Walk Into Executive Offices

A story about how David Friedberg learned to directly engage with executives at Google through his mentor Megan Smith.

"I worked with an amazing person named Megan Smith - she's really well known in Silicon Valley, she was Obama's CTO. She was my mentor at Google and showed me how I could just walk into Larry and Sergei's office and walk into Eric's office.

I'd be talking to her about something and she'd say 'Let's go see what Eric thinks' and she'd drag me over to Eric's office. He'd be sitting there on his computer doing emails and she'd barge in and say 'David's got this idea, let's talk about it.'

She really showed me that we can and should have this kind of dialogue with these executives because our job was to really help push and think about what direction we can take Google. I had great mentorship there. I ended up in meetings with Larry and Sergey pitching them on analytics and offering advertisers the ability to see data. While they were initially resistant, calling third-party cookies 'evil', we eventually convinced them by showing how it could improve user experience and conversion efficiency."