Last week, we held our third annual Career Day at Richard R. Green High School of Teaching. Career Day is an afternoon when professionals from across the city come to the school to speak with our students in small classroom settings about their career paths and industries. The big idea, of course, is to expose our students to careers they may never have even heard of through a compelling personal connection, in hopes of inspiring them to pursue whatever it is that they really love and are excited about during and after college. What’s unique about this event is that every single one of our 550 students, regardless of academic standing or self-motivation, gets to participate.

Given that many of our students have had limited exposure to different careers and have faced challenges and stifled opportunities throughout their education, Career Day has the potential to be a truly transformational moment in their lives, opening them up to a future they simply could not have imagined before.

Career Day is my favorite project, and each year I try to come up with ways to make the event more meaningful and engaging for students. It has grown tremendously from 19 speakers in the first year to 48 speakers this year.

Additionally, we added a Career Fair, in which Amanda Augustine, job search expert for TheLadders, spoke with students about their individual passions and dream jobs. At the fair, students had the chance to speak with representatives from a variety of professions, including the military (Navy and Marines) and AmeriCorps (Vista, NCCC and CityYear), as well as non-profits that offer internships to high school students.

The speaker series featured professionals from non-profits (including Russell Simmons charities), magazine journalism (the editor and art director from US Weekly magazine), graphic design, product design, music entertainment, system design, cinematography, social media, law, nursing, fitness, software engineering, architecture, broadcasting (Terrence McKnight from NPR & WQXR), finance, healthcare management, and education. A week later, students are still talking about the speakers they met and spoke with at Career Day. In high school time, that’s an eternity!

To learn more about Career Day, or to volunteer next year, please visit the website at wix.com/rkessous/rrgcareerday.

Rachel Kessous has been a public school teacher in NYC for 9 years. In addition to being a teacher, Rachel is also the Director of the Liberal Arts Academy, where she coordinates career preparedness programming for students and mentoring programs focused around finding students passions and preparing for college.

In my last post,  I wrote about why it’s important to challenge your existing assumptions when you build products for mobile devices. As I explained in that article, it is not enough to merely copy (web) functionality and make it look nice on a smaller screen; you have to first re-think what functionality is necessary for a mobile platform. Today, I want to talk about finding inspiration in new places.

When we started our competitive research early in 2013, we investigated every major job-search app within Apple’s app store. We wanted to see how they dealt with the unique challenges of mobile devices and, more importantly, solved the problems of their mobile customers. To be frank, we were disappointed. Most apps just replicated their trusted web experience: login, search for jobs, save or email jobs, and sometimes (if you already had a resume on file), you were allowed to apply using your phone.

Not only do these well-known job-search processes require significant time, they are tasks better managed on a desktop or laptop where you have lots of screen space –which is something you don’t have on your phone.

When we started wondering who else was trying to solve similar underlying problems, it didn’t take long for us to draw correlations between the online job search and online dating. After all, they are based on the same premise of matching people and putting them in touch with each other. If you stop thinking about resumes, job descriptions, cover letters and applications, job search is exactly the same thing as dating. We want to put the right job seeker in front of the right employer. In dating, matching is based on things like height, weight, interests, hobbies etc. In the job search, matching is based on experience, skills, career desires, etc.

So, we did some investigating to see if there was any innovation happening in the dating space. To our surprise, there was. One app that has gotten quite a bit of attention lately is Tinder.

Tinder reinvented online dating with simplistic mobile functionality

At the core, Tinder matches people based on their profiles, and then establish a connection between two people that “heart” each other (think “hot or not”). With that simple functionality, Tinder broke the conventions of countless other dating apps that require users to spend substantial time searching through dating profiles and sending messages to each and every person who appeared somewhat promising. Sound familiar? Yes, that’s exactly how most job-search sites function.

Now think about this paradigm in the job-search space. Why shouldn’t we first match job seekers with jobs and then ask whether they consider themselves a perfect fit for the positions? Then, once job seekers identify a couple of well-suited positions, we approach the employers to see if they agree. If both parties are in agreement, a connection is established, followed by resume (and possibly cover letter) exchanges if necessary.

See what’s happening? We take the work out of the job search. Let us do the heavy lifting and present you with initial matches so that all you need to do from your mobile device is tell us which opportunities you’re interested in. If the employer agrees, you two can take it from there.

