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Girl Geek X team: Gretchen DeKnikker and Sukrutha Bhadouria welcome the crowd to Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner in San Francisco, California. 

Speakers:
Shawna Wolverton / SVP, Product Management / Zendesk
Swati Krishnan / Software Engineer / Zendesk
Erin McKeown / Director, Engineering Risk Management / Zendesk
Alethea Power / Staff Software Engineer, Site Reliability / Zendesk
Eleanor Stribling / Group Product Manager / Zendesk
Sukrutha Bhadouria / CTO & Co-Founder / Girl Geek X
Gretchen DeKnikker / COO / Girl Geek X

Transcript of Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks & Panel:

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Welcome to the Zendesk sponsored Girl Geek dinner tonight. I’m Sukrutha. This is Gretchen. Thanks for joining us. I love all the color around. I love your hair, lovely lady. Anyway, a little bit … you also, all of you. I quickly want to recap what Girl Geek X is. So why you see that up there, Girl Geek X is an organization with Angie, Gretchen, and I working to make it easier for women and people who identify as women or anything you want to identify yourself as, anyone, to come and network outside of work, find out more about other companies that have a great culture and have really, really innovative products, such as Zendesk. At dinners like these, you have the first and the third hour reserved for networking, so I hope you’ve been chatting away and making connections so when you actually want to work at the company or apply there, it makes it easier. It’s like you have inside information.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Zendesk has sponsored a few times before so they’ve been such a great ally and with Shawna working here now. We used to work together before. Not directly but in my head we did work directly. So when she reached out to us we were super excited that we’d have another Zendesk dinner coming up. Today, we do not just dinners. Once we hit the 10 year mark with Girl Geek X, we started doing virtual conferences, which we’ve had two so far. We also have a podcast so search for Girl Geek X and we’re looking for more ideas on topics so listen to what we have and suggest topics. Sign up for our mailing list through our website, girlgeek.io. We also launched our swag store today so–

Gretchen DeKnikker: Did you guys see it?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: You did?

Gretchen DeKnikker: That’s so cute. It’s one of these little guys.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, so Gretchen’s nicknamed those characters pixies because they’re pixelated.

Gretchen DeKnikker: It’s a great name so it’s not just that I nicknamed [inaudible].

Sukrutha Bhadouria: So please share on social media tonight everything that you see here, eat, listen to, learn. The hashtag for tonight is Girl Geek X Zendesk and that’s enough from me. This is Gretchen, like I said.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Okay, Sukrutha said everything we always say except for, please join me in welcoming the amazing Shawna Wolverton.

Shawna Wolverton: Thank you. I am just so incredibly impressed with what these women have built over 10 years. I was looking at their site today. Over 200 dinners. This is an amazing organization and we’re incredibly honored to host tonight. A little food, a little networking and hopefully, maybe, you’ll even learn a few things. We have an agenda because this is what we do at Zendesk. Everything starts with an agenda. We have checked in. That’s good. We ate. We all successfully avoided the caution tape, so it’s a classy establishment here at Zendesk. And we’re going to do some lightning talks and then stick around, we’re going to do a big group picture and then, there’s a whole other hour after we talk at you for a while with dessert and some more chatting.

SVP of Product Management Shawna Wolverton emcees Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner, stating “it’s amazing to get a seat at the table and to look around and see people who look like you.”

Shawna Wolverton: I am Shawna Wolverton. I am the SVP of Product here at Zendesk. I joined about six months ago and it has been an amazing six months. I feel sort of corny a lot. People ask me all the time, how’s the new job? How’s the new job? I feel like a little bit of a Hallmark card. Like it’s so great. But what’s been amazing and I really just sort of figured this out is that I was trusted right out of the gate, right? I was able to go out and be competent. At week 2, I was on stage. In month 3, I’m in front of investors and in front of the press. And it’s just been so amazing to be given that trust. And I was incredibly lucky to join Zendesk in a cohort of women executives. We hired a CIO, as well as our chief customer officer, onto the executive board when I joined and then I looked up and we already had women in our CFO seats as well as in the head of people.

Shawna Wolverton: And it’s amazing to get a seat at the table and to look around and see people who look like you. So you did not, though, come here to listen to me jabber around on about how much I love my job. But we have four incredibly accomplished speakers tonight and we’re going to start with Swati who’s going to talk to us about metaprogramming. At the end, we’ll have some time for Q&A so definitely stick around for that. Swati.

Software Engineer Swati Krishnan gives a talk on “Code that writes code: Metaprogramming at Zendesk” at Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner.

Swati Krishnan: Hi, everyone. Hi, everyone. I’m Swati. And today I’m going to be talking about code that writes code or metaprogramming here at Zendesk. So first, a little bit about me. I’ve been a software engineer in the code services organization at Zendesk for around two and a half years now. In this time, I have learned and contributed to many projects. But of the cooler and fun things that I got to learn here was metaprogramming and I hope that I can share it with all of you out here.

Swati Krishnan: So first of all, what do you mean by metaprogramming? Well, most programs are built on language constructs. These language constructs could be classes, methods, objects, et cera. Metaprogramming, basically, allows you to manipulate these language constructs at run-time. So why is Ruby as a language particularly suited to metaprogramming? Well, that’s because Ruby’s a dynamically typed language. What this means is that it allows you to access and manipulate these language constructs at run-time. This is a difference from what statically typed languages would let you do normally.

Swati Krishnan: So how do we leverage metaprogramming here at Zendesk? So Zendesk is like a Rails shop. So this basically means that we have a lot of products and apps that are built on Rails. For those of you that don’t know, Rails is a Ruby based web framework. Web frameworks have to be pretty flexible so this means that a lot of modules and libraries in Rails such as Active Support, Active Record, et cera, heavily leverage metaprogramming. So by using Rails, Zendesk by proxy, uses a lot of heavy lifting that comes from metaprogramming.

Swati Krishnan: This talk is not going to be about rails. This talk is about account feature flags at Zendesk and how we use a bit of metaprogramming magic to add some more fun and color to them. So before I launch into that, what exactly do you mean by account feature flags? Here at Zendesk, when a developer ship new code, we do so behind … I don’t know why this is so … okay. So whenever developers … that’s better. I’m just going to leave it. So here at Zendesk, whenever developers ship new code, we do that behind something called feature flags. So whenever a feature flag is down to 0%, that basically means that that feature is not available on any accounts. Is this fine? Are you sure? Okay. When it’s done to 100%, that means that it’s available on all accounts.

Swati Krishnan: So this basically gives you mechanism to roll out a feature slowly so it can go from 0 to 100% and you could also roll it back quickly so that if things go wrong, if there’s a bug in the code or if customers aren’t really appreciative of the features–which doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen, but there’s a slight possibility so you should always [inaudible]. So basically this feature flag framework allows developers to ship code in a more reliable way.

Swati Krishnan: So the way that this is built, it basically means that developers now have a method called has feature name question mark available on the account object. So that whenever they’re trying to ship this new feature, they can just basically go if your account object has … they can basically just go that if and say that if your account object has this part of the feature turned on, that means that we can now execute the new feature’s specific code. If it doesn’t have the feature turned on, that means that we can just fall back to our old non feature specific code or just execute old code.

Swati Krishnan: So how can we simplify the existing account class structure so that we can basically add this feature so that developers can by proxy enable new feature specific code? So one way to do that would be basically to just open the account class to add your has whatever your feature name is, question mark, method inside that. All that this method would be doing would just be checking the database to see if the feature flag is turned on for the specific account or not.

Swati Krishnan: So when a developer has a new feature to add, what they’ll basically do is just go into this account class, add a method called def has feature XYZ question mark and it’ll do the exact same thing, which means that it’ll basically call the database and check if the feature flag is turned on for the account.

Swati Krishnan: But there are also several problems with this sort of an approach and you should not be doing this. And that’s because it encourages repetition a lot so whenever a developer wants to add their own feature, they’d basically be like going to this class, adding their method, making that database call to check if the feature flag is turned on. In coding and in Ruby in general, we try to discourage repetition, because if there’s a way to get something done with as few lines of code and concisely as possible, then it should definitely be trying to use that.

Swati Krishnan: The other kind of obvious disadvantages that means that every developer, whenever they want to write this particular has their own feature method on an account object. But how could I get [inaudible] implementation off fetching from the database so this is just encouraging reinventing the wheel, which is something that we don’t want developers to do because that’ll just add potential for more bugs. Because if everyone gets to write their own implementation, then you can have more bugs pop up from that.

Swati Krishnan: And last but not least, why should we do it in this brute force driven way when metaprogramming gives you more cleaner, elegant ways to solve the same problem? So the metaprogramming solution to this is basically just adding list of features. So over here I added a couple of features, but you can increase this with how many ever features you want. And then in these six magical lines, we’ll just be iterating over this features list. And we’ll be calling the Ruby metaprogramming magical method … actually the Ruby magical dynamic generation spell which is basically just going to define a new method based on that item that it’s picked from the list. It’ll just interpolate that in the method name and then, voila. I don’t know if I said that correctly. And then you basically get a method which will then make that database call with what it’s picked up from the features list.

Swati Krishnan: So this basically means that all that a developer now has to do to get the has feature available method is to just add their feature name to this features list and then whenever the Ruby app will boot up and start, it’ll automatically create the has their feature name available method on the account object so they don’t have to write their own implementation. They don’t have to repeat themselves. They don’t have to do anything much.

Swati Krishnan: So this was just one of the benefits and applications of metaprogramming. There are several others, such as the open class implementation, which will basically let you add your own functionality over any method in the class. So you basically even go and open up like the [inaudible] method in the ink class which is a code Ruby library class. And you can add your own functionality, like logging or benchmarking, to it. Another kind of interesting one would be the Active Record library in Rails. So Active Record for those of that don’t know is object relation and mapping. So basically if you have something like user dot name in your code or user dot name equal to Swati in your code, Active Record will magically figure out that this call response to the user’s table in your database. If that user’s table has a column called name, then it’ll automatically create the [inaudible] methods for you so user dot name and user dot name equal to will already be created for you so you don’t have to define it yourself.

Swati Krishnan: So yeah. These [inaudible] the applications of metaprogramming. This is just a glimpse of all that it can do. But I hope that you found this informative and will probably use it in your own work. Thank you.

Director of Engineering Risk Management Erin McKeown gives a talk on “Staying Cool Under Pressure – Lessons from Incident Management” at Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner.

