⚡️Founder Feature: Victoria Young Idol
⚡️Founder Feature: Victoria Young Idol
COO and Co-Founder at Outpace
In This Edition
🔬 Pursue the problems you want to solve
🙌🏽 Tap into the power of mentors and advocates
✏️ Share your top 3 goals daily with your team
About Victoria
Victoria is the Co-Founder and COO of Outpace, a platform that combines 1:1 professional coaching with expert-crafted content. Previously, Victoria has helped to build, launch, and grow culture-defining consumer technology products and teams. She led the go-to-market for ground-breaking products at Facebook and Uber, including the initial development and launch of uberPOOL and Facebook Live. At Netflix, she led Product Innovation for unscripted shows like "Tidying Up With Marie Kondo".
She's also worked extensively with startups as Startup Garage mentor at Station F in Paris, Twitter Chimehack Hack-a-thon, MIT, Kleiner Perkins Hack, and more. In her leadership coaching practice, Victoria combines business strategy with science-backed approaches to leadership.
What sparked your interest in the paths you’ve taken in your career?
Each career decision has been a result of the problems I was most interested in solving at the time, the people I’d be working to solve those problems with, and what I would learn in that process. I’d always been interested in how people make decisions, and how technology plays a role in shaping culture. I studied mass media communications and business economics at UCLA and then entrepreneurship and innovation in my MBA at MIT Sloan.
I always knew that I wanted to start my own business someday. I was fascinated by how companies could solve problems at scale with technology. My work has mainly been in consumer tech: I joined as a Product Marketing Manager at Uber to launch uberPOOL, then joined Facebook for the launch of Facebook Live. There, I got to work on the intersection of consumer marketing, product strategy, and user research as I led go-to-market for new products. This led me to my next role in Product Innovation at Netflix, where I worked closely with content and product teams to help launch new content verticals.
After that role, I went through the Hoffman Institute coaching program, which really transformed how I lead and deepened my self-awareness. I discovered how much coaching energized me as I started taking on clients and thinking about how to get more people access to coaching at scale. Next, I joined a venture studio that focused on the future of work and well-being. When my friend and mentor, Ravi Mehta (former CPO of Tinder, Product Director at Meta, and VP of Product at Tripadvisor) reached out to me to partner up to scale and democratize coaching, I was excited to team up with him to build Outpace.
What are you building at Outpace, and why are you passionate about it?
Across companies, I experienced challenges trying to move from an individual contributor role to a manager role and expand my influence with executives. Without mentors and advocates, I’m not sure how I would have made that transition. Women and minorities are often the least likely to have people helping guide them to navigate politics and organizational dynamics. Once I experienced coaching, I knew there had to be better ways to give people access. We saw people were really struggling at work when it came to more of the soft skills, and needed help to get to the next level.
From the product side, we saw a lot of opportunities to make coaching more efficient and effective by productizing parts of a live coaching experience. When clients meet with coaches, they discuss frameworks, concepts and strategies. But, we believe there’s a better way to deliver that experience by creating more structure and lowering the barriers to entry.
For the past year and a half, we’ve been testing MVPs and building our platform. We provide one-on-one coaching with expert-designed content to help people succeed at work. Let’s say you’re a Product Manager, you can get matched with a coach that has experience in product management and coaching. From there, you work together through the program so you get access to best-in-class concepts to accelerate your learning and personalized feedback for your unique situation at work.
All of our coaches have operating experience at top companies. We believe that in trying to get promoted and be a leader, it’s really important to work with someone who's been in your shoes and navigated the complexities of being an executive.
As you look back, what is one project you are proud of creating over the years?
I knew I wanted to work on a pre-IPO, high-growth company after my MBA, so I joined Uber and helped launch uberPOOL. We were just figuring out how to make carpooling something that was socially accepted and financially efficient. We spent a lot of time ensuring that the carpooling experience was a positive one for people, and did lots of research around pricing, social dynamics, messaging, and other variables that would make people more inclined to try carpooling. It was super interesting to have a product that actually helped the world by reducing the environmental impact of driving, especially in a city like Los Angeles, and also democratized access to on-demand transportation by lowering the price point for taking an Uber.
To launch uberPOOL, we had to optimize the product experience from a pricing and timing standpoint: what was the maximum wait time we could have someone wait for $X price? This required operations, product, and marketing to all work really tightly together to create an uberPOOL experience that people would rate 5 stars. The complexity of the problem along with the hustle of the team made it a really interesting problem to work on.
Right now, building Outpace from 0 to 1 is also super exciting — I’d always wanted to try building a startup. Creating something that didn’t exist at all before that helps people with one of the biggest pain points in their lives — work — has been one of the most rewarding experiences in my career.
What is your communications style as a leader?
At the end of the day, it’s really important to be authentic to your strengths and lean into them. I’m a compassionate and collaborative leader. I’ve been described as the team “Christmas tree,” and I think being authentic and open really helps the team have crucial conversations, which are critical to making or breaking the success of any endeavor.
My main values are to be kind, supportive, and open. This approach I have found helps me achieve business results in a healthy and positive way. Since I'm also a coach, I bring that encouraging and inquisitive approach to team dynamics as well.
How do you approach communicating internally with your team?
At any organization, it’s critical to over-communicate. With remote and hybrid work, it's incredibly important to have a sense of collaboration and accountability. We’ve been able to foster this feeling in a few ways with a solid communications infrastructure in place for this information to flow. This consistency enables us to replicate working down the hall from each other and creating a digital forum for that experience.
On a daily basis, we share our top three daily goals in a channel and cheer each other on reaching them, as well as find opportunities to collaborate. On a weekly basis, every Monday, we share recaps of our weekend, wins, and priorities. This team meeting that shares what’s top of mind and what obstacles we’re facing. We also have ad hoc meetings as needed all the time, and keep the Slack very active.
I'm also a big fan of bringing humor into the work because research has shown it improves resilience and team dynamics. We go wild with emojis and GIFs.
Can you share one of your favorite funny GIFs? 🤣
How do you continue your learning journey?
Over the years, I’ve learned how important it is to take the time to reflect and synthesize what’s happening. We all move really quickly and it's easy to get caught up in to-do lists and goals.
I've made it a practice to write weekly, using my favorite journal. I list my top three priorities for the week and the tasks I want to accomplish. This journal also has prompts to help me make the time to think about key questions. When I write, I’m able to take those learnings and move them forward in actionable ways.
I’m also always learning from people around me, following interesting conversations, courses, and content from people like Lenny Rachitsky of
and Julie Zhuo of . When I was in business school, I interviewed Megan Quinn, an inspiring venture capitalist who gave me this advice — you don't necessarily need to have an actual direct connection with a mentor to learn from them. I took that to heart and follow leaders on social media to read what they share or listen to podcasts featuring their insights.
From the Archive: 🇺🇦 Ukraine: A Special Edition — 6 ways to help Ukrainians and your employees during this difficult time.When I wrote that post a year ago, I never thought this war would still be happening. It continues to be a challenging time in the world. Let’s remember to create and maintain our caring list. 💛Thank you for reading The Switchboard. ☎️ Every interview edition is based on a live interview and personally written by me — Julia Levy. Learn more about why I write. Review the Index of past posts.
If you enjoyed this article, consider sharing it, giving a heart below ❤️, commenting or posting on LinkedIn and Twitter.