“Ladies and gentlemen, what a performance! In Part 2 of this series on full stack learning, we dive into the importance of understanding your frame of reference to learn new skills effectively. From my pivot from journalism to mastering crypto through immersive experiences, this post highlights how identifying and leveraging your unique perspective can accelerate your learning journey. Stay tuned for Part 3, where practical strategies will help you build your own learning stack!”

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Introduction: Expanding Your Learning Stack

I lied. This is now a three-part series on learning stacks. 

In part one (which you can read here), I introduced the idea of relating a technology stack to a “stack of knowledge” about any topic area. I shared why I believe it’s more important than ever for everyone to have a broader set of context about their area of work.

In part two (this post), I’ll discuss how we learn something new outside of traditional academic environments by understanding our unique frame of reference. I’ll also share a bit about my personal experience of learning new things in a professional work context.

In part three, I’ll get into some of the practical and tangible ways to apply these ideas to help you light up a new “learning stack” in the job search process – or really, anytime you’re trying to learn something new.

Let’s get into how understanding your frame of reference is a foundational skill to help you learn something new. So grab a cup of coffee, it’s story time. Or don't, and just skip this one. Totally your call.

The Sideways Pivot: Adapting Primary Skills into Transferable Skills

Fifteen years ago, I had a newly minted journalism degree from Northwestern University with no job prospects and $25.57 to my name. Welcome to the Great Recession.

Despite diligently following all the well-intended career advice from my academic advisors, not even three internships were enough to land a full-time job. This was not for lack of trying. I didn’t really know it at the time, but I essentially graduated with a full stack toolkit for an industry that felt almost immediately irrelevant. 

I wasn’t alone. Years later, I’d learn that only 55% of journalism graduates from 2009 found full-time jobs within one year of graduating. Fortunately, I found my way into a job adjacent to the tech sector that summer, largely through a combination of luck and persistence. (But that’s a story for another time.)

Since then, I’ve jettisoned myself through more career pivots than I can count. I’ve held jobs in media, consulting, web2 startups, venture capital, crypto startups, education foundations, and now, AI.

Through all of these career twists and turns, I’ve learned a few very important things:

In 2009, I had a breakthrough.

I shifted my focus from seeking journalism jobs to exploring writing roles and identifying industries that could benefit from my skills as a trained journalist. This perspective shift allowed me to convert my primary skills into transferable ones.

By recognizing my core skills—research, storytelling, critical thinking—and understanding their value in different contexts, I was able to pivot into various roles beyond traditional journalism. My ability to synthesize complex information helped me succeed in my first job at a tech-inspired management consulting startup, and my knack for simplifying complex details helped me level up in increasingly technical roles at both web2 and web3 companies.

Recognizing and leveraging your unique frame of reference helps you spot opportunities in unexpected places and adapt your existing skills to new environments. I believe both of these will be essential skills for the next era of how we work. Here’s how.

Frames of Reference

Some of the smartest people I know excel because they understand their strongest areas of expertise and use these "spike areas" as a shortcut to help them quickly synthesize information, identify patterns, and make decisions. Maybe your “spike area” is in finance, and you see the world in numbers. Maybe your “spike area” is in engineering, and you see the world through how things are built and constructed. No matter what area you spike in (and I firmly believe everybody has one), it represents the unique frame of reference you use to see the world.

As a classically trained journalist, I initially embarked on my career with a frame of reference centered on processing information through writing, understanding implicitly that I needed other people as sources and quotes for any story I wrote. But I didn’t really understand the versatility of this concept until I started working at VC funds. 

In a partnership business like most venture funds, typically a few general partners collectively decide which businesses to invest in. The anchor deciding point event has become the classic “startup pitch” presentation, where an anxious founder prepares a dozen or so slides and puts themselves under fire among a panel of VCs. 

Startup pitch presentations have become a quick, effective way to provide partners with as much differentiated information as possible about new businesses. As a founder, you need to demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of your business, covering what you’re building, why you’re building it, how you’re building it, and the potential for profit. As an investor, you typically have an hour with your colleagues to evaluate the business idea against the patterns of hundreds or thousands of other pitches you've seen, and quickly decide whether or not to invest.

