David Dold Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, California, Us

I hold together the parts of the company that are effectively what you'd call Trust & Safety. It mostly consists of legal and security reviews including all of the associated annual audits, plus managing all of our obligations under the ever growing list of privacy laws that govern the use of personally identifiable information, and building out the support team to talk to all of our customers about all of the above. When all of that is done, I also manage revenue accounting, plus all of the things that are normally part of Operations like our securing our office spaces and ensuring that we are actually registered to do business as a company. The little things.One of the things I took away from the sheer volume of interviews I did at Dropbox was exactly how unsophisticated the interview process is for most companies. Even at a tech company like Dropbox, recruiters were tracking data in spreadsheets that determined whether they are actually doing a good job. They then needed to balance what could be competing priorities; get enough butts in seats for interviews to meet their managers' targets, and not annoy the crap out of the hiring managers by trying to fill numbers by bringing in lower quality or questionable candidates. Gem helps fix that problem by giving recruiting teams real data that they can use to evaluate their actual results and improve their overall outcomes.Gem is also going to help fix what is probably the biggest problem with sourcing and recruiting now; that being me. Not just me, but me in the sense of every human involved in the decision making process. I don't really worry about making the wrong hire; they happen and they are horrible to deal with but it's a rare mistake to make. What I worry about is all the people that I didn't pass through and how many of them would have been amazing but failed to get an interview. How Gem can help bridge that gap is an important part of why I am here.

Sydney, Nsw, Au

Data is the new oil, so I moved over to Data Republic to take on Product Engagement. The concept of a secure platform for data governance was strong, but especially in Australia this might have been 5 years too early. You can lead a horse to oil, but that doesn’t mean you don’t still need a car to get anywhere. Or something.Prior to moving to Data Republic, I'd always been somewhat in the 'privacy online is a fallacy' camp. When Google CEO Eric Schmidt said "if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," I thought it was pretty much true, as well as being the only completely straightforward thing I ever heard him say. Dealing with the data providers at Data Republic and some of the platform partners, though, started to change that for me and I began to swing around to the concept of individual rights ownership. You should have as much individual safety online as you do offline, which as a concept is going to continue to grow in importance as more and more of what you do and who you are becomes data that organizations are going to want to ingest.Data Republic wasn't at a technical state where they could take that on, though. The concept behind the platform was solid, but they were carrying a lot of technical debt and even more so, their partners were only just ready to dip their toes into data sharing. It's hard to run a data marketplace when your core data provider insists on face to face meetings with every company that wants to license their data. Accordingly my core responsibilities were tied to much less lofty goals than data equality. I built user engagement programs, developed Product Marketing and pricing strategies, took my excellent copy/paste web coding skills to the next level as the webmaster, ran yet another company's AdWords account, and helped develop and manage the FuelD data accelerator program for startups.

San Francisco, California, Us

A return to Sydney had always been in the works, to the extent of our leaving stuff in storage there when we'd moved away the first time. Originally, the plan was to start up a User Operations team in Sydney to support APAC business customers, but the reality is it made more business sense to continue to do that from Austin as it was much cheaper even if we staffed off-hours shifts. My title changed to the ambiguous Program Manager, and my weeks were filled with a variety of holes being patched. I'd do some Solutions Architecture, some Customer Success, some User Operations, and then even more interviewing.This was the end of the run for me at Dropbox, and it was an appropriate end, helping another new office get it's head around what it meant to be a Dropbox office. I would never have thought of myself as a culturally significant person at a company. It's not that I don't like the people I work with, I often love them and keep in close contact for years after we've stopped working together, but I am historically unreliable when it comes to company social events. I even ghosted my own going away party when we left San Francisco, although from what I hear it went on happily without me for a few more hours. Without an Operations team to run in Sydney, culture was kind of my big value, though, so I did what I could. I couldn't kick out another masterpiece like the hairless cat email, but I could show them what we should look for in interviews and how we should handle clients. Also, it's way harder to ghost social events in Sydney since half of them are on boats in the middle of the harbor.

