Your career journey doesn't have to be a solo trip

Life is a challenging thing to navigate alone. Most of us are inherently social creatures, and to varying extents benefit from sharing both our defeats and our triumphs with others who have a genuine stake in our lives. Some people come into our lives and become so invested in our well being and success, and we in theirs, that they become partners. They fearlessly enter the fray with us as we throw ourselves against life's challenges. They celebrate with us when we win. They keep us grounded and centered. They comfort us when we are weary and beaten down, and they help us pick ourselves up so that we can continue fighting the good fight. Without them we would be less. Incomplete. Incapable of achieving our full potential.

It is no accident that startup advisers and investors strongly encourage entrepreneurs to have a co-founder or co-founders. It isn't surprising that one of the best ways for businesses to achieve success is aligning employer and employee interests through alliances. Partnership, or the lack thereof, can be a critical factor in the success or failure of companies, teams, and projects.

When I think about my own career, I've had many partners who have contributed to my success. I had a number of amazing teachers and professors. My Ph.D. advisor, Jack Davidson, in particular, was a great partner. We had a productive, super fun period of collaboration where we bounced ideas off of one another, had a few epiphanies, and did some interesting research that we published while I was a student. I've had amazing coaches and mentors, like Bill Coughran, Maynard Webb, and Reid Hoffman, who have been so gracious and generous to me over the years sharing their time, wisdom, and perspective. I now have the honor, privilege, and insurmountable-but-happy task of trying to repay that generosity by partnering with them on occasion to help entrepreneurs do great things.

I have had amazing partners with whom I have collaborated to lead big groups of people building big software systems and companies. God knows how they managed to put up with my sub-optimal temperament and foul mouth. Omar Hamoui and I, and a truly kick-ass team of folks, spent several years at AdMob trying to bring something new and meaningful into the world. We had each other's backs for three rather intense years trying to change and reinvent mobile advertising, giving mobile app developers a way to distribute and monetize their work. David Henke, Bruno Connelly, Sonu Nayyar, Igor Perisic, Alex Vauthey, Mohak Shroff, and I, alongside a team of folks I feel insanely honored to have the privilege of working with, have spent the last bunch of years as partners building and scaling technology at LinkedIn through an IPO and six years of super fast growth. And trust me, we needed our partnership given the magnitude of the task and the obstacles we encountered. Jeff Weiner and I, particularly over the past couple of years, have been very close partners, offering each other support at critical moments when we most need it, striving everyday to do right by LinkedIn's members, customers, and employees.

I've recently embarked on a new professional journey, and I can already tell that I'm going to have great partnerships in the ambitious work that we're going to tackle.

So. All of this was actually just the set up for the next bit, which for me at least, and I suspect for many of you as well, is the most important, powerful, productive, and rewarding partnership in my life: the partnership I have with my spouse. When my wife and I met we were both Ph.D. students hell bent on a life in academia. We were both focused on graduating and figuring out how to land that first tenure track job. As unromantic as it might sound, both of us were testing the waters fairly early on to see if the other understood what a commitment to academic life meant: long hours; navigating the uncertainty of the tenure process; and for an academic couple in a market with far more Ph.D. supply than tenure-track job demand, the extreme difficulty and set of likely compromises involved in finding a university or even a town that would have openings for a tenure-track historian and computer scientist at the same time. But we were aligned. We very quickly became partners.

Even when we decided to leave academia, my wife and I made the decision together, and we replaced that ambition with a set of goals oriented around impact and the good that we hoped we might one day be able to do for those in need. It has never been easy, but we've always been there to support each other, one helping the other push through the difficulty of the moment, ultimately knowing that we were trying to accomplish the same thing. Even now, without my wife spending a significant chunk of her time and energy running The Scott Foundation, trying to further its mission of empowering children to achieve their personal best, I couldn't do what I do given our joint ambition and commitment to giving back to the community.

So, on her birthday, I'd like to thank my most important partner for always being there for me, and telling her in public, like a sap, how truly grateful I am for everything that she does for me, our family, and our world.