Get to know: Veronika Belokhvostova, VP of Analytics at Meta, on Her Career Adventure and Inspiring…

Get to know: Veronika Belokhvostova, VP of Analytics at Meta, on Her Career Adventure and Inspiring Reads

Brief bio:

Veronika is a VP of Analytics at Meta, where she spent the last 8 years managing a portfolio of Data Science and Data Engineering teams, currently consisting of Integrity, Security, Customer Support, Operations, and AI Solutions and Automation teams. Together with other members of the Integrity leadership team, Veronika oversaw the $13B+ investment in Integrity and the exponential improvement in Meta’s Integrity capabilities. This included AI solutions for detecting content violating Community Standards (e.g.: hate speech, scams, spam) and other Trust & Safety issues. Before Meta, Veronika was a VP of Analytics and Strategy at Expedia and a Director of Analytics at PayPal, worked at the Deloitte Economics Consulting Group, and Ariba Inc. Veronika graduated from Stanford with a BA with Honors in Economics and a minor in Computer Science and from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley with a Masters in Business Administration.

Introduction

Careers are made in retrospect, through staying curious about the world around you, introspection on what you enjoy and are good at, accumulating experiences that help you with quick pattern recognition and effective decision-making, connections with talented people who challenge your thinking and complement your skills, and reading good books along the way. When I started out — Data Science did not feature in any job titles and Meta Inc. did not exist as a company. Yet, the moves I made along the way built a strong foundation for my 8+ year career at Meta enabling me to rise to VP level at Meta.

Ariba Inc.

When I graduated from Stanford, I joined Ariba as a Localization Engineer. I was excited to work at a company that one of my professors described as revolutionizing supply chain management. I learned a lot — about software development cycle, software internationalization, and how different functions partner together. However, less than a year after I joined, the tech bubble burst, the stock was down by 10X and Ariba was going through multiple rounds of layoffs — along with many other Silicon Valley companies. As I was on an H1B visa, the prospect of losing my job came with an additional risk of being forced to leave the country within 30 days.

Books:

• The book that helped me power through these changes was Who Moved My Cheese? : An Amazing Way to Deal With Change in Your Work and in Your Life by Spencer Johnson. With the speed of change accelerating, it is even more relevant today, particularly at Meta. In fact, Mark Rabkin, one of Meta VPs, wrote an internal post “The resiliency of Alien Chess” where he talked about the importance of developing the capacity to accept, detect, and adapt to the inevitable internal and external changes.

Deloitte Economic Consulting, Deloitte.

The upside of the risk of being laid off was being challenged to look for a new company and a new line of work, which resulted in me discovering Analytics. The Deloitte Economic Consulting Group offered a plethora of opportunities to apply what I learned in both Computer Science and Economics at Stanford to analyzing data across many domains. I worked alongside Economics PhDs on analyses ranging from pricing strategy optimization to estimating damages in a multi-hundred-million dollar Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement litigation to detecting money laundering patterns in banking transactions.

Consulting was a great place for somebody who loves learning and wants to hone the skill of connecting the dots across multiple domains and disciplines. This skill turned out to be very useful later on. My work on Integrity at Meta sits at the intersection of technology, society, and government regulations — challenging me to connect the dots across vastly different disciplines and stakeholders. Consulting is also a great industry for learning how to present information to senior executives — clearly and succinctly.

Books:

• Though I read it much later, A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer encapsulates the importance of staying curious and connecting the dots across multiple domains. Successful people like Steve Jobs excelled by connecting seemingly unrelated passions (like calligraphy and technology) into unique innovations such as the beautiful fonts developed by Apple (see Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson).
• Envisioning Information and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte are foundational books on the topic of choosing the right data visualization method to ensure the audience correctly internalizes the data.
• The Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto (from the famous McKinsey consulting firm) is the go-to on how to write presentations for senior audiences by leading with the most important information and clearly laying out the supporting evidence. At Meta, we refer to a similar concept as “what’s the tldr.” Each document and presentation starts with the most important conclusions and recommendations — the tl;dr. Barbara Minto is also the inventor of the MECE (mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive) concept, which is in daily use at Meta and many other companies.

