How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey)

**Ada Chen Rekhi** (0:00)
You know, it's a terrible outcome to wake up one day and be sort of late career and feel trapped because you have a certain lifestyle or certain expectations of the people around you that you have to go work this job, but then you look at yourself in the mirror and you're not happy going in there. I think that's a terrible trap that we should all try to avoid as we kind of navigate our career paths and find the thing that's sort of most optimal for us, which is usually a mix of career success, but also meaningfulness and sort of alignment in the work that we're doing with our values.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:35)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Ada Chen Rekhi. Ada is an executive coach and also the co-founder of a product called Notejoy. In her coaching practice, she focuses on helping founders scale themselves. Before starting her company, she was Senior Vice President of Marketing at SurveyMonkey. Before that, she started a contact management startup that was acquired by LinkedIn, where she ended up leading LinkedIn's marketing efforts for their growth team. Two fun facts about Ada. One, she started her current company with her husband, which we chat about whether that's a good idea or not. Also, her brother is Andrew Chen of A16Z fame. In our conversation, Ada explains how to make better decisions with a framework she calls Curiosity Loops. We do a live exercise around my own personal values.
She shares a bunch of advice on how to intentionally and practically build your early career path, how to thrive as a woman in Silicon Valley, when to get a coach and what you can do on your own with that one and a ton more. Enjoy this episode with Ada Chen Rekhi after a short word from our sponsors.
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Ada, welcome to the podcast.

**Ada Chen Rekhi** (3:20)
Thanks. I'm excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:22)
I've heard such great things about you from a lot of people, including a bunch of guests that have been on the podcast. You also have this really great Venn diagram of maybe an ideal guest for the podcast. You've done growth, you've done products, you've started a company, you're also an executive coach to founders. There's a variety of topics I'm excited to dig into. Thanks again for being here.

**Ada Chen Rekhi** (3:43)
Yeah, I'm excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:45)
An interesting thing that I'll start with is that when we were chatting about what to focus on in our conversation, we're e-mailing about this and you did something, but if that was really interesting, you ran something called the curiosity loop, where you pinged a bunch of your friends and asked them for input in this really structured way. I thought I'd start there. Can you just share what this process is so that we can learn how to maybe do it ourselves, this idea of a curiosity loop?