Chapters

After nearly fifteen years at Google and three years in sustainability with Sidewalk Labs by Google and Google Earth, I am uncomfortably excited to announce that I am turning a page. My last day at Google is Tuesday, March 4, 2025.

The story of what I'll be doing next will get its own post. For now, I want to dwell a moment on the ellipsis and express honor and gratitude for my time at Google and for the countless Googlers who co-authored my arc.

My Google Story

After fifteen years as an engineer and engineering leader across financial services, tech startups, and big companies like Microsoft, I joined Google in 2010 as a senior engineer in New York. But I wasn't an individual contributor for long, and what unfolded after was a journey across diverse parts of the company:

• Google Ads (2010-2014): Not my first leadership role, of course, but where I truly understood how team unity, organizational culture, customer empathy, and cross-functional collaboration supercharges velocity and impact. It's where I learned that anything worth doing is always worth doing with other people.
• Google Cloud (2014-2019): Here I experienced my awakening to service-oriented strategy, servant leadership, and workplace community. Working across four VPs, sixteen directors, and countless collaborators, it's where I learned to flip the script from "What do I need?" to "How can I help?"
• Google Maps (2019-2020): High-performing teams share attributes like psychological safety, dependability, and structure and clarity. Here I learned to develop these attributes intentionally and programmatically, not just hopefully and organically. It's where my theory of career stages matured and took shape.
• Google.org (2020): The most influential and rewarding experience I had at Google. Compressed team-building, distributed/asynchronous/remote work, radical focus, the power of purpose. In just six months at the onset of the pandemic, I developed intense, meaningful connection with people I would never meet in person and with true heroes committed to public service.
• Area 120 (2020-2022): Where I learned to think of early-stage teams and projects as purpose-built learning machines. It's not what you've built or even which customers you've signed – it's how you moved efficiently and effectively to reveal customer preferences. If you design to learn, rather than design to adapt, you might win your footrace with time.
• Geo Sustainability (2022-2025): Where I experienced the joy and reward of applying effort and innovation to "atoms, not bits" – urban design, quality of life, sustainability, climate change. Beyond Google, beyond blinking cursors and browser windows, there are communities of people at work – making choices, making things, making waves – and we owe to them our service.

Epilogue

I loved my experience at Google. Well, most of it. Let's be clear – Google is not perfect. It's curiously imperfect, more of a Wonka Chocolate Factory than an Eden. I might expand on that in the future.

But throughout the years, I had the opportunity and honor to work with countless direct reports, students, mentees, and coaching clients, and I learned more from them – about becoming a better leader, manager, coach, and human being – than I could have ever expected.

I also had the privilege of building a powerhouse network of collaborators, peer coaches, managers, thinkers, and creatives who invested in me, stood with me, and provided me the feedback, support, purpose, and friendship to grow.

If I were to list the names of all the Googlers that touched me and enumerated all the ways they made my life more meaningful, more colorful, more enjoyable, more connected, it would be a book in itself. I'll just say thank you, to all of you.

Bookmark This

This post closes one chapter and opens another. It also marks the start of this newsletter, Power Band by Marc Jacobs. In the posts to come, I'll be sharing:

• My next professional adventure (stay tuned!)
• Reflections on leadership, engineering, and organizational growth
• Lessons from my time at Google and beyond
• Thoughts on sustainability, technology, and impact
• The ongoing development of my book, "Power Band: Nine Career Stages from Getting Started to Giving Back"

I encourage you to subscribe and stay connected. Thank you!