At Union Square Ventures, I sat through hundreds of pitches from startup founders. In the beginning, this felt a little bit like standing on the roof of your apartment building in the middle of a hurricane. Lots of energy, but it’s coming from all directions and you can’t quite tell where to look. Each entrepreneur we met presented in such a different style, with such different business context, that it felt nearly impossible to compare and contrast. The questions that each partner peppered the founder felt erratic and random. Sometimes I’d try to ask a question or two, but I could always tell I was somehow interrupting some unspoken flow of information gathering happening among the hive mind around me.

Over the years, things started to make more sense from where I sat.

I started to pay less attention to the material presented and more attention to how it was processed on the receiving end. And I noticed something interesting. The questions each partner asked were not erratic and random; they perfectly correlated with each of their unique frames of reference. Someone with more of a financial reference frame would dig more deeply into questions of unit economics, someone with a more technical frame would dig under the hood into all of the nitty-gritty details about the underlying tech stack. Almost as if each successive question helped fill in gaps for their specific reference frame, enabling them to make a decision from the most informed position possible.

What I also found interesting was that even someone with a primarily technical frame of reference could still absorb and form opinions about other aspects of the business. They just used their “anchor frame” as a starting point. This says to me that it was less about what information was being shared, and more about structuring it in a way that made sense to them. By asking thoughtful questions, you can move any new piece of information into a structure that makes sense to your brain. Then decide what to do with it.

The questions would continue, presumably until everyone around the table had satiated their brain’s need to acquire whatever information their particular frame of reference required to fill gaps. And then, collectively, a decision would emerge with an almost elegant and effortless power: To invest or not to invest?

How to Read a Market

You can’t really read a market unless you know your frame of reference. I know this because I tried. For many years I tried. But the structure of the information presented just didn’t resonate with me to achieve a point of conviction. It didn’t matter how many startup pitches I sat through; I always felt like I was missing some critical piece of information.

I felt this way the most acutely among the crypto and blockchain-based businesses we evaluated at USV. I’m not exaggerating to say that I probably sat through 1,000 hours of deeply technical conversations where I barely understood what we were talking about. 

As a curious person who generally likes to understand things, this was quite possibly the most frustrating experience of my life. And I’ll give you this: Blockchain networks and the underlying infrastructure of this ecosystem is probably one of the most complicated things I have ever set out to learn. (There is a reason I studied journalism, not applied computational mathematics.) But still.

While temporarily living in Australia in 2021, I witnessed the tech industry's hype converge around crypto networks and communities in a groundswell of bull market fervor. I saw hundreds of thousands of people joining something I had been exposed to for years but felt too far removed to engage with. That’s when something inside me snapped, and I decided I needed to figure it out.

As soon as we moved back to New York City that summer, I started spending my nights and weekends with “crypto hack nights” with my husband. No joke. We’d literally order in a pizza and just poke around Discord networks, NFT communities, CoinDesk and Bankless articles, and long-winded Twitter comment threads. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this is now the critical first step toward lighting up any new learning stack: The tinkering phase.

Over the next couple of years, I accelerated my learning process in web3. What took me a decade in web2, I accomplished in about three years in web3. Here’s what happened:

In essence, what I learned along the way is that my frame of reference is a network mindset. Of course I couldn’t learn something new in the isolated context of one boardroom or a single type of interaction. I needed to immerse myself in the entire ecosystem. I learn through living it, among the groundswell of network activity.

Now that I understand this about myself—both my starting frame of reference and the steps I need to advance my learning curve—I am confident that I can pivot these skills into various industries or verticals. This understanding builds professional career resilience.

Conclusion: Embracing Your Unique Learning Journey

You might be thinking, this sure seems like it takes a lot of time and effort. And maybe you don’t care enough to learn something new if it means staying in random hacker houses at multiple crypto conferences around the world while you’re also very pregnant with your second baby and everyone in your personal and professional network is asking what the hell you are doing in your life.

That’s probably because you don’t have a network frame of reference to learn something new. Lucky you. Your way is probably much faster (and more practical) than mine.

What’s important is understanding the frame of reference you carry with you as an adult to learn something new. Knowing how you see the world is the most critical first step in any learning journey. By identifying your unique frame of reference, you can build your own "learning stack," making the process more effective and tailored to your strengths.

And, like I said, this process can get faster every time you do it. Even better, by the time we enter the professional world, we already have about 18 years of lived experiences in academic environments as a head start.

In the next post of this series, I’ll (try to) bring this home with a few practical ways to help you understand your frame of reference and apply your primary skills into a true “full stack learning” experience as an adult.