I always wanted to be a teacher. And then once I got to grad school I learned that being a professor and running a lab required much more. Setting a research vision, budgets and funding, building the lab, recruiting students, guiding and growing them, and keeping the whole ship running… it wasn't mostly teaching the way I thought it was. If those were the things I was going to do anyways, I decided to do them in the business world and shipped myself off to Silicon Valley. I'll talk to you about what it’s like being a physicist in the business world, and what I've learned along my random walk. I'll go deeper on people management as the critical skill to scaling yourself. And I'll leave plenty of time for questions on anything, or to hear thoughts you have.

Joel leads the global Sales Planning & Operations org which scales Facebook's business. Prior to Facebook, Joel worked at Yahoo! leading the Americas Ad Marketplaces team and as the Chief of Staff to the CEO, and prior to that worked with McKinsey & Company leading digital media business growth in high tech. Joel holds a B.S.E. in Engineering Physics from the University of Michigan and an M.S. in Applied Physics from Caltech. And Joel still wants to be a teacher, someday.