The Compounding Career
What a decade at one company, a move across continents, and a seat in a self-driving car taught my friend about careers
There’s a question I keep coming back to in my own career: what actually compounds?
People default to ‘title’ or what looks impressive on their resume when they think of growth. But almost 2 decades in, I can confidently say resume ≠ career.
So what compounds? What actually builds over time in a way that makes you more effective, more trusted, and more yourself? Because most career advice optimizes for speed. Move fast, get the next promotion, switch jobs, collect experiences. But the people I know who’ve built something real seem to have done the opposite. They invested deeply, stayed longer than was fashionable, and built relationships that paid off years later in ways they couldn’t have predicted.
Nikita Mitra is one of those people. She and I both showed up in America at around the same time, both from India, both trying to figure out how things worked here. Professionally, culturally, linguistically. Early on, we’d swap notes on the small absurdities of American work culture. She once referred to the trunk of a car as the “boot space” in a meeting and got blank stares. These moments were funny, but they were also tiny reminders that we were operating in a version of English that wasn’t familiar to us.
Nikita and I overlapped at Uber. We weren’t in the same org at all times, but we were in the same building, navigating the same chaos, watching the same company go through its very public growing pains. I was there for her ten-year anniversary at the company. A milestone that, in tech, feels very mythological.
She’s now at Waymo, doing product and growth marketing for autonomous vehicles. I’m at a16z, building Tech Week. Our careers diverged, but the underlying questions haven’t. How do you build credibility when you’re starting from scratch? How do you stay yourself in rooms that weren’t designed for you? What actually compounds in a career, and what’s just noise?
I sat down with Nikita to find out.
Your first job sets the tone
I have this belief that your first job and your first manager shape everything that comes after. A good first manager compounds. You carry their lessons forward without even realizing it. With a bad one, you spend the next decade unlearning habits you didn’t know you picked up. Either way, that first experience sets the baseline for how you think work is supposed to feel.
Nikita’s first job in tech was in risk management and ad fraud at Meta, back when it was still Facebook, in Hyderabad. She was learning how people game systems, studying behavior at scale, spotting patterns, and understanding incentives.
I asked her what she learned there that still shows up in her work today.
“I think the most important thing is it taught me to think about both sides,” she said. “A product marketer sits between math and creativity. And that started there.”
She’s still in touch with her first manager, who ironically is now a Senior Director at Uber. “She’s a mentor and a friend,” Nikita said. It sounds casual but it says a lot about how she operates. The relationships from the beginning compound. And that idea, that the earliest investments in people are the ones that pay off most, kept showing up throughout our entire conversation.
First day at the (job) airport
Nikita’s first day at Uber is one of my favorite Uber career stories.
She was visiting the city, and her soon-to-be manager offered to pick her up at the airport. “I thought, wow, this is such a warm company,” she told me. Turns out he didn’t come to welcome her. He came to recruit drivers.
“He handed me a credit card and said, ‘You’re launching a market. Figure it out.’”
That is about as far from a traditional product marketing role as you can get. She was at an airport with a credit card, trying to figure out how to get drivers on the platform.
I asked her what that kind of scrappy, ground-level work built in her that a normal marketing job never would have.
“It taught me how to think like an entrepreneur,” she said. “You’re operating at multiple different altitudes. You’re speaking to almost every function in the company. You’re thinking about both supply and demand in a way that a typical marketer wouldn’t.”
Even as a marketer, you should build the ability to see an entire business as one system and understand where you fit inside it. Most marketers, especially early in their careers, get trained to think in terms of their function: what’s my channel, what’s my campaign, what’s my brief. What Nikita got instead was the experience of having no function, which forced her to think about the whole thing. The marketers I know who are genuinely exceptional almost always have a period like this somewhere in their past, where the lines between marketing, ops, strategy, and sales didn’t exist because there weren’t enough people to draw them.
The question is whether that kind of learning still happens the same way in 2026.
AI can’t shortcut the learning
We got into whether early career marketers today should seek out this kind of experience.
“If an early career marketer is thinking they can use AI as a shortcut to their learning process, then they would have never gotten the skills that we did through doing the grunt work.”
Everyone talks about AI making you faster, and it does, especially if you’re senior enough to have the judgment already. If you’ve spent years developing a taste for what good positioning sounds like, or what a compelling narrative arc feels like, then AI is a genuine accelerant. You can move from idea to execution in a fraction of the time.
But for someone just starting out, the grunt work is where the taste comes from. The hours spent writing briefs that get torn apart, running campaigns that flop, sitting in customer interviews where nothing goes the way you planned. Those are the experiences that build the instincts AI can’t replicate. Skip them, and you end up with someone who can produce output at incredible speed but has no framework for knowing whether that output is any good.
I wrote recently about what happens when the first instinct is to prompt instead of draft. Nikita’s point sharpened that for me. For senior marketers, AI is a genuine accelerant. But for someone just starting out, the grunt work is where the taste comes from.
So if you can’t shortcut the learning, what do you invest in instead?
Invest in relationships. Especially the unexpected ones.
The most consistent theme in my conversation with Nikita wasn’t about marketing frameworks or career tactics. It was about relationships. How she builds them, when she builds them, and which ones actually matter.
“Relationships go a long way when you’re walking into a new org,” she said. “And one of the best pieces of advice I got from a mentor early on was: build some relationships that people will not expect you to.”
She means outside your function. If you’re a marketer, everyone expects you to build relationships with brand marketing, maybe your product counterpart. Nobody expects you to invest time with the engineer, the legal counterpart, or the policy team.
