Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Gutierrez:
What does your day-to-day look like?
Smith:
My day-to-day varies by day, as I participate in a great deal of nonre-
curring meetings. It's funny—at Rent the Runway I have a lot more meetings
than I ever thought I would have, but I actually enjoy them. I like the meetings
because they give me time to understand where other people are coming
from and what they are trying to solve. Personality-wise, I'm very much a
feeler, so I enjoy trying to understand other people's point of view.
The rest of my time is focused on problem solving and thinking. Non-meeting
time is great because I can sit down and do whatever I want to do. Thinking
is actually something I've been working on putting more time away for on
my calendar. My thinking time consists of not looking at things, not reading
articles, and not even interacting with a computer. It's very much a time to
just kind of sit and work through these problems more, because otherwise it's
very easy to get caught up reacting. If I don't have my thinking time, a kind of
ADD can kick in, and then I stop exploring things like: What does that actually
mean? What happens if I look at it from this other way?
Gutierrez:
How is the data team set up at Rent the Runway?
Smith:
There are eight of us and we're all domain experts on different things.
There's one guy in charge of our recommendations system for the web site.
There's another person who deals with the product and making sure we're
getting a lot of our logging completed. I'm more on their semi-team, doing
the on-the-website stuff. We also have someone focused on marketing and
financial reports, as well as the CAO [Chief Analytics Officer] who provides
direction for the Analytics team and maintains our visibility with the rest of
the company.
Then we have another semi-team who focus on the operations side. So we
have one data scientist there who built the predictor for when a dress is going
to be late. Then we have another guy who builds out our Tableau reports, and
we're making a big effort to try to get that off of him, as he ends up getting
inundated with questions all day long. And the last person is our data engi-
neer, and he's really into building the framework for how all of this is being
processed. I like to work with him a lot, just because I enjoy helping lessen
the work of everyone around me. By helping to improve our systems and
frameworks, everyone can do more of the fun things because they have less
infrastructure to code and overhead to maintain.
Gutierrez:
What excites you about Rent the Runway?
Smith:
The data, the people in the company, my interest in fashion, and being
involved in a web company that has a physical aspect to it. First, I'll talk about
the non-data pieces and then we can come back to the data. In the company, in
addition to all the great people, I really love all the women. It's really different
than other places because most tech companies skew heavily male, especially
