Six lessons in management from BuzzFeed’s Publisher, Dao Nguyen

Dao Nguyen may not know what Kanye West looks like, but she could probably tell you how many hits a headline with his name would get.

Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American numbers whiz who studied math and computer science at Harvard, was named the first publisher of BuzzFeed 10 months ago. But it’s not her pop culture knowledge that got her the job.

Senior executives created the position for Nguyen after she was responsible for skyrocketing BuzzFeed’s traffic to 200 million unique visitors in less than two years, according to Fast Company.

Here, she sounds off on what she’s learned helping bring clicks to one of the world’s biggest social news empires, being one of the few Asian-American women doing it, and always moving forward:

1.     You were promoted to publisher at BuzzFeed the same time two other women were moved up, but reports say you’re still one of the only women — and the only Asian woman — in senior management. Tell us a little about what that means to you.

I think it’s important for people of all kinds to have role models that they can aspire to. Your role model doesn’t have to be someone of the same gender or race or even someone in top management. And it helps to have a range of types of people who are successful: the geek, the extrovert, the ass-kicker, the empath, etc. I’m happy to be someone a little different from the norm for those reasons.  

2.     You’ve spoken in past interviews about the importance of being mindful. How has that helped you, in or out of the workplace?

Being mindful helps to put things into perspective.  I’m not as mindful as I should be — still working on it 🙂

3.     A profile by Inc. described you as having a “c’est la vie, let’s move on” attitude. Would you agree with that characterization, and do you think it’s useful in the office?

It’s a fair characterization. I like to focus on what we’re doing now and in the future. We should learn from past missteps and not obsess over them.

4.     What would you say has been the biggest reward and the biggest challenge of your job?

The biggest reward is seeing a growing, engaged, happy technology team working on challenging and important projects for the company. The biggest challenge is continuously identifying changes and tweaks to make that happen organically as our company and industry shifts so quickly and radically.  

5.     What questions do you ask when you hire? What qualities do you look for?

I look for people who learn constantly and are excited about BuzzFeed.

6.     You’ve said in the past that your career trajectory “has been kind of accidental.” If you could go back, what advice would you give to your 23-year-old self and why?

I would tell myself, “Narrow definitions of things help you on a technical level, but not on a management level.”