Navigate Career Pivots with John Kim #37

John Kim has had an unconventional career, pivoting from professional gamer to software developer, to serial entrepreneur. We discuss how to assess your career, make pivots, and balance your growth long term. John shares principles from complexity science to help you navigate unknowns, risks, & opportunities in your career. Plus other powerful frameworks to make better career decisions.

"So if you're working at a bigger company, what you're really trying to optimize for is how quickly can you move up in turn terms of 'Abstraction Layer.' It's not about titles. It's about, can you actually understand the next layer of abstraction within the business.

So if you're like an IC, what is the engineering manager's priority right now for your team? What is the, let's say a director of engineering's priority right now for the team?

And if you actually start caring about those things, you'll be able to make a lot more faster progress."

JOHN KIM, CO-FOUNDER & CEO @ SENDBIRD

John S. Kim is the Co-founder and CEO of SendBird, the world's no.1 chat API. The platform currently serves over 100M monthly chat users across the world's leading companies such as Reddit, Delivery Hero, Yahoo!, Rakuten, Paytm, Accolade, Livongo, and DHL. John is a serial entrepreneur, engineer at heart, and an expert in the API economy and communications tech space. Little known fact about John is that he was Korea's no.1 pro-gamer for Unreal Tournament.
 

SHOWNOTES

• How John went from professional gamer to #1 chat API company @ Sendbird (2:47)
• Creating vs. consuming & why John walked away from professional gaming (6:58)
• John’s early career pivots: from software engineer to social gaming & Y Combinator (9:08)
• How to apply the complexity science principles of “Convergence” & “Divergence” to your career decisions (11:17)
• Navigating “Abstraction Layers” & why you need to invest time to build “social capital” in your career (15:31)
• The “Human Capital” Framework & balancing the skills you accumulate throughout your career (19:04)
• Building emotional capital, training for cognitive empathy, & the tradeoffs of agreeableness (20:41)
• How to manage expectations & communicate with stakeholders when you need to pivot (27:34)
• How John applied these principles to make career decisions and pivot his company (30:23)
• How to pick careers aligned with your happiness and motivation (37:10)
• How to pivot your career using the “2PM” framework (people, product, market, money) (39:59)
• Future founders: Why you’ll be happier making 10 year career decisions & quick pivots (44:04)
• Takeaways (46:23)

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