Offering up a time capsule from my business blogging past that I think still resonates today: In 2005 I contributed to a business book unlike any I’d read, called More Space: Nine Antidotes to Complacency in Business, written by emerging business bloggers. Some of the chapters were about marketing in this new era of social; some were about productivity. My chapter? I guess you could call it “Business Memoir”. I was obsessed with how personal experiences affected our professional lives, and with how moving toward personal authenticity was a path to effectiveness in business.

So many things have changed since I wrote this: Blogging is no longer the bright, shiny object in media. I’ve long stopped being a “cost center” and have been existing on the revenue/business generation side for the last 12 years. And my dear friend, “Calvin” passed away in 2006. But the principles remain the same.

Many thanks to Todd Sattersten, the guy standing next to me in this picture from our book signing at SXSW in 2006, who had the vision behind More Space.

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It was 2002 in San Francisco, meaning everyone who used to work south of Market Street was now unemployed. At the time I was in between jobs and would prattle on endlessly to my friend Calvin about how poor I was. Calvin is a soft, technologically oriented man in his fifties; we’d met at a personal development workshop a year before and often got together for lunch in the City, or on the Peninsula where he worked, to talk about relationships and writing.

He saw me eyeing one of his cell phones.

“You want it?” he said. “I got it on eBay.” I suspected Calvin spent more time buying used electronics than he did working.

“No, no, of course not,” I said, embarrassed. “I was just looking.”

Calvin always listened attentively, providing me with inspiring books to read during my imposed sabbatical, and offered his own form of unemployment insurance — a subsidized lunch check. When the bill arrived at the end of every shared meal he’d say, “Put down your co-pay,” and I’d hand him five bucks.

Today he broke the monotony and told me about a job opening at his company. I was surprised by his candidness; he’d spent fifteen years at the company but had not one whit of promotional rah rah to offer.

“I’m not promising you a new career,” he said. “The company is in trouble. I’m not even sure I like where it’s going. I can only promise you an income.” It was enough.

“Do you need my resume?” I asked, unsure of what Calvin could possibly tell the hiring manager about me other than I had a tortured past with men and was desperate for a job.

“Shoot me a resume for HR’s purposes,” he said. “But I’ve already told them about you. We could really use someone with your communication skills.”

Skills? What skills? As far as I was concerned, skills came from trying. Skills were about tangible things — closing sales, completing projects on time and on budget. I’d only gone into job interviews with facts and figures. I was nervous; what would I bring? Pay stubs from the unemployment office to prove just how needy I was?

My first interview went poorly. I was told the position required an element of selling, but mostly customer relationship skills. I flew to LA to meet with the head of sales, which frightened me a bit — I was hoping to chat with someone on the cost center versus the revenue-generating side of the business, as I relate to those folks better. People in sales always struck me as a bit heartless, disembodied from the product. I’d worked in publishing for years but spent most of my career on the fulfillment end of the contract; getting the business was someone else’s problem. I reassured myself with what Calvin had told me over lunch; the company was rethinking its approach to fit a more solution-oriented sales strategy, as opposed to its previous “take it or leave it” attitude. The company was notorious for producing the priciest events in the tech industry. During the dot-com boom they could get away with it — you’d be a fool not to hawk your product next to Apple’s booth in front of twenty-five thousand qualified leads, even if you had to sell your youngest child to do it.

“I’ve told them forever that our arrogance couldn’t last,” Calvin said to me. “We heard the grumblings when things were good, but no one listens when you’re making money hand over fist.”

Now, however, the company was in bankruptcy proceedings. Its former shoo-in customers, the top tech companies, were finding that smaller, more intimate and customized events were yielding better results — for less money — than the Cirque du Soleil-like extravaganzas that Calvin’s company produced. The smaller clients had other things to think about, like making payroll. Calvin’s company had made so many acquisitions during the years of irrational exuberance that it simply couldn’t afford them any longer.

Still, bankruptcy was a step up from unemployment.

“They still have health insurance, right?” I asked Calvin. As long as my paycheck cleared, I couldn’t care less about the company’s history. I took Calvin’s warnings with a grain of salt.

Calvin explained that they wanted someone who could close deals, yes, but who would also stick with a handful of their largest clients and continually monitor and grow the relationships. I imagined myself kvetching with product managers and faxing them contracts.

“You’re right, Calvin,” I said. “I am perfect for this job.”

I received a call later that day from an HR person who wanted to schedule an interview.

“Can you make it to our Los Angeles office?” she said.

“Sure. What day?”

“Tomorrow. At 8:30 A.M.”

I looked at my watch — it was 4:30 in the afternoon. Wow, I thought, they mean business.

That night I hardly slept, I was so anxious, but I finally succumbed to my insomnia and got out of bed at 3:30 A.M. to make the 6 A.M. flight. Needless to say, by 8:30 A.M. I was a bit out of it, and the gallon of Starbucks I’d chugged at the airport was acting more like a diuretic than a stimulant.

I arrived at the interview decidedly underdressed. Calvin always wore Dockers and a button-down shirt to work, so I wore an uncontroversial plain cardigan sweater over black slacks. I had been told the head of sales “could fit in twenty or thirty minutes.” I tried to bullet-point my skills in my head during the flight so that I would be as concise as possible. While I waited in the glass-walled lobby I recited them in my head.

The VP’s assistant came out to greet me in a suit. He smelled of expensive cologne.

“He’s ready to see you now, Jory,” he said.

My first thought was, “Shit.”

I met Jerry, the vice president of sales, with a firm but clammy handshake.

I don’t remember much of what happened, only that my bullet points were irrelevant. All that highfalutin name-dropping I had intended for the first five minutes was pushed to the wayside by his immediate questions.

“So, Jory, the San Francisco office speaks very highly of you; though I must admit some concern. I don’t see any sales experience on your resume.”

“Oh I’ve had plenty. At my last company we all had to pitch in and cold call. However, my experience has been much more in working with the client. I’ve developed programs for quite a few companies and grown those relationships.”

“But did you close sales?”

“Not per se, no. I grew them.”

“That’s not closing the sale.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Let me be blunt, Jory. We need a closer. Someone who has closed at least $3 million in annual sales and who has considerable cold calling experience — at least eighteen months. I don’t see that here. I’m still trying to make sense of what you have down here near the bottom of your resume.”

In an attempt to completely alter my past for this interview I shoved my previous seven years of magazine editing and writing experience into a few lines, even shrinking the font. I wanted to tell him that, having sold advertising in an all-hands sales effort during my last job, a dot-com in its final tailspin, I had developed the skill of bullshitting my way through anything. And while $3 million worth of bullshit was certainly a lot of bullshit, it wasn’t insurmountable. In fact, I could probably make the company that much thinking of ways to save money. Let’s start with a ban on dragging people on airplanes for twenty-minute meetings. . . .

But I didn’t say anything. I just nodded empathetically, hoping he would take exception to my lacking background because of my ability to take it like a man, not a sniveling, soft-skilled woman.

I was back on a plane by 10 A.M. and back in San Francisco by noon. No sooner had I entered my apartment when I received a call on my cell phone from Calvin.

“How’d it go?” he said.

“Don’t ask.”

“Yeah, I thought I’d hear it from you first. . . . I got the feedback from Jerry’s office.”

“Thrill.”

“I have good news and bad news.”

“You know me — start with the bad.”

“Jerry didn’t like you.”

“Geeze. . . . What’s the good news?”

“We don’t like Jerry.”

I got the job.

It seemed so strange to me that I had “won” the majority of folks over without so much as telling a white lie to spiff up my qualifications. I was taken “as is,” like one of the many flawed electronic gadgets Calvin bought on eBay.

It occurred to me that what I perceived to be my flaws — in this case my vulnerability around Calvin — was my strength. Calvin didn’t help get me a job because I was “a closer” but because he knew me and could relate to me — so much so that he convinced others at the company that I was a worthy investment. All the struggles I’d shared with him further cemented in his mind my ability to connect with customers. He’d known all along that I would crash and burn in that interview; it was my utter incompatibility with Mr. $3 Million that sealed the deal.

Like I said earlier, I’d met Calvin at a personal development workshop. We’d gone for different reasons. He’d gone because he’d had a near-fatal heart attack just a few months before. Obviously, he’d survived, but things were different. He knew that his condition had, in part, been a result of the stress he’d placed on himself to perform. Not to do work as such but literally to perform, to be someone he wasn’t. He wanted more clarity on just who Calvin really was.

I went for business reasons; the company that produced the seminar was a potential client, and they invited me to attend, gratis, to better understand their “product.” My boss at the time had thought that attending would be good for growing the business relationship, so they sent me — on Memorial Day weekend, no less — to represent our firm. I sat through the first few hours very pissed off. I read self-help books all the time and knew this routine cold. It would only be a matter of time before they’d ask me to start punching something.

I sat next to a red-haired woman who, I could smell, was dying for a smoke. The first moment of freedom we both beelined to the front door and stood in the unappreciated sunshine.

“Is this a lot of crap or what?” she said, lighting up.

“I wonder if they’ll notice if I sneak out,” I said.

“Yeah. My husband made me go to this; I don’t know why. I suppose he thinks it will make me a better listener or something. Why’d you come?”

“Strictly business, I assure you.”

“What do you mean? You work for the company?”

“Me? No. They’re a client . . . potential client. We might do an advertising campaign for them. Supposedly this will help me better understand them.” Somehow, by introducing myself as someone who would never be so desperate as to actually pay for one of these seminars I was washing myself of that human funk I smelled on the others. After all, I had been told my whole life that I had my shit together. And now I had a well-paying, director-level job to prove it. I’d been a magazine writer, but after slogging it out for little pay and being rejected by clueless people for a while, it became very clear to me I needed to aspire elsewhere. The company I was working for, which would become a blip in the dot-com cosmos just a few short months later, had made for a great ego shelter the past few years.

Despite my threats to leave I stayed. What would I possibly say to my boss if I abandoned our mission of good will? That I was above this crap? She was accustomed to jumping on planes at the beck and call of clients. All I needed to do was keep my butt in a chair.

Throughout the day, I writhed and repositioned myself in my unforgiving stackable chair. A few of the workshop participants had brought cushions; I wondered if any of them would be willing to sell me theirs. Food was not allowed in the room, but I crammed bits of protein bar into my mouth whenever the course leader looked away. After a few hours, however, as more people shared themselves with the group, I forgot about my discomfort; I became interested in their stories, even a bit impressed. There were a few CEOs, entrepreneurs who’d just sold their companies and, now very wealthy and with their lives wide open to possibility, struggled to find the next, meaningful step; a few very young people with woo-woo parents who wanted their kids to get a dose of this self-awareness stuff early, preferably before they were my age.

The next break I ate lunch with folks who were more up than my last break mate. One was an executive coach who said he was reviewing the course. He’d taken it before three years earlier.

“Which part did you forget?” I asked him, “the incessant repetition or sitting for fifteen hours in uncomfortable chairs?” He just smiled, and maybe laughed at me.

I noticed the red-haired woman I had been sitting next to was nowhere to be seen. Shame, she seemed to actually need this shit. As annoyed as I was by being here, I was finding my social tendencies kicking in; I was actually enjoying my conversations with people. And some of the content was interesting, much the way it’s interesting to sit in on a focus group, to examine the state of others. I always thought of myself as somewhat of a pulse taker. Someone who could observe, synthesize, and then create something that “spoke” for the people I’d observed. I did that a lot as a magazine writer, often writing articles on stuff I’d read about that seemed to be compelling to somebody; unfortunately, the content bored me. Sometimes I wondered if it bored my readers as a result. And, well, I’d rather be dead than boring.

I sat with another woman, a nice girl for sure, but a bit weepy. She kept a box of Kleenex under her chair, which was nearly used up, and we were only on Day One. By the end of the first grueling day the instructors told us that we’d be all over the map in terms of our emotional levels. Some of us would be racing at the top of the roller coaster; others would be low, or maybe even confused. I thought: Smart tactic to get people to come back — make them think that it’s all part of the “process.”

We were asked to call a family member that night and share an “inauthenticity.” I’m usually very good with homework assignments, but I was confused. I didn’t think I had any reason to call someone. I dialed my twin sister from my bed. She lives in Boston, three hours ahead, and seemed annoyed.

“Hello,” she said, barely awake.

“It’s me.”

“It’s late.”

“I know. I know. Just humor me . . . So I’m taking that workshop this weekend, and I’m supposed to call someone and share something inauthentic about myself. . . . Do you think I have anything to share?”

“I don’t know. You seem to tell people things whether they want to hear them or not.”

“I know! I’m a fairly straight shooter, right?”

“Maybe you can call someone who knew your ex?” My stomach dropped when I heard that.

“Why would I do that? What else is there to discuss about that? It’s over. Done.”

“All right. You just asked if there was something you could share. It seemed like that could be something.”

“This homework assignment is stupid.”

“Yeah, no shit. It’s two in the morning here.”

“OK. So, for the record I called you, we determined that there was nothing for me to share, no inauthenticities, and we’re cool.”

“Fine. Good night.”

The second day I wore something a bit more casual. I had an odd feeling that I’d need to wear clothes that weren’t so binding; something that I wouldn’t mind crying in. The executive coach had warned me that the second day can get very emotional for people. I figured, I cry at movies, and with all this raw, frightening emotion I was likely to witness today you just never know.

The course instructors seemed to be getting mighty personal with the morons who opted to get up and share with the rest of the crowd. As expected, some broke into tears. I could smell my sweat when this occurred. I just listened and applauded on cue, at the end of each gripping bit of testimony.

We had some sort of visualization exercise that I cannot share, not only to maintain the privacy of the people I met in the seminar, but because I truly don’t remember it. All I remember was the hit, directly in my stomach and rising. We had to keep our eyes closed, as I suppose the point was to have an experience untainted by worries of being watched. Still, I felt a pang of embarrassment, even shame. I became aware, beyond any way that my brain could comprehend, in my body, of the absurdity of my life.

