Alumnus Edward Ho
JOHNSON CITY (Feb. 13, 2018) – Before Edward “Ed” Ho was leading Twitter’s Consumer Product and Engineering Group, he got his start at East Tennessee State University.
Ho gazed out his office window overlooking downtown San Francisco as he recounted the story of a young, eager student who dreamed of working in Silicon Valley.
“It was a long time ago, in 1999, when the internet was just coming up. It wasn’t as clear that there were as many jobs as there are now. At the time my goal was to see if I could work in the industry,” Ho said.
Not only did Ho work in the industry, he worked his way up, now leading the team responsible for the development of new features and operations for the social media giant Twitter. Years before he began working alongside Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey as general manager of consumer product and engineering, Ho was studying at ETSU with dreams of becoming a physician.
“It turned out that I was not a very good student when it came to organic chemistry,” Ho said with a chuckle.
What he was good at, however, was tinkering with computers.
“It suddenly dawned on me that if this is what I like to do in my free time, then let’s see what this is really like as a profession,” Ho said. “I soon found out that the faculty in the computer science program were fantastic. They were fundamental to my career.”
As his passion became clearer, the computer science major set his sights on a coveted internship with Microsoft. Ho says he “bombed” the interview and was completely devastated, thinking he had ruined any chance at a big break.
Fortunately, another opportunity presented itself later that year through Ho’s work-study position in the foreign language department at ETSU. A professor who taught Japenese knew about Ho’s aspirations to land an internship in Silicon Valley, so he made a call to friends working at Sony. This time, Ho aced his interview, and the following summer, packed his bags and headed out to San Jose, California. The rest is history.
“I feel so lucky, so fortunate to have had that opportunity,” Ho said. “I tell people who are starting their careers that the real luck is being part of a good team and being someone who will do anything to help the team succeed.”
Ho attributes his teamwork mentality to all the sports analogies he heard growing up in Knoxville and his leadership experiences at ETSU. He was a Presidential Scholar, an Admissions Ambassador and a Preview Leader.
“I love working with great people and I love leading teams,” Ho said. “I remember leading Preview and it’s not that different than the work I do now, but on a much larger scale.”
Ho built his tech career by working on a series of successful teams. He helped develop a machine translation product as a software engineer at Sony’s U.S. Research Labs and was part of the team that built the Yahoo! Pipes program to aggregate and filter web data. Ho spent five years as staff software engineer and director of product development at Google before co-founding Cover, a replacement for the Android default lock screen that offers quick access to the most frequently used and relevant apps. Then, Ho joined Twitter in 2014 after it acquired Cover.
Since then, Ho has been focused on creating a better experience for Twitter users. His team implemented the increase to 280-character tweets as well as an improved experience for following live sports coverage.
“Being able to shape a product that is used by a sitting president and world leaders as well as ordinary people to start movements and by governments to better communicate with citizens - it’s a huge responsibility and a blessing to do this work,” he said.
So what is the username of Twitter’s general manager of consumer product and engineering? @mrdonut
“It’s not a joke, I just really like eating donuts,” Ho laughed.
Ho returned to ETSU to receive the coveted Horizon Award from the College of Business and Technology at its annual Hall of Fame Awards Ceremony last spring. During his visit, he spoke to current students and reminded them that they have what it takes to be successful in Silicon Valley. He regularly sends tweets to ETSU’s Department of Computing to share internship opportunities at Twitter.
“I’ve never been the smartest person in the room,” he said. “Even when I was at ETSU, I wasn’t the best student. Any great accomplishment is made by people working together.
“My degree from ETSU has allowed me to work everywhere. Students can stay local or go somewhere else. These jobs are for you if you want them.”