San Francisco, California, Us

There had never been a point in my life where I saw my path heading through Texas. I'd been to Dallas a few times with Google to support Verizon as part of the reseller program and had not been enchanted. It's flat, it's hot, and it's a long drive to get anywhere. But we needed to grow the team exponentially faster than we were able to in SF, so we packed up the house and moved our now two kids to another city we'd never been to before.I'd done plenty of interviewing at Google and with Dropbox in San Francisco as we ramped up the teams, so I was already comfortable with the process of passing judgement on another human being but Austin took it to the next level. We began the office with two bald guys in a small rented room and immediately started hiring for every role. I interviewed for my support team, I interviewed for sales, I interviewed for recruiting, and the office team, and IT, and then for managers to help lead all of these people we were bringing in. By the time I left, we'd grown the team to 150 people and I'd gone over 4000 screens and interviews at Dropbox, putting me in the top 3 interviewers for the entire company. And more than just the volume, the actual results were amazing. This was legitimately the best team I have ever worked with let alone hired myself, and even more important than the great work we did together is all of the amazing things they've gone on to do since as PMs, PMMs, PR Directors, and startup founders.I never expected Austin to be as amazing an experience as it was, potentially topped by the team dressing as me for Halloween although that did highlight the fact that I needed more variety in my wardrobe, but as we rolled into 2015 it was time for the family to make another change.

San Francisco, California, Us

Google was a big deal for the resume, but Dropbox was my home. I started as a sales engineer to take on everything post-sales for the business product, which at the time was still technically just a bunch of consumer accounts with some shared storage space. I'm not sure how we get to the sales engineer title other than I wasn't really a support and I wasn't really sales; I was just someone that Drew and Arash were being told had the skills they needed to hire for if they were going to go after the business market. I felt like a member of the user operations team, I sat with the sales team, and I largely just got down to business on my own.For the first year, everything for the business customers went through me. If you were a Dropbox for Teams user, you probably had my direct cellphone number. Eventually we started hiring to build out an account management team and shifted most of the more technical support to the user operations team. It didn't take long before we realized that balance needed to change and we built out a dedicated support team offering all the fancy options that business customers want, like phone support. I took half my AM team and moved officially to the Operations side of the world.In addition to interviewing people constantly, I also kept my AdWords knowledge up to date by managing the SEM efforts for the business offering, helped do product development for business features which was often (at least in the early days) a matter of 'oh hey we should probably change this', and started up what would eventually become Dropbox for Good. In the first iteration, it was just Dropbox employees donating a team to the charity of their choice, but in addition to just generally feeling good about doing good deeds, I also got to meet Formula 1 drivers and people from SETI. Rad.As fast as we were growing in San Francisco, it just wasn't fast enough so we cast our eyes towards Austin.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

After the year in the Google Tokyo office, our travels came to an end with a return to Mountain View and a role on the sales operations team working on the development of the internal sales productivity app. All told with Google, I managed over $1b in advertising spend, built out teams in 4 different offices, lost my first name, but gained a ton of experience doing a lot of different things. The Google I'd returned to was vastly different than the one I left; from 700ish people when I'd first started to something like 30k+ when we arrived back at HQ, and I could not have picked a more redundant function than sales operations to take up on my return. When your company just prints money like an ATM, you don't really need a sales operations team to help you get from 125% of quota to 130%. I knew I'd reached the end of the road when a sales manager told me they'd keep my recommendations in their back pocket for next quarter in case they needed the extra $2m I'd projected it was worth.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

After returning to Sydney for another year, the lure of international opportunities pulled us onward again, this time to Tokyo. The overall role for me in Tokyo was a little less defined than in Sydney or Singapore. In theory, I was there to help build out the local optimization team for their existing AdWords clients as well as start up the local reseller channel. In actuality, I spent a lot of time sitting in meetings listening to my translator as everyone else decided what exactly it was we would be doing the next time we got together again for another two-hour meeting. I became very well practiced in the art of exchanging meishi, though, so they weren't entirely a waste of time.We did get some good work done while I was there with integrating Japanese operations into the global Google flow and made a bit of progress with getting NTT onboard as a reseller, but after only a year we decided it was time to head back to the US. We had a great time in Tokyo and have gone back to visit several times since, but it is relatively hard to live there day to day. The hard part isn't not speaking Japanese, it's not being able to read. Being illiterate sucks when you need even simple things, like cold medicine. Going into a pharmacy and pantomiming your symptoms, then hoping that they box they just gave you isn't laxatives is not fun the second time. But, for one year, I was 努瑠土 instead of Dold. It was cool.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