A beautiful story rolled out in front of me — so good I’d wished I’d written it instead of lived it — of a girl so plastic you could knock on her, and very pretty. She made sure of it. She lived a plastic life and wondered why she couldn’t feel very much. People liked to be around her, but only for so long — shit, she was plastic! How long can it hold your interest, really?

Our eyes were still closed. My cheeks were wet; I must have started crying. And I felt a weight, literally, coming from my nose. I shook my head and felt a soft, wet pull. I broke ranks and opened my eyes. The room was full of people with closed eyes, some crying, and a pendulous, two-foot-long globule of snot was hanging from my right nostril. The others couldn’t see it, but the seminar leaders couldn’t have missed it. How unattractive! The Plastic Girl has snot coming out of her nose! The Plastic Girl is absurd. Boy that was funny. So funny I felt a chuckle coming on and then a full-out belly laugh. A few of the others started joining me.

We were asked if we wanted to share our experience. I didn’t, I thought, and yet I walked to the microphone at the front of the room. I felt I owed these people an explanation. I looked up; a room full of people were looking at me. Their eyes hurt, but I let them take me in, snot and all. I hadn’t rehearsed anything in my head. What the hell would I possibly say? Even I was surprised by what came out, the sound of my voice.

“I’m a good writer,” I said. “But I’ll never get it down on paper. Ever.” I decided to tell these people the story of the Plastic Girl. Several months before the seminar she had been dating a coworker who could best be described as different from her. He wasn’t your average professional. His hair was longer than hers. He was wicked smart and wicked rude. She liked the fact that he was rude. Some people at the company called him an asshole, which they felt perfectly comfortable calling him around her, as they assumed she had no connection to him whatsoever. They never spoke to each other in the office, never saw each other in the vicinity of the office. They kept the personal and the professional completely separate, walled off with Fort Knox–like security.

One day he gives the Plastic Girl some very bad news that he has just discovered; he is HIV positive. The information bounces off of her, as there is no place for it to be taken in. Surely, she being Plastic, she cannot contract such horrific things as HIV. She reacts by pretending he doesn’t have a virus and hoping that he will learn to do the same, or accept his condition and stop being so emotional all the time. Weeks later his body was found in the park, hanging from a tree. The sound of plastic cracking was deafening.

The funeral, the HIV testing, and the therapy sessions that followed chipped away at her some more. Since his death she just hadn’t been feeling like her usual plasticky self. She felt soft and mushy. Her usual unquestioned get-up-and-go was more tenuous.

I told them my overriding concern at my boyfriend’s funeral was whether my mascara was waterproof. I told them that the greatest compliment you could give me in the last few months is, “Despite it all, she looks great.”

I sat down and the Weepy Woman hugged me. I didn’t feel I deserved to be hugged. I felt sick to my stomach, and ugly. I could feel my face had puffed up from the tears.

At the break people kept coming up to me. One man said he didn’t know why but he just wanted to hug me. The executive coach asked me out.

A tall, scruffy man approached me, “Wow, that was some story. It’s a shame you stopped writing. If you decide to start up again I’d love to help.” He extended his hand, “My name is Calvin.”

I returned to work that Tuesday.

“How was the seminar?” my boss asked me. “I hope it didn’t completely blow your weekend.”

“It was fine. Real nice.”

“No one made you drink the purple Kool-Aid, did they?”

“Nope. It was cherry.”

“Hah. That’s the spirit. Brief us later in the staff meeting.”

“Yeah, sure.”

I thought about what I would say. Frankly I had no new insights as to how we would win over the client. I suppose they’d won me over. I understood why they invited me to their seminar. How can you work for clients whose language you do not share? I’d thought I knew their language, but until this weekend I had been speaking in tongues. I wasn’t speaking Human.

*****

A couple of months after I took the job at Calvin’s company, I noticed he’d maintained this cheapo Web site called a Web log that he posted copy to every day.

“What is it?” I asked him, “Are you selling products?”

“No. I just like to post my opinions.”

I thought he was naive. What if someone lifted his stuff and posted it to their site? Would he get royalties? I told him he should keep his best stuff for print.

“These aren’t articles I’m posting. These are conversations,” he said. “You can’t wait to get these in print. They happen in real time.”

Anything to avoid work, I thought. Calvin posted to his blog constantly, typically in the middle of meetings, from his laptop or BlackBerry, any way he could. He often sent me links to stories or commentary. I always sent him brief thank-you notes for sending them, but I never read the stuff. I used my spare time reading trade Web sites that focused on tech trends the company covered for the industry. From these sites I learned who mattered, and who I needed to pursue.

Everyone knew Calvin had checked out of the quotidian aspects of his job a long time ago. From a manager’s standpoint the only reason he woke up every morning was to surf on eBay for bargains or post to “his little Web site.” The first time that I visited Calvin’s office I was shocked at all of the bells and whistles he liked to use, or to just collect. There must have been three BlackBerrys on his desk, four cell phones, two servers (one for his personal use, he later explained), two desktops, and a laptop. Despite all of his gadgets, he never used them to record deadlines, to-do lists, and project plans. At times I was quite irritated with Calvin; when he failed to show up at meetings people would come to my desk looking for him.

Once he missed a meeting that I had scheduled with one of our most promising clients.

I don’t usually confront senior executives, but Calvin was so clueless (or approachable — I hadn’t yet made the distinction) that I confronted him about his flakiness.

“I told them you would be in that meeting,” I said to him. “How are we going to get to their decision makers if we can’t even convince the gatekeepers?”

“Sorry,” Calvin said. “Who do you want to reach at that company?” I told him.

“Tell you what,” he said. “Let me call him. We’re friends.”

The bottom line was, despite his flakiness, Calvin was a hot commodity, the guy you would go to when you wanted to score a meeting with some pooh-bah at Apple or Adobe. These muckety-mucks blew off us sales types, but when Calvin called they cut out of meetings, or if they couldn’t talk at that moment, they always called back.

I often had to broker sales through Calvin, even though he wasn’t in sales, because the contact refused to talk to anyone but him. I would often write notes to him during teleconferences with potential customers, listing instructions to help move along the conversations. He never followed my instructions, but he did close deals. It didn’t matter what Calvin was requesting of them; it seemed that as long as the words came from him, they were gold. Once, when I’d asked Calvin to accompany me to an off-site pitch meeting, our general manager quipped, half-joking, “Make sure he’s wearing a clean shirt.” Still, there was no question that Calvin should attend.

There was something powerful about this man who eschewed appearances. Calvin had a secret “in”, and no one thought to question where it came from. He seemed to know more than where a person worked or his position in a company. He knew them personally, and he knew the real stories behind their trade-publication announcements. He knew that some VP I wanted to get a meeting with had a long-standing grudge against our company for an article we produced touting a competitor’s new product release.

“How did you know this?” I asked Calvin, thinking he’d read this in some insider column available for an exorbitant subscription fee.

“He told me,” Calvin said.

Calvin also knew who was disappointed with the events we held for the industry, which speakers tanked, what the word on the street was about our new launching event in Amsterdam. Yet he never polled, surveyed, or hired a marketing team to find out our customers’ perception of us, nor did he ask. They simply told him. And in return he told them things that he knew about hot products, open jobs, must-see demos. Despite all that he was told, it seemed the debt of information owed him was always greater. Not like he was keeping track; I was.

I wondered why Calvin hadn’t helped us to leverage these contacts sooner. I also questioned his sanity: What the hell are contacts for if not to drum up business?

I went to a follow-up to the seminar where I met Calvin, as I felt like something inside me had cracked open that Memorial Day Weekend, and this unintelligible crap was oozing out — old memories and strange, entrepreneurial desires. I was seeing something but couldn’t yet make it out.

The next seminar I attended was not quite as visceral as the first. Most of the people there were ready to explore themselves and less resistant to being there. Many of the sessions were interesting discourses, almost like college lectures. One discussion that interested me, in particular, was about authenticity; more specifically about being authentic.

This discussion made me nervous. I had suspected I had authenticity issues, but what does it mean to be inauthentic? I’d always tried to beat people in quantifiable ways: get more money, get more promotions, or get better evaluations. But, on occasion, I found myself in situations where people were simply not impressed. And nothing I could say or do could change it. I usually referred to these people as weird, or naive. Something just wasn’t right about them.

I had been warned by another attendee about the course leader. “She’ll kick your ass,” he said. I wondered what he meant. She was tall and slim. Granted, I’m short, but I fight nasty. Physically I could take her.

Over the course of the day I started to understand. The woman wasn’t so much an ass-kicker as a bullshit detector. People shared some mighty strong insights and stories about themselves. I’d come out as a crier and now had my box of tissues planted under my chair. Wads of wet Kleenex were starting to pile up underneath. But with some of the most convincing people she would stand and look at them with her arms crossed and her nose wrinkled, like she’d smelled something bad.

“Nope,” she’d say. “I don’t buy it.”

I spent that first day with my mouth agape. Here people were opening themselves up to inquiry, sharing themselves, and getting shot down like plastic ducks in a carnival game. It seemed irresponsible to me, her behavior. Once again, I feared sharing myself. What if everything I’d believed about myself and shared in an effort to show my vulnerability was rejected, labeled inauthentic? Oh, the horror.

A new word was used at the seminar and regarded as the worst insult you could place on someone: “Sincere.” It held a new meaning in this seminar, not the dictionary meaning. In this room, sincere meant its very opposite, or a bland attempt at authenticity. If someone shared something and was told they were very sincere they immediately dropped their shoulders in defeat. While I was hardly an expert, I started to see a pattern in everyone who was dubbed sincere. Usually they had devised some story about themselves about why they were so alone, or fat, or unhappy, and it was usually very very sad. When they spoke I thought of Beaches and other movies that made me cry, of the music that often played in the background. It played behind these people while they spoke.

On the flip side, some of the people I thought had not one whit of charisma got away scot-free. If they were asked a question, they might have said, “I don’t know,” or given a very plain vanilla answer. They had so little sense of story about them; they didn’t see themselves as ingenues or characters in a melodrama that were put upon by the world. The reaction the leader had with them was always the same, “Thanks very much for sharing.” My reaction was always, Boooooooorrrrring!

My goal for the day was twofold — to be able to come to this mind-blowing epiphany about myself and then to have the course leader smile at me and say, “Thanks very much for sharing.” The question was, how? I couldn’t quite make out what it took to be authentic, the secret sauce.

“Jory!” Her voice was so loud, I thought. I looked at her like a deer in headlights.

“You’ve been quiet today. Why don’t you come up here and share your thoughts on authenticity with the group?”

I walked up to the microphone, concerned about my underwear. I’d worn a pair that tended to creep up. My voice sounded shaky, scared.

“Yes?” I said into the microphone.

“Yes what? I have no questions for you. I just thought it would be nice to hear your thoughts on the discussion.”

“About authenticity?”

“Sure.”

“Well . . . I just realize that I have been living my life as a very sincere person. I haven’t been very real. I say what I think other people want to hear.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you for sharing, Jory. Your comments were very sincere.”

“Scuse me?”

“You heard me. . . . Tell me, did I catch you at a bad time?”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“It seems I didn’t allow you enough time to rehearse.”

Shit. This wasn’t happening.

“I’m not sure what to say,” I said.

“I can see that.”

“OK, so it’s like a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t thing, is that it? I’m being totally straight with you, but if I say anything, it’s not authentic, it’s sincere.”

“Not necessarily; just what you are saying now.”

“Fine then, I just won’t say anything.”

(Silence.)

The leader said, “Now you are being sincerely indignant.”

“What the fuck do you want from me?! Not to speak? Not to be silent? I don’t know what you want, OK? I don’t know what you want!”

“Now you sound angry. Sincerely angry.”

I put my head down and pouted to myself. The silence wasn’t maddening, however. I didn’t feel like I was wasting people’s time. The moments felt necessary.

“I’m so frustrated,” I said, surprised by the weakness of my own voice. “I want to say the right thing, but I can’t. I’m not sure I know how to be authentic. I’m worried that I never will be real. I’ve been this way for so long. Practiced.”

The course leader smiled, “Thanks very much for sharing, Jory. You can have your seat now.”

They hired a new guy to be my direct supervisor at the company. I had been working at the firm now for two months with hardly any supervision. I’m a fairly independent worker and used the time well to bone up on the industry, but I was ready to delve into working with clients. I had been told not to make any calls yet, as the general manager was still working out significant changes in the product. Revolutionary changes, actually.

I’d listened in on his meetings with our largest clients and was quite impressed: He seemed to be the epitome of what I had promised to be this job around, a good listener. We’d been arrogant, he said. We were ready to get real with our customers and give them what they wanted. We’d been receiving their feedback now for months, and soon we would unveil our new product, a conference that drew only the most qualified leads and that didn’t require a huge investment. At the end of every call, I thought to myself, “Shit, sounds great, but how?”

I was impressed with our humility and insistence on creating a “customer experience”; when potential clients called to ask about the upcoming show, I toed the company line. “We’ve been taking in all of your feedback and incorporating it into plans for the new show,” I said. “We’re still working out the details, so I can’t share much with you now. But the changes are going to be big. Real big.”

Our largest client was in my territory. I did all the groundwork to reestablish contact with the client, set up phone calls, and connect with the primary decision maker. It almost seemed too easy, when I got a simple, one-line e-mail from a marketing manager who wrote, “Can you talk at 1p today?”

I forwarded the note to my boss, who would hopefully have something to say, as I had no clue yet what our product was. We figured this woman was a gatekeeper — by the sound of her title she clearly was — and we just needed to keep her on the hook long enough to get to her boss. By then we’d have a better idea of the value proposition and would probably have pulled together some glossy materials.

The meeting was fairly brief. She asked very basic questions about the product. My boss was good — he practically crafted the package as he spoke, throwing in special features that would “increase their traction” at the event. She was a dutiful peon, asking if we had any figures that backed up what he was saying.

