A decade in one post
I wrote this for LinkedIn when I said goodbye to MPOWER Financing. It belongs on a permanent shelf, so here it is.
How do you sum up a decade in one post? An impossible task. Naturally, I'm going to try.
At the beginning of my MBA, a pile of my international friends and I stuffed ourselves into my car, turned up the dance music, and drove to a startup career fair in DC. That's where Yasmin Lalani heard my laugh. She liked it, we both liked marketing, and the rest is history.
When I joined, MPOWER Financing was 15 people in DC helping international students turn an acceptance letter into a plane ticket. The company ran on integrity and data, and it always came back to the people: the students we served and the team that showed up every day to serve them.
What a wonderful, wild adventure it's been: from intern to manager to director, through the foundation years, scaling up, a COVID relaunch, and then growth many times over.
The growth marketing team started as one part-time MBA student updating the website by hand. By the end it was 10 people, some of the most brilliant, creative, ambitious, and wonderfully quirky humans I've ever worked with. We built a culture where curiosity was part of the job and weird ideas got a fair hearing. We knew how lucky we were while it was happening.
A few more people for the history books:
- Mike Davis, my very first manager, back in the internship days.
- Lutz Braum, my first mentor at MPOWER. We started performance marketing together.
- Nitish Malpotra, my first hire. From SEO to marketing analytics, we grew in every direction.
- Pari Lennartz and Mack Wallace, who coached me through tech and product, while COVID set the world on fire.
- Sagar Somani, my fellow wizard. We launched things, we built things, we broke things!
- Emmanuel 'Manu' Smadja, for a decade of believing in me and leading with a drive that was contagious.
- And of course Duncan Moss, manager, mentor, and partner in crime these last four years.
To my team: you were the best part. Thank you for everything, and as you know, this isn't the end.
Something new is brewing. In the meantime, I'm exploring Asia, deepening my yoga practice, and taking on interesting growth projects...
If you need a little marketing magic, you know where to find me. 馃獎