Employee Spotlight: Jessica Davis Gets Sh*t Done
At the very core of the tech industry is the drive to do things that have never been done before, to introduce the world to something it’s not yet seen. Just as explorers on any frontier employ a variety of tools, companies like Lacuna rely on many different kinds of people to push progress forward in the face of obstacles both expected and unanticipated. In my experience, one of a startup’s best secret weapons can also be one of its least heralded roles: the “swiss army knife.”
This is an individual with a skill set so diverse they can wend their way through an absurdly broad array of challenges and come out on the other side with an end product that makes everyone proud. Their talent lies in the instincts, tenacity, and professional grit it takes to thrive in growing companies like Lacuna. Give one of these folks a problem, no matter how esoteric, and they will get sh*t done.
Jessica Davis is Lacuna’s swiss army knife, and we wouldn’t be where we are without her.
Figuring out what a great transportation ecosystem looks like
Jessica hails from Brisbane, a sprawling riverport on Australia’s east coast with roughly the same number of residents as Houston. Despite being born into a family of auto-mechanics and dedicated car enthusiasts, she always gravitated towards her city’s robust public transportation network. By the time she was a teenager, she was already figuring out how to make Brisbane’s multiple transit modes work for her. “I would bus-hop to work, or catch a ferry to get to the gym… I never thought about whether or not there was a way for me to get to where I needed to go,” she told me. “There always was, even if it took a few connections.”
Such a quotidian experience of safe, reliable, comfortable, and comprehensive public transit is (quite literally) foreign to many Americans; though Jessica took it for granted at the time, in future years it would help her to understand what’s possible and why it’s important.
Brisbane’s famous blue, yellow, and white vehicles regularly make international appearances in Bluey, a popular children’s animated series set in a Brisbane-inspired city.
Figuring out how to get from Queensland to California
Jessica began her professional life as a receptionist for a coal-mining company, teaching herself the entire Microsoft Office suite, which she used to create operational tools such as a database that organized the company’s multimillion-dollar contracts. It was then that she started getting recognized for her figure-it-out skills, and parlayed those into a new coordinator/consultant position with a corporate communications and PR firm. As their in-house Office suite guru, Jessica trained colleagues and clients that spanned international consumer brands, B2B enterprises, and government agencies—and discovered latent instincts for sales and marketing. She evolved her skill-set to become a power user of the Adobe Creative Suite while transforming the firm’s materials from slapdash generic sales documents to eye-catching responses with tailored messaging for each prospect. The firm won more commissions with less effort.
In her off hours, she played video games with online friends from around the world—but never did she imagine that such a hobby would be the catalyst for tremendous change in her life. In 2010 one of those friends e-introduced her to Taylor, a young techie living and working in the Bay Area. Despite a 7,000-mile distance, 18 time zones, and their initial skepticism, he and Jessica hit it off. They didn’t meet in person for another four years—but when they did, they would never again be apart, marrying in California in 2015.
However, anyone who’s ever experienced the American immigration process knows it can seem like a bureaucratic gordian knot. Jessica did what she does best—figured it out—and it wasn’t long before she was legally cleared to work in the US. She got a marketing job in a civil and traffic engineering firm, where one of her first tasks was to create a proposal for a Caltrans project. Her first step: quietly googling “what is Caltrans”.
Like nearly every immigrant, Jessica spent her first couple of years in the US being regularly surprised by an unexplained cultural tidbit or local jargon that needed figuring out on the fly.
After she and Taylor settled in the East Bay, Jessica also found herself navigating another state public agency: the California DMV. As the Bay Area is largely bereft of Brisbane-like public transportation, she got her first car at age 30 — experiencing firsthand the unsettling realization that access to job opportunities and affordable homes is entirely dependent on access to transportation, and that the US sports some very real barriers to entry.
Figuring out how to break into tech
Meanwhile, Jessica was beginning to feel frustrated with the engineering industry’s approach to problem-solving for the public realm. “So many of the civil or traffic solutions were the same in every firm,” she said. “And they were like applying a band-aid rather than tackling the problem at the root.” The memory of the public transit in Brisbane as a gold standard was still fresh.
Taylor encouraged her to give the tech industry a try. She attended a career fair in San Francisco, where one memorable career coach unhelpfully informed her that tech companies were only looking for specialists and subject matter experts, and wouldn’t know what to do with a swiss army knife like herself. Another obstacle to figure out a way around.
One day in 2019 she spotted a job listing that sounded like an uncannily good match. Proposal management skills? Check. Public agency experience? Check. Passion for bringing great transportation access to the masses? It was this last statement that really told Jessica Lacuna was a different kind of company. As our 33rd employee joining in our very early days, she found her fingers in pies that were well outside her job description—from registering as a business in different states, to legal contract writing, to establishing branding guidelines—and loved it. “Being given the trust to ‘figure it out’ is really wonderful and fulfilling for me,” she told me wistfully. “It really is an environment in which I've grown and come to understand how successful companies operate.”
Heading into her fourth year, Jessica is now a Lacuna “old-timer” and a critical member of the Go-to-Market team.
The thing about the old adage “a jack of all trades is a master of none…” is the phrase, while often misused pejoratively, actually ends with “...but oftentimes better than a master of one”—a brilliant summation of swiss army knives. These polymaths come armed with both hard and soft skills, ample in both IQ and EQ, diamonds in the not-so-rough.
Jessica is no exception, and today, she’s tackling her biggest professional figure-it-out challenge to date: as Lacuna has grown to include more specialists, particularly on the Sales and Marketing teams, she is pivoting to becoming a specialist herself. As our Senior Capture Manager, she dives deep into the intricacies of the marketplace, keeps her finger on the pulse of transportation needs in different communities, and helps keep us on a true path to our ultimate goal of creating a transportation operating system.