PayPal, eBay Inc.

Working on money laundering detection at Deloitte spiked my curiosity about the cat-and-mouse game of fraud detection. So as my learning curve at Deloitte flattened, I joined Risk Management at PayPal, which was able to succeed in online payments due to leveraging data in fraud and credit loss detection.

While learning about fraud detection at PayPal was fascinating, another key learning came when I transitioned into Customer Analytics. I learned that even a successful company like PayPal might be missing some basics. As I discovered, PayPal’s optimizations were primarily transaction-level, not customer-level. For example, whether or not to decline a transaction to avoid the loss due to a potential chargeback was a transaction-level decision and did not take into consideration the potential of losing a valuable customer. With each department focusing on their product metrics, we were missing the bigger picture on the customer journey and long-term company success.

Books:

• Before I started at PayPal, I wanted to learn as much I could about it and its parent company eBay. The PayPal Wars: Battles with Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth by Eric M. Jackson was a great read on how new technologies revolutionize established and highly-regulated industries against all odds.
• Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs by John Doerr is a classic that can help avoid the mistake of driving local maxima through the wrong metrics.

Hotwire, Expedia Inc.

My next career adventure was joining Expedia as the VP of Analytics and Strategy for Hotwire, which provided great travel deals to millions of customers. This was an amazing opportunity to rebuild the Analytics and Data Engineering team for Hotwire and to be part of the executive team as it worked through a turnaround. My team improved the ROI on tens of millions in marketing investment spend and increased sales efficiency. I oversaw a multi-million-dollar portfolio of Data Engineering projects, including opening a new Business Intelligence center in India, a multi-month upgrade of the data warehouse, and the expansion of Hadoop. But then Meta called and asked me to work on solutions that served over a billion people.

Books:

• As you climb the ladder, soft skills — navigating different personalities and learning styles — become increasingly important. I am naturally skeptical of books that try to force people into a few rigid categories. Yet I found the provocatively named Surrounded by Idiots: The Four Types of Human Behavior and How to Effectively Communicate with Each in Business (and in Life) by Thomas Erikson extremely useful. I could immediately relate to the illustrative examples and leveraged many of them in coaching conversations and in self-reflection.

Meta (aka Facebook) Inc.

As I write this, I am nearing 9 years at Meta. The longest tenure I’ve had at any company. Meta offers such outsized impact and such diversity of intellectually challenging and meaningful work — it leans on every ounce of my diverse experience and more. The impact one can have at Meta is staggering. When I started, I managed Meta’s Social Impact Data Science team, which helped build solutions such as Charitable Giving. Charitable Giving enabled Meta users to raise funds for charitable causes. When we started out, even $20M in funds raised seemed like an unachievable goal, but a few years later our users had raised over $7B using Meta tools.

Integrity @ Meta Inc.

In late 2016, about a year into my tenure, I was asked to take on extra responsibilities — the Integrity Data Science team. The team worked on addressing violations of Community Standards — a set of policies developed by internal experts in collaboration with external partners. These policies lay out what is and isn’t allowed on our platforms.

With the support of company leadership, we more than quadrupled our investment since 2016. This kind of investment enabled us to scale up Machine Learning solutions so that we could quickly identify violating content and take it down. For example, before 2018, only ~20% of the Hate content we took down was detected by our systems before it was reported by users. By 2021, that number reached over 90%. Through a similar systematic approach we developed solutions for tackling crises and high risk elections — ensuring proactive and automated enforcement on violating content. AI-powered automated enforcement was particularly important when the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, and thousands of reviewers, who enforced on violating content through manual review and created labels for training our machine learning solutions, had to pause their work.

