- Neha Sampat says being promoted quickly at Sun Microsystems made her overconfident.
- When she moved to a job at VMware, she struggled to navigate a new environment.
This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Neha Sampat, 47, about navigating multiple promotions when she worked at Sun Microsystems. Business Insider verified her employment with documentation. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I've always had one foot in startups throughout my career.
I started a PR firm with my friends after undergrad and ran it while pursuing an MBA at Santa Clara University. It was one of many startups I founded throughout my life. Currently, I'm the founder and CEO of my own software company, Contentstack.
But early in my career, I wanted to try working for a big company. In 2002, while doing my MBA, I started a product management internship at Sun Microsystems. After about eight months, they hired me full-time as a product manager.
I was a kid who fell into a company that was one of the darlings of Silicon Valley at that time. Getting a job there was a big accomplishment for me.
I was promoted three times in my four years full-time at Sun, but when I moved to a new job at VMware, I had to learn to do things completely differently, and it humbled me.
I realized being promoted too quickly made me overconfident. Nowadays, at my own company, I'm much more careful about how rapidly I promote employees.
I got promoted annually at Sun. I felt like a rising star in the company.
Sun hired me as a product manager after my internship, roughly around March 2003.
I had a lot of confidence because I'd already run my own business. A year into my full-time role, I got promoted at my regular performance review into a senior product manager, where I was managing others.
I realized I wanted to keep moving up and began actively trying to get promoted, attempting to perform at the level above my position so I could achieve that goal.
A year later, I was promoted to product line manager, and then after another year, I was made group product marketing manager.
Other people were getting promoted at the company as well, but I think I was one of the rising stars in the organization. Roughly a year after I was hired full-time, one of my VPs pulled me aside, saying I brought an entrepreneurial mindset to Sun and they wanted to invest in me and my career.
Sun was a place where you could be yourself and hone the power you brought to the table. If you had a really good idea, it didn't matter whether you were an intern or a 70-year-old engineer, someone would be willing to listen, and those ideas could go all the way up to executive meetings.
I had the opportunity to think differently, and I felt it was valued. It fed my confidence a lot.
I was managing people with more experience than me
The last title I held at Sun was as a group product manager. I was around 27, managing a team of about 15 people. Everyone on my team had been at the company longer and had years more experience than me. It was really challenging because many of them saw me as the intern who got promoted way too quickly.
The biggest challenge was gaining people's confidence. I remember one of my employees saying he didn't think he should report to me. I suggested having one-to-one meetings to learn from each other. Eventually, he realized I was giving him projects that he wanted to do, and he started instigating meetings with me, too.
I think I was good for an inexperienced manager. There were many things I didn't know, and I was definitely naive, but I did the best I could with what I knew.
I don't feel I underperformed in my roles, partially because my growth mindset led me to have many peers and mentors who guided me, but I didn't have the years of experience a person in these roles would typically have.
It was only after moving to a new company that I realized I was out of my depth
I wanted to step up to a director position at Sun, but the company was going through a lot of changes.
While it was a darling of Silicon Valley in the 1990s, it struggled in the early 2000s. The part of the business I worked in wasn't getting the traction the company wanted. I knew I needed to leave and started applying for other jobs in and outside Sun.
In March 2007, I started a job at VMware. It was a lateral move — I was hired as a group marketing manager running their e-commerce channel. I expected to keep rising through the ranks, but VMware had a very different culture.
Sun was all about good ideas, but I felt VMware was focused on high pedigree. There were a lot of Stanford and Harvard alumni and I wasn't one of those people. I realized how different my career and upbringing were from the majority of employees there.
The first year was the hardest. I remember being worried about asking stupid questions.
I once had to put together a presentation about our commerce store. I had meetings with the product management teams where I couldn't even understand some of the questions the team members asked me because of the company vernacular and acronyms they used.
It felt like everything was done by committee, and I felt like I had to convince people to let me attend meetings. They were methodical about decision-making, which meant getting things done took longer. I had to learn to do things completely differently.
Getting promoted fast at Sun gave me too much confidence. Being at VMware humiliated me because I didn't know how to grow and thrive in a different organization, and it was humbling.
It was great to be uplifted early in my career, but this felt like a big fall. I didn't feel secure enough to ask questions and seek help.
I spent four years at VMware, but I was never promoted. I probably should have moved up during my last year, but I also think I was catching up to the experience others had at my level.
Just before joining VMware, I co-founded a consultancy company called Raw Engineering with my husband. I'd already been helping him with the business in my spare time while at VMware and wanted to return to being a founder, so I left VMware and became Raw Engineering's CEO.
I'm now the CEO of another company we built called Contentstack.
I now take a slower approach when promoting my own employees
If I were going to work in corporate for life, I think the rapid promotions I experienced wouldn't have been great for my career because you need to move at a pace where you can successfully grow.
But as an entrepreneur, I think it was great because it forced me to do things outside my comfort zone.
Now, at Contentstack, we're very intentional about promotions. We try not to promote people more often than every two years, even if they're super high-performing.
We're a much smaller company, with just under 500 employees, but if Contentstack were to grow as large as a company like VMware, I'd want to be even more intentional about promotions.
You have to give people the opportunity to grow in their roles for them to advance to the next one.