Three Career Growth Lessons From Google’s Former Chief Search Evangelist
After more than a thousand meetings with CEOs and senior executives across the globe, Nicolas Darveau-Garneau has seen firsthand what separates fast-growing careers from stagnant ones.
Darveau-Garneau spent five years at Google as Chief Search Evangelist, a role that required him to advise top advertisers on digital strategy. From 2017 to 2022, leadership teams regularly traveled to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, to spend full days discussing their biggest challenges and ambitions. Those conversations became the foundation for a set of career principles he now shares publicly—and in his upcoming book, Be a Sequoia, Not a Bonsai: The Seven Growth Secrets of the World’s Most Successful Companies, released January 27.
Based on his experience working with leaders from small startups to the world’s largest enterprises, Darveau-Garneau outlines three practical ways professionals can accelerate their careers in 2026 and beyond.
1. Identify the Career You Want by Choosing a Person, Not a Job
According to Darveau-Garneau, the most important step in career growth is gaining clarity about where you want to be five or ten years from now. But instead of focusing on job titles, he recommends focusing on people.
Rather than asking, “What role do I want?”, ask, “Whose career do I want?”
“Pinpoint a human being you truly respect—someone whose career you admire and would be excited to emulate,” he advises.
In his experience, only about one-third of people already have a clear role model in mind. The rest need to reflect deeply before identifying one. However, this step is essential. Without a clear destination, career decisions become reactive rather than intentional.
Before you can grow, you need to know which direction you are rowing.
2. Apprentice Under the Best People You Can Find
Once you have identified a role model, the next step is to work as closely as possible with someone like them—even if it means short-term trade-offs.
Darveau-Garneau openly reflects on a mistake he made early in his career: starting a company at 26 before apprenticing under leaders he admired at firms like Apple or Google. While his startup, imix.com, was ultimately successful and acquired in 2001, he believes he would have learned far more by spending time inside world-class organizations first.
“If you know where you want to go, find the best person you can and work for them for two to five years,” he says. “You might earn less or carry less responsibility, but the learning curve will be dramatically steeper.”
That depth of exposure—how great leaders think, decide, and operate—often pays dividends later in ways that early independence cannot.
3. Master AI at a Meaningful Level
The final—and increasingly unavoidable—career lever is artificial intelligence.
Darveau-Garneau argues that surface-level familiarity with AI tools is no longer enough. While many professionals can use ChatGPT or similar platforms casually, true career acceleration comes from deep mastery.
Do you know how to reduce hallucinations? Can you chain multiple AI systems together to solve complex problems? Do you understand how to operationalize AI reliably within workflows?
“If you’re not at least in the top 25% of people using AI effectively, AI isn’t your tool—it’s your competition,” he warns.
Those who reach the top tier of AI capability, he believes, will see their careers “skyrocket.” This perspective is echoed by other industry leaders, including Brandon Daniels, CEO of AI risk management firm Exiger, who emphasizes that critical reasoning and judgment will be essential skills in an AI-driven workplace.
Clarity Comes First
While all three steps matter, Darveau-Garneau is clear that the first is foundational. Without clarity about where you want to go—and who represents that future—everything else becomes harder.
“I didn’t know this when I was younger,” he reflects. “In hindsight, I wish I had figured it out earlier.”
For professionals looking to grow in 2026, the message is simple but demanding: choose your direction intentionally, learn from the best, and develop skills that will remain valuable in an AI-first world.