Check out your Company Bowl for anonymous work chats.
Thank you to Site Operations Manager Brynn Pierson, for hosting our 6th Business Intro Session. As a former intern, Brynn explained her journey at Rakuten Rewards and gave career advice to our summer interns. We are so proud of her and glad the interns have someone to look up to as they kick off their post-academic careers.
Rakuten team members turned out in force at Oakland's Lake Merritt yesterday to support the launch of The Stephen & Ayesha Curry Foundation's Eat.Learn.Play. to benefit underserved kids. You can help too! Find out how we'll make a $25 donation for every new Rakuten member who signs up at the link below.
How can retailers use their brick & mortar locations to satisfy need-it-now shoppers who don’t want to wait days for delivery? A new eBook from Rakuten Ready shares easy solutions for exceeding customer expectations.
Randi Peyser, Senior Manager, Talent at Rakuten Why did you decide to join Rakuten Marketing? RP: I met with the HR team and had a final interview with Yaz Iida (now the President of Rakuten USA) and was sold. I was drinking the Kool aide. It seemed like such an interesting industry, especially for someone like me who loves online shopping. It felt like home. Was it hard transitioning from supporting just Rakuten Marketing to all the Rakuten Group businesses? RP: With any transition comes growing pains, however I love that we’re finally at a place where we can consider ourselves “one Rakuten” and it gives me the opportunity to learn about our other business units. Not only can I be a cheerleader for Rakuten Marketing, but for all of the business units. It’s also given me the opportunity to partner with other talent team members across the US that I wouldn’t have had the chance to work with before. SN: What’s your favorite part about your job? RP: Truly, the best part about my job is people I work with on a daily basis. The relationships I’ve been able to build are invaluable.
Hackathon For many people, participating in their first Hackathon can be intimidating. What would you tell those people? I’d tell them that it’s about the experience and not the result. Two main takeaways, the first is the people – It’s an awesome experience to have people from different business units come together and form a team. We got the chance to know each other, learn about what everyone does and get a different point of view. The second is the fun behind being able to push personal boundaries. It doesn’t matter if you code or not, you could contribute more than you expect. You may end up doing Q&A before the CEO and the whole crowd, which is a great experience to have. Would you change anything if you could do the Hackathon project again? I would take initiative next year to pitch and form a team to involve more people I don’t know from different business units. I would include the same group, but that would all be dependent on if they’re interested in the idea or not.
An Interview with Faye Shi, the Ebates Hackathon Winner I joined the team mid-January as a Product Manager for Ebates, so I’ve been here for a few months now. Faye Shi (002) Why do you love programming? I love programming because we can do so much more with it and use that to improve the lives of others. What was the idea of the project? What was your strategy to work together? Aria reached out and pitched the idea. She had over 7 credit cards she carries everyday in her wallet which was getting difficult to manage because she was forgetting which card to use for what. We did a quick survey during the weekend before the Hackathon to validate the hypothesis. During Hackathon days, we did user interviews and met with new people. We have a team of 6 people from 3 different offices, Aria, Sneha, Sachin, Jainam from Lexington, Bronwen from SF and me in CC. The team is pretty diverse in terms of location and business department. The strategy for communication was to kickoff the meeting with brainstorming.
Attending Glassdoor’s 2019 Best Places to Work Event Sarah Nelmes, Senior Recruiter at Rakuten, tells us about attending Glassdoor’s 2019 Best Places to Work Event in New York City. In February I had the opportunity to fly to New York and attend the Glassdoor 2019 Best Places to Work Event with the Rakuten Marketing Talent Team. I’m always game for any excuse to get together with my team and Glassdoor puts on fantastic events in our industry. There were leaders speaking from Glassdoor, Compass, 23andMe, Salesforce, Bain & Company, Southwest Airlines, and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. The event kicked off with audience participation when the MC asked the question “What makes a best workplace?” The discussion centered around benefits, rewarding work, relationship building, perks, work-life balance, the people, etc. Turns out there are a lot of things that can make a company great to work for. I loved hearing from tech companies on the best way to develop women in leadership. Glassdoor has so much data available to them through the job seekers who use their site.
Cafeteria Cool: Rakuten’s San Mateo Office Eatery Gets an Upgrade One of the newest perks of working at Rakuten’s Crimson Campus in San Mateo is the updated cafeteria. Opened in January 2019, employees have a brand new area to grab coffee/tea, eat, and step away from their desks.Rakuten provides employees with free breakfast and lunch on a daily basis. Breakfast is usually a variety of fruit, yogurt, and egg wraps/sandwiches. Lunch consists of 4 different entree options and a salad bar. There’s also a soup station with two options that change daily. What has been the biggest change with having this new cafeteria? Brad: Keeping everyone pleased and providing variety so that everyone is happy. There was a change in pace, but there was more space to work with and we are able to provide better quality meals. How is the menu created? Brad: [The menu is] Created by me and talking to people to see what they want to be served. What is your favorite thing to make? Brad: Cereal. Honey bunches of oats. If you could cook with any chef, who would it be? Brad: Marco Pierre White because he
Meet Raluten Talent Acquisition: How does your work impact Rakuten’s mission? Our work in TA dramatically impacts Rakuten’s mission. The bottom line is that Rakuten’s mission and values are first and foremost, they’re on the back of our ID badges and close to our hearts, and so we have to be very thoughtful when we go out and recruit people to come to Rakuten to think about bringing people in who are going to be respectful, mindful, and driven by the values of the company. That’s how we advance the mission and make sure that we really understand the overarching values of Rakuten and then the nuances of the various flavors of the business and that we’re able to advance the culture by bringing in those who want to perpetuate that plan too. This is not easy to do in Silicon Valley where people can be focused on themselves, we drive the mission by bringing in people who are about the business – play for the shirt instead of for themselves. That’s how we move the mission, by helping identify the talent that believes in and buys into Rakuten’s values first at the core.
Rakuten CEO on his business, philanthropy and how he came to be one of the biggest drivers of research into a groundbreaking new cancer therapy. (Biotech) ‘TREATING CANCER WITH LIGHT’: RAKUTEN CEO TAKES ON BIOTECH MAY 7, 2019 Rakuten CEO Mickey Mikitani was recently interviewed on stage at the 2019 FORTUNE Brainstorm Health conference in San Diego, which hosted many of the biggest names in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. During a fireside chat, Dr. David B. Agus of the University of Southern California quizzed Mikitani about business, philanthropy and how he came to be one of the biggest drivers of research into photoimmunotherapy, a groundbreaking new cancer therapy. For Mikitani, it’s a story that began in 2013, when he made a large investment into San Diego-based biotechnology startup Aspyrian Therapeutics—now known as Rakuten Medical—to help fund research into photoimmunotherapy. This investment was a significant departure from his hitherto primarily IT-focused portfolio, but i
