WomenTech Network: The Big Changes in Life and Growing Your Career with Rachana Kumar

Hi Anna, thank you for the very generous intro.

Yeah, thank you. I think I went to engineering school for my undergrad degree. That's where I learned a lot about computer science and technology in general. But I would say before that, I grew up in India, and while I was growing up there, I grew up close to Bangalore. Bangalore is like the tech hub, the Silicon Valley equivalent in India. I grew up with computers from my childhood, but they were expensive when I was growing up. We just had computers in the school where I could go and use the computer once a week or something, play some games, and learn some super basic things. While I was finishing high school, I was debating whether to go into engineering or to do law or something else. Also, my generation in India was the first generation to see the benefits of globalization opening up the economy, when there were a lot of jobs being created in Bangalore in the tech space as well. Math, science, and tech were really booming, so maybe I should go to engineering school. That's how I landed in engineering college. That's where I would say most of the things I learned in terms of logical thinking, how does technology solve larger problems, all those things I picked up while I was in engineering school.

Yes, sorry, I lost you. Yeah, absolutely. My real interest in technology actually really peaked once I started working. I think the main reason for that is even in engineering school, there's applying technology to solve real human problems, and seeing their reaction to it, improving their life, making it more efficient. I think what gave me the most joy about my job, and that's where once I started working, I was really excited about new technologies: how can I solve more problems, how can we do this at scale, and things like that.

Yeah, I think you really nailed it in terms of superpower, because I didn't realize that until I started working. It's like you have this superpower. So I truly think it's a superpower, like you said. You need to know where you want to act, which problem you want to solve, and you can start applying it. It's basically coding and having the different tech skills. It could be used in different fields. I think also one of the stereotypes of people who are interested in technology is that you have to be super geeky, sit by yourself in some basement, and be a lone person coding away. I don't think it's like that at all. I was a... if someone needs to start using it, you need to do more research, you need to do some marketing to sell the product that you have built. So it's truly a team sport. I think that's another part of the job I was essentially worried about. I enjoy interacting with people and I'm an extroverted person, but it was a truly collaborative job which I enjoyed a lot. That's when I would say I had a little bit of interest, it grew more in engineering, but I truly enjoyed the capabilities of technology because I had more access to it as well once I started working.

Yeah, I think when I went to... I went to RV College of Engineering in Bangalore. I was looking at the numbers. They are substantially higher. I think it's around 30-40 percent. So there are a lot more girls entering engineering schools, which is very exciting. But even once I started working, once I came to the US and started working in software engineering, there were very, very few women on my team. It was predominantly, I would say, it would be me and another person very early. Another engineer, it could be a project manager or a designer or something like that who were female. This was 15-20 years ago, so it was predominantly all men.

I grew up and went to college there, and of course, as I just said, I was in Bangalore. There were a lot of tech jobs and a lot of opportunities. It was a tech hub, so it was certainly not a lack of opportunity. But my sister had moved to the US about four years before I was growing up. I'm very close to my sister, still very close to her. I have a lot of family in the US as well, a lot of cousins. But my sister was here, and she was like, maybe you should come too. That's when I started looking for jobs in the US as well. I thought it would be also, I think working in different countries in general, it doesn't have to be the US. The US is fantastic in that very few countries can offer that. But I've also worked in Cambodia, I worked in South Africa. I think exploring a new culture, a different country, all of that is really exciting. But the main reason I came here was my sister was here, and there was also a lot more different fields and opportunities as well. All of that combined together seemed very exciting, and New York seemed so exciting. It's still exciting. When I was 20, I was like, oh yeah, of course I want to go to New York, which is very exciting.

So I came to the US in 2005-2006. Around that time, the economy was also... where there is a shortage for local talent. For people to hire other people from another country, there has to be a charter. It's supply and demand, like any basic economics, like any other industry. So there were a lot of tech jobs then, and the economy was very good, and immigration was not as hard as it is now. So I started looking, got in touch with a few people, had a few referrals, and I found a job while I was in college in India, and then I came here after that.

