Hi Reader, This week on the Gentle Power Podcast (GentlePowerPodcast.com), we sat down with Daniel Imberman, a friend from the Sandbox community who now runs his own consulting firm out of Mexico City. Daniel spent years as an engineer. He was employee #10 at Astronomer, the company you might know from a certain Coldplay kiss cam moment, and he helped scale it from 10 to 300 people. He then left to build a business where he himself is the product. Much of what we discussed revolved around how...
7 days ago • 7 min read
Hi Reader, A few weeks ago, we hosted a live Q&A for people who'd just been laid off from a handful of large tech companies. Alex Daniels, a corporate attorney who spent years at Cooley, one of Silicon Valley's top law firms, joined us to field questions. Nearly 100 people showed up and we ran out of time. So we recorded an emergency episode of our Gentle Power Podcast. Alex Daniels joined us again as did our friend Grace Ling (a creator and UX designer who we had just interviewed for her own...
13 days ago • 6 min read
Hi Reader, If you've been following international news, there are massive protests happening right now in my (Gerta’s) country of origin, Albania. People are taking to the streets to protest against the government's dealings with the Kushners to develop a luxury resort on a highly coveted, beautiful island in the Albanian Riviera, one of the fastest-growing travel destinations in Europe. The protests are reminding me that some of the smartest negotiations don't look like negotiations at all....
18 days ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader, Our Gentle Power Podcast guest this week, Angela Liao, has negotiated from every seat at the table. She spent years on the supplier side in Asia, negotiating on behalf of manufacturing companies with customers like Apple and Google. After Asia, she went to work at Tesla in the US, then to Google, where she now leads device strategy and negotiates manufacturing partnerships. Having been on both sides of high-stakes business negotiations, Angela has developed a keen sense of what...
25 days ago • 5 min read
Hi Reader, In light of the recent mass layoffs that have hit many notable companies, we hosted a live Q&A this week on negotiating severance agreements. We also brought on our friend, Alex Daniels, to share his legal POV. Alex is a corporate attorney, a former Google employee, and cofounder of a boutique law firm that works with startups and professionals. A lot of people couldn't make the session and asked us for the recording, but to respect attendees’ privacy and to encourage open and...
27 days ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader, We've seen many layoffs at top companies across our circles recently, and wanted to use today's newsletter to discuss negotiating severance agreements. One caveat upfront: severance is harder to negotiate than a job offer. When it's a new job offer, both sides want the deal done. In a severance situation, the company holds more control and has less incentive to move. But this doesn't mean that it's not worth trying to negotiate. If you're being laid off, at this point you don't...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader, During Alex’s last job search before we started YourNegotiations.com, he interviewed for a role he was super excited about. The company was a market-leading rocketship, he would report directly to the founders to help build out an entire team, and the recruiter was very friendly and responsive. But there was one thing Alex noticed that the recruiter said on every single call, from the first screening to the check-ins between interview rounds: “Just so you know, we have a company...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, We're back with Part 3 of our conversation with Arben Malaj, one of the most renowned economists in Albanian history (and Gerta’s father!). If you missed Part 1 and Part 2, Arben walked us through what it was like to serve as Albania's Minister of Finance in the late 1990s, during one of the worst financial collapses in modern economic history. 60% of Albania's population lost their savings overnight in a wave of Ponzi schemes. Arben was 36, barely in politics, and somehow became...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Hi Reader, The recruiting process has a lot of unwritten rules, and most candidates follow them without question. When a company asks you what your preferred salary is, it seems normal to give it to them. It just feels like what you're supposed to do, so you do it. That's just what the process looks like, right? It doesn't have to be. The norms favor employers, and that's not an accident There's a quote by American author Eliot Schrefer: "Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people." In...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read