Name: Liz Wessel
Age: 26
Job Title and Description: Co-founder and CEO at WayUp
College Name/Major: UPenn and studied Political Science, Math and Japanese
Website:wayup.com
Twitter Handle:@lizwessel
Instagram Handle:@lizwessel 
What does your current job entail? Is there such a thing as a typical day?
Liz Wessel: I would guess that about 60% of my day is spent in interviews, then 20% is spent in internal meetings with employees at WayUp, then the final 20% is spent with external people, whether it be investors or press or clients. As we grow bigger, more interviews show up on my calendar -- I feel like I could be a full-time interviewer anytime soon.
What is the best part of your job?
LW: Definitely the people I get to work with. I learn from and get inspired by them every day.
What was your first entry-level job in your field and how did you get it?
LW: I only had one job before WayUp, and that was working at Google -- first as a Product Marketing Manager in Mountain View, and then leading all Brand initiatives in India. I got this job from a summer internship I had my junior-year summer at Google, which I got simply by applying online!
What words of wisdom (well-known quotes, an anecdote from your boss) do you find most valuable?
LW: Great isn’t good enough.
What is one mistake you made along the way and what did you learn from it?
LW: I know this sounds cheesy, but I’m a big believer in not thinking of things as ‘mistakes’, and rather thinking of them as learning opportunities. The true ‘mistake’ you’d make is doing one wrong thing twice -- meaning that you didn’t learn from it the first time. That being said, the most obvious mistakes I’d point to that I learned the most from were all hiring mistakes -- bringing people onto the team who were just not vetted properly during the interview process for whatever reason. But we’re constantly working on improving our interviewing in order to avoid this from happening anymore.
What has been the most surreal moment of your career thus far?
LW: This is such a hard question! I feel like there are surreal moments every day. I’d say a “top 5” pick would be our first company all-hands after we acquired Looksharp. Suddenly we had four new full-time team members almost overnight, and we had to figure out how to video conference them into the meeting so that they could see us and we could see them. It was a bit crazy to think that in 2.5 years, we grew from 2 employees to 52 and that we now had 2 offices.
What do you look for when considering hiring someone?
LW: The most important key is whether they would fit into the WayUp culture. Then, I look at whether their skills match up with the skill-set we’re looking for. Finally, I consider whether they are the type to be strategic and creative, and therefore think outside of the box in order to bring their role to the next level.
What advice would you give to a 20-something with similar aspirations?
LW: Try before you buy! If you want to start a business one day, then start a business during college when the risk is lowest, since you aren’t betting everything on it (because you have classes, and so on)... If you want to go into marketing, get a part-time job as an Ambassador for a company to see a bit about what marketing is like. And so on. (Pssst you can get one of those part-time jobs on WayUp!)
What's the one thing that's stood out to you the most in a resume?
LW: What stands out to me most are the achievements that someone has in each role they’ve been in. I typically don’t care too much about the responsibilities if there are no quantitative achievements listed next to each responsibility. For example, if you say that you were a writer for your school newspaper, that’s fine and dandy, but so are thousands of other students. If you say that you’re a writer who has the #1 most-read content of anyone at your newspaper, and whose page traffic helped to increase advertorial sales by 20% in one semester, I’d be impressed.