Benjamin Grohé is the Product Manager for new consumer products at TheLadders. When he is not coming up with innovative ideas to delight our customers, he is celebrating his European heritage by cruising the streets of New York City on his new Vespa or playing football (the REAL football).

TheLadders is the leading job-matching service for professionals.  As a privately owned company, we do not disclose our financials. However, because we are constantly asked about our growth and performance by our outside stakeholders, we have decided to share with the outside world – for the first time — selected company metrics on a quarterly basis.

First Quarter 2013 Highlights:

• Jobs Posted by an Employer: In the first quarter of 2013, we have seen the number of jobs posted by employers on our site increase 116% year-over-year and 21% quarter-over-quarter. Jobs postings soared in Q4 2012 with our move to a free search and post model.
• Targeted Hiring Alerts (THA): THA are jobs sent via an alert from employers to a select group of professionals that matches the requirements of that specific job. This metric represents growth in both jobs and candidates. Since revamping that product in Q4 2012, we have experienced explosive growth.  THA have increased by 368% year-over-year and 47% quarter-over-quarter.
• Number of Employers using TheLadders to find the best candidates has increased 86% year-over-year and 21% quarter-over-quarter.

First Quarter Benchmark:

• At TheLadders, we serve the entire market of career-driven professionals, but today, we are best known for helping candidates and employers find and fill jobs that are $80K and above.  At this salary level, we mostly compete with LinkedIn. Our benchmark analysis highlights our performance vs. LinkedIn Corporate Solutions Customers.

Strategic Announcement:

• With the anticipated launch of our native iPhone app for professionals, we expected to release data in Q3 about our app downloads and, later, about our monthly mobile active users.

 Alex Douzet is CEO and Co-Founder of TheLadders. In this role, Alex is responsible for the company strategy, global business operations, and product development.

Last Thursday, I presented at the Clustrix NYC roadshow. Technical executives and leaders from two of the world’s largest database groups on Meetup, New York City’s MySQL and NewSQL groups, were treated to an in-depth presentation about our direct experience with Clustrix, a leading scale-out database. The event, hosted at our SoHo office, drew attendees from companies like SMBC Capital Markets, Getty Images, Pythian, Pixable, M-Square, and ACES.

Historically, databases were the bottleneck in any system, and in the web world, often the primary cause of website downtime and bad user experience. We wanted to keep the downtime as low as possible, so we looked for different ways to scale our database. We also wanted our developers to focus on adding value to our product, rather than spending time working on a database layer. The goal was to scale the system smoothly and economically as requirements increased. A new database system would be able to handle large numbers of concurrent users, provide continuous availability, and process extremely large data sets.

We had several options to scale our database: break it to smaller databases called shards, migrate to a simple key-value or a document store, buy a big iron database, or adopt a modern internet-scale database solution called NewSQL.

The term NewSQL was first introduced by The 451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett in a 2011 research paper discussing the rise of new database systems as challengers to established vendors.

“NewSQL is used to describe… new relational database products and services designed to bring the benefits of the relational model to distributed architectures, or to improve the performance of relational databases to the extent that horizontal scalability is no longer a necessity.” - The 451 Group

TheLadders became one of the first adopters of NewSQL database technology, which is why I was invited to present at the Clustrix NYC Roadshow. I spoke about scalable database solutions, costs and benefits, comparison, selection, implementation process, and a little bit about the future of the NewSQL database market.

The presentation explained the rigorous evaluation and decision-making processes my team undertook to choose a scale-out primary database and captured the audience’s attention right away. Clearly, we understood how critical it was to put the right database solution in place to help power our business. And we left no stone unturned in our evaluation of alternatives. Several attendees mentioned that the depth and detail of the evaluation were highlights for them. The audience walked away with first-hand insight about the strengths and weaknesses of the many alternative products and approaches evaluated by my team.

Of course, what they ultimately wanted to know was why TheLadders chose Clustrix and what results we experienced. Several attendees took notes as I walked through the specific, detailed criteria and performance results that led to Clustrix as the clear choice. Wrapping up with details about the implementation process brought it all home for attendees, as there’s nothing like learning from real-world implementation experience.

Sergei Tsarev, Clustrix CTO and founder, followed up with an overview of the Clustrix solution, use cases, and architecture. He then closed the session with a live demo of Clustrix on Amazon Cloud (AWS), demonstrating the simplicity of starting up the Clustrix scale-out SQL database on AWS in 6 easy steps, and under 10 minutes.