Erin McKeown: Hello, everybody. My name is Erin McKeown. I just want to first say welcome. I’m so excited that Zendesk is hosting this event. I’m even more excited to share with you guys a couple of lessons I’ve learned through managing incidents throughout my career. To quickly introduce myself, like I said, my name is Erin McKeown. I’m the director of engineering risk management here at Zendesk. I have the great pleasure of leading a team of–a group of teams, actually, that I like to think of in three different categories, which is really our first line of defense, threat prevention, and recovery. When I say the first line of defense, we have what we call our Zendesk Network Operation Center. We actually have Kim Smith here with us who leads the ZNOC. Hello, Kim. Everybody say hi. She’s visiting from Madison. So Kim has the pleasure of running a very, very awesome team that takes–monitors and takes care of our systems 24/7 365 a year. Like I said, they do all kinds of monitoring. They put out fires. They escalate to different engineering teams when there’s something that is a little bit larger that they need help with.

Erin McKeown: In addition to our ZNOC, we also have our incident management team. They partner very closely with our ZNOC, and they’re responsible for running all of our response and coordination of any service incident that we have here at Zendesk. On the other side of that, we have our business continuity and disaster recovery. These are really the areas of which we focus on planning for training employees and testing on how we can recover from business disruptions. So that can be anything from a natural disaster that impacts one of our office facilities to a natural disaster that may actually take out an entire AWS region. Everyone cross your fingers that that does not happen.

Erin McKeown: So this is one of my favorite quotes. It’s a little nerdy, but Franklin Roosevelt said, “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.” Disclaimer, I’m not a sailor, but stick with me here. I think what Frank is trying to get at here is that no matter what, there’s always going to be challenges that come up and we are going to have to deal with adversity and we can plan and we can do all kinds of things to get prepared for events to take place but at the same time, we need to take these as an opportunity to continue to learn and to grow. And so, I’m just going to share with you guys two events that I’ve actually been a part of and two important lessons I’ve learned from them. I really wanted to dig in and give you guys a real technical incident type of conversation but I didn’t want you to fall asleep.

Erin McKeown: So the first event that I’m going to talk about is from 2011. Back in 2011, there was a 9.1 earthquake off the coast of Japan and it actually was a mega underwater earthquake that took place. As a result of that, there was a tsunami that then hit a nuclear power plant and caused a meltdown of the Fukushima power plant. This is considered the second biggest radioactive event accident to have happened to Chernobyl. I don’t know if you guys are watching the HBO series, but kind of along those lines.

Erin McKeown: So a very, very devastating event. We actually had an office in Tokyo with 250 employees on the 50th floor of a high rise building when the earthquake happened. You can imagine how scary that would really be. That was the first wave of it. And then the tsunami hit and there was devastation across the entire the eastern side of Japan. And then this huge threat of radioactivity that was potentially threatening Tokyo. These employees went through the ringer. I mean it took us about a week and a half to confirm where all of our employees were, make sure that they were safe, make sure that their families were safe, that they had what they needed. All the work that was going on in Tokyo completely stopped. It’s fine. There was other people that picked it up and things to do.

Erin McKeown: I think that what we learn from this type of an event is no matter what, people are our most important asset. As a company, you consider it family and I think one of the challenges that companies do have is really understanding that line between responsibility and just doing the right thing for their employees. In this particular event, we actually considered chartering planes to get our employees out. We didn’t have to do that because it turned out everything was going to be okay, but, yeah. So bottom line from this experience, to highlight that despite the fact that the office was unoperationable for weeks at that point, everything was fine business wise. All we cared about was the employees being safe and their families being safe.

Erin McKeown: So this is another event that took place in 2012. Hurricane Sandy. It actually impacted the eastern seaboard, caused over an estimated $70,000,000,000 dollars worth of damage. Another very, very human wise devastating event. I’m not going to talk about that one. Part of this in this one, a startup that became … well, I wasn’t working there but partnered with them on some things. I wasn’t responsible for their DR. They actually had their data center in downtown Manhattan. I don’t know if you guys know that there’s data centers in downtown Manhattan but from a risk standpoint, I would not be having my data center downtown Manhattan.

Erin McKeown: Anyway, they completely lost power. They lost backup generator power. They didn’t have a disaster recovery plan. They didn’t have their data backed up. So they were pretty much dead in the water. They had to sit there and wait and see if everything would come back or if it wouldn’t. So the big lesson from them here is luckily, the services came back. They were able to continue their operations, but they quickly implemented a disaster recovery and backup data … sorry. Data backup policy.

Erin McKeown: So I think one of the things from this experience is really understanding again, first and foremost, the people aspect is the most important, but when you start thinking on the business side of things. Especially for a company like Zendesk, that our data is our bread and butter, that’s where you want to be putting some focus and making sure that you’re considering that and making plans for it. So yep. Just kind of the takeaway from that is we do consider people. Again, I think about it from a Zendesk standpoint because like Shawna, I absolutely love it here. I’ve been here for four years. They’re going to have to drag me out kicking and screaming. Again, I do believe that we’re a company that … you know, people first. We do believe that also our data’s pretty important too. So thank you so much.

Staff Software Engineer, Site Reliability, Alethea Power gives a talk on “Computer, Heal Thyself: Automating Oncall, So You Can Sleep Through It” at Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner.

Alethea Power: Hi. This is my talk. Computer heal thyself: automating oncall. So you can sleep through it. My name is Alethea Power. I’ve worked in auto-remediation, which is what I’m going to cover, and I’ll explain that term in a minute. I’ve worked in auto-remediation for about 10 years. I built one of the world’s first and largest auto-remediation services. And now I’m building an auto-remediation service in conjunction with Kim and the ZNOC team here at Zendesk.

Alethea Power: So what is the purpose of auto-remediation? Well, tech companies have been finding through the dev ops revolution, not revelation. I mean I guess it’s kind of a revelation. Over the past number of years, that they can get better product quality, faster product development velocity, and higher service reliability if they give product engineering teams both the responsibility and the authority to manage the full life cycle of the software that they’re writing. So that means not just writing code but the engineers who write the code also push the code out to production. They operate the code in production. And they respond when there are outages in production.

Alethea Power: So this causes a virtuous tight loop. The engineers who are writing the code are best equipped to solve problems when they occur and when those problems occur, it gives those engineers a lot of extremely useful information about how to change that code or repair it. So quality goes up, speed goes up, et cera, et cera. But this introduces a whole new set of responsibilities for software engineers that they have not traditionally had to take care of which means we have to provide them with tools to make these jobs easier so that they can focus on the part they understand and not have to worry about lots of things that distract them from the focus of the code.

Alethea Power: So auto-remediation is meant to be a tool to help address with your mediation of outages. And I’m not talking about the Fukishimas of the world. I’m talking about much more frequent outages. The kind that happen 20 times a day. The kind that happen at 4 A.M. and at 4:45 and at 6 and at 5:30 A.M. So what does this look like in practice? Traditionally, you have a monitoring system that detects when you have outages in your infrastructure with your services. That monitoring system gives alerts to engineers. Now this could be in the form of engineers sitting in front of a dashboard of alerts 24/7 watching it. It can be in the form of alerts paging engineers in the middle of the night and waking them up. Yeah, et cera, et cera.

Alethea Power: And then engineers take their own knowledge and documentation recorded in what’s frequently called runbooks to execute various commands in the production environment to try and solve these problems. So these commands can be things like, if you have an application that’s wedged, maybe you’ll restart it. If you have a hard drive that’s full and maybe it’s full because there’s a bunch of errors spewing into a log. Then maybe you truncate that log. If you’re in the middle of being attacked. If you’re in the middle of a DDoS attack. Maybe you changed some routing rules to black hole incoming requests.

Alethea Power: So these are the kinds of things I’m talking about. So in auto-remediation service replaces these two components. The engineer gets replaced with a service and the runbooks get replaced with remediation code. So instead of having human readable documentation about what to do, you have blocks of code. And the auto-remediation service goes and executes this code in response to alerts in the monitoring system. And then engineers can sleep through the night. Their talents are better used for, for instance, instead of waking up to restart a service that has a memory leak, they can be well rested in the morning and figure out why it has a memory leak and fix that.

Alethea Power: And in general, we can take better advantage of the knowledge that we have across all of our engineers. The engineers that are being woken up and the engineers that are watching these dashboards. We’ve got a lot of really knowledgeable, talented, intelligent people. And we want them to be able to use their skills in the most sophisticated and interesting ways possible. So we’re trying to automate as much as we can.

Alethea Power: So I’m going to look at an example here. This is a configuration file for the auto-remediation service that we’re building. I tried to design the configuration language to be as simple as possible while also being flexible enough for what we’re trying to accomplish. So let’s walk through it. This file says if you have this issue on these hosts, then it should run this job in response but don’t run it more often than that. So specifically if the osquery agent is busted, web servers in us-west-1, then you want to run this block of remediation code but don’t do it more than five times per hour per cluster. Make sense?

Alethea Power: So let’s go look at this thing right here so we can understand how that looks. So we’re also building an SDK, mostly built by engineers on Kim’s team. And this SDK includes a lot of convenience objects and convenience methods so that the people writing remediations can focus just on the logic that they care about and they don’t have to worry about things like SSH authentication and properly rotating keys and how do they get authentication into AWS so they can reboot EC2 hosts and stuff like that. We abstract all that away for them and we do it in ways that make our security compliance team happy. Every remediation uses a different SSH key magically.

Alethea Power: So this remediation you can see in four lines of code. It could fix this problem. So let’s walk through these lines. First, you import our SDK so you get all of these convenience objects and methods. Then you subclass our remediation class and override the run method and inside of that, you get this convenience object. If it’s an alert on a host, you get self.host. The remediation doesn’t even have to know what host it’s working on. It can if it wants self.host.name. We’ll tell you a host name but you don’t have to. And you get this method, self.host.run, which magically does lots of SSH things in the background and can run this command to go restart that service.

Alethea Power: So it’s that straightforward. We’re trying to make it as simple as possible for our engineers. It’s pretty complicated on the backside. Here’s a pretty simplified picture of what the backside looks like. So, Swati, you did a magic thing with a dot. I don’t know how to do it so I’m just going to go point. So that thing, the alert mapper, pulls in alerts from PagerDuty. That’s who we use for monitoring or where we consolidate our alerts. And it runs those alerts through the configuration like the configuration files we were just seeing and calculates what remediation jobs to run, inserts those jobs into the database, and then that thing, the job launcher, pulls the jobs from the database, hands them as config files to Kubernetes and Kubernetes executes them inside of containers. We’re running them in containers because I’ve built this before and engineers make jobs that take 100 gigs of ram and all the CPU you can use so we don’t want any job to choke out the others. And lastly, since we have this nice infrastructure in place already with a beautiful SDK, we’re giving people the ability to launch proactive jobs using a CLI to do things like kernel upgrades and other stuff that’s not necessarily responding to alerts. All right. Thank you.

Group Product Manager Eleanor Stribling gives a talk on “ML in Support: Infusing a flagship product with innovative new features” at Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner.

