Tariq Shaukat, former President of Bumble

The whole point of college and the early stages in your career, I think, is learning how to learn. And I think this is something people forget how to do as they progress in their career. They stop really remembering how to learn and they default much more into 'what do I know' as opposed to 'what do I want to know' or 'what should I know' or 'what do I want to learn.' That kind of skill set, which is really a muscle that you build when you're in college and early in your career, is really important. Preserving the knowledge and appetite and willingness to learn is really important because that means that any situation you go into—I remember one of my first jobs, I was in consulting and we had a venture capital portfolio that the company wanted to sell. This was a small company, a hundred-person company, and they just called me one day and said, 'Hey, can you go and sell our venture capital portfolio?' I had no idea. I literally had to go online and Google how to sell a venture capital portfolio. I think I was able to make a name for myself because I was always willing to go back to first principles and figure it out. So this principle of learning how to learn is really important. And then the second piece is just being curious. I have both a blessing and a curse that I'm curious about everything.

Nobody is a robotic drone anymore—I'm not sure that they ever were—but the expectation is that you're not. People want to surround themselves with people that are fun and interesting. You don't really need to be fun, you just need to be interesting and not a jerk. So 'don't be a jerk and be interesting' is, I think, the most important set of principles. If you can be creative, great, but not everybody's creative. So play to your strengths. If you're not creative but you're just massively analytical, awesome. If you're really good with people, great. If you don't mind cold calling people, then do that. It doesn't really matter—just be interesting and be nice. I don't know if you know Professor Pentland from the MIT Media Lab, his whole idea of social physics, and Professor Barabasi about how networks form and how you can start to see how networks actually connect and predict based on those interactions what happens. But the key that they all say is: how do you not let those things die in terms of an initial connection?

I was randomly assigned to a dorm. It's not like they did a personality test and figured out who am I going to meet. And yet I'm still in touch with half of the people that I used to live next door to, and some of them are still my best friends. When you look at the research, it all comes down to: high-stakes interactions are bad, and low-stakes frequent interactions are what builds trust and depth of relationship. Tony Hsieh, who was the CEO of Zappos—he sadly passed away recently—but he used to give a talk about the importance of serendipity and collisions. The whole theory of what he was doing with the Downtown Project in Las Vegas, and what Steve Jobs tried to build into the new Apple headquarters from what I read at least, was the idea that you want to facilitate people bumping into each other. It's the same notion—it's not high stakes. You're not coming in to present to a group of 50 people your recommendation; that's a high-stakes infrequent interaction. This is you're at the coffee shop and you run into somebody and you have a three-minute interaction, then you do it again, and you do it again. And what you see time and again is that that builds depth of relationship and credibility. And so in a company, we at Bumble spend a lot of time thinking about when we're in the office—which is not all that often—how do we actually make sure that people have time where they can just sit and have a coffee together. Inside of the app, Bumble BFF for example, which is our friend-finding app, a lot of it is trying to move past this idea of you're interviewing a friend to how do we digitally create low-stakes, high-frequency interaction so you get to know people.

So much of any profession really is about: can you engage with people, can you persuade people, can you actually communicate in a compelling way? It's a thing that I tell my kids—my kids are in middle and high school—the thing I tell them all the time: having the right answer is about 15% of the battle, and then the rest of it is can you present it? You don't need to convince—everyone thinks this is debate school or something all the time, and that's not really the case. But the question is, can you actually communicate what you think and why you think it, and then think on your feet? One of the things that I do inside of Bumble that I think drives everybody crazy—but, you know, there's some room for my position—is anytime you present something, I'll basically say, 'Great, what could have gone wrong? Or what did go wrong? Or wait a minute, 90% of that's great, 10% of it's not—let's figure out how do we make that 10% better.' And a large part of it is not trying to find the flaws—it's to be able to get into the discussion to understand how the person who's closest to this thinks about it. The people who are most successful are the folks who can actually communicate the clearest and the sharpest. So that notion of connection and persuasion is really, really important. The mistake I see a lot of people make is they get obsessed with networking—'How many business cards can I hand out? How many mixers can I go to?' I don't do that. I don't think I've ever been to a 'hand out your business card' mixer in my life, and I think I'm probably one of the best connected people that I know, because I generally like to be in interesting discussions. When you're in interesting discussions, you get invited to other interesting discussions, and you meet people through that—inside the company as well as outside the company. Being yourself, and again, that curiosity point, is really key.