“How can I?” my boss said. “No one is doing this yet. However, I understand your concerns. Normally this would be a $500K package. But we’re realistic about things these days. We know we’re asking our clients to take a huge leap. We also know that gone are the days of the million-dollar trade show booths. I’ll have Jory put together a proposal, but it’s probably going to be a $250K package.”

Wow, I thought, what a value.

“That won’t be necessary,” she said. “I’ll just need a term sheet. You can fax me the contract.” Apparently, this “gatekeeper” had the keys to the safe deposit box as well. She made this whole sales thing look easy. She faxed the contract back, signed. Just a few more of these, I thought, and I’ve blown away my quota. This sale, I felt, was proof that our insistence on being real with customers, on letting them know that we’d heard them, was going to help us blow our numbers out of the water.

In reality, we’d just sold a bill of goods to our largest client, and now we had to bullshit from there. The products that sold from that point on were not actually built as a response to client feedback; they were hybrids of the product we’d just sold our largest client. Unfortunately, these products didn’t match what the other companies needed. Some companies that directly competed with this company were pissed that they hadn’t been given first dibs, or any say in the matter. I told them all the same thing, the same thing I’d heard my boss say:

“We’ve incorporated your feedback over the past few months and the product reflects your concerns.”

“What concerns?” said one particularly argumentative customer. “I never asked for this! A turnkey solution? I never asked you to save me money at the expense of displaying my brand!”

It was a particularly painful meeting. My boss and I had actually flown to see this client with the expectation of closing them, as the company had every year for the past five years. “They need us,” is how it was explained to me, when I first brought up the concerns they had not-subtly relayed to me via e-mail, when I introduced our revolutionary turnkey product.

We left the gilded lobby of the company smiling — at least until we got to the parking lot.

“God,” my boss said. “They are so trade show. We need to get over their heads and start talking to folks who actually understand this shit.”

Unfortunately for us, those were the decision makers; the “grunts” that we spoke to every day, who stood on the trade show floors for hours on end. Their management gave purchasing authority for that very reason — they lived the product. Still, we were convinced that we just needed to rationalize with someone with a director or higher title, someone who understood what was happening in the market. Someone who wouldn’t react like a child to change.

Meanwhile, Calvin tapped away on his blog and, on occasion, provided insight into what some of our larger clients were thinking. We’d learned that another big client of ours highly distrusted our management and was blowing off our calls.

“I think they want us to prove this new concept of ours before taking it on like a guinea pig,” he told me. “Maybe we should let them pass this time around, or maybe we should just let them have it for next to nothing until we do right in their eyes again.”

“Oh, that would go over well, Calvin,” I said. “We’ve got $2.4 million to clear this year. How are we going to get there if we let one of our biggest clients get the product for free?”

“Those numbers are apparitions from a time we’re no longer living in,” Calvin said. Ultimately, he kept these opinions to himself. He wasn’t exactly the Norma Rae of the office, more like the creeping wise man. You had to visit him in his cluttered lair and be willing to put up with rants against George Bush before getting an ounce of customer insight.

I can’t say I blamed him. People in the office tended to shut down when they heard threatening information. If it came from a customer we sent them a bottle of wine before shutting down. If it came from an employee that person was treated like a leper. I’d seen a few people leave in ignominy, for what I’m not sure.

Tension was rising in the office, and now my boss’s boss was wondering why we weren’t making our numbers. We had, after all, scored an early win and pulled in a big client. We’d listened to customers and had eaten humble pie. Why couldn’t we pull in the rest of the usual players? Clearly, the sales team wasn’t doing their job.

One morning there was a lined sheet of notebook paper taped to my boss’s office door. It was a sign-up sheet. We had to sign out and back in any time we took a break, including bathroom breaks that took longer than ten minutes.

“Guess that rules out taking a decent shit,” said one of my colleagues.

I was starting to feel the pinch, or more accurately, the quick rush of air before the axe fell. When the “we’ve listened to your feedback” line failed to go over, we resorted to quick-and-dirty appeasement. Several of the big players I had brought in were now complaining about their deals. They’d heard that we’d offered a competitor ten feet more space to close a deal, and another company the ability to hang their sign when the rest weren’t allowed to brand their booths. Some threatened to pull out of the show.

“I could have told you all this would happen,” Calvin told me, over lunch. “They all speak to each other.”

“But they are all competitors! Why would they do that?”

Calvin laughed at me. I was starting to understand. On purely a commodity level, every company is the same, and they only have their personal legacies to differentiate themselves. By providing a turnkey solution that allowed none of the companies to compete, we’d made sure they had no other leverage but to turn to each other and cooperate.

And there was something else, something even stronger than business theory. We had banked on a few assumptions, namely that companies will do anything to compete. They’d pay more money to look better than their competitors, and they’d keep their mouths shut about it. What we hadn’t banked on was the human factor: the fact that these “Trade Show Folks” went to the same events — ten, twenty, thirty a year. They stayed at the same hotels and had beers with each other after long days on the floor. They talked about their kids and the goddamned drayage and union costs they were charged to set up their booths. They sniffed out the bullshitters. We’d never really asked them what they wanted; we just assumed we knew. And then we sold them something that showed we’d never really bothered to ask. We’d been very, very sincere.

The show was a week away.

“It’s going to be a long week,” I said.

The first day of the conference conjures up for me visions of the American Revolution. I’d seen movies like Glory and The Patriot and was always bewildered by how the British practically walked to their deaths wearing garish red uniforms, knowingly marching into excruciating pain. I stood there with my colleagues, taking a deep breath, about to march — scuse me — walk the show floor and greet our clients. We wore stiff pantsuits and, as my boss required, hard-soled shoes. They were the Americans, wearing casual, logoed Polo shirts and comfortable shoes. I wanted to linger in the back and let the other sales folks take the first shots.

One of the people in operations ran over like a loyal decoy.

“I just finished helping your client set up. Shit, Jory, she . . . is . . . pissed. I told her you’d be right over to chat with her.”

Another operations person, who had been working with another of my clients, took me aside with more diplomacy, “I think I quelled them for now, but they are definitely going to want to vent about a few things. I think they have a list,” she said.

I relayed this information to my boss, asking for his input on how we should handle this rare, direct contact with the client. They were no longer pains-in-the-ass whose phone calls we could ignore until we thought up some special amenity we could throw into their contract.

“No worries,” he said, though I knew him better now and could tell this was just a reaction. “Set up a meeting.”

It got worse. The grumblings miraculously trickled upward, to my boss’s boss. I was asked to “make room for a few more chairs” at our feedback meeting.

I saw Calvin, who had been busy with the content side of the conference, and told him about my date with death at approximately 1 P.M. He giggled like a schoolboy. I knew that he wished me no ill will; it was only that his suspicions had been validated. Although the show he’d spent years developing was quickly crumbling at his feet, he felt a strange satisfaction in having had the clairvoyance to see it happening months, maybe even years, before.

The meetings we held with these important clients were anything but fun, as having your maw stuffed with humble pie is often rather painful. I did what any smart person would do and kept my mouth shut and took notes. My boss offered an ounce of resistance by making some claim that he hadn’t said what had been attributed to him by the client; unfortunately the Lilliputians had taken plenty of notes during our initial pitch to them and had documented the conversations.

At the end my boss’s boss, a smart lady who had also kept her mouth shut during the proceedings, asked if I had written down all the customer complaints.

“Yes,” I said. “All seventy — I’m sorry, seventy-one — points.” The only thing I had said the whole meeting, and I don’t think it was appreciated.

One of the clients — one we’d determined was too low level to take seriously, had spoken the entire time. She had been in her position with the company for twenty-five years. Long enough, I suppose, to have seen it all. Longer than me, my boss, and his boss combined.

“Do you get that we have been on board with your company for years, through thick and through thin?” she said, looking more hurt than angry. “We want you to be successful; your events have done that for us in the past. Do you know what it feels like to be lied to all of the time?”

Needless to say our GM was humbled by all of this; he said, “We plan to make up for all of this. We are currently planning a summit for our best customers. We’ll fly them to a resort, on our dime, of course, and try to figure out where we went wrong. And we intend to collect every ounce of feedback and incorporate it into our next event.”

I thought to myself: Wow, why wasn’t I told about this summit. But then I remembered how we got into this whole mess in the first place: by pretending we’d listened. This was just the same old line, different day.

The war ended, as most do, with a lot of carnage — in this case amid the rubble of dismantled trade show booths. Numerous key personnel were asked to leave shortly afterward, including Calvin. I was not fortunate enough to get fired, so I left of my own volition, surprised that I had managed to find a job to replace this one. When I started to refashion my resume I didn’t know what to say, what was my title? Strategic Account Manager? Propagandist?

My last day at the company I snuck out early, had a drink with a friend, went home, and took a very, very, long shower.

The first time I’d taken Calvin up on his offer to critique my writing, I’d dutifully followed his request to write about my most embarrassing moment, an exercise I suppose he thought would get me to come out of my shell and become a more authentic writer. I wrote about a date I had in high school that went horribly awry when my father came in the room, just as my date and I were, um, getting to know each other.

We met at our usual lunch spot. I was anxious to hear his thoughts.

“Your grammar’s good,” he said, “but anyone could have written this.”

“How can you say that, Calvin!” I was practically screeching. “This story was so painful to write!”

“I can’t even tell if you were actually screwing the guy,” Calvin said, taking a sip of iced tea. I didn’t speak to Calvin for a long time after that. Clearly here was someone who didn’t understand nuance, or, for that matter, maturity.

But alas, here I was, several years, several jobs, later, bringing Calvin up to speed on my life, my exploits, my failures, my embarrassments. Somehow, sharing them, while not necessarily vindicating me, lightened my load.

I hadn’t been working with Calvin for over a year. I enjoyed the people at my new job, but not the work. Funny, I was doing exactly what I had signed on to do, what I knew I could do, but I was starting to perceive that it wasn’t what I’d wanted to do. Every job in my career has been about filling someone else’s need. To me, getting jobs was tantamount to having a bag of tricks. I could pull any combination of delightful qualifications, based on the hiring manager’s mood and what I’d read about the company’s culture. But in the end I’d felt more like a well-qualified weather vane than anything else. I could point anywhere, but the swinging was making me dizzy.

In a previous life I wrote for magazines, and I wanted to freelance — or more accurately, to write — again, but the thought of starting up the old engine of eighty pitches a day seemed daunting to me. Plus, when I wrote professionally, editors often tweaked my original ideas so many times that creating an article seemed more like origami than like personal expression. I’d gotten into a rut of making my work marketable but not unique, and certainly not worth a second look.

I made sure that employment would be on the agenda for my next lunch with Calvin. Surely he knew someone in his vast and powerful network who could help me find a new job, one that, this time, didn’t make me doubt my sanity. He didn’t give me quite what I was looking for, but, as I was to discover, he gave me more than I ever thought I needed: one of his portals to success.

“Why don’t you start a blog?” Calvin said. I thought back to all those links to his little Web site he used to send me by e-mail. A site for people with too much time on their hands.

“That’s so Valley,” was my retort. “I want to get back into publishing.”

“A blog will get you back into your writing, and you can test your content on people, see if they bite.”

I started my blog with the most commercial of intentions — to make it back to the dog-eat-Manolo Blahniks print publishing world. Reading my first few posts feels like being on a first date, enduring someone who’s strategically charming and excessively careful. I picked all-too-obvious subjects, namely reality TV shows. (Incidentally, I wrote a post about the pathetically sad show Surreal Reality the first weekend my blog was in existence; it still generates traffic on my site, as anyone Googling Bridgitte Nielsen can attest.) Mission seemingly accomplished.

And yet my mission wasn’t accomplished. I felt like my blog was a one-sided conversation. I received very little feedback, except from my Mom, who, as anyone who reads my blog knows, stamps nearly every post I write with some comment exclaiming how proud she is of me. Calvin told me that I needed to be patient. Hell, he had set up an aggregator blog that pulled the posts off blogs he read onto his site, requiring no work on his part. Over an incubation period of three years he now received daily traffic in the thousands.

“Just think of how much more traffic you’ll get just because you try,” he said.

I wanted thousands! I wanted adoration. I was, you could say, like every other freaking product marketer on the planet, trying too hard. I needed an edge of some sort; I needed to be different from the others. As with all the other lessons I’d learned about authenticity, I’d learn this one unwittingly, yet inevitably, through an inauthentic urge that could not be quelled through any other means than by being real. In the end, authenticity really isn’t a choice; it’s the only way.

Mind you: I didn’t suddenly decide one day to be authentic. I had simply given up my need to be “on,” to sell myself. If I went to my computer feeling gross, then goshdarnit, I’d let the scant few who happened to bump into my blog know it. Instead of trying to produce content, I simply translated the thoughts, the impulses that were already there. Initially this was a painful process; I would question myself, “Did I actually have that thought, or was that thought thunk in an attempt to be authentic?” But the more I wrote, the less I cared. The Web suddenly became a transparent medium through which the contents in my brain — the chatter, the anxieties, and, lo and behold, the opinions were transmitted, intact. It was around this time that I generated readers, not just traffic.

A few months into my blogging experiment, Calvin and I met for lunch. I missed our daily chats from back when we worked together; I also missed the free technical support. Calvin, as I mentioned, left the tech media company a long while back, but he was hardly struggling. Once his “network” got news of his free agency he had a full roster of consulting projects; he even had to turn away work.

“You’re working hard, it seems,” I said to him.

“It doesn’t feel like work,” Calvin said. “It feels like I’ve finally answered a knock at the door.”

I understood how he felt. Blogging had opened a customized world for me, one that was full of possibilities, and one that didn’t require me to guess what it wanted. I couldn’t remember where I’d stashed my modular set of resumes, one for writing, one for project management, one for business development, and so on. The proof was in the disclosure. People saw where I was coming from and then asked if I would like to tag along on their projects. I imagined it worked that way for corporations as well — a Web site served as a reference, but the blog invited the inquiry.

I said to Calvin, “It occurs to me: It’s not how much you spin but how much you share that earns you points these days.”

