Professional Development with Victoria Young

Scale - 1:1 guided learning to democratize success  

Victoria Young is Co-Founder of Scale. Scale is a platform for 1:1 guided learning and professional development, featuring experienced operators from world-class companies. By democratizing access to the insights and knowledge executives receive through coaching and making it mainstream, Scale helps people supercharge their success.

She has helped to build, launch, and grow culture-defining consumer technology products and teams, including working with startups as Startup Garage mentor at Station F in Paris, Twitter Chimehack Hack-a-thon, MIT, Kleiner Perkins, etc.

She led the go to market for groundbreaking products at Facebook and Uber, including the initial development and launch of uberPOOL and Facebook Live. At Netflix, she led Product Innovation for shows in the verticals of Unscripted and Series, including "Tidying Up With Marie Kondo" and "You".

In her leadership coaching practice, Victoria combines business strategy with science-backed approaches to leadership, empowering her clients to take action to define their values and challenge their limits. She also writes a newsletter focused on the macro trends and actionable strategies for helping to build the future of work, well-being, and wealth. 

We dive into the benefits of coaching, how text-based platforms can be easier to access, and bringing structure to content.

Eve #WealthWednesday Highlight 45: Victoria Young, Co-Founder - Scale

What was your first investment?

The one that I can remember proactively taking action in was for Nvidia. A mentor and friend of mine at Facebook was really encouraging me to be more strategic and be more interested in my own wealth and grow my knowledge in the space. She kept telling me, you've got to look into Bitcoin, you've got to look into these different tech stocks, diversify, look for it, look for all the opportunities and at the time I had a really big challenge with feeling comfortable in that space. For me, I took what she said and I was like, well I trust her, let me just make this investment. It ended up paying off really well. That was the first step in growing my curiosity and my knowledge and my comfort level in the space of investing. 

How/why did you get into your space?

Business school got me into the world of tech, but I realized very quickly once I was getting promoted and getting into more senior roles, that there were still a lot of areas that I needed to master in order to continue to succeed as an executive in these very dynamic and challenging environments. I always struggled with anxiety, imposter syndrome, and confidence in these spaces and showing up with the kind of executive presence that that space called for. 

When I first experienced coaching, I went to the Hoffman Institute and it was very transformative and powerful for me to develop a deeper level of self-awareness and control over my own emotions, how I thought about things, and reframing. It gave me my power back in situations where I was feeling really nervous or anxious or having a lot of imposter syndrome. Once I saw how effective it was for me, I couldn't not try to help others with everything that I had learned. So I began my own journey of coaching other people. Then my co-founder and I, we were friends and he was a mentor of mine. When he came to me with the idea of scaling it in a more efficient and open way, I got super excited about it. Now that's what we're building together. It's really grounded in my own experience having been coached and seeing how it could really change and turn my career and my life around. 

There's a big spectrum of coaching. The coaching we do now with Scale is much more on the professional development side. When I first experienced coaching with Hoffman, that was a much more on the spectrum of therapy and introspection. Hoffman is further down on this end and Scale is much more on the professional development side. 

But when I first went through coaching with Hoffman, it was really a deep look at all of the patterns that I had that were much more reactive and the default setting that I would go to when I was in moments of anxiousness or stress or panic, and that level of self-awareness around those patterns empowered me to be very mindful of when they were coming up in a way that was ineffective for me, in terms of how I was showing up as a leader, how I was managing my work, my stress, all of that. So that was the role that it played. The way we got there was through a combination of journaling, meditation, coaching in small groups, one-on-one coaching and really having that open conversation and being able to confront yourself in those moments of when you have descended into self doubt and anxiety, as we all do, and building your power and increasing your toolkit around how to manage that. 

What role do you play in the wealth space and why is it important?

There's so much opportunity for women to continue to get more opportunities for leadership. And it's hard to bring into leadership for women, oftentimes because of a lot more of those challenges, like I mentioned, that are more informal mentoring or unconscious bias that we have to overcome. A lot of that isn't easily addressed in a regular cohort based learning course on Udemy or Coursera. It requires a little bit more nuanced support and guidance to think through the complexities and figure out the best approach for reframing or how you show up in certain situations. 

