My first job after college and my "foot in the door" was as a Customer Care Representative at Yahoo! Inc. I was hired as the 10th person in the department and the 587th employee at Yahoo!.

This position not only placed me in a rapidly growing company with room for advancement, but it allowed me to experience how organizations deal with extreme growth, especially within an rapidly changing market environment.

Looking back, it is fascinating to remember that I provided the first technical support for a number of Yahoo! services that still exist today. Now that the Yahoo! Customer Care department has hundreds of employees based across the U.S. and the world, I am proud to say that I was one of the first and helped to shape the organization.

Most importantly, serving Yahoo! users directly was an excellent way to get to know the business and the customers it served. By working closely with both our user base and our product and engineering teams, I quickly learned the skills necessary to advance into Yahoo!'s production team and to build tools and services that met customer needs. I also had a chance to sleep under my desk during the many nights that we were faced with thousands of user emails that had to be answered using Netscape Communicator and cutting and pasting pre-written FAQ's from a Word document.