This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Melody Meckfessel, a former vice president of engineering at Google who founded the data-platform startup Observable in 2019. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I joined Google in 2004 as an engineering manager. It was the most thrilling job for a person like me who loves to build software that people find useful. At Google, I worked on search, data tools, and systems that Google was using to bring data centers online.
I couldn't imagine as a kid growing up on a farm that I would help build some of the most influential systems in the world.
I grew my career at Google year after year. And all of a sudden (though it wasn't all of a sudden because it was over 14 years), I was a vice president of engineering at Google Cloud, leading an organization that was the size of a midsize company.
I was flying all over the world to speak with customers. Chief information officers and chief technology officers of global financial institutions were looking to me for advice about building their systems. It was incredible. I could see and talk to the people I was helping, and the teams I led were having an influence on major areas of Google's business.
In my last few years there, though, I had these moments when I wanted to go and build something new. At Google, I learned how to measure everything to understand what's working and what's not, and I saw this whole new area of helping people work and collaborate with data that wasn't being addressed. I imagined creating a platform that empowered people to tell stories with data, whether you're a Stitch Fix, a biopharmaceutical company, or a teacher.
But I couldn't see the path to build that idea within my job at Google. For one thing, I didn't have the time.
I was choosing to grow my career and my responsibility at Google.
I'm a single mother and, because I prioritized my schedule with my daughter, I was doing things like flying to Munich for a business meeting and immediately flying home — two straight days of travel. I would be off my phone for evening time with my daughter, but then I would get back online to work. I was spending hours commuting to meetings and working on vacations.
I had someone close to me recently say, "Melody, you always go do the thing, the challenging thing." In early 2019, after years of thinking about this data platform idea, I knew I needed to go do this next thing. Like, every part of me needed to go see if I could.
The hard parts of being a CEO
So in April 2019, a year before the pandemic started, I left Google and founded my startup, Observable, a data-collaboration platform that helps anyone tell stories with data. Since then, I've raised two funding rounds, a Series A and Series B, and I'm laser-focused on growing the platform to help more people globally work with data.
I built a great team of about 40 employees and a community of nearly half a million people who are engaged every month viewing the data stories our users create.
If you asked me about the hard parts of being a CEO, I would say the differences in my duties from those at Google and trying to understand how to tackle the unknowns by myself. And then there's growing a company in a pandemic — talk about trial by fire.
But one of the things I am really grateful for is a group of people who are sounding boards and supportive of me. Theresia Gouw from Acrew (one of my investors) is so encouraging to me.
"Go Melody," she says to me. "Just do it. Keep, keep working on your mission every day. Never hold back."
As for the day-to-day, I set my own schedule and I'm not on the road all the time. I'm with my kid more. She knows the names of pretty much everyone at Observable and they know her, which is different from my old work life.
These days, instead of just stress, I have a lot more gratitude. I get to work on the thing that I'm passionate about, and I get to build an inclusive team and environment that model what we want the world to look like.
And I get to create my own path and do that in a way that's true to the human I want to be, which means being ambitious and having the biggest influence on as many people as I can.
My teenage daughter recently said to me, "Before, you were like a stern businessperson. You had this mode that you were in, always working.
"Now you're like a business hippie. You're able to relax, and we have a better relationship because you're less stressed. You just want to help people."