“But those are the ones that give you a completely different perspective,” she said. “They make you an advocate in rooms you wouldn’t normally be in.”
I’ve seen it over and over. You can have disproportionate influence by investing in spiky, unexpected relationships across the org. Even if work isn’t family, colleagues can be friends. Take a coffee meeting that doesn’t have an obvious ROI, just because you like the person. Because credibility gets built for you, by the people around you, when you’re not in the room.
And those relationships don’t just help you in a single role. They become the foundation for how you navigate entirely new environments.
Three cultures, one playbook
Meta. Uber. Waymo. Three very different companies at very different stages, but Nikita joined all three pre-IPO. She keeps picking companies at a stage where the rules are still being written, which means the person willing to figure things out in real time has an outsized advantage.
I asked her how she recalibrates each time she walks into a new org.
“The first thing I look at is whether titles matter more than ideas,” she said. “That’s a red flag. If a company is too focused on titles, you know something’s off.”
Another point worth naming: you can’t box in a company’s culture permanently. It’s the culture at a point in time. The company you interview into is not the company you’ll be working at two years later. The question isn’t “is this a good culture” but “is this a culture that rewards the things I value right now, and will I be able to adapt when it shifts?”
But her playbook for navigating each new environment stays the same. First: invest in the people around you. Second: perception management. “Influence 101 is getting to know people as human beings before getting into the business,” she said. “Get early wins. Find the low-hanging fruit and kill it like no one has ever done it before. Then you’ve earned some currency.” And third: strong POV, loosely held. You don’t walk in and demand to be heard. You earn the right to be heard. And then you hold your opinions with enough flexibility that people want to engage with them instead of defending against them.
That last point, earning the right to be heard, turned out to be one of the most personal parts of our conversation.
The cost of directness
I asked Nikita if there was ever a moment in her career where she felt like she had to become a different version of herself to be taken seriously.
“It’s more like investing time in order to be a full, authentic version of myself,” she said. “The truest version of myself is very direct and opinionated. But before I can be that, I have to build the baseline relationship and credibility. I have to get early wins. And then I’ve earned the currency to push for my opinion.”
She described it like a life cycle. You can’t skip ahead to the part where people take your directness as confidence. You have to earn it. Every time. In every new room.
I know this pattern well. There’s a version of this that’s just good career advice. Of course you should build relationships before leading with strong opinions. But there’s another version that’s harder to talk about, which is that the distance between “confident” and “too much” isn’t the same for everyone. The tax is real, even if you can’t always name it.
Nikita framed it generously: invest the time, do the work, earn the currency to be yourself. I think that’s the right framing. But I also think it’s worth noting that some people walk into rooms with more starting currency than others. And the people who’ve had to earn every bit of it? They tend to know things the people who started at headquarters never will.
What compounds when you stay
In tech, the default move is to leave. Two years, three years, then on to the next title bump. Nikita stayed at Uber for almost eleven years.
I was there for her ten-year anniversary. It was one of those moments that makes you pause and think about what actually compounds and what doesn’t. Through the IPO, the reorgs, the culture shifts. All of it.
What Nikita found (and what I think is genuinely underappreciated) is that tenure creates a kind of compound interest that job-hopping can’t replicate.
“Reputation carries with you,” she said. “And someone takes a bet on you in a way that just doesn’t happen when you’re new every time.”
If you look at the career trajectories of the most senior leaders in tech, almost all of them had long tenures somewhere. The churn happens at the junior and mid-career levels. Several people who break into senior leadership stayed long enough for someone to see them across multiple roles, multiple challenges, multiple cycles. And then someone bet on them.
“It’s easier to find advocates who vouch for you when they’ve watched you for years,” she said. “That’s what compounds.”
There it is again. Relationships. Over networking and over “building your brand.” People who have watched you long enough to know what you’re capable of, and who are willing to say so when it matters.
Bringing heart to algorithms
Nikita spent years embedded in Uber’s marketplace team. Pricing, incentives, shared rides. The engine most riders never think about.
It was a male-dominated, math-heavy environment. “Extremely brilliant people,” she said. “Very objective. Black or white. No gray area.”
She found her sweet spot in the gray.
“They were lacking something fundamental,” she said, “which is bringing the heart to their algorithms. They’d say, ‘This algorithm optimizes for what should be delivered to which customer. I don’t need to think about the customer.’ But they were missing something.”
I asked her what being that close to AI in the physical world every day makes her optimistic about.
“It’s saving lives,” she said. “40,000 people die in car crashes in the US every year. Millions globally. Everyone else is thinking about AI saving them time. I’m seeing what AI can do for humanity at large.”
The through-line
If there’s one thread running through everything Nikita told me, it’s this: the things that matter most in a career take time to build, and there are no shortcuts.
Time to earn credibility before you can be direct. Time to build relationships before you can influence. The credibility you build before someone takes a chance on you. Time in a country before you can be your full, authentic self.
And through all of it, the common denominator is people. The relationships you invest in, especially the unexpected ones, are the infrastructure that everything else gets built on.
In a world that’s obsessed with speed, Nikita’s career is an argument for the opposite. Compounding career investment that turns a ads analyst in India into someone marketing the future of transportation.
The currency of time. It’s the one thing you can’t shortcut, automate, or hack your way into.
Nikita Mitra is the Product & Growth Marketing lead at Waymo. Previously, she spent nearly 11 years at Uber across multiple roles including Head of Product Marketing for Emerging Businesses, and started her tech career at Meta in Hyderabad. She’s also a featured speaker at Product School.
Until next time,
Shrikala