Mentor Spotlight: Saumil @ SafeGraph

Mentor Spotlight

Meet Saumil, a Mentor at The Commons and Growth Strategy & Analytics Lead at SafeGraph.

To summarize Saumil's career path in one line: University of Michigan -> Business Operations @ Uber (got to sit in a self driving truck and car) -> Chief of Staff @ Common (raised a Series D round and launched HQ2 in Atlanta) -> Growth Strategy & Analytics Lead @ SafeGraph

Describe yourself with three emojis

🚀 Always looking for the next adventure, personally and professionally

🌕 Definitely a morning person; love to start my days early and get going on a good note

🏖 When I'm not living my day to day life in NYC, you can probably find me at a beach somewhere in the world

Current role & location?

📍 Growth Strategy & Analytics Lead at SafeGraph. Currently located in New York City and working for a fully remote company.

What prompted your past career pivots?

I look for three things in a company:

  • Do I like what the company is doing and do I believe it has upside? 
  • Do I feel like I am going to be challenged and learn in this role? 
  • Do I think I am going to like the people I work with?

I am fascinated by numerous different industries and I like joining a startup fairly early to see what it is like to build a company from ground-up. Working on new challenges and different size companies intrigues me. I have been fortunate enough to join a company as early as 55 employees to 10K employees.

What have some of your interview processes looked like?

My interview process varied across the different roles and companies I have been at. Aside from the behavioral parts of the interview, I have had to do case studies, writing assignments, mock presentations, SQL challenges, and Excel tests at various stages of the interview process. No two companies interview the same so it’s important to not let your skills get rusty. 

We love having you in our community at The Commons! Can you share a few things you love about being a mentor?

  1. I love meeting and working with individuals who live in different parts of the world and come from different backgrounds. You learn a lot as a mentor when your mentees work in industries ranging from Oil/Gas to Finance to Media.
  2. The Common Community is absolutely fantastic as well. Everyone is so helpful and friendly and wants to see the best in each other. Whether I want to discuss the latest trends in Crypto to who is the best player in the NBA, I know that there is someone at Skillful who would gladly engage.

What should people who are thinking about joining The Commons know about it?

The Commons' Sprints are great for anyone regardless of what stage in your career you are. You will get to work with a wide array of some seriously smart people and learn a ton of skills that will be applicable to any role. The Commons Community is the cherry on top with numerous engaging discussions and resources to help us all succeed. 

Tell us more about your role at SafeGraph! What team are you on?

I lead our Growth Strategy and Analytics function at SafeGraph. I am constantly thinking about new ways to grow our business while maintaining a data-driven culture for the company. I am measured on how quickly and effectively we can grow our Enterprise, Mid-Market, and Self Serve business while also ensuring that the company can make smarter decisions using data.

What has been one of your favourite projects at SafeGraph?

  • Project Objective: We wanted to quantify the impact of the brand building our teams were focusing on.
  • Project Overview: Our marketing team is pursuing various initiatives to grow our business and our brand. Measuring brand is not an easy thing to do because there are various outlets where your brand can be promoted, ranging from podcasts to website visits to conferences and events. How do we determine the ROI of our brand building efforts was what I ultimately tasked to solve.
  • Your Role: I worked with our marketing team to first identify all outlets where our brand can be promoted and assigned scoring for  the outlets based on intent and impact. I then did analysis across all of our social channels, website traffic, community network, and SEO efforts to provide a weekly brand score for our team to see and base decisions from.
  • Something cool / fun about it: There are so many different marketing tools that allow you to enrich data, measure intent, see where people are dropping off in our funnel, and determine impact. Learning how these tools work and how to build brand scoring in automated fashion was super interesting as it was a blend of  technical analysis and creative efforts.

And now, a few fun tidbits about you!

🎙 Favorite Podcasts: 

  1. All-In Podcast with Chamath, David Sachs, Jason, and David Friedberg
  2. Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

📰 Where you get your daily news: TWITTER -- way better than any news outlet

📚 Favourite Books:

  1. Good to Great by Jim Collins 
  2. Atomic Habits by James Clear

🌟 A CEO or leader you admire:

  1. Jeff Bezos (his annual shareholder letters are a must-read. His vision and focus is unmatched)
  2. Satya Nadella

Join our Strategy + Operations Sprint to get to know mentors like Saumil!

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Mentor Spotlight: Lamya Ezzeldin
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Mentor Spotlight: Lamya Ezzeldin
Meet Lamya, Senior Product Manager at GoBolt & Product Mentor at The Commons!
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