Eleanor Stribling: Hi, everyone. My name’s Eleanor Stribling. I’m a group product manager here at Zendesk. What that means is I manage other product managers. And what I wanted to tell you about today was how we’re using machine learning in Support, our largest, oldest product. A little bit about me. I would also say that Zendesk is really the best place I’ve worked in in tech. I’ve been here a year. Before that, I’ve been in all kinds of companies ranging from a company that’s like a 100,000 people all the way to a teeny, tiny social impact startup and this experience overall has been just amazing. I work with obviously lots of really smart people, so definitely encourage you to explore this if it’s of interest to you.

Eleanor Stribling: One of the reasons I really like Zendesk and I like working on this product is … well, it’s not evil. But also, it really helps people do their jobs and do them well and that’s why I’m so excited about this particular project. Putting machine learning in Support, because like I said, this is the product that a lot of our customers use. Use it a lot. They’re in it everyday. And we want to help them do their jobs better and more efficiently. So machine learning is a great way to do that.

Eleanor Stribling: I want to do a little bit of clarification of terms. So when I say Support, I might mean something different than what you imagine it to mean. So most people when they say, most normal people who don’t work here, when they say support, they mean calling support like I need to call support because I’ve got a question. That kind of usage. What I’m going to talk about is the product Support. So Support, as I mentioned, is our oldest product. Until recently, it was Zendesk. And basically it’s a system for creating tickets or issues, moving them through a system, making sure the right people see them at the right time and then resolving them. And that’s kind of the core of what we offer. So it’s a really cool place to work because we have huge impact on a lot of users.

Eleanor Stribling: So a pause here and then zoom up a little bit. When you think of machine learning as part of customer service or customer support, what do you think of? What do you sort of imagine? Chances are, you imagine something like this. So this is one of our products. This is AnswerBot. And it is exactly what the name connotes. It is a bot that answers questions for people in chat. So in this example, you’re connecting to a chat. You’re asking some basic questions. AnswerBot looks at the text and predicts a response and then serves it to you. If the prediction is strong enough and if it doesn’t, as you can see right here, it’s going to escalate it to an agent. That went by really fast but trust me, that’s what it did.

Eleanor Stribling: So that’s usually how we think about customer support with ML, right? Bot answers your questions. I think this is a great product and it does lots of great things. Among them, it means that customers don’t always have to talk to a person. So I definitely have my moments. I think we all do when we really don’t want to talk to a person and in these circumstances, it’s great. But the problem with answer bots, generally, not just ours, is that people do want human connection. So it’s great for deflecting some issues but sometimes when you call support, you just want to talk to a person. How do I get to a person, you might scream into the void.

Eleanor Stribling: So really the question that we have now as a very customer centric company building a product that’s supposed to help you build relationships, is how do we help people inject that humanity that customers want, they want to experience. How do we help them do more of that? How can we help them be more efficient? And I think we started looking at machine learning as a way to do that in Support. This is also, I think, important kind of context. We do this really cool report every year about customer experience trends. So if you’re interested in customer experience, generally, if you’re a data person, definitely check this out because I think it gives you good perspective or if you want to apply for a job, just saying, it will give you really good perspective into the landscape.

Eleanor Stribling: So there’s a lot going on here but basically people expect answers fast. They want it on every channel that you have. They expect you to be on every channel. They really want you to be proactive but you’re probably not doing that so there’s a lot of pressure right now on these customer support organizations. So in this environment of I just want a person but I also want a person with all this other stuff, how do you manage that? So when we first looked at taking this approach of we got this giant product people know and love. It’s like where they spend their whole day in a lot of cases at work. We first started with the question, how can we use machine learning to help customers manage complexity. Because we are going up market. We’ve got more and more customers who have huge agent teams. Like about 40% of our annual revenue comes from customers that have over 100 agents. So these are not small companies. There’s a lot of complexities.

Eleanor Stribling: So we kind of started there, but then realized pretty quickly as a customer centric company that really, what we were asking is how can we use machine learning to make our customers even better at their jobs? And really even beyond that, how can we help them make their jobs less stressful? If you imagine being an agent or a manager of support agents or even an administrator of a system like this, there’s a lot riding on you. There’s a ton of stress. People are calling you stressed out, saying I’ve been trying to talk to a person for however long. It’s often not pleasant and so, I think, to make jobs for these folks easier is one of the reasons I joined Zendesk, because again, it’s something that’s actually improving people’s lives and it’s definitely not evil.

Eleanor Stribling: So what we wanted to do was figure out, how do we add little things to this so that it won’t blow you away, like the machines aren’t taking your job, but we’re giving you little tools to do everything that much better, that much faster. So again, being a customer centric company, we looked at the main groups of customers that use our product, which you see across the top there. Agents, managers, administrators. And then we thought about, for each of them, as you can see down the side there, what their goals are and then we thought about what we could use ML to do for them. How could we help them do their jobs with this rich set of data that we have for each customer?

Eleanor Stribling: So first of all, agents. So they really need to get happy customers. Like if you’re finally getting that touch of humanity in your support experience, you want your customer to leave happy, right? It satisfies them. It satisfies the customer. Everyone’s incentives are aligned. So the plan here is because agents are often working in complex environments, they can be very high turnover environments, we wanted to figure out a plan to–and what we’re working now, actually–is essentially crowdsourcing agent responses. So we can start suggesting next steps for people as they’re working on a ticket. And that’s really huge. Again, in somewhere that’s really fast paced, maybe you’re working on something you’re not familiar with, we’re kind of there to lend them a helping hand and help them be a little bit faster and more efficient and give people more relevant answers.

Eleanor Stribling: For managers, so managers are leading a team of agents and they really need these agents to be efficient and make people happy and they care about CSAP. Part of that is making sure you got the right number of people, the right people and the right number, in the right place to answer questions. So here we’re looking at grouping relevant data together. So for example, if you have a ticket that comes in and it’s one of a hundred tickets about the same topic, we want to surface that in a really clear and simple way for managers so they can respond effectively. Either by getting agents with the right skills. Maybe they figured out a response they want to communicate to their team. That kind of thing so that they can get on top of it. Another thing that we’re working on managers that I think will really help is predicting surges. So we can look at the agent staffing that they’ve had at any given time. Maybe it’s a time of it’s really busy like around Christmas for example or maybe it’s just every Wednesday. What do I need? The other thing we’re working on here is figuring out how to surface that intelligence so managers can do their job better so we’re giving them a little boost.

Eleanor Stribling: And then finally, administrators. So these are the folks that set up Zendesk and maintain Zendesk. And so their main thing is that no ticket, no issue kind of gets undealt with. And I think that there’s kind of a constant stress that they have that something will not be answered because they somehow messed up the settings. So the great thing about administrators from a data science perspective is they kindly label a lot of data for us. We don’t want them to stop doing that but what we can do is learn from how they label data for us. And what that means is we can help make sure that no ticket goes unanswered. That if they don’t assign something that makes sense, we can provide suggestions, updates for them, but also for managers in real time so that they can change the routing. So there’s a lot of really cool things we can do that would really have real time impact in small ways on our customers to, again, make their job better, make it easier and less stressful. And really, that’s one of the reasons I work in tech. Because I want people’s lives to be made better through it.

Eleanor Stribling: And finally, if you follow me on Medium or Twitter, you know I’ve got kind of this weird thing about Harry Potter and I had studied language in Harry Potter. But to me, this project is kind of like that. It’s like we’re taking something that’s everyday that people are used to staring at for hours on end and we’re adding little things that are unexpected and kind of cool. And so that’s why I think that this is such a great space to be in. Because we’re having like huge impact by making little and also extremely cool changes to the experience. We are also hiring in that team. Shameless plug. We’re hiring in that team for a data science engineer and a data scientist and I’m also hiring for a product manager, so if you’re interested in any of those, definitely come see me after. Thank you.

Shawna Wolverton: All right. Thank you to our amazing speakers. Why don’t you guys actually all come back up and we can do a little Q&A. I think there’s going to be some folks out with mics wandering around. Maybe. There you go. We don’t need all the mics. So we got about ten minutes for Q&A if anyone has questions about the talks or Zendesk or you know, we know a lot of things. Trust us. It’s fun. No? Careful, we’ll ask you … oh, great. Right … oh, you’re close but then we got one up here.

Zendesk girl geeks: Shawna Wolverton, Swati Krishnan, Erin McKeown, Alethea Power and Eleanor Stribling answer audience questions at Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner.

Audience Member: Hi. Alethea, I really enjoyed yours as someone who’s been woken up so many times from PagerDuty. Like God bless you. Can you talk more about the code behind what makes all that wonderful magic run?

Alethea Power: Yes, but there’s so much of it. Maybe it’s better to go into details after the Q&A?

Audience Member: I will find you. Thank you.

Shawna Wolverton: I have a feeling–

Alethea Power: I guess I could give you like a 30 second. It’s all written in Python. We use Aurora on the backside for the database. Like I said, we put containers into Kubernetes. I don’t know. That’s a very quick, quick, quick. It looked like you frowned when I said Python.

Audience Member: Oh no.

Alethea Power: Okay, so don’t find me afterwards. No, no, seriously. Totally come ask.

Audience Member Thank you.

Shawna Wolverton: Heard one up here.

Audience Member Hi. This is a question for Swati. You mentioned metaprogramming and I’m actually really interested in dynamic programming languages, such as Python, but you mentioned you mostly work with Ruby. So I was just curious if you ever worked with other languages, such as Python, for instance?

Shawna Wolverton: Lovers and haters of Python.

Swati Krishnan: Thanks for the question. My internship project here was in Python. So yes, I’ve worked with Python before. That was dealing with, I don’t know if you’ve heard about [inaudible], but that’s like a graph database implementation in Python. So I worked in that quite a bit and yeah, Ruby and Python are very similar, interchangeable somewhat. Yeah. Any more questions about the?

Audience Member: Talk to me more about it.

Swati Krishnan: Sure, catch me and then I can talk to you about my Python work. Sure.

Shawna Wolverton: Question.

Audience Member: Hi. I have a question for Alethea. So no doubt that it’s great that you’re not woken up at 4 A.M. or on call. Agreed with that. But I’m curious, one of the philosophies of DevOps is that when engineers feel the pain of the alerts, they’re more motivated to fix it. And so do you find that maybe the engineers aren’t as motivated to fix it and if so, is that actually a problem?

Alethea Power: That is such a good question. So this service is in the process of being built right now, but like I said, I built this in the past and had years of experience running it in the past. That’s why we surface very public metrics from it. So rather than feel the pain in a way that makes them bleary eyed and less capable of doing their jobs, they feel the pain in the sense of error budgets and visible metrics and things like this. So, yeah.

Shawna Wolverton: For the record, blameless accountability.

Alethea Power: This is true. I’m actually a big fan of blameless accountability.

