TLDR; I left my job to full-send Bookmark, and I’m excited to welcome Brian Yu as Bookmark’s new technical advisor. 🥳

“There’s no right decision; there are only decisions you make right.” — Unknown

Leaving my full-time job as a PMM at Bubble was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made, but I’m excited to make it the right decision.

I joined Bubble almost two years ago to gain a breadth of experience at a hyper-growth startup that would prepare me to run my own one day. (Thank you to my mentor, Trishan, for steering me in that direction!)

The experience I got was richer than I could’ve imagined. As the first product marketing manager, I repositioned Bubble as an enterprise solution in a move upmarket; led the release of new usage-based pricing plans; hosted events like How to Build Day; collaborated with product, engineering, sales, customer success, and every function of marketing to launch new features like version control; and navigated the growing pains of a company that more than doubled in size.

In the weeks leading up to my decision to leave, there were many moments of self-doubt and anxiety. But those moments were far outnumbered by the exhilaration of launching new product features, the joy of speaking to users, the conviction in the problem I’m solving, and the self-confidence that I can do this.

I’ll sincerely miss working with the wonderful people at Bubble, but I’m ready to pursue Bookmark full-time and appreciate all of you for supporting me on this adventure. 💜

Here’s to chasing dreams — wherever they may take us! 💫

What’s New: Introducing Brian Yu ✨

Sometimes you blink, a decade passes, and one of your childhood friends becomes your startup’s first advisor!

Brian Yu is one of a kind. We met in 2014 at a high school speech and debate program. I won a modest Lincoln Douglas tournament that summer thanks to Brian’s mentorship, and he went on to win a National Speech & Debate title the following year.

We overlapped for a year at Harvard, where Brian graduated in 2019 with a degree in computer science and linguistics. (NLP was his jam before the emergence of ChatGPT.) Following his passion for teaching, he received his master's degree in technology, innovation, and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2021.

The decision to bring on Brian as a technical advisor was a no-brainer. At Harvard, he taught courses about artificial intelligence and web programming. He was best known as the course head for CS50, Harvard's introductory course in computer science, and a co-instructor for CS51, Harvard's course on abstraction and design in computing.

In his free time, Brian runs a YouTube channel with 162K subscribers called Spanning Tree, for which he writes and animates educational videos. You can check out his latest video on how computers add numbers so quickly!

Brian has worked at tech companies of various sizes, including Automattic and Palantir. As I think about team-building, I’m excited to lean on his experience at Byteboard, where he’s developing an accurate and equitable process for engineering hiring.

It’s an honor to have Brian on the team, and I can’t wait to see what we’ll accomplish together!

Finally, this announcement would not be complete without this two-minute video of Brian solving eight Rubik’s cubes blindfolded. Need I say more?

What’s Cooking 🍳

Fundraising, fundraising, fundraising — more to come in a future newsletter! Here are a couple of other things that are top of mind:

• Enhance data infrastructure: I’ve been using Segment and Mixpanel to track product utilization in the web app, and now I’m working on integrating Mixpanel into the Bookmark Chrome extension. Once that’s in place, I’ll have a more complete understanding of feature usage.

• Explore AI-powered search: My stretch goal in the next two weeks is to play around with integrating OpenAI’s Assistants API. If you have experience with this API, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

This Week’s Ask 🙏

If you know any kind, smart, and talented people in the world of startups and venture capital who you think I should chat with, please let me know! Intros are always deeply appreciated, but even pointing me toward someone you’ve heard amazing things about is helpful. I’m in my ready-to-elevator-pitch era. 😀

That’s it for now. In case you missed it, you can catch up on the March 1 update here. Thanks for reading!

Nicole

Made with ❤️ from NYC. Shout-out to Lorae S., Rachel W., Theo G., Brian Y., and Will C. for reviewing my drafts!