We also saw the need to be more transparent with our stakeholders. We realized that regulators, media, and nonprofits essentially had the same set of questions for us — though they framed them differently. That is how the idea for the Community Standards Enforcement Report was born — out of the need to systematically and proactively answer these questions. In 2018, after a lot of whiteboarding, heavy investment in improving our data infrastructure, and lots of debates about metric definitions, we shipped our first Community Standards Enforcement Report. This quarterly report became the most comprehensive Integrity report in the industry.

Books:

• Machine learning is foundational to our work at Meta. In Integrity we would not have been able to make progress on issues such as hate speech without materially increasing enforcement through automation. Examples of books that informed my thinking on responsible use of AI and the importance of choosing the right training data are The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design by Michael Kearns, Aaron Roth, et al. and Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez.
• Our election protection efforts involved tackling misinformation. Many books have been written on the origins of misinformation and the mechanisms for its propagation. Here are just a couple: Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, et al. Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday.
• A distinctive feature of Meta is the ownership mindset of the Analytics org. Meta is very data-driven and this puts the Analytics org at the center of decision-making. However, we need to use this power wisely, build a reputation of intellectual honesty and communicate findings objectively and transparently, particularly when it comes to communicating analysis on a contentious topic. A great book on this topic is Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant. The research cited in this book shows the effectiveness of objective storytelling when it comes to convincing people to change their minds.

Podcasts:

• There are a number of blogs and podcasts — at different ends of the spectrum — on the contentious topic of Technology and Society and social networks in particular. Stratechery, Platformer, Hard Fork, Your undivided attention, Pivot, The Ezra Klein Show, and Firewall are among the most popular.

Managing a portfolio @Meta

Over the last few years, my portfolio grew to include Data Science and Data Engineering for Security, Customer Support and Operations. That required learning about new domains, such as Security. Security has well-established industry standards (https://www.nist.gov/cyberframework) on capabilities each company should have and how to mature them. However, measurement in the Security space is particularly difficult as Security involves minimizing rare but often severe events. Due to how tricky this measurement is, engineers might sometimes be skeptical about the value Analytics can bring to the table. At Meta, we’ve been able to gradually establish a data-informed Security strategy by progressing from building foundational data and metrics to what we call “understand” analyses on key contributors and levers.

Managing a growing scope requires even more emphasis on developing leaders and building healthy organizational processes. I’ve been fortunate to play a role in helping multiple talented people rise to Director and Senior Director levels. Below I listed a couple of books that really resonated with me and members of my team and helped us encourage a growth mindset and diagnose and improve team dynamics. I wish I’d read some of these books a decade ago! I also came to embrace the power of simplification (see a couple of resources below) as a way to help large orgs row in the same direction and align on their progress.

Books:

• How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk by Hubbard, Douglas W., Seiersen, Richard, Geer, Daniel E., McClure, Stuart is a go-to for developing measurement for Security.
• Managing a portfolio requires growing great talent by instilling a growth mindset. One book on the topic that really resonated with me is Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things by Adam Grant. Another great book on shaping organizations is The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World by Ronald A. Heifetz, Marty Linsky, et al.
• As I came to Meta, I increasingly realized the importance of simplification, particularly when the problem is complex. Naomi Gleit, VP of Product, posted exceptional advice on creating clarity in complex organizations (Extreme clarity and Simplifiers). I also recommend Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World by Donald Sull, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, et al which offers strong evidence for the way simple rules make complex organizations stronger and offer superior outcomes in crisis situations.

Closing thoughts:

I found that it is hard to stick to a career masterplan as the world around you changes. I also found that one does not have to. Because the changes around us create new opportunities that one would not have even imagined at the start. But only if one is paying attention, staying curious, and is ready to step up to the plate. I want to end with a quote I really like by Herbert Spencer. “The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.” I hope this post and the books recommended in it will inspire you to take action and have an impactful career.