Yeah, all good questions. How I landed it is a little bit of a long story. As I was mentioning before, I went to grad school after I worked for eight or nine years. I went to Columbia University here in New York. My intention while going into Columbia was to always do something related to technology, as we already discussed, it's like a superpower which can be applied to any industry. One of the things I was thinking of was an international development organization like that, but work on things specific to technology. While I was at grad school, I did a couple of consulting projects with the UN, and I also explored different opportunities. As I said, that's the good thing about going to grad school. Even with years of experience, I found it opens you up to spaces that you have never even thought of before, and opportunities you've never even thought of before. While I was doing that, someone whom I work with currently, my friend Phoebe who I work with at Etsy right now, she was working at Columbia University then, and she suggested that Etsy might be a good fit because I was very clear that I wanted to work with something that was very mission-driven. You can be helping the world in so many different ways. What really attracted me to Etsy at that given point in time, and still the reason I'm still there, is we help serve entrepreneurs all over the world who are small entrepreneurs, small businesses, and entrepreneurs. Predominantly, most of them, over 85% of them, are all women. So for me, the ability to take women's talents and making skills and help them turn that into a business and provide a global buyer base was really, really exciting. Besides that, from sustainability to diversity, all the different areas that I care about, Etsy was one of the... I started as an engineering manager there. So yeah, the second part of your question was how is my current job different from previous roles. Before I answered that, do you have anything else for what I just said?

That's a really good question. I also want to acknowledge that we're all over the world in a really tough economy now, so the luxury to choose might not always exist for everyone. It's not always necessarily existed for me, but at that given point in time, there was the privilege and luxury to choose. So when you have that, I in general think of interviewing absolutely as a two-way process. I have been a hiring manager, and I have seen from a lot of other leaders, they also want people hopefully on their teams who can ask them hard questions, who are thoughtful, because you're mostly only as good as your team is. The way you can get better is by having a team who can think critically, who can ask you hard questions. So if you're going for an interview, a few things I would look for: one is the core of the business, the customers they're trying to serve, and the problem they're trying to solve. Does that excite you and does that align with your own values? Because the things I care about and my personal values might be very different from somebody else's. So first of all, introspecting and understanding what are the causes that you care about. A way to know, at least in a tech product-driven organization, that they really care about customers is a few questions you can ask about how they do research, how they understand their customer needs, how they bring both quantitative and qualitative data that they have, how they bring that back into their work on a day-to-day basis. Also, for me this is important, how do they think about diversity? Does the team, the whole group, basically look exactly the same, and does that mirror some of the customers? The reason I'm saying that is if as a company you are serving this customer base, does your own team look anything like your customer base? Otherwise, how are you going to have any customer empathy or understanding? Do they care about having, as I said, are they open to people who are critical thinking? Do they care about different people's opinions? Also, I talk to a lot of people who work there. It's a lot of work when you interview. Of course, in the interview, no one is going to say, oh, I think the company culture sucks. No one's going to say that. But you can see how they were, for example, the hiring managers are like checking the company website. I feel like because I also hire people, I feel that... doing what is their mission, no matter big or small, and how it aligns with your own values. So they're a public company, they publish their financials, they publish a lot of numbers. There's a lot of public information you can take. When I joined, it was not a public company. At that given point in time, we were still like a growing startup, but we were a B Corp in the US or something. It's called like a big corporation where you would get certified that you're hitting a lot of goals in terms of sustainability, diversity, and a few other things. I read the full report there. Then I also got in touch with my network, spoke to a couple of people who were working there, and asked them how their day-to-day looks like. One of the things that... trying to connect are some ways you can understand what's happening there.

