Sora Lee has worked for some of the biggest names in tech — and earned six-figure salaries doing so.
The 34-year-old worked at Netflix, Meta and TikTok before starting Kurated Agency, which aims to connect Korean beauty brands with creators and outlets in the U.S., in 2023.
Lee didn’t plan to work in tech when she was an undergraduate student studying economics and political science at the University of California, Berkeley. But she started her career at a startup called TubeMogul, and continued in tech from there.
In a little over 10 years, Lee honed her business skills and leveraged her connections, growing her salary from around $40,000 to the $400,000 in total annual compensation she was earning when she left TikTok. And in recent years, she brought in additional income through speaking engagements and content creation on the side.
She became a millionaire in 2024 due to consistent investing and maximizing her salary with every job change.
Here are four of her best pieces of advice for scaling up your career and your income.
1. Be adaptive and build translatable skills
Many people ask Lee what they should major in in college, she says. But your major is less important than what you’re actually learning from your coursework, early jobs and internships.
“Be adaptive and focus on building skills that you can translate to other companies easily,” Lee says.
Especially in an industry like tech, what you study in college could become fairly obsolete by the time you’re looking for jobs, Lee says. There’s also a chance your dream job doesn’t exist yet.
Learning newer technology and staying up to date on the systems big companies use can help you pivot into roles you may not have previously considered. Lee says she could go after AI jobs because of her experience using those kinds of tools in her previous roles, despite not having held an AI-specific position.
2. Interview as much as possible
If you’re exploring different career opportunities, it might seem exhausting to send out dozens of applications and attend multiple interviews. But Lee says interviewing with a variety of companies helps her learn what she wants in her next role.
Interviewing for jobs is “very similar to dating,” she says, in the sense that if you go on a bunch of dates with potential partners, there will likely be a healthy mix of good and bad ones, and you can learn from both.
The more interviews you do, the more you’ll see yourself getting excited and energized by certain aspects of each position, which can help you narrow your search, she says.
“You need to pay attention to how things make you feel,” Lee says.
3. Identify your money-making skills
While it’s important to know what you’re good at and what you enjoy, Lee says it’s just as crucial to identify which of your skills can help you make money.
“Especially when you’re younger, unless you’re rolling in money, it’s important to start gaining skills that you have seen [provide] some success,” she says.
“Follow your passion” is one of the worst pieces of advice Lee received when she was in college, she previously told CNBC Make It. That’s because plenty of people are passionate about something that won’t necessarily help them land a high-paying job.
“Figure out what you’re good at that people would pay money for and figure out your passion, and ideally, it’s aligned,” Lee says.
4. Be ‘unapologetically you’
Especially in the face of rejection, it can be tempting to fake certain traits to try to get through an interview or land a role. But authenticity is incredibly valuable, Lee says.
“Be really unapologetically you,” she says. That can be difficult for young people still trying to figure out who they are, but “having your personal brand is really important.”
Lee says her content creation side hustle has helped her become more comfortable and confident in her own skin, which has helped her do her full-time jobs better. Her social media following has also been an asset when interviewing with companies like Meta and TikTok because it shows she understands the platforms both from the technical side and the creator side, she says.
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