Molly Graham: J-curve career leaps lead much further than incremental corporate stairs
Molly Graham · “I like being scared”: Molly Graham’s frameworks for rapid career growth | Molly Graham · Jan 4, 2026 · at 27:28
Molly Graham recounts how Chamath Palihapitiya convinced her at Facebook to leave HR and join mobile hardware, introducing the J-curve career progression framework.
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“Chamath, when he pitched me on this job, actually drew me a picture on a whiteboard. He said, you know, look, you can stay the way a lot of people do careers is a set of stairs. You can be boring to use Chamath and stay on these stairs. Just walk up the stairs and you'll get promoted every two years and your title will change from manager to senior manager to director to senior director, whatever. And he was like, but that is boring. And he's like, the much more fun careers are like jumping off cliffs, basically that you jump off this thing and you do fall, you know, for a period of time. I always like to say it's about six to nine months, but then this thing happens where you climb out and, you know, the picture he drew had this J curve sort of like basically leading you to places that are way beyond where the stairs could ever get you.”
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