Moving from Academia to Commercial Graphs

In this GraphGeeks podcast, Amy Hodler chats with Janet Six, a product manager at Tom Sawyer Software who made the leap from academia to industry in the graph world.

Janet relates how she fell in love with what she calls the "beautiful combination of mathematics and art" in laying out graph structures. After pursuing a PhD, she was determined to bring academic research into real-world applications. Despite being warned against studying AI in the 1990s, she followed her passion anyway, and now, thirty years later, we're seeing incredible connections between graphs and AI through LLMs and agentic workflows.

We also get to hear how Janet, as a former competitive roller skater, sees her current product management work as "choreography" - dancing between customer needs, business requirements, and technology constraints while working within deadlines and real-world limitations.