Yeah, those are all good questions. I think as a rapidly growing company, when I joined, just as an example, there were I think less than 100 engineers at Etsy. We have over 600 engineers now. The public part... of course, I think it's important that some of the things change from a startup. The culture in a startup is a little different, but when once you start taking public money, you're accountable for a lot more things. So for me, some of the biggest things that I learned, I was a senior manager then, became a director, senior director, now VP. I managed all different shapes and forms of the organization, and I have seen it grow. It was basically to always be open to change. I think it's one of the most important things I learned in the whole process. I can answer more practically. In the middle of a pandemic, if I said, oh, I went and ate in restaurants all the time or traveled in airplanes all the time, I missed that, but things have changed. A lot of things are outside your control. I feel especially in a workplace, as long as things are changing for the better for the new phase, and the core value and the mission is the same, you need to learn to adapt very quickly. I think it's good fun to be nostalgic, but it's also important to know when to move on and accept the new reality. So one is having a very open mind to change, and as a leader, never being comfortable with 'this is how I run things.' For example, when we were a much smaller private company, the amount of emphasis we had on our business numbers and goals and KPIs was much lesser because organically we were growing so much. Once you're accountable to the public and you have to talk about your financial results every quarter, you have to track it much more closely, you have to see if you're hitting your goals on a monthly basis. So a lot of these things change, but I also think that they're all great learning opportunities. To see these challenges as opportunities and to be open to change, because nothing will be static and the same all the time. So to have the growth mindset, someone who can identify patterns and gaps that nobody else is noticing and caring for, and proactively working on making it better and filling those gaps, I think it's always what helps people be successful.

Yeah, I think to begin with, everyone literally all over the world were... hard-hit cities. This was right in April, and a lot was changing very quickly. It was certainly challenging. I can start from a personal point of view and then talk about as a leader some of the things I did and Etsy as a company did to help navigate through that situation. First of all, I keep joking that with two working parents and no immediate family around us, the amount of support that was there in my personal space, from helping with childcare to helping with... anywhere, but the work was kind of the same. There was no childcare and two working parents at home. So how do we even work to begin with during the day was something that took us some time to figure out. My husband and I had to figure out schedules: will you take care of the child for some time, then I will? But you can't go anywhere and neither can anyone come into the house. So just figuring out the personal situation of how to work, it's like having three jobs then. You're cooking three meals a day, taking care of a child, and also working full-time. Even though you're sharing responsibilities with your partner at home, it's still a long time. You stay... and it's also important that I'm present for them and I'm emotionally available to those people, because everyone is trying to figure out. You have your responsibility both in your personal and professional space. In the past, whenever at work I felt like things were going crazy and I needed more help at home, I would ask my mom or my mother-in-law or my sister. They all literally live in the other part of the globe to either plan something for me or come here. None of that even existed because we were all left on our own. So it was a struggle to figure out things personally. But on the professional side, I feel really, really grateful to work for a company that... including me were very transparent that we understand this is not normal, and there is a lot of flexibility. Just communicate that very clearly to your team. Once you figure out that you can work, you can't work till 12 o'clock that day, you can work starting after 12 o'clock in the afternoon. Communicate that to your team, add that on your calendar. So even now, we continue to roll out a lot of different ways of flexibility, from leave to parental leave to providing more childcare support, to reimbursing some cost for online classes for kids. So we started testing that fairly early, and we also saw that some people had their laptop and their full work setup, of course everyone has a laptop, but a lot of people didn't have a work setup like a chair or a monitor. It's not just about having a laptop and doing something; it's about working well and comfortably, having the back support, different factors. We immediately started providing support for all those things. We also, as leadership teams, started doing check-ins more often. In the first few weeks of COVID, when we didn't know what was happening, our CEO would talk to the company at least once or once in two weeks, address things directly with them. Because one is trying to get work done, but also all the world events that are happening. Somebody in your family might be sick, or your extended family might be sick. Processing everything that's happening. So besides expensing basic things like all the office-related work equipment, it's also forming employee resource groups to support that, and managers being available, providing a lot of flexibility. I think these are some of the things that Etsy tried to do. Certainly on my team, I'm hoping there's a culture where if people need to take time off or they have other responsibilities, they all communicate about it very openly.

Yeah, yeah, that's fun. Yeah, I like when you're saying in your bio on LinkedIn you stated doing the impactful work but also still having fun. I think that's one of the important components of enjoying work, regardless of which stage you are at, is actually having fun. If my son interrupts a meeting now, we all do video conferences. He picks up, I give him a notepad and a paper, he picks a person and he keeps drawing them. So now my coworkers have their portraits done by my son. So after the meeting, I send them pictures: see, look, he drew you.