Calvin shrugged; I tried to ignore the glob of ketchup in his beard. “Yeah, sure. . . . ” he said, looking off into space. “That sounds good.”

(Many thanks to Denise Tanton, who took the pictures in this post and helped me to remember my mom.)

She had no angle, no ulterior motive, no secret wish that I make something of myself. Her only request of me: Keep writing. 

I disappointed her in this regard, taking years off writing anything personal — I didn’t want to spook investors or employers. And writing for the sake of writing felt like an indulgence best left for my hazily imagined retirement. So she relished the scraps that she found online — marketing newsletters, a musing on LinkedIn about blockchain. Weeks before she died, I wrote a series on startup marketing that delighted her. Even if she didn’t understand any of it, I was writing again. That’s what mattered.

Her profoundest joys were her kids’ personal, not professional, meanderings. The movies we loved, the articles we read, the music we preferred. Anything we wrote. She read every blog post I’d ever written, calling me sometimes minutes after posting something to tell me she loved the post, and if I had a minute maybe I could fix a typo two-thirds of the way in. 

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I gave her access to my TypePad account so she could copyedit for me, initially as a joke, but eventually because I needed her help. She knew how I operated, in bursts of energetic inspiration followed by grammatical loose ends, unread emails, unnoticed backlinks. It wasn’t unusual in 2005 to receive a call from my Mom.

“You read the comments from your post yesterday?”

This was how she got me to respond to them. 

She understood that I was always interested in others’ reactions to my work, but I was also distracted by the future. She was my engagement. She knew my struggle with being present. I outsourced this work to her.

She was the family documentarian and witness; our first call to share news, both good and bad. When my sister separated from her husband I was visiting with my Mom in Chicago.

“Did you talk to Julie yet today?”

“Not yet. Why?”

“You should give her a call.” 

I was a sporadic record keeper and relied on her to give me birthdays, new addresses of family members, the number to reach someone in the hospital. She wasn’t religious about religion, but about tradition. At Christmas she set up her plastic tree and every single ornament ever purchased or gifted to her. And when she got “too creaky” to do it all herself, she enlisted my brother to do it, at the same time every year, Thanksgiving. She sent birthday cards, anniversary cards, sent me cash every year on my birthday, up to my 50th. The last one she’d live to see.

She was a hoarder of sorts, of memorabilia. After a flood wiped out a good portion of her family archive, she realized she needed to distribute her collection for optimal safekeeping. She sent me my high school and college articles, most of which I didn’t remember writing, a yellowed New York Times clip, my first and only, published in the City section, and a baby book stuffed with achievement certificates, notes from parent-teacher conferences, and my grade school report cards. 

And she printed copies of all my blog posts. I made fun of her at the time for it, but then, through a template change snafu on TypePad I lost access to the previous five years of blog posts and was grateful she had kept all of my writing.

In college when I had to pick a major, I kept my options as open-ended as possible, choosing English Literature. I was interested in journalism and broadcasting, but even this branch of liberal arts was too restrictive, I had thought. What if I changed my mind? I could always apply for journalism school later if I wanted (which I ended up doing and then didn’t go; a decision I was to repeat multiple times, with multiple grad programs in multiple disciplines). I don’t recall my Mom having an opinion about any of this, other than she knew I would figure it out. She had never gone to college and thought that all of her kids making it through undergrad was accomplishment enough. 

One thing she always made clear: You could always come home. She had asked me to stay when I was 21 and graduated from college early, anxious to get on with a career in New York City. There was no rush, she said. My bedroom still looked as I’d left it, just more picked up.

“I don’t want you to go,” she told me.

I can’t stay, I told her, but I promised I’d come back. 

I never came back to Chicago to live, but my room would stay largely intact for 20 more years, converting very gradually into my Mom’s office.

I never intended to employ my mother. But, being my mother, she engaged with people who commented on my company’s blog and had started writing her own, developing her own community. Her dedication and interest in engaging and supporting other writers inspired one of my BlogHer co-founders to suggest that, perhaps, we could bring her on as a community manager. I thought that made sense, so long as she didn’t report to me.

By now I was living in California, though traveling to New York and Chicago several times a month and would often stay with my mom when I was in town. She sat with me, often speaking to me with my laptop between us as I could only justify my downtime if it was spent catching up on email. She was always willing to take the errant drips of my attention, for years never getting the full stream. I would share what was to me at the time the most critical news about my world – venture funding rounds, landing major accounts, preparing for our annual conference. She took all of it in, every tedious drop, knowing that I would eventually spill the good stuff. My joys, my fears, the shit that made me laugh.

We talked about dreams, not the future-facing, rainbow colored ones: Mine were always classic anxiety-driven dreams: Being late to class; being unprepared for a test; being back in college and realizing I had not only failed to study for my exams, I hadn’t shown up for class, hadn’t even registered. I’d wake up from these dreams still trying to mentally unspool my actions, asking myself, “what were you thinking this whole time?” I had been sure I had done SOMETHING toward my future. What was it?

My mother shared her own recurring dream: She was on top of a tall building with her four children, and in the rapid succession of a twisted video game one of us would fall off the edge, forcing her to extend her freakishly long plastic arms to catch us. She never let on if she failed to catch anyone.

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Over the last 10 years we spoke by phone most days. By then Mom wasn’t traveling anymore, and she became less willing to visit friends or have visitors. For some people close to her it was an affront—a sign that my mom didn’t love them anymore. My sisters believe that she just wasn’t feeling good, and she didn’t want people to see her that way.

It was hard for me, in the months before her death, calling and, shortly after sharing a troubling thought or confidence hearing her say, “Well tell the girls I love them,” meaning, “I’m done talking now.” Her capacity had been limitless, and I started to feel soft contours of a boundary—something my mother had never established before in my lifetime. 

Looking back, I think she was trying to gradually, lovingly, wean us off of her as an omnipresent reminder that we mattered. We’d have to start doing that for each other, and on our own.

Weeks before she passed I told her about yet another career transition, a new mission, and how strange it felt to me to not be in a panic about the details of execution, or about how it would all turn out.

“I’m not worried,” she said. “You know you are going to be just fine.” 

There wasn’t a tinge of persuasion in her voice. She said it like it was a fact, like every other affirming fact she had told me my whole life. 

I suppose that was her ultimate gift: the underlying assurance that whatever it was I would do with my life, I would be OK. I was OK. I was worthy of anything. I had nothing to prove. 

I wish for the same for my girls; the reassurance of those long, plastic arms.

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Many years ago, I experienced a tragic personal loss that no self-help book could help me process. A compassionate co-worker took me to the side and suggested that I seek healing from an alternative source – her psychic. “Just keep an open mind,” she implored me.

I felt a little silly sending a check in the mail to someone I had never met (again, this was a LONG time ago – no Venmo), who lived in another state and would connect with me psychically over the phone. So before I met with her, I paired the psychic with someone I trusted implicitly, who I always suspected had some psychic ability herself, and who would tell me if this person was credible: My mother.

I waited by the phone during the time I knew they were in-session. My mother called me shortly after it was over.

“Sorry for the wait, I just needed to write everything down,” she told me. “Hoo-boy it’s a lot!”

My mom read her pages of notes verbatim. The psychic had known that my mother had four children and offered her spiritual counsel on specific aspects of my mother’s life that resonated deeply. I was awestruck as my mom shared the psychic’s insights into my grandmother, father, siblings. 

“And she had a lot to say about you, too, Jor…” 

At this I started to feel nervously hopeful. Could this psychic tell me about the person I had just lost to suicide? On this topic my mother’s notes were, she admitted, quite thin. He was a newer soul, my mother explained, as she had been explained to, and still finding his way to the other side. She offered me the psychic’s advice on how I could spiritually nudge him to eternal peace and then got to the business of sharing more notes on the living.

“She wanted me to tell you something,” my mom said, “She knew you had sent me to her because you needed to know something. I mean, you don’t KNOW what that is consciously, but spiritually you do…” 

At this, so many questions flooded my brain: Why did this person I lost, who came so quickly and powerfully into my life, have to just as quickly leave it? What did he want to tell me? What was I supposed to learn from him? What was the purpose of his death? What was my purpose?

My mom continued, “She says you are very, very tired, Jory. You just don’t know it yet. Deep down. Very, very tired.”

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I have been in a state of career achievement since, probably, puberty. A lifelong achiever I gathered accolades like breadcrumbs, hoping they would lead me somewhere I hadn’t put too much thought into. 

And as such my purpose has changed a lot over the years. 

At various times these have been milestones of a life well-lived (in no particular order):

• Earn the most girl scout badges 

• Get all A’s

• Be Class President

• Be a three-sport athlete

• Get into my top-choice sorority

• Travel in Europe

• Watch every independent film listed in Time Out NY in 1998

• Publish a book

• Work at a Big Tech

• Start and exit a company 

Some milestones I don’t list here because I achieved them not knowing how badly I wanted them. For instance, part-way into the pursuit of “Start and exit a company” I realized I wanted to be a mother. After some struggle, I ultimately decided to hedge my bets and trust I would be sure of this milestone once it was achieved. It took a miscarriage, which in some small way I attribute to my ambivalence, and the despair that followed, that convinced me of its validity as a milestone. 

I also had a poorly-conceived milestone around being famous enough to appear in People magazine. My mom had a subscription that I grew up consuming, and when I worked at Time Inc. in the 1990s, when national print publications were still the single source of cultural truth, copies were dropped into my in-box weekly.  I assumed if I achieved the milestones above I would increase my chances of achieving this one. But then, reading a People magazine one day and seeing some poor celebrity skewered for looking less-than-fabulous while attempting to travel incognito at LAX, I decided that I should probably re-think that one.

Similarly, I had a vague bullet point for wealth that I refused to nail down with specifics, as I didn’t want to limit myself to a number, citing inflation, and thinking, if I had the opportunity to be the wealthiest self-made woman on the planet I wasn’t going to turn it away because I had aimed for less. I wanted to keep my options open. I realized I should probably aim to achieve both wealth and renown on my own terms, and get a financial planner to help ensure I didn’t go bankrupt in the process.

And now, having cleared this riff raff of seeming life obligation I’m forced to ask the question, Now what? This has made determining my life’s purpose very, very difficult. Having been so achievement-oriented I naturally turn to my work to answer that question. But while some may derive clues on their life’s purpose by examining their career ladder, try doing so when you’ve built something more like a career labyrinth of passion projects, startups, and fractional roles. 

The only thing I can say for sure something has shifted. I’m finding little strangenesses – behaviors I never would have exhibited ten, 15 years ago at the height of my frequent flier status. Back then, “succeeding” was a numbers game, and the more activity I logged in the name of work, the higher the likelihood I would be successful. Sure there would be failures, pathways that yielded nothing, but so long as I stayed in motion I stayed successful. More to the point: I stayed alive.

In my summer vacation book “From Strength to Strength” author Arthur Brooks argues this is a common strategy for most “strivers,” in any field. Whether you are composing music, making scientific discoveries, or building companies, you are capitalizing on some extraordinary form of capability, or intelligence, you possess by doubling down on it, generating momentum in the form of accolades, awards, Twitter followers, money, achievements. 

But, as explained by Brooks, this form of “fluid intelligence” that strivers tend to capitalize on inevitably declines. And this decline is not just in your head, it’s an actual, biological phenomenon. 

The silver lining is that alongside this decline is an incline in “crystallized intelligence,” or “the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past.” As Brooks explains: 

“When you are young, you have raw smarts; when you are old, you have wisdom. When you are young, you can generate lots of facts; when you are old, you know what they mean and how to use them.”

In my experience, I had noticed less a decline in my ability to churn out facts, or opportunities, than an impatience with the motions required to generate them, and an aversion to roles requiring the same unquestioned executional fervor, often with diminishing results. 

In my career adolescence I was a windup toy that you could point in the direction of a goal to achieve and I would go after it with an electric zeal, sometimes into a wall, but then I would course correct and find a new route. Evidence of this strategy includes hundreds of plane ticket stubs (which I used to keep, perhaps, as Proof of Movement–PoM), a calendar full of external-facing meetings morning to night, and a career path littered with startups that pursued big ideas, swung for the fences, and outgrew their realities.

Today, wind me up, and it’s a tossup what I’ll do. I might go towards a goal, but more slowly and deliberately. I might stall, wondering what’s the point of wasting energy only to hit a wall, and wait for my inner voice to be convinced. I might do something completely inefficient and meet with friends who have no direct link to the opportunity at hand but who make me laugh or think. Or I might stand completely still.

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Some of these behaviors, I’ve reasoned, can be attributed to wisdom gained over time, but others I’m not so sure. Where once I could attend a conference and instantly generate a heat map of ideas to pursue, I am much more interested now in staying in one place, listening to someone intently, and offering thoughts that may or may not fit their expectation of helpfulness. I don’t seek out opportunities so much as I prefer to attract – or even better, create – opportunities. This lowers my at-bats for success, to be sure; it also minimizes the sorting for opportunities that are worth the effort.

I am working on a project that I hope will become a major cobblestone in the bumpy, uneven, pathway of my life’s work, and even as I see the chaotic, necessary scuttling of colleagues and collaborators in service of a mission, a scene I have actively participated in – if not instigated – for nearly 25 years, I continually question our movements, the calls I’m asked to attend, our assumptions behind our efforts. I ask: Is this really necessary, or are we just moving in place? 

This new strategy, easier as it sounds, requires INaction, something that feels foreign to me. It often feels wrong.

But then I remember the alternative: Moving just to move. Just to prove something. Being scared. Being tired.

Of course, a friend pointed out to me, being able to carve a living out of purely meaningful matter is a privilege, a luxury. Sometimes you just have to pay the bills, she said. Sometimes you just have to wind yourself up and go towards something because you are paid to move.

I understood. I understand.