While building out the agency and reseller teams, I had taken on most of the product specialist functions for those groups as well as the conversion tracking and analytics rollouts for AdWords in general. My next natural step would then have been on to the product team to eventually become a product manager. Instead, we decided to ditch the house we had just bought 2 months earlier and move with our new baby to Sydney.While in Sydney, I managed the Online Sales & Operations team dedicated to serving the top advertisers in Australia and New Zealand. We grew the team from 8 to nearly 40 account managers while also completely redeveloping the model for servicing OSO accounts, expanding the role of our friends in Hyderabad from support only to full account management. I embedded one of my team members in India for six months, we redeployed our Australian team members to focus only on high growth and top spending accounts, and spent the next year refining the model to the point where it was eventually adopted in the US as well. I'm really trying to think of something funny to say about all of it, but it was all legitimately serious work.We also fell in love with Sydney, getting lost while looking for one suburb and ending trapped on a peninsula when I couldn't figure out how to make a right turn. We gave up on escaping and decided to stop for dinner, then realized we'd found our new home.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

In the middle of building out the team in Sydney, I was asked to relocate to Singapore to help start another new office. We were focused on hiring local language speakers from across SE Asia to support all of the countries in the region and convincing them to move to Singapore where the cost of living was likely 20x what they'd been enjoying at home. It was supposed to be a one-month stay while the intended manager for the office sorted out some visa issues, but it turns out Singapore is really serious about that whole compulsory military service thing and weren't too happy about letting him return to the island without doing his tour of duty.We ended up in Singapore for almost 6 months, which is about five months and a few weeks longer than I think I was designed to live in a tropical environment, although I did find a new favorite food in the hawker market across the street from the office. Carrot cake, that is neither made with carrots or a cake in any way, but instead kind of a fried omelet. Delicious.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

AdWords was still pretty new when I started at Google. Headquarters at the time was two buildings, with the cafe being run out of a trailer in the parking lot and my desk right around the corner from Larry and Sergey. Sometimes I'd run into Larry in the kitchen, just staring into the drink fridge. Our relationship hit it's zenith when he asked me one day what exactly was in an Arnold Palmer as he wanted to try it but the can was the size of his head and it seemed a waste if he didn't like it. Not long after this, we moved into new buildings and never got to continue developing what, I felt, was a burgeoning friendship.I initially focused on client services for the top level advertisers, helping them develop a complete SEM strategy and optimize their spending on Google and the ad network. When the team verticalized, I took on the larger advertisers that were focused on developing their own automated bidding platforms, including Amazon affiliates that spent more than Amazon themselves, and the adult vertical because no one else wanted to handle them. I had the most awkward work conversation ever when my manager leaned over to me during an All Hands and whisper asked if I wanted to do porn.From there, I started the agency team, which led to my building out the operations side of the reseller team, which led to my winning a Google Luminary Award and the $5k marble the size of a babies head that goes with it. Then it was on to Sydney.These first few years at Google are also where I lost my first name and become just Dold.

Hipbone circa 2001 is still better than most of the co-browsing customer support tools I’ve seen in the ensuing twenty years. Unfortunately, getting to that level of sophistication back then also meant it was an incredibly complex deployment which led to long sales cycles and even longer deployment plans.After my time at Infoseek, I figured I was now a technology worker and went looking for a similar role. Joining Hipbone as a Client Services Engineer pushed me into a bit more complex of a role doing actual technical deployment and support work. I'd jump in for pre-sales demo setups, copying the web code for a prospective buyer on to our servers and mocking up an instance of Hipbone running on "their" site. In retrospect, this could have led down a much darker path as a professional phisher as I got pretty good at faking corporate sites including banks and ecommerce pages. Instead, it just helped define my 'stack overflow' development style of finding something cool and then fiddling with their code until I get it customized for my needs.Engineering talent and technical superiority didn't win out in the end, though, and eventually I was the only one left in the garage that used to house the post sales team. It was great as it meant I got to park my motorcycle inside next to my desk, but also not so great as it's generally a clear sign that things are not going exceptionally well at the corporate level. I came out of Hipbone with a much clearer appreciation for what product market fit can do for a company, a burgeoning grasp of HTML and Java error logs, as well as being fully locked in to tech as a career.