Yeah, I think that's a really good and interesting question. The way I think about this in general is based on who you are and the societal constructs around it. Certainly, the minute you're born, whether it's a baby boy or a baby girl, differentiation starts. Then there are so many other things where your life experiences might be very different from your teammates based on gender. It's a predominant one, as well as class and geographic location. All these things add to your life experience and what you are as a leader. Of course, there is a difference because of that. One predominant one is gender, so that's where I think there's a difference sometimes between male and female leaders. But that's also why diversity is so important on teams, not just gender diversity but diversity based on ethnicity. All these things are really important because then you have a difference of opinion. Diversity of thought is what I was getting to. Then you have diversity of thought, and that's how even leadership differs. To answer your question, is it different? I think it is different in some ways, based on your background in general. But I think traditionally, a lot of male forms of leadership that are always poker face, perfectly put together, nothing can shake you, all that stereotype of what a leader should be, I think hurts company culture at large. I'm not saying that kind of leadership is not great, but what I'm trying to say is that shouldn't be the only form of leadership. I think I discussed this when we were talking at the Women Tech Network conference last time. You can complement each other. For example, if one of my coworkers is always very poor, very closed, and they might be an introvert, but that's what I said, it can be a different personality. They don't open up as much. I might be a person who talks more about my feelings and is very transparent about my thoughts. I think we can complement each other and work very well together. Women are more empathetic and vulnerable, and I think that acts as a great dimension to leadership, especially at times of crisis. If you even look at a lot of countries which have done quite well during COVID, that kind of leadership might also be better, which is again my personal opinion, I might be wrong.

I don't see as many as I would like to. That's the honest answer. I feel like every now and then, it's two steps forward, one step backwards, what keeps happening in diversity and technology space. I could be in my own bubble. Let's see, on my executive team, there are more women than men, and it's one of the very few tech companies where that's the case. But even in a company like this, there's not as much representation, especially in engineering. There's still a lot of work to do. But honestly, when I entered the industry, which was a while ago, no one even talked about lack of gender diversity. In my first five years, I saw that, and even if I felt really bad about it, I felt like no one was talking about it. That in turn made it not okay for me to talk about it, even if I felt that we need to do something to improve the situation, because you didn't want to be the person... I think it shouldn't be on the underrepresented person to be the one talking about diversity. I think they should do that more, because as the underrepresented person, it shouldn't be my sole responsibility. So I feel like there's so much consciousness and talk about it now, so I feel hopeful about it. But are we doing great? The answer is absolutely not.

Yeah, I think it's an interesting question. I have thought about it as well. It's a combination of a few things. As I said, Etsy was a place where I truly enjoyed my work and the team. I did get... it was also a hyper-growth company, and if you're a top performer in a hyper-growth company, you can get more and more responsibilities and grow fairly quickly. That doesn't... it's also a combination of being at the right place at the right time. But I would say a few things. One is to begin with, to have a supportive partner and a supportive family, because however much you think those two things are separate, it's very hard to make them separate. I really think a lot of my parents, my in-laws, my sister, my husband... my husband is a true partner in terms of taking care of the child and those things. So having a supportive space at home where they're there to cover a lot of things in your personal space, I think it's really helpful for just a decent amount of peace of mind. Also, I hire a lot of help so that when I have free time, I'm just spending it with my family. But I had absolutely no financial backing, so it was a lot of trade-offs. If I spend so much money right now, will it be ROI positive in the long term for my career? That's the question you need to ask. Everybody's situation is different, and even being able to afford help is a privilege. After that, in the professional space, I would say seeking... having people at work. I don't mean just work friendships to hang out, but people who are genuinely both within your workspace and larger in the industry who could be your mentors and who you could have honest conversations with. You have to be strategic. It's not like the path is always going to be... I think at Etsy, I've had long-term friends and mentors whom I feel like I can go to with any career questions. If I have a dilemma, I have a solid group of women, both friends and mom friends, whom I can talk about parenting. The same thing also gets mixed up with friends from grad school, other women leader friends who I feel like whenever I think, 'Oh my god, I can't do this,' I have a group to vent, and they can give solid advice as well. Then the last suggestion I would have is, if you are ambitious and you want to be happy, I would say the last one would be open to taking risks. If there's a challenge at work where no one wants to touch it because they think it's not going to work, I feel like I always feel attracted to those things because people will think this is not going to work, so no one wants to try it. I always think, it's something new, but why do we think it's not going to work? Let's at least give our best. So I think I have a decent amount of appetite for risk, and I'm okay with failure. So combination of these things.