Audience Member: I’m also just curious as to how many engineers helped you to build this and how long it typically takes?

Alethea Power: So it’s me and two engineers on Kim’s team. We spent a while designing because there were some security compliance constraints we had to hit and also, we’ve purchased a number of companies, so we have to be able to work with a wide variety of infrastructural decisions. So it took us a few months to figure out high level, how to design the system so that it would do all of that. And once we knew roughly what we were doing, I don’t know, what would you say? We’ve got about 80% of the code written in two months. Something like that.

Audience Member: [inaudible].

Alethea Power: Yeah. We’re cranking right now.

Audience Member: Hi. I have a question for Eleanor. So, I don’t know anything about your product, Support, but I’m assuming there’s a dashboard so when the customers come to open a ticket, is there a knowledge base? I was going to ask you, are you using machine learning to help the customer before they open a ticket.

Eleanor Stribling: Yes. So we’ve got a product called Guide, which is basically a help center. It’s a really easy use, out of the box kind of help center. So yeah, we’ve got that product. We also have AnswerBot, which I mentioned, which helps people before they even reach out to a person to try and resolve their issue before that. And we also have a bunch of tools for people who administer help centers to help them figure out what to write articles about so from those three dimensions, we try to take care of them before they need to reach out.

Audience Member: Got it. Thank you.

Shawna Wolverton: Going once. Oh, one more. [inaudible].

Audience Member: I have a question for Erin McKeown. She and Kim Smith and I actually started Zendesk on the same day, a little more than four years ago. But Erin, when you started, you were the first person to work in business continuity and disaster recovery here, and now you’ve built out quite a practice. I’m just wondering if you have any sort of quick tidbits, lessons learned, insights on that experience over the last four years?

Erin McKeown: Yeah. Well, that’s a really good question. Yeah, I started out as business continuity disaster recovery program manager and that kind of scope grew quite a bit. We had a lot of activity on our intimate management so we built out an entire team that is really churning now and doing amazing work. And so, been switching focus a little bit to prioritize different things and build out different teams. I’m actually, right now, hiring a disaster recovery manager who then will hire three analysts under them so I’m really excited about the progress that’s being made there. But I think what I tried to do was focus on what I could actually manage and actually what I could take on and be honest with myself about that. Because I think I started out of the gate being like oh, I’m going to do all of these things and quickly was like, oh gosh. Got to pace it back a little bit.

Erin McKeown: Again, having very supportive upper management and with that whole perspective has really helped us get progressively down the line, but, yeah, it’s been a fun journey over the four years for sure.

Shawna Wolverton: One in the back.

Audience Member: Hi. This question’s for Eleanor. I was just curious, and it seems that the product you’re thinking about might not be as mature. How do you deal with customer questions around validation of the algorithm or you mentioned you’re going to forecast demand search. How do you deal with where they’re like, well, how is this true or how do I know you’re giving me the right guidance because I don’t trust the machine or the model?

Eleanor Stribling: Yeah, that’s a great question. I actually saw a really … this influenced me a lot. A talk by someone from PagerDuty at a conference a little while ago. And I talked to him about it after because we were thinking about doing some similar things and he was saying that really the biggest challenge was getting people to adopt the ML because they didn’t trust it. And so I think the approach that we’re taking is very much opt in, we’re going to validate all of these algorithms we’re writing. We’re going to validate them all with customers before we start and make those early validation customers EAP customers, we hope, to sign them up so they can sort of see it in action and be part of making sure it works the way they need it to. So I think that that’s one tack.

Eleanor Stribling: But I think it’s also the reason behind the strategy that we’re not going to suddenly say oh, we’re going to use ML to route all of your tickets. Like trust us, it works. We’re not going to do that. We’re going to very gradually introduce little things that help people a little bit. And they don’t even have to take the suggestion if they don’t want to. But the hope is that over time, they begin to trust it. It doesn’t replace them. It doesn’t replace necessarily even huge amounts of their workflow. It just makes it a little bit better for them and I think that that’s definitely going to have to be the first phase of how we approach this. And then we’ll see.

Shawna Wolverton: I think one more question. Yeah? But we’ll all be here afterwards. Feel free to find us.

Audience Member: Hi. I have a question for Eleanor, too.

Eleanor Stribling: Sure.

Audience Member: It’s a continuation to what she asked. So with every customer that opt ins with you, do you retrain your model and then how do you know, how good is your model?

Eleanor Stribling: Yeah, so, great question. So we are doing individual customer models. I think that that’s really because each customer’s quite different and we definitely have customers with a ton of data and we want to make sure that we customize the solution to them. I think that’s how we’re going to get the best result. In terms of validating it, I think that, again, we’re going to need to do a couple of steps. I think with some of our biggest customers, we have some customers who are already really interested in this. So I think that there’s an opportunity there to get them on board. Have them help us test it effectively. I think we will be gating some of these things, so we’ll give them options to roll it out to portions of their organization. We have a lot of customers who deploy it in multiple areas in the organization. So do that gradually. Make sure they’ve got some training around it. But I think, again, really the strategy needs to be we’re going to get some customers who we know it works for them and they can help us evangelize it, because otherwise, I don’t think people won’t necessarily trust it. [inaudible] own data. Does that answer your question?

Audience Member: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eleanor Stribling: Great.

Shawna Wolverton: All right. Thank you lovely speakers. We fed and watered you. We educated you a little bit. And in exchange, you get to learn why it would be so amazing and awesome to work here. I want to introduce Lauren from our recruiting team.

Lauren Taft: Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for coming. I’m Lauren Taft, manager of recruiting for technical and university recruiting and Stephanie, who’s over there, who’s our senior tech recruiter. Just wanted to tell you a little bit more about Zendesk. We have 145,000 customers, 2,600 employees. Our headquarters is here in San Francisco. We have 16 global offices. Our product is in 160 countries. It touches 60 languages. And we have 1.4 billion yearly interactions processed.

Lauren Taft: So a little bit about Zendesk recruiting. We’re growing at scale. There’s tons of opportunity and with opportunity comes impact. And then a little bit more about what our values are here. We practice empathy, focus on relationships, and be humbledent, which is humble and confident together that we made as one word. Kind of a fun little spin. We thought it’d be great to show you a video. Oops. I should pause this for a second. We made this for International Women’s Day and it’s a little bit of what it feels like to be a female here at Zendesk.

Video Speaker: Oh okay, one word.

Video Speaker: One word to describe her? Badass.

Video Speaker: Oh, I would totally call her a badass.

Video Speaker: Badass.

Video Speaker: Is badass one word?

Video Speaker: Okay, two words. She’s amazing, but she is also a badass, which is pretty cool. She has a special way of like seeing things within you that you might still be trying to grasp or shore up and she’s like no, you’re there. You’re ready.

Video Speaker: Any time she gives me feedback, it’s often very direct, and sometimes a little shockingly direct, but it never upsets me because I know that it’s coming from a place in her heart where she wants to be my best self.

Video Speaker: She had a really genuine talk with me, which I really appreciated. It was kind of like a big sister talk and it was a talk that I’ve never gotten from anyone at work. She just did it in such a genuine, motherly way. The way that she approached the situation, I really respected, and I realized why she deserves to be in a leadership position.

Video Speaker: Wow. She said all that? Trying to put into words the emotions that are there around it. It’s wonderful to feel recognized. I feel like that’s something a lot of women don’t ask for or expect. I had women like that in my own life, and it is super meaningful to me in terms of just being a person in this world to be able to affect somebody like that, so.

Video Speaker: She’s really helped me to push myself outside my comfort zone. To own those aspects of being a woman that at times can appear or make us feel a little bit more limited. I think her favorite word was, use that emotion and passion for good. To help get things done. To help drive what’s important to your team and your organization and that’s the first time I’ve really looked at it that way. How do I take that crazy wild but super passionate part of me and put that in a place and use that in a way that can get good things done?

Video Speaker: I really love it when women have a conviction or a boldness to put themselves out there and say this is a thing that I want and then to go get it. And it’s been so cool to see her succeed and push herself and push others and grow Zendesk over the past couple of years.

Video Speaker: We would talk about what we’d like, what we didn’t like about our jobs and what we wanted and she took the steps to communicate, make it clear what her goals were, but she didn’t just wait for things to happen. And that’s what is mostly inspiring is that she took her destiny into her own hands. She went and took classes outside of work and was able to move her career in the direction that she wanted to.

Video Speaker: I would say that she’s helped me by demonstrating that you … it’s always easier to take responsibility for your current situation and how to get to where you want to be. She’s shown me that it’s good to not necessarily wait for opportunities to show up, but to go after them aggressively. Even if you’re not sure how they’re going to pan out and even if sometimes other people are telling you not to go after the thing, that if your gut is telling you to go after the thing, you should do it.

Video Speaker: I’m actually surprised at how many strong, powerful, motivated, intelligent women that I’ve met since I’ve been here. More than I’ve ever met in my life. It helps me to drive myself to be better, but it’s also just a really good support network.

Video Speaker: We’re hoping we can spread the joy.

Video Speaker: You are definitely spreading the joy. If there was like one moment this week that I needed this most of all, it was like right now, today.

Video Speaker: I’m so glad to hear that.

Video Speaker: So, thank you.

Lauren Taft: Uh oh. I don’t know what’s going on. There we go. So I hope you guys enjoyed that video. Just gives you a good sense of what it’s like to be here. If you’re interested, come chat with us. It was a pleasure hosting you all. We had a bit of swag snafu so check your inboxes for an Amazon gift card. We’re very appreciative that you’re here, and we are going to take a group picture.

Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner group picture – thanks for coming out and joining us!

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Co-Founder and SVP of New Markets Tracy Sun welcomes the crowd to the Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner in Redwood City, California. The stylish evening’s theme: “people-powered innovation”.

Speakers:
Tracy Sun / Co-Founder & Senior Vice President of New Markets / Poshmark
Barkha Saxena / Chief Data Officer / Poshmark
Vanessa Wong / Senior Director, Product Management / Poshmark
Angela Buckmaster / Associate Director, Community Operations / Poshmark
Camille Forde / Senior Manager, New Markets / Poshmark
Adrienne Hamrah / Software Engineer, Cloud Platform / Poshmark

Transcript of Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks & Panel:

Tracy Sun: So I’m here, I get to kick us off. And so after welcoming you, welcome again. What I’m going to do is tell you a little bit about me. I’ll do that pretty fast and then share what people-powered innovation means and why we chose that to be the theme of the evening. And then we’ll just kick it out to all of the amazing speakers that you’ll hear tonight. I believe there’s six women that will talk to you tonight about who they are, what they do.