As expected with the technical experts in the crowd, the Q&A session got fairly deep on the inner workings of Clustrix and how it has performed and evolved at TheLadders. The informal networking after the presentations prompted even more thought-provoking questions and insightful discussions.

Overall, it was a great event and the Clustrix team was grateful to TheLadders for hosting and presenting our story. Perhaps the clearest sign of the event’s impact was that multiple attendees stated that they were “convinced,” and wanted to start testing Clustrix right away. I think that speaks volumes to the clarity of the presentation and the credibility of the Clustrix database solution.

Dmitri Mikhailov is the Principal Database Architect for TheLadders. Prior to TheLadders, Dmitri worked for Fortune Global 500 companies in Europe and the United States. He’s worked with big data for over two decades, designing and developing efficient solutions on every major database platform.

After many weeks of careful planning, my colleagues and I were proud to launch our inaugural JobMobile event in New York City last night. This was the first in a series of nationwide events that brought together the talent acquisition community to discuss major innovations and strategies in mobile recruitment. It also served as a festive platform for us to honor the top 1% of recruiting professionals in New York, better known as TheLadders ELITE.

Our CEO and Co-founder, Alex Douzet, gave a keynote presentation on the ever-increasing demand for mobile solutions across a broad spectrum of sectors, including recruitment. It’s estimated that within the next twelve months, employers can expect 50% of their web traffic to come from mobile devices. This shift in our businesses creates many opportunities, but also comes with its challenges.

Employers cannot simply transform their companies’ web experience to an iPhone screen. Mobile requires an intuitive design and user experience that brings convenience to the job seeker with functions like “one-click apply.” With that in mind, Alex discussed TheLadders’ latest projects, including our mobile-responsive site redesign for job seekers; the introduction of our proprietary, competitive-analysis tool, TheLadders Scout; and our impending mobile app that will allow job seekers to find and apply to the right job on the go.

I had the honor of moderating a diverse panel discussion featuring industry thought-leaders Karen Miller, vice president of people for Seamless; Jack Kelly, managing director and co-founder of the Compliance Search Group; Karsten Vagner, director of people for ZocDoc; and Melissa Enbar, director of recruiting for Birchbox.

Our goal was to have an honest conversation about mobile recruitment and discuss what’s working for their organizations and what challenges remain. This group did not disappoint! Not only did they share their best practices and common gripes, but they also talked about the differences in their approaches. For instance, corporate recruiters look for synergies between their product and marketing teams to build a mobile recruitment strategy that fits their brand and shows off their corporate culture; whereas agency recruiters tend to utilize mobile and social in different ways to attract the right type of candidates to suit their clients’ needs.

What I learned from this lively conversation is that every professional interprets mobile recruitment differently to suit their business needs. From the utilization of social media, to developing mobile-optimized career sites and mobile apps, to incorporating Skype and texting into the interview process, organizations can find large and small ways to attract the right candidate pool.

After the panel discussion, TheLadders Director of Client Relations, Employer Marketing & Sales, Thomas Murphy, honored TheLadders ELITE and presented them with their awards and ELITE jackets (I have to admit I’m jealous – those jackets are great)!

The night ended with cocktails and conversations. As always, it was a pleasure to meet so many great people and get a chance to chat. I want to thank everyone who was able to attend and give a special shout-out to our wonderful panelists for their participation. If you’re a recruiting professional who lives in Chicago, San Francisco, or Atlanta, keep your eyes peeled – we’re coming to your town soon!

Amanda Augustine is the Job Search Expert for TheLadders, the online job-matching service for career-driven professionals. She is a Certified Professional Career Coach (CPCC) and Certified Professional Resume Writer (CPRW) who provides job search and career guidance for professionals looking to make their next career move. Have a question for Amanda? Submit your question here for a chance to have it answered in her weekly column, and be sure to follow @JobSearchAmanda on Twitter and “Like” her on Facebook for up-to-the-minute job-search advice.

About a month ago, there was a rally held in Washington D.C. to protest a perceived lack of action by the government regarding climate change. This was estimated to be the largest group in history that has gotten together for this purpose – 35,000 individuals, filling the National Mall, from the Capitol building to the Washington Monument. For those unfamiliar with our nation’s capital, this is an expansive 1.2-mile piece of land.