Scale is to really give people that access to that one-on-one support that generally doesn't exist and it has been getting worse with the pandemic. Whatever level of informal mentorship there was before in the office is almost completely gone. Now you can't casually ask a mentor or a friend at the water cooler, “I had this difficult conversation. I felt like I wasn't being respected or I didn't show up the way I wanted to. How might I navigate this?” You can't have those conversations easily now. So having a coach to be there for you we’ve seen is really helpful and effective for people. 

What excites you about Scale’s text function?

People love having live sessions with their coach, which is always going to be irreplaceable. That human, or as close to human connection, as we can get these days via Zoom, is always going to be important. However, in addition to that, people today are so asynchronous in the way we work and the way we maintain our relationships with our friends or families, at work. With Scale, we're introducing messaging as a way to make it more accessible for people to get that on demand help they need from coaches. 

So for example, if you have a difficult conversation coming up and it's tomorrow and you need just some really quick guidance and support on preparing for that. You can message your coach right away and get a response from them in a way that feels like they're always there for you and it's not as much of the heavy lift of trying to schedule and find the time, which we all know can get really crazy with people's calendars. So that's one way we're able to help more people with just a little bit more of a lightweight way to engage with a coach. 

What do you believe is the most exciting thing you’ve learned and want others to know?

We knew that people would be interested in having the option to message with their coach. But I think we couldn't even prepare ourselves with how open and direct and raw people can be in messaging. Today messaging is such an integral part of everyone's lives that talking about sensitive subjects and messaging or things that people might in the past, not have. Messaging is just opening up these doors of really open communication. That's really exciting. We also see what you guys do with Eve as well - when there is a structure around the information and content that you're delivering that helps support people at the foundation from which they can then dig in, ask questions and dive deeper into their specific and unique situation. 

For every guidance sprint that we provide our little skill loop of learning practice and feedback. So you're always given content where you can really absorb and learn some of the best in class concepts. Then you move into practice, which are about 25 exercises that help you apply those concepts to your unique situation so that it's actually really relevant and specific to you. And then the feedback part is where the magic happens and the coach comes in and has all this great context from you that you've shared in your exercises and can really start to dive in and help you assess exactly what areas are the biggest opportunities of growth for you. We've just seen that this model is really effective for people to experience the transformation that they need to get towards the outcome they're working towards. 

Who is a person or company that inspires you in the space and why?

From a personal level, I would say my friend, Jackie Bona, who's building in web3 and launching Valora. It’s super exciting to see her continue to create access for people globally through crypto/web3. Seeing her as my friend move into such an executive leadership role and crush it - it's really awesome to see at a personal level. 

In terms of other resources we have, we are partnering with Career Karma as well. Ruben Harris is fantastic for creating more access to people to break into tech, which again has been such an incredible wealth creator. And we really just believe in communities. So we're partnering a lot with different groups like On Deck, Reforge, and products by women. By being there for the community and helping to bring people together, that's really a rich place for more ideas, more support to be had. We also actually just launched a product coaches campaign to help spotlight the best product coaches that are out there. Shining the light and bringing more awareness to people is a great way to help them continue to grow. That's something that we care a lot about at Scale. 

What advice would you give to someone getting started?

There's always room to grow. It is important to remember to stay open to finding the right mentors and coaches in your life who really can be there for you and understand where you're at or have either some sort of shared experience or similar path that you really respect and want to follow is great to find early on. It can help you with overcoming a lot of areas where you don't have to make the mistakes yourself. You can get that support from someone else and hopefully help accelerate your journey. So I always really advocate for ongoing growth and always being open to connections, whether that's with other people that are your peers or other people in different industries, you just never quite know who you might meet or what might come from that meeting. That's something I always advise people to do: be open to meeting great people and the more open-minded and growth minded you are, the more opportunities will end up coming to you. 

How can we stay in touch?

You can follow us on LinkedIn at Scale Higher. I'm also on LinkedIn sharing tips for your personal and professional growth.

You can also find us on twitter @scalehigher and then scalehigher.com. So all of those places, we are active and always trying to create value and bring in more members of the community together. So hopefully we'll see you there.