Tracy Sun: When we talked to the panels, everyone wanted to share a tip that they’ve done or something they’ve done in their career that they really wanted to share with the group. So we’ll talk a little bit about tips and try to have a whole bunch of fun doing so. So to kick it off. My name’s Tracy. I’m one of the co-founders and I head up a new department at Poshmark we’re calling New Markets.

Tracy Sun: My background, I grew up in the East Coast. I’m still kind of an East Coast person, but getting more and more West Coast as the years go by. I started in science. I was a science geek. I loved reading about brain and behavior. I moved into fashion pretty early on because I loved building brands and obviously now, I’m in technology. So my one thing I wanted to share with all of you is you can switch industries. I get this question a lot. It’s hard. So you have to really want to do it, but if you want to do it, you can do it. And I’m happy to answer questions later about some tips on how.

Tracy Sun: But the first I’d say is you can do it and you have to believe in yourself. And I’ve done it twice and who knows what happens to me. I’m still pretty young and have a lot to look forward to. So now about the theme of the evening, people-powered innovation. The reason that this is the theme is this is Poshmark’s superpower. What I mean by this is this is the one thing we do that we think we do better than anyone else.

Tracy Sun: And we wanted to share with you how we’re thinking about it and what we mean by it. Because I think that maybe you can take some of that into your own lives or into your own careers or how you think about innovation. It might inspire you a little bit. So that’s why we’re choosing the theme is just really talk about our strengths and the things that we’re really proud of. So people-powered innovation to us means three things.

Tracy Sun: The first is, and then video kind of alludes to all three of them. The first is we built our entire business off of people. We call ourselves a social commerce platform. And what that means is we take people and we insert them into all the important parts of commerce. We think that all of us have stories to tell. We tell them differently. That’s part of the beauty of photos and words and stories. So we want to put that back into commerce. We think that there’s more to selling a dress than seeing it on a hanger at a store. So how did she style it? How did she feel when she was wearing it? Things like that. We think that’s really important.

Tracy Sun: So we put people back into the conversation of commerce and then we build an entire platform around this so that people, anyone, any one of you, it sounds like we have some poshers in the room, but really anyone in the world can become a seller, no matter what your experience, how much money you have, whether you’ve done it before or not. All those things are irrelevant. Anyone can be a seller. And so what we see now is we have 40 million registered users. About 6 million of them have become sellers. Meaning we’re one of the largest selling networks in the world.

Tracy Sun: So raise your hand if you’re a Poshmark seller here. Congratulations. You’re one of 6 million people in the US that are selling on Poshmark, including a lot of us here. So congratulations. So that’s number one. The second thing is you can’t build a people-powered platform without the people. So the second thing we did is we built a community. And what that means is we focused day one on really taking a look at our users and doing everything we can to support them and so saying, we are behind you to help you build your business and we encourage our community to talk to one another in case we can’t be there to support you, support each other.

Tracy Sun: And so not only does that happen in physical venues like this, but it happens in events that we hold like in our app. So a mobile event and it happens in the conversations when you’re on Poshmark and then it happens offline as well. So a lot of times we’ll see Poshmark users talk to one another, they met on the app and then they talk to one another in real life. And that to me is one of the most beautiful things about why I love coming to work every day. It also reflects in a lot of our business metrics too.

Tracy Sun: So, for example, every day a Poshmark user spends 30 minutes on Poshmark. And for those of you in commerce who think about these kinds of metrics and maybe some of you are not in commerce that think about these kinds of metrics, that’s unheard of for commerce. People don’t spend 30 minutes talking about shopping elsewhere and maybe nowhere. So people are not just talking about transactions on Poshmark, they’re also talking to each other as human beings. And that’s where we like to spend our time. That’s how we find extra minutes in the day when we’ve had a long day is to have a human connection.

Tracy Sun: And so, in so many ways, we feel like we’ve built a really large marketplace and a really large platform but also a really large place for people to come and to connect with people, either that they know really well or that they’re meeting for the first time. So that’s the second piece. And then the third is Team Posh. So there’s some of us here tonight. Team Posh is really all we have. We don’t hold any inventory. It’s all people. And then a lot of code that happens and a lot of packages shipped around but there’s 400 or so people that are part of Poshmark that really make everything go round.

Tracy Sun: So we spent a lot of time thinking about how we can innovate in this realm and really keep people happy and motivated, creative. And eight years into the business still feel like they’re learning new things every day. And so I’m really excited to kick this off. We have five people coming up to share their story, get into some specifics about the innovation that they’re seeing and the stories that they have. So with that, I’d like to bring up our next speaker. Can I go ahead? I’m going to go ahead and do it. Okay. So our next speaker is Barkha and she’s our Chief Data Officer here and officially one of the coolest women at Poshmark.

Chief Data Officer Barkha Saxena talks about being a data geek, and working with mobile, social, and commerce data, at Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner.

Barkha Saxena: Thank you, Tracy. Hi, everyone. Is everyone having fun? I was telling Tracy that I’m always bummed when I go after her. She’s such a fascinating speaker. So I’m basically making sure that nobody has very high expectation. I’m going after Tracy. So just about a little bit about myself. I’m Barkha Saxena. I’m Chief Data Officer at Poshmark. I’ve been here for five years. But somebody was asking me, I was talking to them, hey, this whole data thing didn’t exist 10 years ago so what did you do then? I was like, yeah, it’s true. This whole world data service didn’t exist but I had been literally doing this. This was my first job out of college.

Barkha Saxena: I studied statistics. Numbers is what I have known my entire life. I spent my first 10 years at a company named FICO. I was a data scientist there. I started as an individual contributor, moved into management role and then I spent some time in product management, sales, and corporate strategy. After that, I spent a couple of years in advertising industry, still focused on the data, building data products for advertising. And then I had my second child and I thought I would take a little bit break. And like in two weeks break time, my husband, someday one day comes and he says, hey, I heard about this really cool startup. They had these virtual parties which is called posh party and I think you should go and meet with them.

Barkha Saxena: And I was like, okay, it doesn’t hurt to meet. So I found a connection to Manish and I met with Manish and Manish said we had some conversation and then he said, “Hey, you should come and meet with Tracy.” You just met with Tracy. Once you talked to Tracy. There is no going back. So here I am, five and a half years ago, I joined Poshmark, still here and having a lot of fun. When I joined Poshmark, it was really the driving factor was people. I met with Manish, Tracy, Chetan, Gautam, our founding team. And honestly, it had been a long time.

Barkha Saxena: Like being in the tech sector, I had not met so many smart but super humble people. And then from being a data geek, this aspect of I’m going to be working with mobile, social, and commerce data. It can’t get any better than that. What I didn’t understand at that time was when you are putting this social and the commerce together, it’s a totally different beast than just thinking about the social network and just thinking about the commerce. So Tracy explained the social commerce from the vision perspective but I’m a data person. So I have to understand it from the data angle.

Barkha Saxena: So how did I understand the social commerce? And how I started to understand it’s really not putting two plus two, four. Really getting them together is we are making two plus two, seven. And the way it works is from the data perspective, when you are selling, what are your goals? You want to acquire users who will come and buy stuff. So at Poshmark, you build your follower network, you follow people, they follow you. And by that way, you are basically finding out the impact, the people who are going to see your merchandise.

Barkha Saxena: Then how do you market inventory? So there is a whole aspect of sharing which happens in the platform. Everyone who is successful in selling at Poshmark knows that you cannot be successful if you’re not sharing. So you’re engaged in sharing, not just your item but you also share other people’s items. Because when you share somebody else, they will share yours and you are basically just expanding the network of the people with whom you’re sharing your item. So you market your items, but then after that, you have to close the deal. How do you close the deal?

Barkha Saxena: You have to engage with your buyers in conversations. So their conversations happen in their platform around fit, style, color, and then Poshmark has built all these tools in the service of community to which you send out offers in a very personal, personalized manner to all these buyers. And that’s how you close the deal. So sellers are very vested in being social in the platform because at Poshmark that gives them an advantage to drive the more social you are, the more successful you will be. Now from the buyer’s perspective, the reason you want to be so socially engaged because when you follow people, it’s exposing you to a larger and larger merchandise which means you are looking at so many items from where you can buy.

Barkha Saxena: So you are getting exposed to the styles of different people. You engage with the seller because you want to be able to understand the merchandise beyond what just the description is telling. If you think of the reason the whole social commerce exists because just in reflecting back, the 15–people who are a little bit older. If you think of the way the commerce was done like 15, 20 years ago. I grew up in India and a lot of time when we went for shopping, we will just go back to those limited number of shops. But it was fine to go because you will go and talk to the person who is selling and that person will know which grade you are in, what you’re doing, what’s happening at your home. And it was fun in those conversations.

Barkha Saxena: As commerce became very efficient with the e-commerce and access a lot of inventory and fast shipping. It was all very efficient but it took the fun away of that personal conversation. And what we have learned at Poshmark is people actually like to connect and talk to each other. So buyers, when they engage with sellers in the conversation on hey, will this dress look good on me or like because the same dress size can be different in different [inaudible]. How do you figure it out it really fits you? So you engage in that conversation and you’re figuring out.

Barkha Saxena: Buyers do a lot of liking activity in the platform and that’s because by doing like you are creating this sort of your wishlist of the items you want to buy. By doing the activity, you’re also building the connections with the seller. So when seller is ready to make an offer, there is a way for seller to reach out to you. So that’s how like when I started looking at social commerce and the numbers started to explain why the social is truly driving the commerce. It wasn’t just hey, we got a commerce, they come less to the social. This is the genius of the founding team who built this amazing platform.

Barkha Saxena: Social is so integrated with the commerce that the two actually drive each other and that is what has gained given us such a unique advantage that we didn’t just try to bring the two pieces together. We built them interlinked from the day one and then you build that kind of platform with the types of numbers Tracy was sharing, like 40 million users and 5-6 million sellers stylist, 18 million shares per day. Think of the amount of data we are collecting. Like we have 30 plus terabytes of data, 400 plus million events logged every day. You leave a data team in that kind of environment. It’s like the wonderland for people.

Barkha Saxena: So my team is so excited. It’s a cross-functional thing. We work with multiple teams and we are solving problems that cross the aisle. From working with the marketing team on different types of users. That question problem. Working with Leanne’s team and helping out how we can serve our community better. Working with Tracy’s team and figuring out how can we help them launch market. There’s so many problems teams are solving, they get to work with humongous amount of data. They get to use different types of data technology and the tools to build out the solutions which creates business value for our community.

Barkha Saxena: And just to bring it back to I’m very lucky to have such a fantastic team which is just building all these awesome solutions. But the reason all of us are so engaged in doing all this wonderful work, going back to what Tracy said, this is just a wonderful place to be. The people are–I don’t know how many have notice our core values. I have worked at multiple places. This is the first place where I would say we actually live by our cultural value. We focus on people, truly on people. You heard Tracy. The whole conversation is started on people. We lead with love. We trust each other. We believe in supporting each other.