I’m telling you this because TheLadders would now require a space of the same proportion to fit all of the employers on its site. That’s right – we hit a new milestone this week: more than 35k employers are using TheLadders to find the most qualified job-seeking candidates out there. Luckily, each hiring manager can search for candidates from the comfort of their own computer or mobile device, so we won’t be renting out the National Mall anytime soon.

Our primary goal at TheLadders is to match the right person with the right job. As a member of TheLadders’ Employer Relations team, I am reminded of this goal every day as I approve new employers to use our site. For those unaware, every single employer profile submitted has human eyes on it before it gets approved (more often than not, my own beautiful blues). Taking this step allows us to verify that only legitimate recruiting professionals are allowed to post and search on our site.

Now, there is no certification needed to make a recruiter “legitimate” – we simply use the information on each person’s profile to ascertain whether they are right for TheLadders. The information can be found in a corporate email address, it can be found on the company website they provide, it can be found in the “About Me” section they write, etc. We take a look at the total package and then make a judgment call. If an individual doesn’t meet our standards or have a complete profile, he/she receives a personal email explaining why they weren’t approved. Often times, those turned away contact our Employer Relations team to find out what they need to do to get approved, and eventually are.

So, is this process of maintaining a high standard for employers on TheLadders worth it? Are we able to have our cake and eat it too? This is a commonly used idiom, albeit one that has never made much sense to me. Rather, I would say that through our approval process, we are able to eat a larger piece of cake that is delicious while still being nutritionally sound. On second thought, maybe desert analogies are not the best way to categorize this success. More than 35,000 employers using TheLadders, all meeting our high standards for quality, is a mark of success that stands on its own.

Andrew Wilson is a Junior Account Manager at TheLadders, specializing in recruiter acquisition and onboarding for the Employer Relations team. He enjoys Cleveland professional sports teams, and things that don’t make him miserable.

A couple of weekends ago, I headed down to Wharton Business School to attend their Startup Unconference.  A former colleague of mine, Ware Skyes, CEO of NoWait, invited me to run a workshop with him called, “How to Write the Perfect Product Spec,” which made me smile. Over the years, I’ve seen many product specifications, none of them perfect, and the idea that on day zero you would know exactly what you want on day 100, 200, and 365 is, in my opinion, fundamentally flawed. However, I wanted to participate regardless, if only to drive that point home.

A big theme of the conference was managing business and technology interaction, a timely topic considering the number of young entrepreneurs I see just looking for people to execute their winning idea. In a keynote from Steve Welch of Dreamit Ventures, he cautioned about becoming too enamored with ideas, “The best idea ever at Dreamit Ventures never made it out into the market.” He observed that teams that executed well together had the most success at Dreamit, whereas the idea is secondary to the team that is executing it.

He is right, and young entrepreneurs should be focusing on finding good partners in technology, sales, as well as in marketing. I like to say, “Five dollars and an idea will get you a cup of Starbucks coffee.” The idea will absolutely change and evolve from when you get that first funding to when you have something customers will love and pay for. The team you pick will thrive with that change or they will not, and a good team that executes together is critical in all companies, especially in early-stage startups.

In 2003 at TheLadders, our big idea was a newsletter of hand-picked jobs sent weekly to sales professionals. In the 10 years since, our idea has changed countless ways; some things we’ve tried worked, while some have not. Our founder Marc Cenedella still sends his weekly newsletter, the largest and longest-running newsletters of its type in the world, but it’s just one part of a much larger and growing business. We have more ideas than time, and how we execute on them has proven to be the most important thing we do.

Therefore, we told the workshop of Wharton MBA candidates that we were not going to show them how to write a perfect product spec; that is an impossible and futile task. In fact, it is not the primary job of the entrepreneur to provide solutions, but rather to identify a need in the market:  “Potential User X has this pain; let us try to address it.”

The problems faced by young MBA founders are amplified when they have no experience in the technological and/or UX domains of the solution space. Not fully understanding a platform’s affordances and capabilities will, at worst, lead to a subpar product and, at best, a long slog of trial and error. Too often, money runs out before anything is launched.

What’s a fresh MBA graduate with a great idea to do? First, he or she should invest in finding great partners who can bring missing functional expertise to the table and then put those partners to work.

