A career accelerator in your inbox.

Feeling stuck in your career? Want to speed up that next promotion? Want to make a change? My mission is to help as senior managers and directors breakthrough to executive levels. This newsletter shares the hard-won learnings and musings from my work as a chief product officer, career coach, venture partner, and solo-entrepreneur.

About me

I have had a storied career the last 20+ years that most Asian moms would be proud of:

I got my engineering degree at University of California, Berkeley.
I flew around the world with McKinsey and Company as a business analyst
I got my MBA at Harvard Business School, co-founded a failed wine startup, and met my tall, dark and handsome husband
I landed at Thumbtack as the 1st PM, riding a crazy growth trajectory with them from as they became a Unicorn and raised more than $250M while I was there. I went from entry PM to Director in 4 years
I made a hop over to lead the consumer feed and profile teams at Instagram during its heyday, working from the brand new San Francisco office near Salesforce park. I also started a family and had 2 beautiful baby boys.
Post the Covid19 pandemic and baby haze, I left Meta to become the Chief Product & Technology officer at Fuzzy Pet Health, a series-C startup with $88M+ in funding.
And now? I’m a venture partner at LifeX ventures while running my own coaching business as a solo-entrepreneur.

And yet, I get frustrated and angry on a regular basis. Why? Because the business world is so unfair to minorities and women. No matter where I look, whether it’s big tech, venture capital, or entrepreneurship, the best opportunities to advance and make generational wealth are unevenly distributed to those who are in the dominant “in-group” in the United States - white men. Minorities lack opportunities, role models, resources, or sometimes even confidence in themselves.

And that is where this Substack comes in. I found that I can only do so much in one-on-one career conversations due to my limited time. However, a newsletter will let me provide a resource and role model for anyone looking, gratis. There are many common themes and learnings across the hundred of coaching conversations, primarily with minorities and women, I’ve had since 2016. I’ve also had a wide range of career experiences from startups to big tech, entrepreneurship to investing, allowing me to draw similarities between environments. I hope this begins to even the playing field.

So for the next year (or more), I will be posting here every Thursday content that will help minorities and women advance in the career and personal life. It’ll be career centric, with smatterings of musings around how to manage family with career, how to write and publish a book (The Uncommon Executive: Breakthrough to the C-suite as a Minority), or the similarities between raising a dog and kids.

I hope you enjoy what I put out here for discussion, and I genuinely look forward to hearing back what you think as well.

If you’re new here, check out some popular posts from the archive:

Interested in 1:1 or Group career coaching? Get in touch with me at https://www.yuezhao.coach

I also teach a Reforge course to senior managers and directors on how to breakthrough to the C-suite. We cover key topics including executive presence, self-advocacy, sponsorship, and building coalitions. Check it out here.

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A career accelerator for aspiring executives. Hard-won learnings from a Chief Product Officer on career growth, executive leadership, and combating bias.

People

Yue Zhao

@yuezhao

Chief Product & Technology Officer turned Career Coach, Author, Venture Partner, Mom of 2 boys