Barkha Saxena: We embrace all the weirdness. That is one of the core value. Honestly, even I use it in my personal life. Like when you start to accept people for what they are, life just becomes simple. And then together we go. So we are so vested in each other’s goal that it just makes this place, this beautiful place. With that, let me invite… Can I invite? More wonderful people that you guys can meet with. Okay, thank you.

Poshmark girl geeks: Tracy Sun (speaking, right) moderates a panel discussion with Adrienne Hamrah, Camille Ford, Vanessa Wong, and Angela Buckmaster introducing themselves at Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner.

Tracy Sun: Sorry, I’m just trying to make them nervous. We’re just going to get excited, get loose. Let’s go. So first question, can you introduce yourself a little bit about what you do at Poshmark? So everyone has context of all the amazing things you’re going to say after that.

Angela Buckmaster: Yes. Microphone on. Okay. Hi, I am Angela. And as Claire mentioned, I am the Associate Community Operations Director. And so my team works under the Community umbrella and what we do is actually support all other areas of the community team through data analytics, product knowledge, and training.

Vanessa Wong: Hi, I’m Vanessa. I’m senior director in the product team and I run the core experiences team. And when I say core experience, what it means is the buying, the selling, the social interaction, working with our power sellers, our new sellers, any international expansion. And then also like market expansion as well.

Camille Ford: Hi, everyone. My name is Camille Ford. I work on the new markets team and the markets team is really focused on driving expansion into new business areas. So what that looks like could be developing a new category, launching multiple markets within the product alongside Vanessa’s team or expanding into new departments as well.

Software Engineer Adrienne Hamrah talks about innovation at Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner.

Adrienne Hamrah: Hi, everyone. I’m Adrienne. I’m a software engineer on the growth team. What does that mean? I basically work on projects to bring in new users to our platform. Whether that’s like an influencer project or just any like fun new things, new features.

Tracy Sun: So I know it was pretty fun to hear from me and Barkha but these ladies have the real stories that you want to hear about. As I was hearing earlier about what you guys wanted to share. I just thought it was great content to share with this group here. So no pressure. So we talked a lot about… Sorry, I’m being really goofy. It was a crazy day today. We talked a lot about innovation. And I kind of talked about it at high level, Barkha talked about it at high level. Can you guys really bring it home? Like what does innovation look like to your day to day?

Tracy Sun: Is there an example of something you’ve done recently, for example, that you think it was just a really cool project to work on because it involved innovation and, or something around people? I think that would be great for everyone to hear. Who wants to go first? Adrienne, you want to go? We’ll go backwards.

Adrienne Hamrah: So a good example of innovation was we basically wanted to bring the influencers I work with on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etcetera. We wanted to bring them onto our own platform rather than going through a third party. So that was my first project, starting from helping the product manager all the way to doing the tech spec and actually executing on the code. And one example of innovation is in order to like see the level of influence someone has, we have to have some sort of metric so we know how much to pay them for, for posting on Instagram, for example.

Adrienne Hamrah: And instead of going through their API because there was a lot of stuff going on Instagram and they’re saying they were taking away their API, we decided to actually just use the HTML code and get their stats that way. So I think that was a really fun example. Because the first thing, if you’re familiar with software, the first thing you usually do when you talk to different companies, is you go through their API. And we decided to just bypass that completely.

Senior Manager of New Markets Camille Forde talks about markets and using technology and social as tools at Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner.

Camille Ford: So the innovation question’s interesting because I feel like throughout my career I’ve always tried to think about how can I do something different? But at Poshmark, I feel like that question gets tipped a little bit. It’s how can we do things differently using social as a tool, using a technology as a tool. And so I feel like working on markets for the past six months is a really good example of that. And so markets themselves are just easy experiences within the product that make it easier for people to connect, sell, and shop by what’s important to them.

Camille Ford: And in many ways, it’s just a layer on top of Poshmark’s existing platform, but really digs into the social piece, which is, brings it back to people, I think at the end of the day. And so for me, even working on markets and figuring out like how can we get people to shopping experiences that are relevant? It’s almost like this backwards thing where through markets we’re now enabling people to shop the way that they used to shop.

Camille Ford: So if I only wanted to shop luxury and I want to go into a luxury store and I want that like real-time feedback on a certain thing, I can get that through the luxury market on Poshmark. And so to me, this is like an interesting full circle view of innovation around how can we use the tools that we have to kind of bring it back to its core. And so just working on launching markets over the past six months, I think now we have roughly 25-ish markets has been an interesting experience for me with regards to innovation.

Vanessa Wong: So, many years ago, we launched a feature called Offer. And what that feature is, I don’t know if any of you… Has anyone used it? Raise your hand if you’ve used that feature on Poshmark? So it really mimics normal behavior. You’re there like, think about the olden times. You’d go barter and negotiate. And we kind of bring that to life in the app. So what we did last year is we launched a feature called Offer to Liker. Has anyone ever liked an item on Poshmark? Has anyone had a listing and gotten likes on Poshmark? Yeah.

Vanessa Wong: So it’s an amazing feeling. You know that these people are really interested in your product. And so you’re getting all this love for this product. And so we thought why don’t we use that energy to the seller and help them. So what we launched is Offer to Liker and where you can give a private discount to the people that like your item. And that’s been amazingly successful for us. We’ve just used kind of normal behavior and we’ve used that organic behavior and we’ve amplified that through our product.

Angela Buckmaster: Awesome. So I’m kind of echoing some of the things that you’ve heard. Poshmark is a social commerce platform. And so on the app, people are commenting and communicating with each other on listings. They’re liking. They’re communicating and building bonds with each other through buying and selling. And so from the very early days of Poshmark, we actually saw that these users, these poshers, were, as Tracy mentioned, getting together outside of the app, as well, very organically and just meeting up.

Angela Buckmaster: There’s actually a term that has been coined for someone that’s a friend that you meet on Poshmark that is PFF which is Posh Friend Forever. And so, as you can tell, these bonds are lifelong. And so we saw this and we thought, okay, this is really, again, the lifeblood of Poshmark. We are all about the people and spreading the love. And that’s the only reason all of us are here today. So we came up with a type of event called a Posh N Sip. And the Posh N Sip is a posher-led event.

Angela Buckmaster: And these poshers are finding the venues. They are inviting their friends, their family, their PFFs, to get together and not only talk about Poshmark but also just build upon these bonds. And make more connections and really grow and empower each other. And so I think, to me, that’s something that’s super exciting because we get to see them meet all over the country and just get together and just kind of continue what they have on the app but in the physical world as well.

Tracy Sun: Okay, great. So we talked a lot about innovation and if you guys want any more, feel free to ask. They’ve all agreed to stay for the Q&A so you can’t leave. We’re doing a Q&A right here and then after if you have questions that you want to do in private. Now I want to talk about you as people. You have so much experience that I think is so interesting. It was really interesting to me to hear it. I think it’d be really interesting to everyone else in the room mostly because we’re all so different. Our stories are all so different.

Tracy Sun: And so can you share a little bit about how you got to Poshmark and if there is, and with that, is there anything you did along the way that kind of helped you get into the role or any tip you have? I imagine anyone, here either now or in the future, might be looking to make a change in their job, for example. So if you have any tips on that or you might want to have a job. So if you have a job are they any tips on how to be successful. It’s just you are four really successful women. And then I think I’d like to give a little bit of the floor to that. You want to start, Angela?

Angela Buckmaster: Yeah. Awesome. So I actually have been at Poshmark for a little over six years now. And so I found Poshmark through a friend who still works here. We were friends through middle school and high school, and she heard that I had graduated college and was looking for my first big girl job. And she was on a community team here and said, hey, you should come interview. So I did. And at the time, we had basically one role, which was community associate. And through that, we wore a lot of different hats, as is typical at a startup. And from there, we kind of started to build into different teams.

Angela Buckmaster: And so from there, I moved into the support team. It’s still under the community umbrella and I did some management for a couple of years. And through that, I noticed that I started having and more of an interest in our KPIs and our SLAs. And I wanted to know why are they the way they are. How can we make them better and to really understand them on a deeper level. And so I started speaking to my manager and Leanne, our SVP, and just letting them know I’m really interested in this. I would love to move into more of a data-driven role.

Angela Buckmaster: The time wasn’t right, right at that moment. But I kept telling them and I kept trying to get into projects that I could kind of dip my toes into the analytics area until the day came when Leanne approached me and she said, “Okay, the role’s here, let’s do it.” So I happily went to that more of an analytics role on the community team which was awesome. I got to stay with my community family and did that for about a year.

Angela Buckmaster: And then Leanne approached me with another opportunity and said, “Hey, let’s build out this team.” So now I have the three areas. I have a data analytics team, a product knowledge team, and a training team. And so I’ve learned a lot over six years. I’ve learned that you can’t just keep your dreams to yourself. I think something I really believe is whatever you think about and you talk about all the time is what you are or what you will become. And so I was very open and I kept telling people about my dream and I truly believe that that’s why it happened. Because if you don’t speak up, no one knows. So if that’s my little tip, I would encourage you all to just be very open about your passions and your dreams.

Tracy Sun: That’s so amazing that, Angela, you knew your dream and then went and told your boss. That’s so vulnerable. It’s so scary. Has anyone here done that? Told your boss you want a different job or you want a different you know. Anyone who wants to do that? Just kidding. I love my job. I was just trying to get people… So if you’re one of the people raising your hand, come talk to her. Because she did it and sounds like it worked out for her. So, Vanessa, you want to go?

Senior Director of Product Management Vanessa Wong talks about her journey in product management, and moving on up, at Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner.

Vanessa Wong: Cool. So when I graduated college, the economy wasn’t great and I was just applying jobs everywhere. I was hanging out with my unemployed friends. It was really fun, but my parents were like you need a job. And me being a geek, like many of you guys, I saw a job posting. I don’t know if you guys have heard of CNET? They review electronics and I love electronics. They do a lot of cool tech stuff. It’s in San Francisco. Super fun. And I got a job there. Just amazing. And it’s at a big company. It’s like, “Wow, that’s really cool.”

Vanessa Wong: But I started my job and I was really bored. It was just something, yeah, it was a job, but it wasn’t something fulfilling. But then I got immersed and started talking to people and I got involved in helping building tools for that team with engineering. I was kind of doing product management for the backend tools but I wanted something more. So like Angela, I actually went up to my VP and very–more like a “Hey, this is something I’m already doing. What can I do next?” Like, “How do I prepare myself? Do you have advice for me? Do you have input?”

