Intro

Special Announcement: This episode marks the one year anniversary of The Seven Eighths. I want to thank everyone involved in helping me get to this milestone starting with my family, close friends, guests that have agreed to candidly and authentically share their story and Corey Quinn for giving me the push to keep my work going. I owe it to every one of you. I believe even more than I did a year ago that we indeed need to talk to help normalize failures. We absolutely must talk about the Seven Eighths part of our life that is submerged beneath the social media persona of each one of us.

Welcome to Episode 16 of the Seven Eighths. For this episode, I sat down with Shiva Rajaraman for a conversation about his journey and his struggles. Shiva is no stranger to many of us in the valley. Shiva Rajaraman has held product leadership roles over the past 20 years working on platforms that democratized access for creators. He's currently VP Commerce at Facebook helping people discover products and businesses they love. Previously he helmed technology for WeWork helping over half a million members find the right space for their working needs so they could focus fully on their business. Prior to this, Shiva has held Product Leadership positions at Spotify, Google and YouTube. I speak out of personal experience when I say Shiva is most excited by helping everyone reach their full creative and business potential irrespective of their starting point. In this episode, you will hear Shiva talk about the crazy year of 2020, his personal growth and struggles. He candidly shared about the pitfalls of having a wide scope without a narrow focus, his lessons on betting on just people and not looking at culture and purpose. He talks about the roller coaster ride of scaling a large team and quickly having to pivot and how he would redo if at all. You would hear his eternal optimism and it is infectious. Time to just listen in

Outro

And that’s how the cookie crumbles. Talking to Shiva helped me understand failure is all in perspective. The ones where we anticipated failures and yet made the choices are the hardest one to reckon with. But it is important to come to terms with the outcome and make peace with it. It also made me understand that when it comes to career moves, having a perspective on people, product and purpose is all critical. When two of the three feels out of place, one needs to have the courage to take the right next step: whether it is to course correct at place or move on. I also realized that every transition is time consuming and energy consuming. So it is important to recognize the ripple effects of changing jobs, changing roles and make accommodations in lifestyle to absorb the ripple effects. Maybe even giving oneself the time to absorb the ripple effects? Thank you for listening to this episode. Do share your thoughts and feedback. I am on twitter @femmenectar. Until the next conversation. Cheers everyone!