Nicolas Darveau-Garneau, 57, worked for Google for five years as chief search evangelist, a position that required him to meet senior teams of top advertisers around the world. Teams would visit Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, spend a whole day with Darveau-Garneau and talk about what was top-of-mind for them. He would then work with these Google advertisers to help them improve their digital strategies. 

“I had over 1,000 CEO meetings, from the smaller companies all the way to the biggest companies in the world,” Darveau-Garneau tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. 

Based on those meetings, Darveau-Garneau, who held the role of chief evangelist from 2017 to 2022, identified three ways that people can grow their careers this year. He also wrote a book about his experiences titled Be a Sequoia, Not a Bonsai: The Seven Growth Secrets of the World’s Most Successful Companies, which comes out on January 27. The book reveals how the top 5% of companies act and grow differently from the rest. 

Read on for Darveau-Garneau’s best advice for growing in your career in 2026.

Related: He Went From Food Stamps to Co-Founding a $9.3 Billion Startup. Here’s Why He Walked Away.

Find the person whose career you want to emulate

The first step to career advancement, the “most important feedback” that Darveau-Garneau gave, is to ask yourself the question: Whose career would you want to have five or 10 years from now? This doesn’t mean identifying an ideal job, but an ideal person. 

“Pinpoint a human being, pinpoint somebody that you really respect, whose career you really envy that you would love to have,” Darveau-Garneau says.

He notes that usually only one-third of people he advises have a role model in mind; the majority, the other two-thirds, need time to think about it. Darveau-Garneau emphasizes that this step is critical, however, because before you can move your career in the right direction and grow it, you have to know where you want to row the boat. 

Related: This Founder Solved His ‘Biggest Mistake’ to Go From 0 to 500,000 Customers

Find that person, and apprentice under them

The second secret would be to find that person or somebody similar and to go and apprentice under them. Darveau-Garneau says he made the mistake of starting a business early in his career, when he was only 26 years old, before he had the chance to work for people he admired at Apple, Google or similar companies. He says he would have learned “a lot” by working at these firms before striking out on his own. 

“If you know where you want to go, find the best person you can and go work for them for two to five years and really apprentice,” Darveau-Garneau says. “You may not make as much money [or] have as much responsibility as if you were doing something else on your own, but you’re going to learn a lot more.”

Instead of working for a large company, Darveau-Garneau started imix.com, a site to legally download music. He launched the startup in 1996, and it was acquired by a large media company in 2001. It licensed music from record labels and built a website to let people download the music. It was ahead of its time; Spotify, for context, launched in 2008.

Master AI

The third secret, which Darveau-Garneau calls “the only way nowadays for most of us to advance our careers,” is to master AI. Though anyone can use ChatGPT on a basic level, deeper mastery can set someone apart from the rest. Do you know how to reduce hallucinations? Can you daisy-chain three AI systems, like Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT, to do something unique? How well can you really run AI?

Related: Nearly 95% of Companies Saw Zero Return on In-House AI Investments, According to a New MIT Study

Going deep into AI and being the best in the world, the top 1%, is going to make your career “skyrocket,” Darveau-Garneau says. However, if you’re not in at least the top 25% of being able to use AI, then AI is not a tool or a friend, but a competitor. 

Brandon Daniels, the CEO of Exiger, an AI risk management company valued in the multi-billion-dollar range, agrees with Darveau-Garneau that it takes more than a superficial understanding of AI to flourish as the technology takes over more jobs. He told Entrepreneur that workers need to develop critical reasoning skills to adapt to AI. 

Of these three steps to career growth, the most important one is the first — having clarity on where you want to be 10 years from now. Identifying the person who is in that role will allow your career to really “take off,” according to Darveau-Garneau. 

“I didn’t know that when I was young, and I wish, in hindsight, I’d figured it out earlier,” he says.

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