We offered the conference attendees a tool to use with their partners, a way to include them in devising solutions. Captain Picard says it best:

The entrepreneur sets the course and the team, as a whole, figures out how best to execute.

One technique to solve this is to start projects by including the whole team in devising solutions via a UX Design Studio. At TheLadders, we start all of our bigger two- to 10-week initiatives with this process. All functional groups are represented, including the CEO, marketing, product, development, and support.

Going back to the Startup Unconference, we spent the majority of the workshop running the MBA candidates through a mini, hands-on design studio. Using a little-known problem statement/scenario from NoWait, they did quick five-minute iterations of solo design and team review. The exercise gave them a process they could immediately take back to their projects, a basis for including their entire team in the problem-solving process.

UX Design Studios will not solve all problems of business and technology/product relations, but it’s a good start and relatively easy for small teams to try.

For more information about design studios and how to run them in detail, please see the following articles from Will Evans, who brought the practice to TheLadders:

http://uxmag.com/articles/introduction-to-design-studio-methodology

http://uxmag.com/articles/the-design-of-design-studio

Kyri Sarantakos is Vice President of Engineering at TheLadders.  When he’s not playing around with iOS development, he can be found hacking all things radio-controlled.

Spring is upon us! For most of us, spring evokes familiar images of Easter eggs, flowers, and longer, warmer days to come. However, according to our members, spring is also the time of year when you’re happiest with your job.

Across the country, employees report the biggest increase in job satisfaction when winter weather gives way to spring, boosting overall job happiness by 13 percent. Are you ready to be 13 percent happier?

While overall job satisfaction increases across the country from winter to spring, the variance of the increase was also dependent on things like regional climate, and a person’s job industry and salary. In colder American job markets, like Boston, New York, and Chicago, working professionals are 30 percent happier to see spring come than their counterparts in warmer markets like Los Angeles, Houston, and Miami. Makes sense right? If your winter is colder, then of course you’ll be happier to see spring than someone in a warmer climate.

But hold on, after further analysis, we discovered that people in colder markets report an average job satisfaction level 28 percent higher all year long than warmer markets (even those toughing it through famously cold Boston winters). Let’s look into why…

• Warmer job markets have a higher percentage of sales professionals
• Regardless of location, season,  AND salary, sales professionals generally report higher levels of dissatisfaction
• Colder weather markets have a more even distribution of professions across their top job types

Basically, more sales employees with a less diverse job market means that no matter how beautiful it is outside, that market is relatively less happy with their jobs.

TheLadders unearthed lots of other interesting trends; here are some highlights:

• Happiest Job Market: Washington, DC,
• Unhappiest Job Markets: Sacramento
• Happiest Professions: Law, Tech, and Accounting & Finance
• Unhappiest Professions: Real Estate, Sales, and Education

One more interesting trend showed that the axiom, “mo’ money mo’ problems” is actually true. Professionals making or “about to make” $100k proved to be the happiest, meaning there is a psychological factor in starting to make six figures (something employers could leverage in raises/bonus considerations), even though the difference between $90k and $100k is nominal in your take-home pay.

Additionally, the trend data shows quickly diminishing returns on incremental salary as employees near the $200k mark. Across all industries, professionals reported being less happy the more money they made after $170,000 per year. Think about that: on average, professionals making $240,000 a year reported being slightly unhappier than those making $40,000.

So who is the prototypical happiest worker in the country? Drumroll please…our analysis shows that a city-dwelling techie, who works in the northeast during the spring months, and makes six figures (but under $200k) is the happiest employee in the country. Conversely, if you find yourself working a sales job in Sacramento, perhaps this research will persuade you to pack your bags and take a cross-country road trip this spring.

* This study analyzed the behavior of more than 390,000 TheLadders members over the past two years.”

Daniel Cronyn is the director of consumer marketing at TheLadders. Besides a passion for creative direct-response campaigns and analysis, he spends his time tracking down obscure music events and even more obscure food choices across New York City.

Hot on the heels of attending TED2013 in Long Beach, CA, I flew back last weekend to deliver a “Founder Talk” at the 2nd Annual NYU Entrepreneurs Festival, a two-day event to promote and support entrepreneurship across the University. As a proud NYU alumnus, I was invited to be a keynote speaker to share my stories of success, along with the challenges overcome along the way, with the rest of the NYU community.