Vanessa Wong: And he was very open and receptive and pretty much immediately he was like, let’s craft a role for you, which was amazing. I did not expect that. I came to kind of talk to him, building a case, not sure what would happen. I definitely was really scared, but he was very receptive and I got the role as a project manager to help build internal tools. But deep down, I really wanted to work on the user side. So I was building tools for the shopping team. So that was my kind of first step into shopping which kind of leads to where I am at now.

Vanessa Wong: And so then I was in that role for maybe about a year and then internal opening opened to be a PM for CNET shopping and CNETshopper.com and I applied. And what was great about the people at CNET is that they were so supportive. My manager was like, “Hey, yeah, go, go talk to that hiring manager.” And we were able to work through and I was able to transfer into that role. And then I was there for several years and then it kind of leads me to Poshmark where my then boyfriend was like, “Hey, there’s this job opening at this company called Kaboodle.”

Vanessa Wong: And Kaboodle is our CEO, Manish Chandra’s, first company that he started. And I just applied. I was like, okay, this seems pretty cool. I’m already doing something in shopping. This is social shopping. This is pretty new then. And then I applied and I wasn’t sure about this whole thing because it was still pretty new. Social shopping was a pretty new concept back in the day. And then I applied and then worked there for several years. I went on with my journey in product management to many different companies.

Vanessa Wong: And then I had kept a close relationship with Manish and he’s always been my mentor. And then one day he’s like, “Hey, what about joining Poshmark?” And I was like, “Yeah, of course.” This seems natural to work with people you really trust and you really admire. But coming full circle back to my role now, just a couple of weeks ago, someone on my team, she came up to me and she kind of did the same thing that me and Angela did.

Vanessa Wong: She’s like, “Hey, I love what I’m doing but I want more. Can I talk to you about it?” I’m like, “Yes.” She’s like, so the first thing she said was, “Sorry, if I’m being aggressive,” and I stopped her right there. I was like, “You’re not being aggressive at all.” Like, “I welcome this. Please, please feel that you can do this any time. I’m here to help you fulfill your dreams.” So we’ve started this conversation and we’re really helping her where we’re going to really help chart her to her dream.

Tracy Sun: That’s amazing.

Camille Ford: I’m going to cry.

Tracy Sun: Yeah.

Camille Ford: Sitting next to her. So there really are some interesting themes here. I also graduated when the economy wasn’t doing so hot and I felt like, what is the responsible thing to do now? Go be an accountant. And so my team teases me now because I call myself a recovering accountant because that’s exactly what I am. But I started my career about 10 years ago at PWC. It felt like that was the right thing to do. That was the safe thing to do. I had student debt, but it was like not the right thing for me at all. In about a couple of years into doing that, after I felt like I had a good foundation around financial services. I was auditing at the time, mainly VC funds and private equity funds.

Camille Ford: I also then went to my boss and said, I’m not happy. Like, I like it here. I like the people, I like the culture, but I don’t like the work that I’m doing. And I feel like there’s a part of my brain that’s withering away because I’m not doing anything creative. And they helped me, they helped me find a new role. And so I moved into a marketing function where I felt like I could get some different functional expertise in something that felt like I would be able to still use the analytic side of my brain but also use the more creative side of my brain as well.

Camille Ford: And it was a really great learning experience. But after a little while, it also felt like, okay, what’s next? This isn’t quite enough. And so I made the decision to move from the East Coast. I was in Boston at the time, go Bruins, and I moved to the West Coast to attend business school. And I was really intentional about my time during the MBA to just like, one, unlearn all the stuff that I didn’t feel like was for me. Because I told myself, “You are an accountant. You are only the analytical person. Who are you to think that you can be creative? Who are you to think that you can find both of those things in one job and be happy? Who are you to think you can work in fashion at all?” And really opened myself up to the possibilities of what could be.

Camille Ford: And so I spent those two years just doing a lot of internships in fashion tech and just retail and trying to just learn everything I felt like I didn’t know. Interestingly enough, I had been a user of Poshmark for several years. Actually, before I moved for business school, I sold all my stuff on Poshmark, moving across the country. And it was right before I was about to graduate. I look around and a lot of my classmates have these fancy jobs. They’re all set. They’re enjoying all this traveling and here I am still recruiting up until the day of graduation.

Camille Ford: I’m looking at Danny back there because I got a call from the Poshmark recruiter on the day, the morning of my MBA graduation and I thought he was going to say, Camille, we have an offer for you. He didn’t. Instead, he’s like, “Camille, we don’t have something for you right now. But like we still want to stay in touch.” And that was a little heartbreaking, to be honest, going into graduation, but still stayed the course. And a week later which actually was on my 31st birthday got a call from Danny again and this time it was like Tracy’s ready to make you an offer.

Camille Ford: And I share that level of detail only to say that what got me through like, one, switching these functions, kind of keeping the momentum up when I felt like I wasn’t necessarily getting to the place that I wanted to be in the time that I wanted to be at, to get there, rather, is just this layer of tenacity. And just going after it and knowing that like you are totally worthy of whatever it is that you think that you can get. Because the opportunity might not present itself right now but it definitely will.

Camille Ford: And so just staying the course that you feel like is true and natural to you and not being nervous that like, “Hey, I’ve invested all these years in like financial services.” Like that’s what I’m an expert in. No, like, now I’m an expert in social commerce. Or I’m going to get there. So just being really honest with yourself and not giving up on yourself would be my best advice.

Adrienne Hamrah: That was amazing. So like everyone else, I also had a career change. I actually had four. So 10 years ago, I was in school. I was in structural engineering and undergrad and while I really liked like calculating forces and making sure things don’t fall down in buildings I ended up getting–

Tracy Sun: Me too, by the way.

Adrienne Hamrah: Yeah, it’s still like every time I drive over a bridge I’m like, I hope this bridge like doesn’t shake. That’s always in the back of my head. So I ended up actually taking a job in civil engineering with the city of San Francisco, interned there for public works. Really, really boring. I worked on sewers and sewers are very, very boring. They like fall apart every 100 years. There’s not much thinking involved. So I went back to school, got a masters in engineering management because I wanted to learn more about the business side, the people side of things.

Adrienne Hamrah: And then after that, I actually went to Verizon. I did a four-year rotation program and that was really, really cool. I got to do four different jobs in four years. Got really great training with executives, seeing how they run a really large company. But telecom was also very boring to me. It’s like there’s only so many cell phone towers I can design. They all look the same and not very challenging.

Adrienne Hamrah: So I shifted again, I decided to become a product manager, and luckily, a girl from high school was the recruiter at a really small startup of 55 people at the time. It was in the cancer research clinical trials space. And so that was really interesting to me because I actually was pre-med for a hot minute in college. So I was like, I’m going to go back to healthcare. As a PM, though, I was doing internal tools and I don’t think that was the right fit for me. And also, the management there was just a disaster.

Adrienne Hamrah: And I think the most important thing I learned out of that is it doesn’t matter how cool the space is or how cool you think the product is. If the people, if they’re not the right fit for you, then go. Because you’ll find someplace else better. So after going through that experience and even though I was like this is such a cool like company, I was like, this is not the right thing for me. So I walked away and then I decided to go into software, so I did a boot camp.

Adrienne Hamrah: It was a three-month boot camp, 100 hours every week of coding. It was the hardest thing I’ve had to do. Harder than structural engineering undergrad because it was all crammed into one. But I came out of it absolutely loving it. I met up with a girl at a new restaurant opening. She’s actually there, Christina. Because we do food influencing on the side. And so she was like, I work at this company called Poshmark. We’re always hiring. I’m sure we have software engineer openings. Why don’t you like look?

Adrienne Hamrah: And so I took a look. I decided to apply. She referred me and I just absolutely fell in love with the culture, the people first, and then it happens that the product is also something I love and I use as well. So it’s like best of both worlds. So I think my tip is, first, if it’s not the right fit for you, don’t be scared to move. For me, I moved four times, four different companies. But just don’t settle and just go for it.

Tracy Sun: Thank you for sharing your stories. You guys, can you give them all just a… Yeah. Amazing. So I’m going to ask one more question and then I think we’re going to open up to Q&A. So those of you who know me and there’s a lot of you in the room, I’m a huge believer in superpowers. So I just gave Poshmark a superpower, which is people-powered innovation. And what I mean by a superpower is that there’s typically one thing that you can do that you know you do better than everybody else. And if you’re lucky, it’s useful in your personal life or career, but it doesn’t have to be.

Tracy Sun: And so I think it’s really–sometimes you don’t know what it is and sometimes it can change but I think it’s really helpful to have that conversation with yourself. Like, what is my superpower? So that you can carry that with you and just know, no matter what, I can do one thing better than everybody else. And I think that’s great for confidence. So I wanted to–this is one of the questions I snuck in there so I’m not going to call on anyone. But if you want to volunteer and share with us your superpower, my hope is that if we share then if you don’t know what yours is maybe we can help pull it out of you by sharing what ours is.

Tracy Sun: So I’ll just start. I didn’t know this until a few years ago but I think one of my superpowers is that I’m really good at telling stories if I care. And I’m really bad at telling stories if I don’t care. And so going back to like career stuff, I have to do things that I care about because then I do my best work. So I think my superpower is, I’m a good storyteller. Anyone want to share?

Adrienne Hamrah: I don’t know if this is a superpower, but I can literally talk about food forever, which is like it’s how I got this job. It’s how I got the job before this one. It’s great because like this company loves food too. So it just worked out and I’m like a supertaster. So I’m just very sensitive to like ingredients as well. So I’m the kind of person sitting at the table and like asking the waiter like, “What exactly do you put in here?” “Oh, yeah, yeah, I did taste that.”

Camille Ford: That’s funny. My superpower? I would say that I’m really good at building relationships with people. Not like massive amounts of people, but if I like find my group, I can really build deep relationships with them and it certainly served me at work, given that the markets team needs a lot of other people to get things done. But it just played a big role in my life to be able to like put myself in other people’s shoes.

Camille Ford: And it’s funny because my friends tell me I’m a good listener. My mom tells me I was the worst listener as a child. So I’m not exactly sure how to reconcile that. But other than kind of going this back to this point around caring. For the people that are around me, I care a lot, and building relationships has been something that I found I’m pretty good at it.

Vanessa Wong: So for me, I don’t know if this is a superpower, but I think this applies to–how many moms are out there? Yeah. So I’m a mom to three young children. I have three girls. They’re all under the age of five so I have to multitask like crazy. My husband has a really busy job too and so I think that carries on into my work life and personal life. I became super efficient after I had my first child. I don’t know if that applies to you other moms too. So I would say a superpower that I have is just being able to manage multiple things, switching context here and there and just being able to switch gears on the fly and just to readjust and reassess and prioritize accordingly. So, yeah.

