Growing up, Gabrielle Heyman, 53, did not know what she wanted to do with her life.
“I thought that I wanted to be in film when I was younger because I’m from L.A. and I have family in film,” she says. “But then when I tried it, I found people were just really mean,” especially to those in the assistant positions she was taking.
It was while working as an assistant at CBS in 1998 that she decided to apply for a job at the company doing sales for online campaigns. “It was the dawn of the internet,” she says, “so they were just building their internet ad sales team.” The people were nicer, it turned out, and she found she had a knack for sales.
Heyman continued to build her career with roles at Electronic Arts, Yahoo and BuzzFeed. Today, she serves as vice president of global brand sales and partnerships for video game developer Zynga.
Despite her eventual success, those early days of the World Wide Web were tenuous. Here’s how Heyman survived and her advice for anyone starting in a brand-new field — like today’s budding AI.
‘I was sure I was going to be laid off’
There was a lot of hype around the internet when Heyman started her career.
The 1990s saw lots of investment in internet-based companies, but beginning in 2001, when many of those companies ultimately failed and shut down, the Dotcom bubble burst. As many as 168,395 tech jobs were cut that year alone, according to outplacement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
“I was sure I was going to be laid off in the Dotcom crash,” she says. She was working at Electronic Arts by then, which cut 250 jobs in October 2001. “And I wasn’t laid off.”
Heyman believes what helped her hold onto her job was being both good at and passionate about what she was doing. You have to “know your s—” in these moments, she says. “Don’t be a fraud.”
When industries are the zeitgeist, many people flock to them to try to capitalize on the boom. That includes entrepreneurs creating businesses with no clear path for profitability, she says. The draw is the opportunity to cash in rather than their genuine interest in making something that works, she says. When demand for that field levels out and some of those companies fold, “there’s a lot of riff raff cut out,” she says of the people who aren’t genuinely interested — taking many jobs with them.
To survive in a new field — like AI, for example — you have to care about it. That means reading articles, “being up on what clients are doing, playing with the technology yourself,” Heyman says. And be discerning about who you’re interviewing with.
“Look at how the company is investing in long-term talent, infrastructure and leadership,” she says, adding that, “it’s often easy to spot the difference between companies chasing trends and those building for the future.”
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