so it is incredibly important to create a human connection between employees. And I feel very connected to my co-workers. We have communication channels dedicated to topics like anime, comics, movies, books, cooking, and more. We want people to draw connections with one another and find mutuality. After all, it is by mutuality that we foster friendships. We also run an internal employee podcast that I help host: Datasaur Bites. In this podcast, we meet one employee at a time and learn about what they do at the company, their hobbies, and much more. This has been a lot of fun! I believe that if you feel welcomed by your team, then you will feel comfortable asking questions / learning with humility. We truly feel comfortable supporting one another in every meaningful way.
Daso: What are the most important skills you’ve had to develop in your job, and what specific projects or assignments did you work on to develop each core skill?
Bruce: The most important skill in my job is teaching. I have to understand the NLP needs of the customer and how to best deploy those needs in our platform. After this discovery, I then have to train our customers on how to use our platform for their workflow. My goal is for our customers to be self-sufficient if they would like to be. And, of course, almost everyone wants to be self-sufficient.?
Teaching is at the core of my position. I will teach admin, labelers, and reviewers on how to use Datasaur for their workflow. I’ve run the onboarding process for our company, building the sequence of the customer’s experience. There has been trial and error, certainly. What helped me the most during this trial and error was watching myself in recordings of onboarding/training meetings with customers. When I taught Public Speaking and coached Debate, I always told students to record themselves and then watch that recording. The same advice is true here: If you run onboarding / training sessions, you should spend some time each week watching yourself. You’ll be able to tell which topics you’re particularly weak at handling, which topics have you stuttering perhaps, and whether you’re patiently explaining items. We can be a great teacher-student combination: the best, sometimes.?
But remember: if you put x amount of energy into criticizing yourself, then put x+1 energy in the solution. Rinse. Repeat.?
Daso: What’s one interesting thing (non-work related) that more people should know about you?
Bruce: One of my most coveted hobbies is screenplay writing; screenplays contain great lessons for communication. I’ve written two feature-length screenplays and am working on my third screenplay at the moment. The practice of screenplay writing is also a great playground for efficient writing. You must be economical with your word choice. Say as much as possible in the least amount of words. Screenplays should also be written on a fifth-grade level of reading. Utilize simple yet impactful words. Finally, while writing a screenplay, you must “show, not tell.” You should vividly describe everything that is occurring in the scene, don’t assume the reader knows anything. These are rules that I apply to all forms of writing and speaking: simple words, vivid descriptions, and economic word choice.?
Daso: What’s something you want to accomplish in your career that you haven’t yet? What motivates you to get there?
Bruce: I want to directly help a startup, namely Datasaur, position itself as the premiere service in the industry. I will take my journey in customer success to its fullest potential: I love what I do. The NLP industry is a fascinating and challenging space to create a successful customer journey. Each need and requirement is wildly different. Every organization deploys different terminology to describe the same technologies/challenges. It is the challenge that is so motivating.
Are you an operator or tech employee looking to learn from founders on how to build your startup? Are you someone interested in joining a startup as an early-stage employee? Subscribe?to my mailing list, Founder to Founder (F2F):?f2f.substack.com .?
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Student at Polytechnic High School
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