Us

My first role in tech, before working for a technology company was actually a cool thing. Through the work with the magazines, I'd met an entirely new group of friends who primarily lived in the South Bay. This led me via a friend of a friend to the graveyard shift for the 24/7 content moderation group at Infoseek. When you give the general public free email accounts, free image storage, and free webhosting, you're going to get some weird stuff loaded on to your servers. Since this was prior to any kind of image filtering/screening software, it was all reviewed manually.It took a good 6 months to get used to working graveyard to the point where I could reliably avoid falling asleep and drooling on myself sitting upright in my chair (and a solid year to get reacclimated to a normal circadian rhythm once I was done). By then, I was running the graveyard shift and building my own little team of misfit toys. This was a group that would now be called Trust & Safety, but back then was just bedlam where anyone could meet the hiring bar, no matter their background or reasons for being there, if I thought they could handle the hours and the stress of the job. Half of that team probably still has PTSD from the stuff we had to review.Eventually I ended up running the entire moderation group plus a second 24/7 network monitoring team for all Infoseek/Go.com properties, a web QA team, and had the distinct displeasure of being the internal resource for reviewing and collecting child pornography for transfer to the FBI. After the dust from the Disney acquisition had a chance to settle, they decided to close the Bay Area office and centralize all their web operations in Seattle. They asked me to move up and flew me in for a long 4th of July weekend visit, but it rained all three days and at that point I knew the party was over.Still, all was not lost. I was in tech, and the Infoseek graveyard shift is where I met my wife (not in that order of importance).

Us

A butterfly flapped it's wings in Brazil, which led me to race a motorcycle 10 years past it's prime in California, which led to a guy from New Jersey introducing me to an editor of a motorcycle magazine in SF, which led to me being sent to Sacramento to take pictures of a motorcycling legend. This wasn't CityBike Magazine, which was highly respected and full of actually good writers, but instead StreetBike Magazine which was not. But it was motorcycles and it was a real magazine, and it was a start. When I got to Sacramento, the organizers apparently thought I was someone else from a more reputable rag and instead of punting me to a corner to take pictures, they sat me down for an interview with one of the most famous motorcycle racers in the world. I didn't even have the sense of professional decorum required to not ask him for his autograph.From that inauspicious start, I went on to do a dozen more interviews, feature articles, race reports, and product reviews for StreetBike while also sowing my seeds around the industry a bit by writing and distributing the race reports for the American Federation of Motorcyclists racing club. This was my ticket into CityBike, where they actually paid me for articles! Bucket list achieved, I was a paid journalist. I did a bunch more interviews for them as well as some more race coverage before finally calling it a career. I'd been racing my own bikes for most of the same period and days of getting up at 5am to race, then hanging around all day watching every single race before heading home to type up the report ended up grinding me down, especially the nights typing with broken fingers and collar bones.As an added bonus, when I look back at the random series of events that led me not just to where I ended up in tech, but how I met my wife and started this life we have now, it was this brief few years skulking around race track press boxes that started it all.

There is almost nothing interesting to be said about working in the insurance industry, ever. Except that reviewing the financial statements from unions can be an eye opening experience when it comes to what they expect they can deduct from their taxes as "entertainment" expenses.When I first started, it was just a small Property and Casualty brokerage, focusing largely on waste haulers. It seemed like a really weird industry for them to have a fetish for when I first started, but what the hell did I know. All of those garbage and recycling trucks driving around your town every morning are a massive liability, as are all the guys that get paid to wade through all the crap everyone throws away to ensure nothing horridly toxic or recyclable goes into the landfill. And the only thing an insurance company loves more than people that never make claims are companies that always make claims and consider ridiculous insurance premiums the cost of doing business.By the end of the first year, I'd passed the insurance exam to become a licensed P&C broker but waste hauling companies weren't buying insurance from a 18-year old kid with green hair and painted fingernails. I mostly just used it so I could sign the certificates of insurance I made up myself in WordPerfect and to taunt one of the partners, in an insurance firm mind you, who had already failed the insurance exam 16 times.I did not know when I took that job that insurance agents were ranked the most disliked professionals in the US, but I understood why by the end.