“Work smarter, not harder!” my daughter says to me, witnessing my distressed efforts at many things these days, from organizing my inbox to fumbling in the kitchen formulating a meal that could have been easily completed by popping leftovers into the microwave. She’s parroting a phrase I’ve said often, not realizing that my capacity for being smarter has a limit. 

I may just want to cook a damn meal as I envision it, from scratch, with my mistakes, with love.

Share PAUSE: Stories of tech, marketing, fairness, hormones

I hope that others who are standing on their own precipices of change will find this helpful.

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Intentions (for 2018): 

Hint: Key word--Action

In January 2005 I had quit my marketing/business development job to pursue an inkling. 

Perhaps it was slightly more than an inkling: I had started blogging the year before and was spending every second of my discretionary time reading blogs, connecting with like-minded community and writing. By the end of 2004 I knew I needed to leave my job and devote myself full-time to something. Problem was, I didn’t know to exactly what.

I started the year 2005 waking up at the crack of dawn (something I didn’t do previously even when I had a job I needed to wake up for) and hit the closest coffee shop to do my “work”, which consisted of reading articles that captured my interest and sputtering out blog posts. Some days I only read and other days found me typing furiously for hours. In those hours I couldn’t type the thoughts that came to me fast enough. 

I told people I was working on a book, which may have been true. More accurately, I was following threads. One of those threads led me to two other women who, like me, had altered their work lives to explore the world of blogging and who became my business partners. Despite there not being a defined market for monetizing blogging, I was called to build something in spite of not knowing where the next paycheck would come from. 

BlogHer erupted from a perfect storm of being in a place of professionally having nothing to lose—I’d already made a choice to leave my previous career behind—no one to answer to, and faith in pursuing something regardless of outcome that I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever feel again.

What I have felt again, now 13 years later, is a renewal, if not quite yet blind faith. I still don’t know where it will lead. But I do know that I must engage in a process of teasing out threads.

I’ve been noticing things:

• I’ve woken up to anger I didn’t acknowledge when I was being harassed, dismissed, or taken advantage of professionally. I figured all this would, too, pass in the wake of my future professional successes, and much of it did. And some of it won’t.

• I have been galvanized by the opening floodgates of women who are outing and identifying not just their victimizers but the many nuanced forms of victimization. They are not doing it for the backhanded press generated by being the 10th or 100th woman to speak up, but because now, in a moment of collective bravery, we are seeing that it’s our imperative to detoxify the environment for us all; and to show ourselves that, once and for all, we can acknowledge and release shame. 

• I’ve woken up to the need to do this in order NOT to be a victim and to get about with what I need to do to move effectively in the world.

• I’ve woken up to my true strengths and weaknesses, and grappling with strengths that confine me because they have led to previous success but are not currently meaningful. 

• I’ve woken up to my desire to change narratives of what it means to be a successful entrepreneur, having seen people “kill it” at the expense of their families, well-being, and/or integrity; and I’ve seen people explore new models of work, business building, and integrating meaning into what we do for a living. 

• I’ve woken up to my motherhood, and values I didn’t know I had. My dear friend and coach (and personal astrologer) Britt Bravo has told me for years now that professionally I am a nurturer, which conflicted with my self-perception as breadwinner/hunter gatherer/revenue generator. I’m finding joy building others’  companies, encouraging other entrepreneurs, and raising my daughters to be curious, kind, courageous, compassionate, and aware of their value and impact on Earth.

• I’ve woken up to where I am fearful, and where I bump against needs for acceptance and security. I used to call this acknowledgement “being practical,” or “being realistic”. I saw my strengths as being a voice of reason and bringing disparate sides together, often at the price of what was most meaningful to me.

• While empathy and flexibility are important, sometimes there are non-negotiables, and the only viable solution is not equidistantly located between two sides. Sometimes it’s closer to you.

I’ve told probably hundreds of people who have asked me how BlogHer was born. There’s the official version, of course, defined by first meetings, a major conference, and venture funding. But there’s my personal version, which for me started much earlier, with a few words inelegantly composed and published on a blog no one was reading or yet knew existed. In that post intention was born.

Just start. Read, interact, ask questions. Find threads. And then piece together. And don’t set goals or define it until you are pulled. There’s a velocity I’ve experienced, in the midst of repeated acts of inquiry or pursuit, when an aspect calls out—the thread. And I need to follow it. But when I’m forced to follow a thread that doesn’t call to me (we’ve all been there, like when we have to dial for dollars, pursue outreach quotas, write empty press releases, create manufactured meaning) things fall flat.

The truth is: Even if you are pulled somewhere, you could still fail. I do it regularly. But failing this way, while painful, doesn’t feel wasteful. And somehow the actions I took while in pursuit of something that called to me manifest. People you meet, insights that were shared, relationships that were made, they stick. They become useful in different ways. They become part of your foundation.

I don’t know exactly why I am writing and reaching out to my community, only that I have been called to act and realized that I have not been following my own advice. I forgot what I told others to do: Just start.

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“…sexism is the ideology that supports patriarchal social relations, but misogyny enforces it when there’s a threat of that system going away.”

--Kate Manne: Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University and author of Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

Back when I was leading a marketing team at AWS, I witnessed first-hand the best and worst of gender dynamics in tech. My team produced events and exhibits for startup founders. At one event, a global tech conference in Lisbon, we hosted a large exhibitor booth and show-floor theater, where our technical evangelists and solutions architects would present and demo cloud services. Hundreds of people attended the demos onsite, tens of thousands watched them on our livestream on Twitch.

My team had the event handled—my job was to ensure our partner teams were supported and to be Brand Cop. All staffers interacting with attendees in our booth or presenting had to wear a branded T-shirt or hoodie. No exceptions. And not having a clean T-shirt was a non-excuse: We maintained a supply in every size, for every staffer, for every day of an event, and then some, at all times. I still have a stack of branded black T-shirts in my closet; my kids have nightshirts for the rest of their childhoods.

One of our solutions architects, a woman, had come to the booth the first day of the conference in a drapey cardigan that covered about 70% of her body. I tossed her a T-shirt and pointed to our on-site dressing room; she reluctantly entered and came out sans cardigan, wearing the T-shirt, looking less enthused than she had a few minutes before. She joked that she felt like “a hot dog in this thing,” which I thought nothing of at the time.

Her presentation seemed to be going well; the audience was engaged and taking notes on paper or their devices. There were no technical glitches in the demo. I checked the Twitch livestream to ensure we were broadcasting, and that’s when I saw the insults, in the stream chat:

“…fat bitch…get off the stage idiot…” and other insults to her appearance, intelligence, and expertise.

I asked one of our event managers how could we make it stop; she said that, unfortunately, this is not uncommon when a female is presenting. And with the sheer volume of inbound comments in chat, it’s impossible to moderate them in real-time. 

I felt awful, and guilty for, in effect, feeding this poor woman to the java wolves. I was naive to think we would all be treated the same in the public online arena. 

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I suppose my naiveté stemmed from having spent over 10 years building my own startup—an online media and marketing company that served female digital influencers and the brands that needed them. My company employed 80% women before it was acquired. And we had built what was at the time the largest conference for women online. Our mantra: Bring It! All body types and sexual identities, all political affiliations, all ages, all levels of technical prowess. Any XX- or XY-chromosomed creator was welcome, provided you respected everyone in the community and adhered to our editorial philosophy of open, non-inciting communication and civil disagreement. 

We were the players and the cheerleaders of our game; misogyny never even made it onto the field. I had, I suppose, lived in a Utopian bubble, where we rose on our merits and ability to lift others.

To be sure, online misogyny is nothing new. When we first launched my company, BlogHer, in 2005, we created waves by, in effect, taming the Wild West of the blogosphere, which was littered with political and sexist trolls. One of the more prominent bloggers in that time, programming instructor and game developer Kathy Sierra, had been senselessly physically harassed online to the point of her permanent withdrawal from the blogosphere. I had been confused by Sierra’s situation: She was a thoughtful researcher, a scientist of user behavior. She wrote about her work with no offensive personal or political commentary. Why would someone like her receive death threats? When we hosted 300 bloggers at that first event, we hadn’t planned on having to ensure physical safety along with a working internet connection. I had to request no photos be taken of a trans blogger to ensure she wouldn’t be identified by bigots that terrorized her online, and we ensured that none of the crowd that gathered around a prominent momblogger were on a shortlist of her documented harassers.

The problem I had been more familiar with and determined to solve was rectifying the inequities in economic opportunities for women online. We had originally built our conference as a counter to another prominent blogger conference that attracted a majority of male investors and entrepreneurs. Emerging female bloggers were commonly regarded as cheap, effective propagators of word-of-mouth endorsements. And our community were fed up with being asked to serve up inauthentic messages and host bad ads for little to no compensation. We set out to compensate women fairly for their work and to create a flywheel of influence that would improve the quality of the opportunities that came to them. Advertisers and investors were well-aware of the purchasing power of women and their online advocacy. It hardly surprises me now that, at our first conference that sunny day in Santa Clara, California, the few men who attended were largely entrepreneurs and investors; some even asked if we’d considered raising a round of funding.

We ended up securing venture capital and proving women online were a commercially significant market, but, ironically, not always to the benefit of women online. After our Series A round of funding I chatted with a prominent parenting and politics blogger in our network. She had asked for advice on a recent engagement with a major media company that had asked her to become a regular contributor. When she asked about compensation, the company said they would be glad to make her an affiliate, and she could earn money off sales she made for the company from the ads on her content. She asked me: How could I have done this negotiation differently? She had wanted to be paid upfront for her work, not on opportunistic sales commissions.

I wish I could say this was an isolated incident. I can’t count the number of major brands who could not understand why we would not take free product (in lieu of money, which underwrote two thirds of attendee costs) for sponsorship of our events. To be sure, some of the women in our network became wealthy monetizing their work, but many long-tail creators simply tired of the hundreds, thousands of requests outnumbering the legitimate opportunities. When programmatic advertising overtook high-yielding, premium advertising, they put their aspirations of supporting themselves on their content on ice.

The presumption by well-funded entities that swag, free promotion, and fun parties with colorful drinks were all women online required, I found, extended well-beyond my BlogHer days. After my exit, I was often connected to founders by VCs who asked me to help their portfolio companies with growth strategy, apparently out of the kindness of my heart. These were not quick and dirty phone calls. One founder met with me in person on four or five occasions and asked me to interview her team and provide a strategy document. When I asked about formalizing the relationship with a consulting contract she was flummoxed. She wrote me an email apologizing for wasting my time. She had assumed mistakenly that I would help her build and execute a marketing strategy for no comp—pay or equity—whatsoever. “I would ask your rate, but I’m sure I could never afford you,” she said. I thought, it would have been nice to have been asked.

A COO of a digital media company discussed with me a role helping to build his company’s network of contributors. This played to my strengths; I pulled together a plan that showed how this could be done, from a product, marketing and partnerships perspective. He asked if, instead, I could transition high-traffic creators from my previous platform to his. I explained that, post-acquisition I couldn’t legally solicit creators still in my company’s network. And it didn’t make sense to anyway; he needed to build one around his platform’s distinct community and value proposition. But, it turned out, it wasn’t my experience building networks that he wanted; he had been hoping I would hand over the mythical keys to the millions of readers from thousands of creators it had taken more than 10 years for my company to amass. In the end, I was to learn, there was no role. I’m not sure there ever was.

Another early stage founder wondered why I wasn’t interested in taking a “more than full-time” role at her early-stage company for a fraction of my previous comp. And she wouldn’t consider a flexible, part-time arrangement. She asked me, “haven’t you already made your money?” 

I found it interesting that some of the worst perpetrators of capping opportunities were other women. But then, they may not have known any other way. Perhaps a manager limited their mobility, or told them in so many words, “this is what you are worth,” and normalized women as the Bargain of the Web. And once one of us takes nothing for something, we all are expected to follow suit. 

Going back into operating roles at emerging tech companies I experienced a new flavor of misogyny: resentment of non-technical women. Going into these roles I recognized that product leaders and developers often held heightened status. And I purposely sought out roles where I could learn new skills, but I hadn’t anticipated the level of acrimony directed at me for the expertise I already brought to the table.

 I had joined a global management team of an emerging tech startup that was 75% female. The company had a flat org structure with a leadership “circle” suggestively setting strategy, but as it scaled, so did the need to embed experienced operators to build playbooks and processes and establish KPIs. While I was interviewing I had heard rumblings that one of the developer relations leads on the team was not a fan of having me—a “middle-management marketer”—heading his team. After I started, leadership called him out for harassing me and others. In adjudicating his case with HR, he insisted that he would only answer to our male CEO and have another male DevRel peer present. Not I, his territory leader, nor the group leader, all women, all marketers, were invited to participate.

In another role I worked with a senior developer peer who continually questioned my programs as not technical enough for a developer audience. Hoping to establish a better rapport I organized a planning session, flying members from both our teams from other US cities and abroad to plan program objectives, components and execution. It was time well spent, I thought. Later he sabotaged the program that he helped to co-create, lobbying against launching it and escalating the issue when I insisted on moving forward with our plan.

A female colleague who had also struggled and transferred to a different team explained her experience this way,"if you are different, they just won't work with you. And they’ll keep it up until you are gone." I wondered to myself, different how?

In all cases my reaction was to work through the friction, stay open, not become defensive, and not get spooked. But when I read posts on Telegram from my (now former) developer team member threatening to physically harm me if I showed up with my team at a fintech conference, my husband suggested that, perhaps, it was time to call it.

"I know you wanted this,” he said, “But maybe it's time to move on."

In his harassing missives my former colleague had called out my experience building and exiting a startup as evidence of my inability to relate to him, or my plan to take over the crypto-world—I'm not sure which. I wish I could say I thought of Kathy Sierra, Brianna Wu, and many of the other brilliant badasses who broke new ground in male-dominated fields and were smacked around for it. He was upset at me for somehow succeeding where I shouldn't have. I should have called him out; but I didn't. I just thought, why on earth could this dude have a beef with me? I'm just a marketing chick.

