My First Job: How I Found Success By Googling It

“We’re putting you on UBS, sound good?”

My boss, Joe, stands over my desk. 

“Absolutely,” I respond. Joe walks away. I open Google and search, “What is UBS?”

Fresh out of college, I joined 7ticks, LLC as an Administrative Assistant just days after they’d moved out of Joe’s basement and into their first office. We were both scrappy and new then but now, more than two years later, I’d just been named Project Manager, and 7ticks was landing big clients like UBS.

7ticks builds the networks that connect traders to financial exchanges faster than anybody else. As Project Manager, I was to facilitate communication between the quietly brilliant network architects in my office, the “trolls” in the datacenter who handled the physical connections, and, perhaps scariest of all, the end users: bank executives who would unironically use the phrase, “Time is Money.”

UBS is intimidating and I’m reminded of being  a kid. Whenever I was nervous about something my mom would say, “Be like that commercial: Just Do It”. And so, with the motivation of both my mother and Nike’s world-class marketing team behind me, I schedule a kickoff call with UBS.

After some small talk, I gain confidence and begin the list of questions I was given:

Question One. “Do you require copper or fiber connections?” Seems simple enough.

“It’s CAT 5e,” someone responds. I’m in deep.

I search “CAT 5e copper or fiber” while moving on to the next question.  A few days later, the next time a client asks for CAT 5e, I confidently write down, “Copper.”

And so it went for two more years: Googling and learning. A short time later, as a surprisingly friendly datacenter troll shows me how to make my own CAT 5e cable it dawns on me:

This is my job, and I’m just doing it.