I’ve had two jobs that shaped everything that came after. One involved waking up at 4 a.m. and coming home with paper paste in my hair. The other involved waking up at 4 a.m. and riding the Eurostar to Paris. Both taught me the same thing.
At 15, I spent a summer with an outdoor advertising company, climbing into trucks before dawn to paste oversized print ads onto billboards. It was unglamorous work. But when you’re assembling an ad panel by panel, you start to see it differently—the composition, the color choices, the way a single static image has to tell a story in three seconds of dwell time. I didn’t know it then, but I was falling in love with advertising.
A few years later, I landed my first real industry job: project manager at Havas in London. I was 21. They put me on one of their biggest accounts, Peugeot, because I spoke French. I spent the next months riding the Eurostar every week, sitting in Paris meetings by day and heading back to London by night.
That’s where I got my real education.
Direct feedback
The French client gave feedback the way many French people do: directly. No hedging, no alternative suggestions—just a verdict. The London team, used to a more collaborative style, would leave those meetings paralyzed, unsure whether to scrap everything or push forward. Managing timelines was suddenly the easy part. My actual job was translation—not just of language, but of intent.
That experience cracked something open in me that never closed.
At PlayStation, I sat between Japanese teams who communicated through humility and unspoken expectation, and American teams who led with emotional openness. At Spotify, I navigated the American instinct to empower a single decision-maker against the Swedish model of full consensus—where nothing moves until everyone agrees. Every role since has asked me to read a different room.
The lesson I keep coming back to is this: Communication is never just about the words. It’s about the cultural logic behind them—the assumptions people carry into a conversation without realizing it.
Bridging differences
Today, as CMO of Duolingo, I lead a marketing team spread across New York, Mexico City, Berlin, Beijing, and Paris. The work of bridging differences isn’t a side challenge—it is the work. And it happens to be exactly what Duolingo is built around: helping people find shared understanding across language and culture.
I didn’t plan any of this. But looking back, the thread was there from the start—in those early mornings on a billboard truck, and in those long rides back from Paris. The best career lessons rarely announce themselves. You usually find them caked in paste, or somewhere over the English Channel.
My First Job is a recurring series in which prominent business leaders share what their first job was and what they learned from it.