I ended up going to the week-long conference. It wasn't a political statement; it was my job.

I realize that, having experienced my share of wins in the tech industry, recalling these episodes can come across as quite rich. Surely not all of the men I’ve worked with were sexist obstructionists. Not every day I’ve worked in tech has been tinged with oppression redolent of The Handmaid’s Tale. In truth, no experience of mine even comes close to the level of discrimination, brutality, and dismissiveness many other women have experienced online. In every role I’ve had I have benefited from both male and female sponsorship. 

But all of this post-traumatic unwinding began when I read this story in Protocol, “Meet China’s new gaming underclass” which describes the lifestyle of a peiwan, or what can best be described as a Digital Geisha—female consorts to male gamers. During the Pandemic this gig has enabled digitally-savvy, underemployed Chinese women to pay their bills, for a fraction, of course, of what male gamers, their “bosses” can earn.

"Only men are considered serious, skilled gamers," Mengyang Zhao, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania who studies China's video game service industry, told Protocol. "However skilled a female gamer is, people generally don't take her seriously, so women tend to hit a low wage ceiling."

I felt sick for these women beholden to a system that will never allow them to fully realize their potential online.

And then I felt queasy for myself; could the disturbances I encountered in my own online career have occurred from my implicit refusal to accept that perhaps, I, too, am a Peiwan? Expected to facilitate, expedite, monetize the online world for others, but never expected to actually play the Game?

The draw of the Internet for me, some 20-odd years ago, was that it was an equal opportunity employer. It has given me opportunities this former print editor and writer could never have even dreamed of inside my previous, analog world. But it also revealed a virtual ceiling that, as much as I tried to deny its existence, has felt just as hard and immutable as its IRL counterpart. For all of our accomplishments, women have failed to disrupt a system built on low expectations of us. The ability to disrupt anything is its own privilege.

At our first BlogHer conference in 2005, a woman blogger stood up to the microphone and declared, “Mommyblogging is a radical act.” It sounded powerful and quotable. I hadn’t realized until much later it was also true.

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I never watched Gilmore Girls when it came out in the early 2000s. I caught an episode while at my sister’s house, while I was on Lifetime Career Hiatus #2. It was the Dot Com bust, and I had made a win-win arrangement with my rapidly de-scaling employer—a 2.5-year-old media startup: I was to take a leave of absence for an undetermined period of time, and when I got back, if the company was still standing, I’d get my job back. I created a similar arrangement with my then-boyfriend. It seemed preferable to simply breaking up.

I moved out of my San Francisco one-bedroom apartment and slept on a friend’s couch, traveled abroad, and stayed for several months with my twin sister on the East Coast. She was teaching at Tufts and Harvard at the time and she and her husband lived on the middle floor of a large Victorian house that had been converted into condos. I took up Bikram yoga and rode the “T” all over the Cambridge/Boston area, blending in with the college students. I contemplated going back to school again, even applying to graduate programs with no real preference on outcome. I went on dates with single friends of friends who had introduced us. Indeed, I met some great people, but they met a blurrier version of me; a woman in transition. My life felt like a Jell-o mold that hadn’t yet set: squishy and runny. 

As much as I traveled I couldn’t shake that feeling of uncertainty. I wasn’t working, I wasn’t recreating. I wasn’t living in the Bay Area, and I wasn’t moving to Boston.  I was waiting; for what I’m not sure. For the Dot Com bust to reverse itself? To get into a graduate program and force some options? For some voice to whisper in my ear: “THIS is what you are supposed to be doing?”

The only consistency I had was television. Every night, like clockwork, my sister would break out papers to grade and have a TV show on in the background. She loved Gilmore Girls. I thought the characters talked too much. I preferred the more action-oriented shows like 24, and that reality show where people had to eat bugs, or vermin, or something putrid without vomiting to win. 

This period of transition didn’t wrap itself up neatly. I ended up going back to the Bay Area. The boyfriend was gone, but my company was still around, though in a death spiral. I was offered my job back for a third of my previous comp. I slept on a friend’s couch while looking for apartments I could afford under my new circumstances. I signed a lease just before the company flatlined. I had been accepted into a graduate program on the East Coast, but ended up not going. Perhaps I subconsciously knew I had been hedging my bets; creating options with no real aspirations attached to them.

I painfully stewed in my seemingly poor choices, identity-less. I took odd jobs so that I could pay my rent. And I applied to jobs I didn’t want. One hiring manager rescinded an offer because she guessed—rightly—that my heart wasn’t really into it (I probably should not have let on that I planned to quit the job as soon as I found a better one).

I became more-adept at recognizing my hedging strategy at work. It went something like this:

Say Yes, even if you don’t mean it. 

But continue to date other options.

I had considered this a very reasonable strategy until I didn’t. It dawned on me that by playing all options, you never play any deliberately. You may always have options, but you will never have fulfillment. 

Unbeknownst to me during that time I was working a core muscle, learning where my boundaries lay by breaching them. By gorging myself on both the junk food and the real sustenance of work. In the immediate years that followed I wouldn’t even know this muscle existed, and yet if it didn’t the rest of me would have collapsed under the weight of the predictably unpredictable career catastrophes—layoffs, leadership turnovers, pandemics—and the more insidious threats—disillusionment and boredom—that can throw a career off-course.

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Thanks to Jill Griffin, who writes a snackable, loving-kick-in-the-pants newsletter for “anxious achievers,” who gave my former career strategy a name: Micro-quitting. She sees this all the time in her coaching clients who wait things out, in a place they know they want to leave, hoping for better.

Micro-quitting.

It's cunning.

Quitting is big.

Obvious.

Micro-quitting is stealthy.

It's devious.

We don't always see the subtle, quit decisions we make.

It's kinda passive-aggressive--but you are the passive aggressor to yourself.

 (Jill Griffin)

My own definition of Micro-quitting: The unrealistic pursuit of a future you are not actively creating; pursuit of accidental fulfillment. This is a paradox. Fulfillment is a decision. Fulfillment is a risk.

Recently I saw the reboot of Gilmore Girls on Netflix, and I loved it so much I went back to Season 1 and watched the whole series. In the re-boot, Rory—who was an ambitious, aspiring journalist at the beginning of the series—is now somewhat disillusioned, having achieved career success and then stalled. She returns home to the town where she grew up, where her mother still lives and has achieved her own entrepreneurial dreams, and retreats to the comforts she enjoyed as a 16-year-old: Reading novels in her childhood bedroom, spending her summer watching people at the pool, and having a fling with a former college lover who is engaged to another woman, while still tenuously tethered to someone else.

She is liquid Jell-o, seeking anything that will help her solidify. She is roughly the age I was during Career Hiatus #2. 

Of course, now I understand Rory. Even at her runniest, even in her anti-glory, she is becoming.

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I was reading a LinkedIn post by an airline pilot who, grounded and unemployed during the Pandemic, found myriad ways to pay the bills, from grocery delivery to a stint as a bike messenger, before returning to his original profession.

The pilot’s story resonated with many people, as did the concept he demonstrated so aptly of the bridge job, or a temporary role one takes to pay the bills, train for a new career, or prepare for a more permanent future role. During the height of the Pandemic the concept of a bridge job became a state of mind, for more than just those who turned to Door Dash or Uber to make ends meet. Even those fortunate enough to stay employed and work at home found themselves evaluating where they worked, how they worked, and what they did as their work. Even perhaps daring to ask: What am I meant to do?

We collectively became side-hustlers.

I loved the pilot’s spirit. He didn’t report his past year of odd jobs with any self-pity but rather with pride in his tour of personal growth. He reminds me of a close friend of mine who unemployed after decades at marketing agencies, took on home repairs for friends during the Pandemic. His bridge job has since blossomed into a considerable contractor business, and he’s had to apply for a builder’s license to take on more clients. His struggle became his opportunity.

For some, these transitions could never be possible, not because they are incapable of doing the work, but because of the mindset required to take a career pause—chosen or otherwise—and make it part of one’s narrative of self-discovery. More times than not, the only reward for it is personal. Future employers don’t give preference to candidates who took time to rethink their careers. They unreasonably expect career decisions to be deliberate and consistent, starting with the first job we take. There’s no preset in LinkedIn for exploring or being in-between roles. If this is your situation, it’s up to you to game the system, put creases in this unstructured time and present it as completely intentional. 

Some of us are really good at off-roading and can even build it into our professional brand. At its best, career off-roading takes us on adventures we didn’t think we were capable of that define the rest of our lives. But for the majority of us, it’s an unwelcome detour we endure until we can find a job with health insurance benefits. We drop into and out of our life’s work, ideally getting better acquainted with it over time. 

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The first time I off-roaded was in my mid-20s, before I had any real business skills to offer as a contractor. All I knew how to do was write, and I figured, now while I still have just myself to feed, I should invest in a writing career. I had followed a series in Inc Magazine written by Harriet Rubin, a former publishing executive who had left her career at its height to become, as she called it, a career Soloist. Later I bought her book expounding on her subject, Soloing. I recall thinking it was not very relevant at the time. She talked about negotiating a severance and taking in consulting fees for single projects that exceeded the annual salary of my previous full-time job. I had just wanted to make sure I could cover my $477 share of a rent-controlled two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. Ensuring I wasn’t dipping into my retirement wasn’t really a thing, nor was buying a volume of groceries beyond what I could physically carry four blocks and up the stairs of my walkup. That summer, when I had a good month, I invested in an air conditioner and only used it when I could afford the electricity to run it. 

But today is different. And the head game that Rubin navigated through the soloing process is more relevant to me. The trick to soloing isn’t just about keeping the lights on, but about constant reinvention while keeping one’s identity intact.

And the career journey becomes less about building a resume, a reputation, and more about nailing what that 26-year-old living in the Brooklyn walkup wanted: Career Self-Actualization. The inherent knowledge that she had done what she was uniquely meant to do, in a way only she could.

The longest tenure I’ve had at a company was at my own. And even here I saw that ten-year journey as an experiment in discovering what I can do differently than anyone else. I had just enough time and autonomy to run the experiments. 

I recently Googled Harriet Rubin to check in on her life of soloing, now over 20 years into her experiment. I wanted to see if she’d fulfilled herself, or if she’d drifted off somewhere unrecognizable. I was encouraged to see she’d written more books and become an executive coach. I also happened upon an undated interview she did with the business guru Tom Peters. She described the reason for relinquishing her role leading a publishing imprint:

“…I had become the person to whom everyone went to with questions in this particular arena in corporate America. I had no questions myself which means I was learning nothing. In addition, my responsibility was far outstripping my authority, which often happens in corporate America. Phrases like intellectual capital were very popular in those days but I felt my own intellectual capital was going bankrupt. Because I kept giving and giving from what I had learned and discovering very little to nothing.”

It’s a better explanation than the one I’ve given to friends I’ve met for coffee, who’ve looked kindly quizzical as I described my latest incarnation into decentralized systems, serverless technology, holocracies, and other things I didn’t know existed six months before. But when I left the company I co-founded, I recall feeling frustrated by the recognizable opportunities that came my way.

Others presumed I was who I was previously, but I knew that she had run her course.  

And so I explored, advising companies who taught me things. I developed my 50/50 rule of working with companies where I could integrate 50 percent of my previous work experience with 50 percent of something totally new. For instance, I worked with a digital ad platform (which I knew cold) in Augmented Reality (a totally new platform for me at the time). When the founder pivoted to a tokenized business model, and I was now 85% out of my depth, all the better. In fact, it led to me taking a role at a crypto venture studio, applying my experience scaling startups to yet another new realm of tech.

Some of these bets paid off into deeper roles. Some didn’t. I recall a family member, known for telling it like it is, pulling me over in the midst of one of my latest explorations, to tell me it was time to get serious, and—you know—get a job job. Get back on the grid.

I didn’t feel defensive, but helpless. He didn’t know I was as serious about my exploration as a heart attack. Exploring had become my job. I didn’t know how else to work.

My older sister, who has been a special ed teacher and held the same job for nearly 30 years, uses a friendly euphemism for my transitions.

“You’ve always got something going on,” she says. I suppose that’s true. Her comment is the closest thing to describing the forever in-between. 

A good friend who navigated her own career transition a few years back reached out to me recently to ask if I would share insights with her consulting firm on the challenges and opportunities of being a tech startup CMO. I was going to be stepping away from my latest role, I told her.  Would my take still be relevant?

“Of course!” she said. 

It was a great conversation. The kind that I like to have, when I talk without knowing what I’m going to talk about. Bits of recent and past experience uploaded into the teleprompter in my brain. This is what happens when I’m in flow. These reminders that I’ve lived multiple career lives and continually reincarnated into roles emerge like notifications. And somehow they harmonize. My words are reflexive. 

I think of those conversations that would have been squashed, that would never have existed, had I not been a professional shape-shifter. 

The interviewer pulled on a long thread that started early in my career and lengthened before stopping abruptly for a career switch into emerging tech. It was picked up again recently: the future of digital advertising. 

“You’ve really provided some great insights into what is happening now,” he said. “I now have to ask: What do you think will happen next?”

I thought of those mini-eras I spent being an expert, sounding off on the future of things. Sometimes the future felt so close it seemed I was making it. But really I was chasing it; and I accept I always will be. The chase, so uncomfortable, has become so familiar. Life in pursuit of the other side. I’m plugged not into answers, but back into discovery. I’m 26 again, just crepe-ier in the knees. 

I stared at him for a moment on Zoom, “You know…” I said, “…I really don’t know.”

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“Hey Killer B’s! It’s Pahla B’s Weight Loss for Women over 50 Series, Day 19!”

My dear friend and former next door neighbor, we’ll call her Wanda, had told me about Pahla B. We were on a post-lockdown walk in my old neighborhood. She was the official first hug outside of my immediate household. Wanda is a Swiss army knife of information. Bring up a problem or situation, and she’ll have a site for that, or a contact to call. She had just provided me with a virtual conference for families managing Covid anxiety and a link to a product on Amazon that enabled girls and women to pee outdoors without pissing on themselves; we were onto my next issue: Not feeling like myself.

