A Generational Entrepreneurial Journey: Meet Kim Nguyen
Originally published on GoDaddy Resource Library
Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at GoDaddy?
My career path is non-traditional. My family consists of first-generation immigrant small business owners. We don’t have any relatives who have had careers outside of our family businesses. I am the first person in my family to go to college in the United States. During my time in college as an undergraduate, I took classes that interested me and ended up graduating from Williams College with a degree in Math and Economics. At the time, I didn’t know what kind of problems I’d like to solve post-graduate, so I joined a strategy-only management consulting firm and worked there for two years. After that, I transitioned into product management at an IoT startup, as I had interest in building something from the ground up. I realized that I missed the abstract problem-solving aspects of math. So, I went back to school for a Masters in Computer Science at Georgia Tech.
Now, I am a Backend Software Engineer on the Commerce Payouts team at GoDaddy. I am based out of Manhattan, New York City. My team works very closely with merchants who utilize the GoDaddy Payment tools.
What was your favorite part of your GoDaddy internship?
I came into the internship with a lot of previous career experience and a very clear idea of what I wanted to learn from my internship. At the time, I was not sure if software engineering was for me, and the internship was a way for me to figure out how to lean into my strengths in adjacent areas while also ramping up on the technical aspects. I was super lucky to join our Commerce business unit, which was built from a wonderful startup called Poynt. GoDaddy acquired Poynt in late 2021 and is now scaling up their work. I joined at a magical time when Commerce was starting to see hockey-stick growth. From an engineering point of view, it means that many of our systems are either at the limit or need to be migrated to better, more scalable infrastructure. As an intern, I was given the opportunity to work on a multitude of projects, building out incredible systems.
What blows me away is simply how kind and excellent my colleagues are, and how hands on our leadership is in terms of vision and execution. I got to meet and work with the founders of Poynt (Osama Bedier and Ray Tanaka). This allowed me to better understand decision context from an engineering point of view from the original engineers who built this business from a slide deck to billion dollars in transactions, and most importantly, got an opportunity to build services that help our fast-growing business scale. It’s such a unique combination of web scale (usually only found at larger companies) but we still have that start-up feel, fast-pace environment.
I guess it’s a cliché, but my favorite thing was the intersection of my colleagues and the stage of our business (hockey-stick growth, lots of opportunities to learn, and lots of fun)!
What’s the most challenging yet rewarding thing that you’ve worked on at GoDaddy?
My Masters is in Computing Systems, so I am trained academically in distributed systems and how to solve problems that come with massive scale, such as concurrency, locking, and database sharding. At GoDaddy Commerce, I realized that we were exactly at the Goldilocks junction where our systems built at Poynt were hitting the scaling limits and growing beyond our team’s assumptions from when we started. We as a team continuously have to apply the academic learnings in production, without taking anything down since we have real customers transacting using our system every day. This is incredibly challenging, but very fun!
An example of this challenging work is the Commissions Report, which I built in 2022. GoDaddy Payments help empower resellers, who are other companies that sell our payments systems to their own merchants. After the acquisition, our business with Reseller was growing so quickly that the manual ops/business analytics process was becoming too burdensome. As an intern, I built a full-stack addition to our internal ops tool that allows business analysts to upload a list of resellers and get back all their merchants’ gross revenues and fees that they need. The front end is in React which is basically an application that uses GraphQL to allow our analysts to authenticate and then upload a CSV to AWS S3, which then triggers the back end. The back end is an AWS Lambda function that queries our Reporting service - which then queries all our production databases for the correct data – and then that data gets aggregated live by the Lambda. The analysts can then download the results in fifteen minutes, which used to take them 20 hours every single month! Seeing this whole pipeline working as an intern was so interesting! I came into this project knowing nothing about AWS Lambda, GraphQL, React, or Java Springboot, and came out with a fully working end-to-end application that is used consistently. Fascinatingly, since 2022, because of our exponential growth curve in Commerce, my intern Commissions Report program is finally hitting its Lambda execution time limit considering we have so many more businesses now in 2024 than what I originally designed the program for in 2022. In addition, our database production load has increased exponentially. So I’ve just finished setting up a Flink aggregation pipeline that greedily aggregates data as it comes in rather than going through our production database calls. This pipeline will replace my original intern project, providing an even more efficient computing platform! Time is a circle... isn’t it?
What is your experience and favorite part of working with GoDaddy interns?
I am currently mentoring three GoDaddy interns, one on my team and two others on completely separate business units here at GoDaddy. When I started at GoDaddy, so many senior people helped me learn, so I feel privileged to be the more senior person helping someone onboard and learn software engineering. My favorite part of working with interns is that they may be in separate parts of GoDaddy that I don’t work with on a daily basis, so I get to learn about other business units and help my mentees work through issues they face. I can be a whiteboarding/debugging buddy for when they are stuck! It’s super rewarding to see interns grow from “not really knowing how to use an IDE” to deploying code that then go into production. This growth takes place in such a short period of time. They teach me so much about different ways of working at GoDaddy, so it’s a win-win for both sides.
How do you keep yourself motivated and inspired in your work?
GoDaddy is accidentally the perfect fit for me, because my family has founded six businesses and sold five. I grew up seeing my parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts facing all kinds of small business issues like accounting, technology, payments, and administrative tasks that distract them from running their businesses. As the eldest fluent-in-English cousin, I became the translator, tax filer, advisor, and administrator for my entire family at the age of twelve. Weirdly enough, it’s hard for me to turn my brain off from small-business problem-solving mode now that I work at GoDaddy. Since many of our products aim to solve precisely these issues, I get the best of both worlds.
What advice would you give other individuals, starting out at GoDaddy?
To my Software Engineers - don’t be afraid of asking “why” until you are satisfied with the answer, especially in times of change. Usually there's some kind of background and historical context for what might seem to be “different” decisions from what you would have made. It's crucial to have a better understanding of the constraints around a problem that led to a solution you might not have thought of.
For everyone - lean into your curiosity and strengths. Everyone brings a different perspective due to their background, upbringing, academic training, and street smarts. You have your own strengths and internal compass. Lean into that while staying curious about other people’s perspectives.
What do you enjoy doing outside of work?
I am obsessed with expertise and beauty. In my free time, I go anywhere where I can experience an expert or artist doing what they do best - creating something that moves others. You can find me at poetry readings and art galleries in New York City, reading design and fashion blogs, dining out and meeting amazing chefs, and auditing computing theory classes in early EST mornings. I also love to cook and host dinner parties with my partner. In the winter, we often cross-country ski in the Berkshires. Additionally, I mentor high school and college students through Thrive Scholars. This is a nonprofit that partners with high school juniors and seniors from low-income public schools and provides them opportunities to thrive at top colleges. My volunteer efforts have been incredibly rewarding, as I feel like I am making a difference for the next generation. I can tap into my experience across consulting, product, and engineering – which coincidentally are all fields Thrive students tend to be interested in post-graduation.
Are you enjoying this series and want to know more about life at GoDaddy? Check out our GoDaddy Life social pages! Follow us to meet our team, learn more about our culture (Teams, ERGs, Locations), careers, and so much more. You’re more than just your day job, so come propel your career with us.
