Shreya Agarwal

I would give my success to my dad's never-give-up attitude, which I've always been inspired by. The funny part is, my parents used to think I was a very naughty child from the start and could never even pass an exam, and they are still shocked till this day about how I'm able to work and why my boss isn't angry at me. I like to work at the very last minute, and that drives me to really succeed in whatever I'm doing. So maybe for me, it's my father's attitude of never giving up and trying new things that have inspired me.

The best advice I've received is always having a mentor - a personal mentor and a work mentor. It has actually helped me a lot to develop my own professional experience and also develop empathy. As a manager, having empathy is really important, and thinking ahead is also very important when you're thinking about growing as a manager. Having a mentor who's been through all of these things actually gives you a lot of experience. Just by learning and listening to their experiences will give you a better understanding and prepare you for how to think ahead of time. Someone gave me this advice about 7 years back, to always have a mentor, and I've always followed that on multiple layers. I'll have a mentor on my org-wide level, on my career-wide side. I normally tend to have a mentor on different aspects of my life, be it on physical coaching, on exercising, and what else can I do which is out of my bounds like marathon. I have a mentor for career development and a mentor internal to my company as well on how to make sure it's aligned with Etsy's values and everything.

My advice would be to network hard. United States and most of the people, we humans are like a social animal. And if you network, you will get opportunities, and if you ask for it - if you don't ask for it, you will probably not get the opportunity, so there's no harm in asking for it. Most of the time, you will get what you want if you ask for it.

The biggest challenge right now is how fast the industry of agents and LLM is growing. The biggest challenge for everybody right now is to keep up with the new stuff that's coming in, and what is right for your company and for your use case. How do you bring the right thing? Because there are like 100 products right now for solving the same thing, 100 agents that can do it. But not everything, not every open source, not every custom open source or third-party tools will be able to solve it, so where do you spend your right energy, and where do you filter out the noise is a hard thing that's going on right now. In terms of opportunities, for Etsy as an e-commerce company, the bigger opportunity right now is that these agents and everything that has been built, there is no real translation how it can be beneficial in the e-commerce world. People are still figuring that out. That is a next opportunity in my mind - how do you leverage agents to the next version of how shopping would be done. Nobody has a right answer for that right now. From the whole ML Infra or LLM side, it's going to be interesting to see how many LLMs would be really useful to actually bring revenue to a company. Some people speculate it's a bubble, depending on how much investment the companies are doing right now. But there would be a time where people will start asking, what is the return on investment on spending so much in the agents.

When I think about work life, the values that are important for me are the type of people and the energy that they bring in, and the type of problem that the company is solving. Am I getting enough freedom to solve the problems that is important for the company, with the right set of people? I think the right set of people is what you can build through culture, as a manager. If, as an IC, you want to look into the culture of your org or your team in your company. And the second is the type of problem that they're solving. If you are solving good technical problems, that will really pump me up. And if you have a good set of people, it can make a difference to your happiness quotient and your work-life balance as well. In terms of personal life, I think for me, communication is the key, and if you both are able to communicate with your friends, with your family, with your husband, I think you will see a lot of happiness in your life. Keeping it very simple, having similar values of how you see your life together in future also makes a difference.