Additional presenters included founders such as Dan Porter of OMGPOP and Paul Berry of RebelMouse, as well as Rachel Sterne Haot, Chief Digital Officer to Mayor Bloomberg’s administration and the City of New York. She spoke about various initiatives underway in New York to cultivate local technology talent for the city’s innovative community. Fellow NYU alumnus Jack Dorsey, founder & CEO of Square and creator of Twitter, made his way back to New York University for a fireside chat with Fred Wilson, co-founder of Union Square Ventures.

You can follow the conversation about the NYUEF on Twitter here.

Tom Post, Managing Editor at Forbes, interviewed me on stage for almost an hour, before taking questions from the audience. Below is the agenda of topics I discussed with Tom:

• The Road Towards Entrepreneurship: From Golden Arches to CEO
• TheLadders is Born to Address an Unmet Need
• The Business Model Comes Full Circle
• A Year of Fine Tuning
• Re-envisioning TheLadders with a Mobile-first Lens

You can watch the entire keynote presentation here.

I had a great time at the NYU Entrepreneurs Festival, and very few other reasons would incentivize me to cut short my stay at TED besides the opportunity to speak at my alma mater. I look forward to doing it again.

Alex Douzet is CEO and Co-Founder of TheLadders. In this role, Alex is responsible for the company strategy, global business operations, and product development.

Last week, I flew to the TED Conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) in Long Beach, CA, my fourth visit. As CEO & co-founder of TheLadders, I attended TED as a guest, rather than a speaker, which is the only show I attend in this more passive role. Although TED is an excellent platform for networking, the main reason I attended the conference was to hear about and learn from outstanding presenters.

Because most of the TED speakers do not work directly in my industry, the immediate implementation of my learnings from there are not obvious. However, there are some amazing moments when I absorb so much from these speakers that it is a humbling experience, demonstrating that a captive audience can learn from practically anyone. Whether a scientist, street-musician, artist, fashion mogul, serial entrepreneur, or a high-school graduate, these categories of “teachers” commonly demonstrate that their ideas are worth sharing. Additionally, I returned home with the feeling that challenges such as climate change, poverty, or job creation can, indeed, be solved. As human beings, if we have a purpose and put our minds to the task, we can be incredibly resourceful and creative.

Bono projects extreme poverty rate of zero by 2030

I highly recommend these three TEDTalks once they become available online:

1. Taylor Wilson, teenage nuclear scientist: Solving the world’s energy crisis

At 14 years old, from his garage, Taylor Wilson became the youngest person to achieve fusion with a reactor. Now, he wants to solve the world’s energy crisis with a safe nuclear fusion reactor. With a $100,000 grant from PayPal’s Peter Thiel, Taylor is skipping college to start a company that will manufacture a safe, non-replenishable fusion reactor (at least for 30 years) that either can be buried or sent to space. His newly designed reactor can produce 10-times the power of a traditional nuclear plant, with the intent of being commercialized in three to five years.

2. Ron Finley, South Central’s renegade gardener: “Plant some shit”

Ron Finley grows a nourishing food culture in South Central LA’s food desert by planting the seeds and tools for healthy eating. He is a true urban farming hero who thinks outside of the box, and could not help but notice what was going on in his own backyard: drive-throughs and drive–bys, both contributing to the area’s high diabetes rate. Ron’s vision started with the curbside garden where he grows fruit and vegetables. When the city tried to shut him down, his fight led to a movement that provides nourishment, education, and health. Additionally, his plans for a green café will create jobs in his poverty-stricken neighborhood.

3. Phil Hansen, stroke-of-genius artist: Embrace the shake

As an art student, Phil Hansen developed an artistic style for extreme pointillism that ultimately caused a tremor in his hand and permanent nerve damage. Eventually, he dropped out of school and stopped creating art until a neurologist suggested he “embrace the shake.” This recommendation propelled Phil on a journey to invent a new approach to making art by embracing his personal limitations. However, suddenly faced with too many choices and resources at his disposal, Phil lost his creativity. To find it again, he challenged himself to create art, only using materials that cost less than $1.00. Phil taught me the biggest lesson from my week at TED:  “I had to be limited to become limitless.”

These are just a few examples of the fantastic TEDTalks during my week, epitomized by the following quote from German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

Alex Douzet is CEO and Co-Founder of TheLadders. In this role, Alex is responsible for the company strategy, global business operations, and product development