 Hey everybody, we are Vector. We help people to grow in their careers for mentorship. My name is Anna, so I'm a CEO and the co-founder of Vector and before Vector I worked as a product lead at Meta on AI products and Future of Work. Also worked in machine learning products for a search engine company, launched a new product for Intercom, was the first product hire startups and also advised them on the AI strategy. But before that I actually was a journalist for almost eight years. Sounds like a drastic shift, doesn't it? This year I made another transition from a product manager to a CEO and to be honest it didn't feel like a huge shift to me. In the light of those recent events with remote work, pandemic, layoffs, economic recession, I started thinking maybe I could share something that I learned from my transitions that could help to people who are going through the career change and also hiring in this current conditions. So before I talk to you about Vector, let me share to you a couple of insights that I learned. And my first insight is that careers are no longer linear. Essentially if previously you could stay in one company for multiple years, like seven, 15 years, and you would change a company only just to get a better job title, right now it's not the case anymore. Previously you were an outlaw if you would change from an accountant to a designer and I mean why would you do that to change your senior title and a higher pay for a more junior one? That's not the case anymore. People in their 20s and 30s don't know what they want to be when they grow up and honestly they don't have to know. Careers those days are more than just a job, they are becoming journeys, explorations of your identity and interests. Like it's okay if you start your career as a marketeer, then you go into design and then for example you decide that community management better reflects your strengths and interests. Career changes became the norm. We are not surprised by them anymore. Eight years ago when I was transitioning from journalism to product management, it felt huge. It was very hard because very few people were actually doing that and it was really hard to understand how you could progress. But today I know at least 50 people who transitioned exactly from journalism to product management and this trend is only accelerating. Despite all the joys of career changes and going to another career it's actually painful. People struggle and they experience a lot of emotional pain and right now with our brains not being wired for change it's really difficult. So what leads me to my second insight? A support network is key to growth. When I was transitioning to product management it actually felt really difficult. I felt really alone because I didn't have any connections in product management and I didn't have anyone to rely on for advice or support. I was lucky to find a mentor who was a software engineer and he was incredible but he couldn't resonate with my journey and he couldn't help me with my career progression. When I transitioned from a product manager to a CEO I actually was able to find many amazing mentors who did exact same journey and their advice saved me maybe a couple of years of struggle and pain. When I was at Facebook sorry this is just a more visual representation of what I've been saying. Essentially if you do it alone you have such a long distance to get to your goal because you just rely on your own experience but if you actually do it with a support network with experience of experienced individuals then you're standing on their shoulders and you're already more far along and much closer to your goal because you're multiplying your experience by theirs. So when I was at Meta persuading great candidates to join the company I always slept with that. You would be joining an amazing company with amazing individuals in your industry who actually can share their knowledge help you with advice and help you grow. When I left Meta I actually realized how powerful the selling point was because when I started my own company I saw that many people in the company are just a team of one like for example we have a highly skilled amazing design lead and I'm technically her manager but I don't have any design background and she doesn't have any peers to rely on to get feedback. One of the tools to solve this problem has traditionally been mentorship but what I realized over the past couple of years of being a mentor and a mentee is that traditional mentorship does not work. Why is that? First of all it's a huge time commitment. Usually you are expected to spend three months or even six months on committing to this relationship and it's hard for both mentees and mentors to do that. Second in traditional mentorship you are most frequently matched with someone much more senior than you are and while sometimes it might be really nice in most of the cases you actually need someone who've been in your shoes recently. So for example if you are a product manager who wants to become more data-driven you actually need someone who just went through this path through this journey and not the director of product with 20 years of experience who is much more concerned about hiring on strategy right now. Also even if you do find someone relevant not everybody knows how to pass their knowledge along so that it's inspiring and actionable not just ambiguous and demotivating and finally as we discussed before career needs evolve very quickly like one month I need to develop my analytical skills another month I need to learn how to present the roadmap to my stakeholders and another month I need to hire a researcher and I need to understand how to do that and in most cases one mentor cannot possibly know it all and that's why it's quite frequent that in a traditional relationship you would run out of interesting topics quite quickly and at the end would just continue the relationship out of respect for each other and that's why we build vector to fix that. We believe that even a short conversation just 30 minutes long but with the right person and structured correctly can make a huge difference. We prioritize diversity over seniority so that you could find an experienced individual who's been exactly in your shoes. We want to provide mentors and mentees with the right guidance for every kind of conversation so that they feel supported and can achieve actionable outcomes and we ensure that mentees and mentors commitment is aligned with their career goals so that they could truly grow. Let me show to you how it works right so we are a diverse team of senior professionals and we want to help people to truly grow in their careers. We actually want to make sure that people grow and find the supports they need to succeed. Hundreds of thousands of startups are created every year and that means that millions of employers join them and we want to make sure that they actually find support as if they were working in a large corporation. With this team we want to make this ambition vision a reality. We come from Meta, Yandex, Klarna, Figma in the intercom to ensure that you can find the support that you truly need. We are very lucky to be backed by amazing investors from Cherry Ventures, Mosaic Ventures and also Google, Meta, Miro, Indeeds and many others and we are very lucky to find the support from our community of mentors and mentees who are really central to everything that we do. Join us today to help us democratize career growth for everyone and make sure that a lot of professionals across the world can truly grow in the careers that they are passionate about. Thank you.