Angela Buckmaster: So I think my superpower is actually something that other people knew about me before I knew it about myself and that is that I will and can support anyone in anything they want to do. So when I was a kid, I was the kid in elementary school who would get put in groups with like the trouble kids because I’d be so patient and supportive but I could like help the group get to the group project and get through it. And so for a lot of years though, I didn’t really realize this about myself and people are like, you should be a teacher, you should do this, you should do that.

Angela Buckmaster: And I always was like, “Oh, what’s my skill? What’s my thing?” And then actually being here at Poshmark and noticing kind of the roles I drifted towards and the people that I drifted towards, I kind of drifted towards the natural leaders because I wanted to support them and empower them. And I found eventually by spending a lot of time looking inside that that’s actually something I enjoy and I’m really good at. So I would say that’s my, my superpower.

Tracy Sun: Thank you guys for sharing. Let’s open it up for Q&A. If you have questions, I don’t know what to do. If you have questions, the mic is coming around. Raise your hand. Barkha, do you want to come up here? You’re fair game for questions. Thank you.

Speaker 12: Thank you. Thank you for sharing. I have two questions, so you can answer either or. One question I have is just about how you try to maintain the company culture as you grow into a larger company eventually over time? The other question I’m curious about is how you use innovation to stay ahead of your competitors? Who are your competitors?

Tracy Sun: Angela, you want to take those questions?

Angela Buckmaster: Yeah. So the first question about culture. I think for us, like you said, we’re scaling so much, so rapidly, not only internally, but externally. And so we have to think about both. And tying back into something I said earlier, I think that the way that we make sure that we continue to scale our culture is to make sure our culture is top of mind. Because again, if you think about it, if you talk about it, if you embrace it, it’s only going to get better. And you can never forget about it. So doing things like making sure we stay in touch with both our internal and external community all the time. Even at the company here.

Angela Buckmaster: So when I started six years ago, we were in one room and I knew everyone, I knew what they ate for dinner the night before. And now that we’re spread out and we’re on two different floors, it is a little bit harder, but you have to remember that we are all working together towards the same goals. So we talk to each other a lot. I can still go up to anyone in the company and talk to them about anything that’s happening inside or outside of the app. So I think again, just keeping it top of mind and always trying to think of how can we do this better has made us be able to scale our culture with the company.

Vanessa Wong: Yeah. Actually, I’ll do the first one too and I could go a little into the second one. So for our product features whenever we build something, we look at what our values are and we always make sure they’re rooted in there. So our CEO is really into love. I don’t know if you’ve guys have… You should catch some of his videos on YouTube but he always says something where you lead with love and with love comes money. And we use that a lot in our product thinking. We have a like, which is a heart, but we don’t have like a hate or dislike. Like how Facebook has different reactions.

Vanessa Wong: We always–everything is really positive. Everything is really transparent. And that goes along with a lot of our company culture as well. Everything is transparent. You can voice your opinion. You know what’s going on at our all hands–all the information is kind of disseminated into everyone. So that’s kind of how we look at when we’re developing products. As far as our competitors, yeah, we’re always checking them out. They’re always doing cool and unique things.

Vanessa Wong: But again, I think because we’re so different. We have like the largest community, social community out there. We have to take a little different angle. We can’t be like an eBay. They’re very different than us and whatever–let’s say we do something similar to them, it may not work for us. So we’re always on the lookout, but we always search within of like what would really help our sellers stylists? As people, they’ve started their own businesses on Poshmark. How can we empower them and how can we help them grow? You’ll be good…

Tracy Sun: No, no, no, no. She’s all right. I was going to echo.

Speaker: Do you have another question? Otherwise, we can keep going. All right there. Is there a mic?

Audience Member: Hi. I have a question about user feedback. How do you gather that and how do you incorporate that into the product development and innovation?

Angela Buckmaster: You can maybe onto that.

Vanessa Wong: So I actually work with people like Angela and we meet with the community team very often. I look at our Facebook groups and we talk to our users. We go to Posh Fest and we’re very connected to our users and we hear what’s going on and we incorporate that into our product roadmap. There are things that our users may request but they may not fit in. They might think that that is the solutions for them. But when we internally talk about these things, we think one step further is like, is that really helping? That might be one thing but we have a larger plan and larger vision for them.

Vanessa Wong: And I think one of the coolest things that I’ve done at Poshmark is each year, we have an annual get-together with our seller stylists called Posh Fest. And I’ve been very fortunate the last couple of years to kind of announce what we did for our hackathon. And so what we did is we had users submit things that they’ve want in the app and we get like, I don’t know, thousands and thousands of requests. And they’re like the spreadsheet is crazy.

Vanessa Wong: But I love looking at it each year because I’m like, “Oh, this is what they’re interested. This is what they’re passionate about.” And so, for example, last year we were able to rehaul our newsfeed and this is something that the users have wanted for so long and they were so excited about it. Another killer feature that we launched was they’d been always wanting a draft listing and so we were able to launch that. So that was really amazing.

Speaker: I think we have a question over here.

Audience Member: Thank you, everybody. I’m actually a Poshmark buyer, especially. I’ve been seller but buying more than selling. And so a question I have for you that I’ve noticed is that there is a very distinct culture within Poshmark. And I was wondering, how do you ensure that positive culture and thinking when like cybersecurity issues or bullying issues and things like that online considering there’s 40 million users, how do you use data or how do you think about the product or how do you build the communities to be able to continue that very specific type of culture that’s already been there? And especially around Cybersecurity anti-bullying.

Tracy Sun: So I’ll start and then Barkha, if you have anything to add, let me know. So we get this form of question quite a bit. And the first thing I’d say is it’s really hard to fake a value. So when you talk about the values that are our unique community, I’d say that comes from what we want and it’s a little bit of the world that we wish we had before we had Poshmark. We live it here at headquarters and it’s, we intentionally said let’s also build it into the user experience and also to our community.

Tracy Sun: And it’s really hard to fake that because you almost have to be a little bit crazy about it and not know you’re crazy. And in that way then you just naturally start to act in a way that’s according to your values and it becomes stronger and stronger. So what we did is we talked a lot to Angela’s point. We knew people were important to us. We knew culture is important to not just culture here, culture in our app, in our community. So we had that top of mind and built everything with that in mind.

Tracy Sun: And there are some times where we said this would make sense to make more money. But this doesn’t make sense if we want to be empowering to our sellers. And so we had our North Star and we chose that path. And so if you know what your North Star is and for us, it’s our people, then it’s easier to make those decisions when those crazy moments happen and you’re panicked and you don’t know exactly what to do. I don’t know if I can answer anything about cybersecurity. Can you? Where is Chetan?

Barkha Saxena: Or Gautam.

Tracy Sun: Or Gautam?

Barkha Saxena: Well, the only thing I would say is we also rely on our community to help with that. That’s the power of this community who is very passionate. For them, Poshmark is not just a product. It’s their own thing. So they really help us with that too. Like there’s lot of comment reporting, a lot of reporting that happens which goes to Angela team and of course, you have to look at it like the… You can report anything. But that’s where their team has the expertise in knowing like how to do it. But I think it’s our community who is actually allowing us to scale more than I would say the data in this case.

Speaker: We’ll take a few more questions.

Audience Member:  Thank you. And thank you guys so much for volunteering your time to talk to us today. My question is around branding, especially when starting a company and starting a venture, especially social like Poshmart. How did you decide your values and how did you decide what kind of brand you wanted to put forward?

Tracy Sun: So I touched a little bit before… I’ll take, okay. I touched a little bit before about our values and just to recap, I think it comes from what you deeply care about and the founders and the founding team, we have a lot of things in common but I think one of the strongest things we have in common is just a belief in the way we want the world to be. So it’s almost outside of business and it’s not just a company value. It’s like our personal values. So it comes from there.

Tracy Sun: In terms of branding, I think that’s a really interesting one for us. And when it came time to really formalize our thoughts around brand, we were a little bit confused because we’re a company that wants to empower other people. And so if you create a really strong traditional brand, likely you will alienate some people. So I come from the fashion background. So my first thought was, “Ooh, we’re going to create a really cool logo and all of our messaging and all of our images are going to look chic and sophisticated.” Things that you had imagined at like Net-a-porter, for example, or just another cool brand. But we’re like, “Yeah, but 80% of America doesn’t want to see that. So what do we do then?”

Tracy Sun: And plus all of our sellers, they have their own story. How can we possibly create a brand around our story? And this is where those core values come into play. And one of our core values in terms of how we prioritize our time is to get behind our sellers, get behind our community, and make sure that we’re empowering them. And so when we think about brand, our brand became empowering sellers. And so when you see some of our videos or you see where we put our energy into things that might be called brand. We usually don’t put our faces, we put your faces right and we celebrate your wins. We don’t really celebrate our wins because if you or the community’s winning, we know we’re winning. So a lot of our brand is around community, honestly.

Speaker: Last question.

Audience Member: Thank you all so much for taking the time to speak with us today. I was wondering if you have an example of a challenge that you’re facing as a company right now or maybe in the recent past. And I’m interested in hearing about what kind of problem-solving methodology you use in a fast-paced environment like Poshmark.

Vanessa Wong: So I think one of the problems is scaling. We’re getting larger. Our app has a lot of different things in there. We want to introduce new features, but I think the core thing is keeping it simple. We don’t want it to be complicated. We don’t want a million steps in the listing flow. We don’t want to make buying complicated. But we do want to introduce new things that are useful for everyone. So I think one thing we’ve introduced within the last couple of years and we’ve introduced a concept of a metamodel.

Vanessa Wong: And what it is, is it’s basically a core set of principles that you kind of adhere to when you’re building a feature and really mapping it back to those. So if I’m going to create this button, like does it really adhere to what we’re trying to do? So really sticking that and it really gets the team aligned, as well. So let’s say we have a team of like 10 engineers working on it. That helps us really stay focused and make sure that we’re reaching our North Star.

Tracy Sun: Just to add one thing to what Vanessa said. The metamodel is a great one. But really that the problem that we’re facing that led that to be the solution is that we used to be a team that would sit around the table and design the product and then we grew to 400 plus people. And what we found is conversations were happening all over the place about the same project in different offices. We have three other offices around the world, and we had trouble–We would always try to communicate but things would always slip between the cracks.

Tracy Sun: And so that’s a challenge of scale that we had is we were not talking to each other in a way that — we weren’t communicating. We were talking and not communicating. So what the metamodel does, and you can call it what you want, but it gives guidelines. Here’s the core values. Here is what when we’re doing a feature, when we’re doing a project, we’re doing a campaign, here’s what it should do. And so double check yourself so that we don’t have to. We can be more nimble as a smaller team.

Speaker: All right. Thank you so much. Let’s give them a big round of applause here.

Technical Recruiter Claire Berkley passes the mic to SVP of New Markets and Co-Founder Tracy Sun to deliver opening remarks at Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner.

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