[7thpower]

I got into a job in corporate IT at a good company and then moved through a bunch of roles, including putting together one of our first data science/ML teams. A couple years later when I was doing product work, gpt 2 came out, so I had started working with it for fun and writing Points of View for our company about how we could leverage these technologies and what the market dynamics would looks like and implications, etc. (I am basically a dollar store version of Ben Thompson.)

It was mostly dismissed at the time, because Alexa and Siri were what people thought of, but when ChatGPT got released I was in a great position and was able to quickly ship. Now I lead that capability for one of our relatively large subsidiaries.

For me, what lead me here was mostly a fascination with the decreasing marginal cost of knowledge work. There is something about building these types of products that is just very fun and feels like cheating, I love it.

[ta1243]

Was the lack of formal education a big problem getting started with that good company? I'm pleasantly surprised your resume made it past the first line of throwing-it-out

[7thpower]

No, but I work for a company with a very unique perspective on education and merit. They are a large privately held firm that does not care about degrees (for 95% of things).

When I was a year in to my career I sat down with one of our senior execs and asked if I should get an MBA, and he said “don’t waste your time, you are already in a university and we will teach you everything you need to know”. And that has been true.

Make no mistake, it is definitely a disadvantage but I got lucky.