Lean In

concerned the shortage of organ donations, which results in eighteen deaths each day in the United States alone. I never forgot this case, and seventeen years later, Facebook worked with organ registries around the world to launch a tool to encourage donor registration.
    After business school, I took a job as a consultant at McKinsey & Company in Los Angeles. The work never entirely suited me, so I stayed for only a year and then moved back to D.C. to join Larry, who was now deputy secretary of the Treasury Department. At first, I served as his special assistant. Then, when he was named secretary, I became his chief of staff. My job consisted of helping Larry manage the operations of the department and its $14 billion budget. It gave me the opportunity to participate in economic policy at both a national and an international level. I also ran point on somesmaller projects, including the administration’s proposal to promote the development of vaccines for infectious diseases.
    During my four years at Treasury, I witnessed the first technology boom from a distance. Its impact was obvious and appealing even beyond being able to wear jeans to work. Technology was transforming communication and changing lives not just in the United States and developed countries, but everywhere. My long-term dream instinct kicked in. When President Clinton’s administration ended, I was out of a job and decided to move to Silicon Valley. In retrospect, this seems like a shrewd move, but in 2001, it was questionable at best. The tech bubble had burst, and the industry was still reeling from the aftershocks. I gave myself four months to find a job but hoped it would take fewer. It took almost a year.
    My Silicon Valley job search had some highs, like getting to meet my business crush, eBay CEO Meg Whitman. It also had some lows, like meeting with a high-level executive who started my interview by stating that her company would never even consider hiring someone like me because government experience could not possibly prepare anyone to work in the tech industry. It would have been so cool to have thanked her for being honest and walked out of her office. But alas, I was never cool. I sat there hemming and hawing until every last molecule of oxygen had been sucked from the room. True to her word, she never even considered hiring me.
    Fortunately, not everyone shared her view. Eric Schmidt and I had met several times during my Treasury years, and I went to see him just after he became CEO of the then relatively unknown Google. After several rounds of interviews with Google’s founders, they offered me a job. My bank account was diminishing quickly, so it was time to get back to paid employment, and fast. In typical—and yes, annoying—MBA fashion, I made a spreadsheet and listed my various opportunities in the rows and my selection criteria in the columns. I compared the roles, the level of responsibility, and so on. Myheart wanted to join Google in its mission to provide the world with access to information, but in the spreadsheet game, the Google job fared the worst by far.
    I went back to Eric and explained my dilemma. The other companies were recruiting me for real jobs with teams to run and goals to hit. At Google, I would be the first “business unit general manager,” which sounded great except for the glaring fact that Google had no business units and therefore
nothing
to actually manage. Not only was the role lower in level than my other options, but it was entirely unclear what the job was in the first place.
    Eric responded with perhaps the best piece of career advice that I have ever heard. He covered my spreadsheet with his hand and told me not to be an idiot (also a great piece of advice). Then he explained that only one criterion mattered when picking a job—fast growth. When companies grow quickly, there are more things to do than there are people to do them. When companies grow more slowly or stop growing, there is less to do and too many people to not be doing them. Politics and stagnation set in, and everyone falters. He told me, “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat. You just get on.” I made up my mind that instant. Google was tiny and disorganized, but it was a rocket ship. And even more important to me, it was a rocket ship with a mission I believed in deeply.
    Over the years, I have repeated Eric’s advice to countless people, encouraging them to reduce their career