The essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Neha Sampat, 47, about navigating multiple promotions while working at Sun Microsystems. Business Insider verified her employment with documents. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Throughout my career I have always had one foot in startups.
I started a PR firm with my friends after undergrad and ran it while doing my MBA at Santa Clara University. It was one of the many startups I founded throughout my life. Currently, I am the founder and CEO of my own software company, Contentstack.
But at the beginning of my career, I wanted to try working in a big company. In 2002, while doing an MBA, I started a product management internship Sun Microsystems. About eight months later, they hired me full-time as a product manager.
I was a kid who fell into a company that was one of his favorites Silicon Valley At that time. Getting a job there was a big achievement for me.
I got promoted Three times full-time in my four years at Sun, but when I moved to a new job VMwareI had to learn to do things completely differently, and it humbled me.
I realized that being promoted too quickly made me overconfident. Nowadays, in my own company, I am more careful about how quickly I promote employees.
I got promoted every year at Sun. I felt like a rising star in the company.
Around March 2003, Sun hired me as a Product Manager after my internship.
I had a lot of confidence because I would already be running my own business. After a year in my full-time role, I was promoted to senior product manager at my regular performance review, where I managed others.
I realized that I wanted to keep moving forward and started actively trying to get a promotion, trying to perform at a level above my position so that I could achieve that goal.
A year later, I got promoted to Product Line Manager, and then after another year, I was promoted to Group Product Marketing Manager.
Others were also getting promoted in the company, but I think I was one of the rising stars in the organization. About a year after I was hired full-time, one of my VPs pulled me aside and told me that I brought an entrepreneurial mindset to Sun and that they wanted to invest in me and my career.
Surya was a place where you could be yourself and unleash the strengths you brought to the table. If you had a really good idea, it didn’t matter if you were an intern or a 70-year-old engineer, someone would be willing to listen, and those ideas could go all the way to executive meetings.
I had the opportunity to think differently, and I felt it had value. It boosted my confidence a lot.
I was managing people with more experience than me
The last title I held at Sun was as Group Product Manager. I was about 27 years old, managing a team of about 15 people. Everyone on my team had been with the company for a long time and had more years of experience than me. It was really challenging because many of them saw me as an intern who got promoted very quickly.
The biggest challenge was gaining people’s trust. I remember one of my employees saying that he didn’t think he should report to me. I suggested having one-to-one meetings to learn from each other. Eventually, he realized that I was giving him projects that he wanted to do, and he even started pushing for meetings with me.
I think I was good for one Inexperienced manager. There were many things I didn’t know, and I was certainly naive, but I did the best I could with what I did know.
I don’t think I underperformed in my roles, partly because my growth mindset made me many peers and mentors who guided me, but I didn’t have the years of experience that one would normally have in these roles.
It was only after moving to a new company that I realized I was out of my depth
I wanted to move to a director position at Sun, but the company was going through a lot of changes.
When it was a darling Silicon Valley In the 1990s, it struggled in the early 2000s. Part of the business I was working on was not getting the traction the company wanted. I knew I needed to take time off and started applying for other jobs at Sun and beyond.
In March 2007, I started working 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 the culture at VMware was very different.
Surya was about good ideas, but I felt that VMware was focused on high pedigree. There were many Stanford and Harvard Alumni and I were not one of those people. I realized how different my career and upbringing was from most employees out there.
The first year was the hardest. I remember being worried about asking stupid questions.
I once had to give a presentation about our commerce store. I’ve had meetings with product management teams where I couldn’t understand some of the questions the team members asked me because of the company’s vernacular and acronyms.
It felt like everything was done by committee, and I felt like I had to convince people to let me come to meetings. They were methodical in their decision-making, which meant that things took longer to complete. I had to learn to do things completely differently.
Get promoted quickly At Sun gave me a lot of confidence. Being at VMware humiliated me because I didn’t know how to grow and develop in a different organization, and it was humbling.
It was great to get a lift early in my career, but this felt like a big downfall. I didn’t feel safe enough to ask questions and seek help.
I spent four years at VMware, but I was Never promoted. I probably should have moved on during my last year, but I also feel like I’m getting the experience of other people at my level.
Before joining VMware, I co-founded a consultancy company called Raw Engineering with my husband. While at VMware I was helping him with the business in my spare time and wanted to return as a founder, so I left VMware and became the CEO of Raw Engineering.
i am now CEO We created another company called Contentstack.
I now take a slower approach when promoting my own employees
If I was going to work in corporate for the rest of my life, I think that Fast promotion I realized that wouldn’t have been the best for my career because you need to move at a pace where you can grow successfully.
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 that promotion. We try not to promote people more than every two years, even if they are high performers.
We’re a very small company with just under 500 employees, but if Contentstack is going to grow as big as a company like VMware, I want to be more intentional about promotion.
You have to give people the opportunity to grow in their role so they can move on to the next role.
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