Masha Savelieva

I think the best career advice I ever received was to say yes to different opportunities, even when you're scared or feel really challenged. I think there's a lot of things that I might have not tried if I hadn't been willing to say yes, and to kind of fail, and still learn from those failures. It comes from a place of having really good managers, and if you have really good managers, they're going to push you to try new things, and they're going to encourage you even when you don't do something right the first time, and they're going to know that you can improve and iterate and get better. I think that was the best advice for me, because I'm someone that really cares about growth and learning, and I want to try all the things. I don't want to pigeonhole myself and specialize in one specific thing. I want to have a broad experience, and I think that's how you position yourself to be capable of all sorts of roles and all sorts of career paths, because you have experience doing a lot of different things, because you are willing to try it, even if it's not something that you were a specialist in before.

I think if someone is in the position to go to college, they should definitely capitalize on internship opportunities and put themselves out there in college. I honestly had an internship every summer, and I worked all year round as well in different capacities, and I would encourage anyone who is at that age, even in high school, to start putting yourself out there. Pitch yourself to a local business if you know that you can help them with their email campaigns, or you are really good at social media, or anything that you have a skill in - there's always someone that knows how to do something better, and if you can do that, then you're really valuable. The more experience you can put on your resume before you start applying for full-time jobs, the better, because you'll be seen as a more qualified candidate. You're also seen as someone who has a self-starter mentality. You're willing to put yourself out there, you're willing to chase opportunities, and not everyone is willing to do that. And I think now, when you're competing with AI, essentially, to have a job, for someone that can go out there and really find an opportunity for yourself, then that speaks volumes, and it shows that you have a lot of initiative. Even if your job was, for example, to be taken by AI, that wouldn't stop you. That would just encourage you to try something else, or find a new path, whether that's within the same company or at a different company.

I think the biggest challenge is the transition to AI. Depending on the specific industry and business that you're in, there's either a really big focus on it, or a big focus on how to not be perceived as AI. I work on the border of tech and more consumer-oriented business, and our struggle is we want to potentially use AI because it obviously makes our jobs faster, but we also don't want to come across as using AI, because we don't want to lose the human connection. I think that's probably very different in the tech industry right now. My friends who are still in the tech industry and work in marketing definitely are oriented towards AI - they're messaging AI, they're trying to name it, they're trying to figure out how it fits into customer needs and how to package it to meet customer goals. I think that's probably going to persist as a challenge over the next couple of years, as we all kind of figure out what is AI's place in the market. Obviously it cannot fully replace humans, but it can replace certain elements of the work that we do, and depending on the industry that you're in, it can even replace the way that we talk about products, and talk about launches, and talk to our customers, but not everyone wants to experience that.

I think at work I would probably say having a growth mindset, and I guess even in my personal life, being receptive to trying new things, being authentic in the way that you show up, and being willing to try something new. I also work at a really small company now, so something that's really important to us is to be able to move quickly, and also to pick up and drop ideas at the drop of a hat, and just be creative - be inspired by the world that's around us. That's my favorite part about working for the company that I work for now. It's not so techy in nature, and it is very creative, and we take inspiration from literally anything in our day-to-day lives, and things that I see on my walk, for example, as something that could inspire a change that we make in our app experience, or something that we develop on the back end for our customers. In tech, creativity is a little bit stifled, because everyone is trying to one-up each other, especially in this world of AI. And that's part of the reason that I pivoted away from that, but I also think it has its place in the economy and in my career journey, and potentially that's something that I would go back to in the future. Overall, I would say my personal values would probably be around growth and learning and creativity and authenticity.