Yeah, sure. I came here when I was 21-22, so I was in India before that.

Yeah, I think it will be a combination of all the things, that's what I'm guessing. We are still trying to figure it out like everybody else. But I think it will be a remote-friendly culture, and we've had remote engineers. So I would say it would be a combination of remote, some people in office, some people who are partially remote. I'm guessing like most companies, especially the ones who can afford to work remotely up to a certain extent, have to be open to all the different options.

Yeah, I think it's a good point. Yeah, and why you're telling this? Yeah, so I think I don't know what a perfect work-life balance looks like. I think it's kind of month-to-month, day-to-day, it looks differently. Some days are great days where you feel like you accomplished a lot at work and had really quality time with family. Some days are like you have a 14-hour work day, and some days it's like you're finding... I've figured out over time what a decent, at least personally for me, work-life balance looks like. What I mean by that is when my son was born, we had no idea what we were doing. It was so hard to figure out what to do with a newborn. So it was in general very challenging. Of course, my mom was there, so that was helpful. But my husband and I, it took us a while to even figure out how to divide chores and childcare work. It was not super smooth. One day we woke up and we knew everything. It was a lot of arguing and eventually figuring it out. Now that my son is older, he's almost four and a half, five, so it's a much easier age. One of the things that is nice is that when people used to work in physical offices, now we get to spend a lot more time with them on weekdays. I would try to only keep everything Monday to Thursday, and anything I do from Friday evening onwards till Monday morning, I was very sure I had to take my son everywhere I go, whether it's meeting a friend or traveling. It's one of the things I love. What are you willing to give up? That's kind of what I think, and that applies to different times in life. I very rarely do socializing which doesn't involve other kids on weekends. But I really enjoy traveling. It was hard to travel alone from the US to Italy with a child. The good thing was my sister had arranged everything there, so I didn't have to go and figure out anything. That's the good thing about having a support network. Even if they know you enjoy traveling, they have arranged everything for you, you don't have to figure out logistics. But my son was jet-lagged, and it was not the usual vacation mode. It was a different way of traveling, which you get used to very quickly. You can't do some other things which you used to do before, and I think that's totally fine because you're doing so many new things, seeing the world through the eyes of a child, and learning so many things with them and through them. So yeah, and you know, we're coming to this point when you said also about being open to change in your job, and I think it's the same in your life, being open to change and figuring things out on the go.

Yeah, that's a good question. We do hire entry-level developers, and we do hire people from boot camps. We have actually a lot of people from boot camps who are very successful engineers. I honestly think very good talent. You can go to etsy.com/careers page, and usually we have... I can double check we still have it. I think September-October is also the season we start hiring new grads, so we will usually have a job posting for a new grad there. That's the one for new college graduates, and that's the one you would apply for.

Several messages, maybe three messages. I speak to a lot of people who are graduating from college, graduating from grad school, and they're like, should I take a job that's only focused on data science because that's the up-and-coming field? I'm like, yeah, that would be great if that's what your interest is. But some people will be like, if I enter finance, can I then switch to something else? I feel like you can get so obsessed about what your first job has to be perfect. I would kind of think of it as choose a first job which will give you the best learning opportunity. Also, given that we are in a tough economic situation, I would say as long as you feel like you'll be happy and the culture is... don't create structures for new people to learn. So that's something I would look for. There is nothing called the perfect job. You can switch industries, you can switch programming languages, you can switch job profiles. You can do so many things later on in life, so don't be too obsessed about finding the perfect thing. If you're somewhere in the middle of your career, I would say go back to the risk-taking part of things. If there is an assignment in another country, or if there's a new business line which seems challenging, or another geographic location, if you have the opportunity to have a traveling job or even do something... from that experience, I feel like they already know it, and they can give me advice maybe if they're further along in their career. I would say always having a learning mindset. I never feel like I've learned everything that's there for my job, and I can just be successful this way. I always feel nervous about so many new technologies and so many new things happening. A little bit of 'I don't know how to do XYZ part of my job too well' is okay. Having that learning mindset, irrespective of even if you're successful in your career and pretty senior, I think it's helpful.