Ada Chen Rekhi
Executive Coach & Co-Founder at Notejoy
Executive coach helping founders scale themselves, co-founder of Notejoy, former SVP of Marketing at SurveyMonkey, and former growth marketing lead at LinkedIn.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
Ada Chen Rekhi shares her curiosity loops framework for structured decision-making, her values-based approach to career navigation, and insights on executive coaching for founders. She discusses the explore-exploit model for early career growth, drawing from her path from Microsoft to LinkedIn to SVP of Marketing at SurveyMonkey, and offers candid advice on women navigating leadership in Silicon Valley.
Leadership Principles
- → Use structured feedback loops (curiosity loops) rather than ad-hoc advice to make better decisions
- → Optimize career choices around personal values, not external status markers
- → Early career should be about exploration with a thesis; exploitation comes later
Notable Quotes
"It's a terrible outcome to wake up one day and be late career and feel trapped because you have a certain lifestyle or certain expectations of the people around you that you have to go work this job, but then you look at yourself in the mirror and you're not happy going in there."
— On the danger of optimizing for external markers rather than personal values
"A curiosity loop is essentially going to a whole bunch of people... asking them a specific question and getting back an incredible amount of information for about 20 minutes of work."
— Introducing her structured decision-making framework
"Don't do what people tell you to do. Take it as an input and look for the hard feedback. Look for things that you strongly disagree with or are surprises to you."
— On how to process advice from curiosity loops
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