Enjoy the Present Kelley Rivoire

5 Minute Mentor

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Kelley Rivoire is an Engineering Manager at Stripe, an American technology company valued at 22 billion in 2019. Kelley worked on building the company’s first real-time Machine Learning model for evaluation of user risk. Prior to that, Kelley studied Physics at MIT and a PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.

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Transcript:

ES: This is 5 Minute Mentor, a podcast where you’ll get advice from prominent engineers, authors, artists, and more in 5 minutes or less.

KR: Hi, I’m Kelley Rivoire I’m an Engineering Manager at Stripe, and I’d like to tell you a little bit about advice that I found helpful in my career.

KR: The guiding principle I’ve probably used the most is to make sure that I’m fully committing myself to what I’m doing, but also not over optimizing too much for the future, and really enjoying what I’m doing right now. I think a few times, I found that it’s tempting to kind of think about where you want to go and what you need to get there, and start thinking about spending time on that, but realize that you don’t actually enjoy that thing. So for example, when I was in grad school, I worked on nanophotonics and I realized that material science was really important, and I thought maybe I’ll go do a postdoc in that. Then I realized that I actually really didn’t like working on that problem. And so it made sense to kind of do something different and focus on what I really did enjoy.

KR: So I think that’s something that’s carried me through pretty well, in my career, to go after what I’m doing and do my best at it, but also make sure that I enjoy what I’m doing right now, and I’m not doing something that I hate, in pursuit of something that maybe I’ll like better 5 years from now. So I encourage everyone to do the same.

Kelley Rivoire, Engineering Manager at Stripe