When Don Faul, head of operations of Pinterest, first went from serving as an Infantry and Reconnaissance leader in the U.S. Marine Corps to seeking opportunities in Silicon Valley, he nearly gave up.
“I didn’t get too many calls back. I didn’t get too many interviews. I didn’t get great feedback from the companies that I was interviewing with,” he says.
The self-described gadget geek nearly came to the conclusion that the tech world might not be for him, but one opportunity led to another, eventually putting Faul in a position to lead. He points to several charts in his talk, speaking about what it takes to go from a flat line to an upward curve. Having joined Facebook in early 2008 before going on to help Pinterest become of the leading social networking companies, Faul knows a thing or two about growth.
“It took me a long time to realize that those skills and experiences that I learned in the Marine Corps were just as relevant at Facebook and Google and Pinterest as they were on the battlefield,” he says.
Watch his talk to learn why leadership is so central is to building a successful company around a culture of sustained innovation.
Tag: Pinterest
These Tech Companies Don’t Have a Lot of Female Employees. Now, They’re Doing Something About It
Since the 1990s, female representation in tech occupations has declined, according to the United States Census Bureau. Which is why some of the industry’s biggest names — Facebook, Pinterest and Box — have kicked off a pilot program to mentor women in tech.
WEST, or Women Entering and Staying in Tech, will tap women from the aforementioned companies to serve as one-on-one mentors for females — whether they’re currently interns starting their professional career or are in midlevel positions and are looking to grow or expand their employment opportunities, according to their website. The program will kickoff in early 2015 and is open to San Francisco Bay area women. It is not yet clear how many applicants WEST plans to accept.
“Mentorship can be incredibly influential in a woman’s career, and we’re excited to be tackling this challenge together,” Facebook says in a statement. “We believe that by working together and providing more direct support, advocacy, and space for community development, we can create an impactful, scalable, one-on-one mentorship program to help women build and grow meaningful careers in tech.”
Several companies, including Facebook and Pinterest, came under fire earlier this year after data released revealed many of the companies had very few women in the workplace. In fact, Facebook admitted that only 31 percent of its employes are female while Pinterest revealed that 40 percent of its workforce is female. Boil that statistic down to technical employees and a mere 15 percent of Facebook’s tech team are women and 21 percent of Pinterest’s tech are female.
That’s a far cry from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s message to empower women, but fortunately, her company along with a few others in the Silicon Valley are taking the first steps to correcting the problem.
Is This the Pinterest of Math and Science Education?
In early January, roughly 100 Duke students did something most college students never want to do: They came back from winter break early. But they had a very good reason. Twelve undergraduate teams competed in a 48-hour challenge at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business to come up with innovative ways to improve science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education in both the U.S. and India. Their final proposals were full of inventive ideas, including a program where students would repair bicycles and a tutorial program where older students would teach younger students via video. But the first-place team went the extra mile, designing an online platform similar to Pinterest, called “STEM Pals,” which could help students gain STEM problem-solving skills while providing resources to teachers. STEM Pals would feature “lessons in a box,” kits with materials to create water filters, lamps or latrines, which could then be used to help needy neighborhoods near the schools. “We use these kits to spark an interest in project-based learning,” first-place team member Andrew De Donato told The Herald Sun. As its name suggests, the platform would also feature a pen-pal component, connecting schools in the U.S. with schools in India. De Donato and another winning-team member, Jenna Karp, said they would like to see STEM Pals come to life. The $1,500 in prize money awarded by Duke may help them do just that.