“I think I was lucky when I came out of school at a very exciting time when the internet was really nascent and the “Gold Rush” was just about to begin,” said Jen Gold, Director of Product Strategy for Helix at MediaMath. “It was about the geeking out of it and the passion and the excitement of getting on the internet for the first time and thinking, this is like a wild west of information and content!”
From joining the digital tech space in its infancy to witnessing the dot-com bust and everything in-between, Gold didn’t step foot on the tech turf until after graduation.
She jokingly said she started in a very high tech field — majoring in intellectual history at the University of Pennsylvania. “It was a combination of history, philosophy, political science and literature, as well as art. Not high tech at all! I initially really wanted to get into some form of media and advertising but really, digital wasn’t a big thing back then.”
Gold’s first job out of school was with the New York Times, working in the advertising division on sales planning.
“I stayed there for a year and a half and it really wasn’t a tech job but I was put on a task force to figure out what to do with the content online.”
Here, Gold got to work on what content should be put out on AOL, CompuServe or the actual world wide web, which was starting to become a content rich place.
“The second I got on the internet I was like this is what I want to be doing, I’ve got to get out of this old school media place and into digital, so I left and joined a very small 18-person website development company startup and have been in that realm for most of my career since then.”
The boom was really happening around this time in the late 90s – Netscape went public among others and companies could do no wrong. But even when the bubble burst, Gold stayed in tech.
“I joined a travel guide book company called Rough Guides where I managed all their digital strategy. I’ve always been really into travel and totally fascinated by traveling around the world.”
Watch the video below!
This led to her next adventure.
In 2004, Gold and her partner decided to make a huge leap of faith and leave New York City for a tiny island in the Caribbean called Vieques, off the coast of Puerto Rico. They bought property there and spent a lot of time on renovation, turning it into a guest house. Gold was fortunate enough to keep her job with Rough Guides, working remotely while learning about the hospitality business. It was during this time she inadvertently became a marketer.
“It wasn’t on my radar but in marketing my own hospitality business, I found that I really liked it. I got into SEO, SEM, some paid display and started experimenting with a little mobile and social and I was hooked!”
Gold still owns the business, but moved back to the States working on product and marketing with TripAdvisor for a few years, where she then made her way to MediaMath. Throughout her interview process, Gold says she was excited about the opportunities here and the growth of programmatic, working on product strategy for MediaMath’s proprietary shared data asset.
“I synthesize what our product teams are building in to something that’s packaged and digestible, which our client services organization and engagement teams can easily take to market and explain to clients what it is we have and why they need it. I find that really rewarding.”
Reflecting back on her career thus far, what would Gold tell her younger self?
“I love the fact that I was able to get right into digital pretty quickly. I guess if I was to say anything to my recently college graduated self, I would just say buckle in, get ready for the ride and be ready for lots of change!”