Peter Genovese, ’14: From Western New York to Silicon Valley

Peter Genovese's journey from Lewiston, N.Y., to Silicon Valley was marked by grit, determination, and a laser focus on his goal to work for Google.

When Genovese transferred to Niagara University's College of Business as a marketing major, he was already working in technology, fixing employees' computers in the corner of the Yahoo Data Center in Lockport, N.Y. He juggled that full-time work with full-time study, and still found time to participate in campus clubs and organizations, including the Niagara University Marketing Association. He became president of NUMA in his second semester at Niagara and grew the organization to more than 70 members.

"Niagara University helped build the foundation of the leader I am today," he said, noting that his close relationships with his professors and Dr. Shawn Daly, dean at the time, allowed him to "stretch his imagination" and gave him the encouragement to look at things differently and challenge the status quo.

This mindset served him well during his seven and a half years with Yahoo, where he quickly discovered there was a clear linear career trajectory that would help him achieve his Silicon Valley dream. He followed that pathway, which brought him to California shortly after his graduation in 2014, taking on positions as business operations analyst, project manager, and technical program manager. In 2016, he moved to Yahoo Small Business as a product program manager, and then joined Yahoo Mail to lead operations for its front-end and middle-tier teams. That same year, he received the Yahoo Super Star award, the company's highest honor, "which only 30 people get per year," he noted, for his work to implement Google Hangouts video conferencing across Yahoo.

"We had a bunch of disparate video conferencing technology solutions at the company," he said, explaining that he led a team of 400 people to replace the old systems with a new one that connected 75 Yahoo offices across the world. "In 90 days, 1,000 conference rooms were turned online with the same conferencing."

Despite his success at Yahoo, Genovese's goal was always to "make it to Google."

"I wanted to be where the action is," he said. "Even though the brand names seemed similar to many people back then, there's a huge difference between getting into Yahoo and getting into Google."

Genovese interviewed 11 times over the course of seven months for one of the highly competitive positions at Google. His persistence paid off when he was hired in 2018 as an engineering program manager.

"It was absolutely brutal, but I got in, which was pretty surreal and a dream come true," he said.

Genovese's career path at Google has been unique. Initially assigned to Google's Search platform, he has taken on special rotations with other teams since then, including working on the Google Assistant for almost half a decade, in his quest to become a product manager, which he describes as "the height of Silicon Valley as an individual contributor." He has also worked for Android and Google Wallet, where he created the product Hotel Keys and led its development as a public product now live to the world. This gave him a deep immersion into the complex world of product development and one of his most rewarding career accomplishments to date.

"I sculpted out exactly what those screens were going to look like, exactly how the technology was going to be built, how we were going to scale, and how it would be used," he explained. "Building my team of business development people and engineers, being able to lead my team and pull all those people together and drive them toward this goal was a very inspiring experience. And we made this really beautiful, really strong and exciting product that could eventually, aspirationally, scale to every hotel in the world."

In May 2023, Genovese was recruited to join the team developing what was then known as Bard (now Gemini), Google's artificial intelligence chatbot. He maintained his role as a high-level engineering/go-to market program manager, but added product management to his responsibilities, becoming one of the few people in the organization to hold two job profiles.

As an engineering and go-to market technical program manager for Gemini Experiences, Genovese collaborates with employees across every business function to promote Gemini and its features and position it in the marketplace. As one of the few go-to market program management leads, he is on the team that actually invents the features and leads the broader organization to make those features and products shine in market. The two roles have enabled him to be part of almost every major launch in Gemini, including that of the mobile app, itself.

"It was just an amazing feeling, being able to get that to market," he said. "It was a very important moment for the company, and it was a very important moment for my career. It was just a very beautiful experience.

"Creating is my passion," he continued. "I want to create, build, explore, invent, push the future forward, challenge the status quo. Why are things the way that they are, how can we do them differently, and why don't we? Artificial intelligence is going to have such an incredible impact on the world, and it's going to benefit so many people at scale and in ways that are step changes. I want to make sure that the world gets the most possible benefit out of this new technology. Being a part of that mission is really, really special and important to me."

Genovese acknowledges that the road to his dream was rocky, at times. He sold everything he had to move to the West Coast and worked 16 hours a day at the salary he was making back in Western New York. He couldn't afford a place of his own, and he didn't have time to make friends. Layoffs at Yahoo made the experience even more intense, he said.

"I was lying in bed most nights, staring at the ceiling, saying, 'Why did I do this?'" he admits. "But every morning, I would wake up and I would think, 'I'm going to get through this day, and I'm going to accomplish my goal.'"

Genovese leaned into the challenge, and it helped him to build resiliency and made him a better leader, he said.

"Every set back is a set up for a comeback," he said. "You can turn every weakness into a strength and make every negative a positive, as long as you keep your focus and discipline. I'm really grateful for everything. It's been really, really, really hard, but it's been awesome."

His advice to others? "Dare to dream. Your future self will thank you."

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