Now, to be fair, I don’t know a soul who can say that over the past 15 months they’ve felt great—even those who learned to make bread and took up meditation. Being cooped up takes a toll on people. For me, I found that, despite my near-daily walks, Air-Dyne workouts, and monotonous lifestyle, I still felt heavy and tired and had consistent brain fog. And while I refused to justify my suspicions with a scale, I estimated I had gained about five pounds. 

“Sounds like hormones,” Wanda said.

“Don’t even say it.”

“Say what?”

“The M word.”

“I was thinking more the ‘P’ word…Peri-menopause.”

That was fair.

Being Wanda, she then pointed me to a resource: “Have you heard of Pahla B?”

As Wanda started to describe this fitness guru on YouTube specializing in women over 50 my brain struggled not to shut her down. For one thing, I’m not over 50 (I just turned 49 on Wednesday, natch)—well out of her target market. And Wanda mentioned numerous times the word “moderation”.

“…Just about 20 minute sessions you can fit easily into your day…”

“…Sometimes I hardly sweat, but it’s great…”

“…She talks to you the whole time; it’s like you’re having a chat with a girlfriend…”

For the record: I don’t do moderation. I am an immoderate person.  I work myself. Or at least that’s been my ethos and subliminal operating procedure for success all these years: Work hard, rest later.

For 10 years, while building a company I religiously stayed in motion. After all, being a woman I needed to prove I could achieve my goals, despite being pregnant during a fundraise, despite fundraising when female founders who raised capital were fewer in number than they are even now. And, later, after I exited my startup and started advising and consulting I had to find ways of adding intensity to my load in order to not fall over from boredom (or irrelevancy, perhaps). And later, when I went back into operating roles with much younger individuals I had to hold my tongue when hearing complaints about having to wake up early, or work late, or do something new and uncomfortable. And when I was in a brutal corporate culture I was one part completely comfortable with the deadlines, demands, and underestimating attitudes, and one part shocked that pulling all-nighters, hitting deadlines, and responding to IMs after 10 pm would not move me any closer to occupational nirvana. If anything, it left me for dead on the side of the road, barely able to breathe.

My philosophy had simply been: Add more weight. Run an additional mile. Feel the burn. Show you can hack it. And yet my personal chemistry was changing. I wasn’t going anywhere anymore. I was running in place and inadvertently running myself into a rut.

Wanda then explained how our body chemistry was such that even if we did super-intense workouts we were doing more harm than good, due to low-to-no supply of estrogen, which helps restore the body. This struck me as a bit of bullshit. One more thing we women tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better about dialing it back. Slowing things down. 

Then Wanda said the money quote that got me back in:

“I’ve lost eight pounds doing her workouts.”

Now the proposition of trying Pahla B was like investing in crypto: Stupid NOT to try. Money made, weight lost, doing almost nothing.

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The first order of business was finding the space. I have a big open living room, but it had become a classroom, music studio, play pit and laundry room during the pandemic. As such I was doing yoga classes in my office, wedging my head between an office chair and a bookshelf during Shavasana. But restrictions were lifting in Northern California, and my kids were going to summer camp. I would have the living room all to myself. I watched some of Pahla’s non-workout videos and listened to her podcasts. 

The first thing I noticed about Pahla: She was a talker. Like nonstop. Sometimes she talked so much she forgot what side she was working on. Often, during core exercises she lost her balance, or grunted, or exclaimed, “I’m bad at these.” She often giggled when she made a mistake, or said, “Oh well, we’re done with those anyway.” She wore eyeglasses and worked out barefoot. Her cat often slept on the couch behind her or ran across her feet as she worked out. She promised never to require jumping or lowering to the ground to do exercises. she ended every session with a cooldown that involved slowly extending your arms out like an albatross and then wrapping them around your body in a shoulder-blade stretching self-hug.

Despite all this lack of struggle, she looked fit, strong, and happy.

The first workout was walking in place for 20 minutes. In future sessions she added light cardio, core work, and light hand weights, insisting that her viewers go faster or slower than she did or even skip an exercise altogether, if doing so was our moderate.

Often I went faster, or kicked my legs up higher than Pahla did, because I could. I had to buy the moderate hand weights she recommended on Amazon because the ones I had been using since my 20s were too heavy. But I never “cheated” by following up the workouts with more grueling activities. To do so, she insisted, was counteractive, stressful to the body, and sending it the wrong signal to start hoarding fat. The point was to not take things to the max. The first few workouts I presumed were throwaway sessions, designed to be easy and keep me coming back. But, Pahla insisted numerous times in each session we’d never work more than we were working now.

The work involved for women like me, who struggled with moderation, was to accept doing less as the pathway to our goal. 

After a week I started to crave the daily workout like I craved weekends. Sweaty or not, I ended each session satisfied with myself.

About two weeks into the workouts, my husband came home from a cycling trip and found me on a particularly moderate edition of Pahla B’s 31-Day Weight Loss Program for Women Over 50, walking in place.

“What are you doing?”

I didn’t need to answer; Pahla was midway into one of her workout lectures, explaining how women over 50 need to work their bodies differently as they age. 

He reacted: “You’re not over 50!”

“You’re missing the point,” I said, not panting, walking in place. “I’m changing … just trying this out.” 

“You’re not even sweating … Look, if you need a workout, I’ll pull one together for you. Something that will actually get you some results.” 

This, from a man who says he’s had a “good day” cycling when he almost blacks out and is frothing at the mouth.  

I felt a need to defend my new workout program: “We used weights yesterday! … I’ve lost three pounds!” 

But it really wasn’t about the weight loss: I was also sleeping better, feeling better. I marveled at how well my body moved through the exercises; how well it responded, how flexible it was.

This engine of a body, despite how it had often disappointed me, fell short of the goals I set for myself, refused to get me where I thought I wanted to go. She was miraculous. 

It made me wonder about the countless trips to the airport at 4 am, countless Monday mornings when I’ve shushed her whispering, is this what you want? 

I thought I could talk her out of it; perhaps even shame her into a 40-year career bootcamp. Tell her what it was she really wanted if she just worked hard enough. But she already knew.

“You see?” she laughed, “We’re already here.”

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Analyzing one of the most pervasive and disturbing forms of dysfunctional communication infecting business today — Professional Ghosting

Ten years ago I was in the process of setting up a NYC-based office for my startup. Every Monday I found myself on a plane, heading out for another round of office viewings, interviews of sales staff, and media buyer pitches.

We had hired an outstanding EVP of revenue who was well-connected and had put out feelers for sales talent. She typically teed up the meetings I took with prospectives when I came to NYC, one of whom was a young woman we’ll call Yolanda.

Yolanda blew me away at the outset. For her interview with me she flew out to Chicago, where I was attending the annual conference my company produced, and she walked the entire length of Navy Pier with me in a pantsuit and heels. She was professional and respectful of the company we had built. She could talk about the brands she’d closed and her approach to selling, but she could also have friendly, casual conversations with my co-founders and our customer communities of sponsors and bloggers. She was confident and immediately likable.

I recall pinging my cofounders and EVP after the conference and asking to get an offer out to Yolanda as soon as possible. Her package, I was told, was extremely generous for a junior-level seller. But that’s what it took to hire promising digital sales talent in NYC in a market where we competed with mainstream media companies.

The next few weeks I got to know Yolanda more, accompanying her on sales calls in NYC and talking with her in the office. My EVP had indicated there were aspects of the pitch that Yolanda needed to learn and that sometimes she came across as a bit airheaded — less confident than she’d appeared during interviews. This hardly bothered me — all sellers had a period when they were getting comfortable with the pitch and products, and there was a steep learning curve in what was then the nascent practice of social media marketing. I thought nothing of it at the time.

A few months later I arrived at our NYC offices on a Tuesday morning and was told I could sit at Yolanda’s desk for the day. I had assumed she was away on calls. My EVP shared with me with manufactured nonchalance that Yolanda would not be coming back to work at the company. I was shocked.

“You let her go?” I asked. “Why?” No one had told me there were serious performance issues.

“Not exactly,” my EVP said. “It’s for the best.”

“Did she resign?”

“In effect she did, yes.”

I still didn’t understand. Several pairs of Yolanda’s shoes — heels that she changed into for sales calls — were still under the desk.

“Did something happen to her?” I asked.

At this point, my EVP knew that there was no way to casually explain what had happened. Yolanda just stopped showing up, she said, and she never called or explained why she wasn’t at work. The team was worried for her and called and emailed her continually, but no response. After several days they even reached out to the police, fearing the worst. At that point, Yolanda sent a brief email indicating that she would not be working with us any longer, for personal reasons.

My EVP threw up her hands as if waving off a bad smell, “So that’s it; we’re better off.”

All I could think was, “But she left behind such expensive shoes...”

During her brief time at my company, I must have connected with Yolanda on LinkedIn: Years later I noticed she provided a “thumbs up” on a post I’d shared there. She’d moved into sales in another industry. I was tempted to look at her profile and see what she’d been up to all these years but thought against it.

I’ll never know why Yolanda stopped coming to work; it’s none of my business. But what has stuck with me over the years is how wrong I was about her. I thought she was a polished, professional communicator; we compensated her well for that. None of her colleagues could report any indicators that there were problems, or that she was unhappy. If anything, she seemed excited and happy to work with us.

It made me realize how at-risk we really are with anyone we hire. And how little we value true communications in the professional realm. We need to appear competent and professional, and we’re encouraged to use our communication skills strictly for fiscally advantageous purposes, such as “acing the interview,” or “closing the sale”.

But how do we communicate more ambiguous situations: “I know you took a chance on me, and I am grateful. But this just isn’t a fit for me,” would have been nice to hear from Yolanda. Then she could have left with all of her shoes.

Why don’t we value integrity more? Why don’t we value courage?

Unfortunately, that would not be the last time I’d experience professional ghosting in my career.

I’ve read with fascination stories about celebrity couples ghosting each other, or about the ghosting phenomenon, in general. Though ghosting was popularized by the preponderance of mobile phones, we — as in, humankind — have tended toward being conflict-avoidant way before mobile came around. By the time I was in college I’d had my share of paramours who said they’d call me and never did, ever again. But the immediacy and dominance of mobile communication has magnified this kind of emotional abuse and given it a name. And the preponderance of mobile seems to have enabled the cross-platform application of ghosting— phone, text and email.

In a live setting, where the ghoster cannot make himself evaporate in your presence, he responds by pretending there was never a break in communication to begin with, which feels like an assault on your sense of reality. I recall being ghosted by a collaborator who, after unavoidably encountering me in a store while shopping with his wife, gave me a big bear hug. I recall my body bristling before my mind could even process a) who this person was; and b) that just months before, he and his business partner had approached me about being a co-founder of their company, negotiated an advisory agreement, spent hours defining my role, engaged in fundraising meetings with my mug on their co-founder slide, traveled to a conference with me where I set up countless meetings, and filmed a promotional sizzle reel with me before my texts, calls, and emails went unanswered.

The encounter felt like a violation. I was with my kids at the time and in the uncomfortable position of not knowing who to be: A jilted business colleague or a friendly acquaintance. I unwittingly chose to be a confused amnesiac, uneasily going along with the ruse while feeling my face go hot.

An undeserved side effect of being ghosted is feeling somehow responsible for the break in communication. When Yolanda decided to go on Walkabout, I recall going through every communication I’d ever had with her to see if there were cries for help or signals I should have paid attention to. Months after the ghosting by my potential startup co-founders, I was at the VC firm of the woman who referred them to me, discussing other business, and I fretted over what to tell her. The truth? Nah, I thought. If I did that she might think poorly of me, as if her former colleague’s extreme, infantile behavior was a reflection of my capacity to deserve it.

Ghosting is an assault on the ghosted’s dignity. It criminalizes its victims.

Perhaps what concerns me the most about ghosting is that the act has become a practical method for handling issues — business and personal — that someone refuses to grapple with.

Having worked in sales, business development and marketing roles and pitched people more times than I can count, I assume I’ll hear the word “No” far more often than I’ll hear the word “Yes.” But I coach people I’ve managed that it’s the quality of the No responses that matter more than the quantity of Yeses in the long run. One of my biggest accounts at BlogHer had to back out of a major deal, and the head of the group called to tell me why and how internal restructuring made that happen. It wasn’t good news, but it maintained the relationship I had with them and demonstrated appreciation for the time and attention I had put into the deal. It was a straight answer.

Respectful exchange between parties is, I fear, falling away in a culture where ghosting is replacing difficult, but necessary, communications, such as “I’m sorry,” “I screwed up,” or simply, “No”.

Ten years ago, if a client I was to hear back from didn’t return a call, it usually meant she was tied up and needed more time to respond. If we had a strong relationship, she’d eventually call or email me to tell me that. And if the answer was no, she’d send me a short but friendly note saying that. And in the best “no” scenarios I’d get an explanation. I personally aspire to that level of communication with people I know.

Today the sheer volume of unsolicited communications coming from multiple platforms makes it impossible to respond to everything, let alone messages from people we don’t know, which makes ghosting that much more feasible. We can ignore difficult conversations, or the mental challenge of having to engage someone we don’t want to talk to, simply by not responding, and then blaming our overflowing inboxes for our radio silence.

An aside: I think it’s necessary to distinguish between ignoring and ghosting someone. Ghosting occurs when a significant connection has been made with someone, and with it an expectation of reciprocated communication. You are not ghosting someone by ignoring Spam in your inbox, or deciding not to return a cold call. These sorts of communications come with an understanding by the sender that they would likely not hear back. Ghosting occurs after communication has been reciprocated and terms of communication are established.

Ghosting has become a negotiating tactic. I’ve been involved in scenarios where teams “wait out” the other party. This always makes me uncomfortable, especially if there was an expectation to get back to the other party by an appointed time. “This gives you the upper hand,” I’ve been told. I believe it gives the other party the impression that, in tough situations, you like to play dead. And if the deal gets done, the other party can now look forward to working with assholes. Not a good look.

Ghosting can be an exertion of power you don’t have, and an affirmation of that fact. Recently a CEO of a stagnating tech company reached out to me about a role. After meeting in person I suspected that the role was not a fit and sent him an email declining the role but offering to help in the interim, if needed. I didn’t expect to hear back. But surprisingly, my note triggered a response a minute later, asking for a proposal. I responded, scoping out what I could do and a fee structure.

In this case, the ensuing silence screamed his frustration and validated my instincts that this was not a fit.

I’m not naive enough to think that some karmic cloud will one day cast a shadow over all who have ghosted others and leave them with the same sense of self-questioning, but I do believe that we must not normalize it. And we must not blame ourselves when it happens to us.

I no longer think twice if asked about someone who has ghosted me to call that person out. I’ll say, “She has integrity issues,” or “He’s cowardly and doesn’t have what it takes to lead.” I don’t look at the behavior as an affront so much as a warning; a dodged bullet.

Of the inspiring projects I’ve taken on recently, one I’m very proud of is Index — a group of top brand and agency marketers who collaborate with emerging companies that seek to leverage our knowledge, experience, and networks. What appealed to me about the group is the “No Asshole” mandate. Of course, we vet the companies we take on to make sure they are differentiated, but they also are “real” as we put it — they do what they say and are not selling vaporware. And we hold each partner to an integrity standard. You could have an insane Rolodex and resume, but if you don’t follow through and do what you say, we don’t want you. As one of my partners says, “I’m too old for that kind of bullshit.”

As part of that mandate we vow to always get back promptly, not only to our client companies or to business prospects, but to each other.

It’s refreshingly old-fashioned. And I’m OK with that.

In January 2005 I had quit my marketing/business development job to pursue an inkling.

Perhaps it was slightly more than an inkling: I had started blogging the year before and was spending every second of my discretionary time reading blogs, connecting with like-minded community and writing. By the end of 2004, I knew I needed to leave my job and devote myself full-time to something. Problem was, I didn’t know to exactly what.

I started the year 2005 waking up at the crack of dawn (something I didn’t do previously even when I had a job I needed to wake up for) and hit the closest coffee shop to do my “work”, which consisted of reading articles that captured my interest and sputtering out blog posts. Some days I only read and other days found me typing furiously for hours. In those hours I couldn’t type the thoughts that came to me fast enough.

I told people I was working on a book, which may have been true. More accurately, I was following threads. One of those threads led me to two other women who, like me, had altered their work lives to explore the world of blogging and who became my business partners. Despite there not being a defined market for monetizing blogging, I was called to build something in spite of not knowing where the next paycheck would come from.

BlogHer erupted from a perfect storm of being in a place of professionally having nothing to lose — I’d already made a choice to leave my previous career behind — no one to answer to, and faith in pursuing something regardless of outcome that I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever feel again.

What I have felt again, now 13 years later, is a renewal, if not quite yet blind faith. I still don’t know where it will lead. But I do know that I must engage in a process of teasing out threads.

I’ve been noticing things:

I’ve woken up to anger I didn’t acknowledge when I was being harassed, dismissed, or taken advantage of professionally.

I figured all this would, too, pass in the wake of my future professional successes, and much of it did. And some of it won’t.

I have been galvanized by the opening floodgates of women who are outing and identifying not just their victimizers but the many nuanced forms of victimization.

They are not doing it for the backhanded press generated by being the 10th or 100th woman to speak up, but because now, in a moment of collective bravery, we are seeing that it’s our imperative to detoxify the environment for us all; and to show ourselves that, once and for all, we can acknowledge and release shame.

I’ve woken up to the need to do this in order NOT to be a victim and to get about with what I need to do to move effectively in the world.

I’ve woken up to my true strengths and weaknesses, and grappling with strengths that confine me because they have led to previous success but are not currently meaningful.

I’ve woken up to my desire to change narratives of what it means to be a successful entrepreneur, having seen people “kill it” at the expense of their families, well-being, and/or integrity; and I’ve seen people explore new models of work, business building, and integrating meaning into what they do for a living.

I’ve woken up to my motherhood, and values I didn’t know I had.

My dear friend and coach (and personal astrologer) Britt Bravo has told me for years now that professionally I am a nurturer, which conflicted with my self-perception as breadwinner/hunter gatherer/revenue generator. I’m finding joy building others’ companies, encouraging other entrepreneurs, and raising my daughters to be curious, kind, courageous, compassionate, and aware of their value and impact on Earth.

I’ve woken up to where I am fearful, and where I bump against needs for acceptance and security. I used to call this acknowledgement “being practical,” or “being realistic”.

I saw my strength in being a voice of reason and bringing disparate sides together, often at the price of what was most meaningful to me.

While empathy and flexibility are important, sometimes there are non-negotiables, and sometimes the only viable solution is not equidistantly located between two sides. Sometimes it’s closer to you.

I’ve explained this to probably hundreds of people who have asked how BlogHer was born: There’s the official version, of course, defined by first meetings, a major conference, and venture funding. But there’s also my personal version, which for me started much earlier, with a few words inelegantly composed and published on a blog no one was reading or yet knew existed. In that post intention was born.

Just start. Read, interact, ask questions. Find threads. And then piece together.

And don’t set goals or define it until you are pulled. There’s a velocity I’ve experienced, in the midst of repeated acts of inquiry or pursuit, when an aspect calls out — the thread. And I need to follow it. But when I’m forced to follow a thread that doesn’t call to me (we’ve all been there, like when we have to dial for dollars, pursue outreach quotas, write empty press releases, create manufactured meaning) things fall flat.

The truth is: Even if you are pulled somewhere, you could still fail. I do it regularly. But failing this way, while painful, doesn’t feel wasteful. And somehow the actions I took while in pursuit of something that called to me manifest. People you meet, insights that were shared, relationships that were made, they stick. They become useful in different ways than you imagined. They become part of your foundation.

I don’t know exactly why I am writing and reaching out to my community, only that I have been called to act and realized that I have not been following my own advice. I forgot what I told others to do: Just start.

And don’t stop.

And while the conversations around unconscious bias and exploited power dynamics have been helpful in raising awareness of the issue, actual solutions have been less obvious.

I recently spoke at an entrepreneur summit, where Kapor Capital Co-Founder and investor Freada Kapor was asked how to “fix” VC, and she replied, “Fire 90 percent of (VCs), starting with the abusers and the bigots.”

I’ve been putting a lot of thought into this myself. I’ve struggled with the answer because as a female founder, I and my two female co-founders had a relatively harmonious experience securing venture capital (from men, I should add) that shielded me from the issues I now see playing out. I remain a big believer in what venture capital can enable; we couldn’t have scaled as quickly and to the extent we did without it.

But since my exit I’ve worked directly with dozens of startups — male and female founded. I’ve seen pitches and interacted with nearly 100 VCs and had difficult, honest conversations with many of them. And I see false assumptions and inconsistent thinking on the investor side in areas where, if they applied the same principles that they encourage their portfolio companies to embrace, they too could better serve their LPs, entrepreneurs, and (let’s all hold hands now) the people who need these products, platforms and services.

I’ve also seen glimmers of solutions tried by some firms that worked.

While I am very passionate about addressing abysmal representation of women and minorities in VC, this is not a rant about that. It’s a rant about some of the broken priorities and processes within VC that, if resolved, could significantly impact access to capital and enable success for all VC-funded companies.

Here’s why VC is broken for some of us:

1. Seed rounds provide unprecedented opportunities, but also Brick Walls

I have mixed opinions about Seed rounds. They were less of a thing when I was first raising in 2007, and in our case unnecessary. We’d bootstrapped for 18 months, had launched a beta, had 100,000 user profiles and 1,000 blogs (or sellers in our marketplace, to put in context) on our waitlist hoping to work with us, and we were generating revenue, though not paying ourselves yet. We were a good bet for a Series A. This report confirms that, today, our $3M A round would likely be a Seed.

We had done many things right, in many cases unwittingly as we had not originally planned to build a venture-backed company. That said, I now meet first-time entrepreneurs who have strong ambitions to scale from the start but don’t have the resources or networks to adequately launch without funding. Seed rounds for these folks have enabled a path.

But I often see what seed investor Elizabeth Yin (one of the investors I spoke to about this topic) calls the “Brick Wall” effect, where founders get over the hump of beta development through a seed round, or participation in an accelerator, and they get all the free help they are going to muster, and then struggle with establishing the infrastructure, partnerships, and expertise they need to get them to the next funding milestone.

Since seed rounds come pre-revenue and pre-market-fit, it also comes with a tighter leash. Once a founder secures seed funding, she is encouraged to scale as quickly and cheaply as possible. And that means usually without the benefit of a “Grown-Up” — my term for an individual who has experience scaling such as a Growth PM, Head of Growth, CRO — or, even less likely, a team of Grown-Ups. In fact most investors would encourage their companies to not even bother with a Grown-Up until Series A or B, which puts Seed-Stage founders at an immediate disadvantage. This isn’t a situation faced by first-time founders only; there are also serial entrepreneurs exploring new markets or, say, going from B2B to B2C who have to build networks and expertise from scratch.

As an early stage founder, I loved my Grown-Up. She helped us anticipate roadblocks faster, scale faster, prioritize faster. We hired her on a contract basis and were able to secure her full-time by our Series B. Most seed-stage entrepreneurs don’t have the resources to bring Grown-Ups on-board, even part-time or in any capacity, so they waste a lot of time begging, borrowing, and stealing these resources, and take what they can get at the risk of distraction.

I held an event last year in NYC that partnered up 100 early stage entrepreneurs with 150 investors and advisors who donated their time. After the event, we received reviews exceeding the 90th percentile for usefulness, with access to critical expertise being a top reason for the reviews. I and my project co-founder tried to pair up “microgigs” for advisors who volunteered, that would pay them for a week, a day, even an hour of their time with founders they connected with who clicked. I was surprised that none of the founders took us up on that.

We did, however, receive dozens of requests from founders after the event to circulate executive summaries and set up meetings with investors and business partners, connect them for coffee chats with advisors, or even have us come in and consult — for no compensation, equity or otherwise.

I don’t blame entrepreneurs for trying to get whatever they can for free. In my case, many were upfront that they were asking for a favor. But, also in my case a significant proportion of the founders who have reached out to me were seed-funded and referred to me by their investors. Upon sharing my (much reduced for early-stage startups) rate card with these founders I often was told, “My Board (investors) would never approve.”

After hearing this refrain multiple times, I dug in. I plainly asked one seed-stage founder seeking significant on-site support, what could she reasonably spend for the role? After much hemming and hawing, she offered up a number that was more an honorarium than a consulting fee. And she said, “You already had an exit. Do you actually need to get paid?”

I teamed up with a colleague, a bona-fide Grownup who grew a Fortune 500 sales organization and ushered two other companies to exit before becoming an angel investor and advisor. We brainstormed a sliding-scale model that enabled early-stage companies to “rent” expertise rather than buy it outright, and retain talent at the appropriate level.

For instance, at a consumer seed-stage startup the team could pay for an hour of more senior, strategic advice per week and, say, 10 hours of less-senior, but critical implementation work (to, say, start and maintain social media feeds, or build a marketing list). As the company progressed to higher stages of growth, it could opt to contract for more hours, transition to full-time roles, or even bring consulting talent in-house, if appropriate.

All of the early-stage founders we contacted for feedback were in voracious agreement that this made sense. One especially supportive VC offered that it’s rare at seed stage for entrepreneurs to afford even this reduced level of support. And, in a roundabout twist, two seed-funded founders told me that even at a level that equated to one-third the rate of one experienced executive, part-time, they could never get a reduced solution approved by their investors.

“This is why,” a former colleague (now advisor and scale consultant) said to me, “I won’t get involved with startups until they are at their Series B.”

2. VC spends a pittance on marketing and over-relies on insider networks.

This is a touchy subject with operational VCs, who will argue that out of fiduciary duty to their LPs, they must keep a lid on marketing expense. Other top-tier investors will argue that their marketing consists of the companies in their portfolio that went IPO, or had outstanding M&A exits.

For some VC firms, marketing is strictly a responsibility of each individual partner, consisting of building a personal brand on Medium or LinkedIn and judging a LAUNCH competition. And many VCs carefully suggest that if you can’t connect with them via warm introduction, you the entrepreneur are not networked enough to make it as a high-growth entrepreneur, anyway.

I would argue that these VC firms are drinking their own Kool-Aid and making a potentially fatal assumption that the only companies worth funding are those with insider networks.

But concurrently, firms will ask their networks and portfolio founders for contacts, introductions to other founders, and recruits for other companies in the portfolio.

And they wonder why there’s a diversity problem.

But VCs’ ability to communicate, and expand upon, their own strengths, knowledge and networks is becoming increasingly important.

And some do it well:

Witness First Round Capital’s enlightening annual “State of Startups Survey,” curated content search for founders, and business-journalist-quality service pieces for startup operators on everything from building culture to recruiting on a budget, to the day to day life of a COO and Chief of Staff.

I read these and was immediately made smarter — granted, after the fact, but still…

Or law firm Lowenstein Sandler’s super-relevant Venture Crush Series, co-hosted by many top VC firms, where even teeny upstarts sit at the table with big-name investors to talk in intimate, unpitchy discussion groups and then get to drink wine and network with them.

Or Omidyar’s Female Founder Dinner series, where they partner with established networks to assemble a diverse group of female founders to talk candidly about their business challenges and advise each other.

Or Andreesen Horowitz’s Guide to Venture-Backed Board Membership, a day-long program delivered in partnership with Stanford University’s Rock Center, where senior female executives and entrepreneurs can get a real view into how to get board roles, recruit a board, and serve on one. You want to attract and engage strong female talent for your portfolio companies? That’s how.

Or True Ventures’ True University event, a two-day event supporting both founders and teams of portfolio companies, which includes hour-long segments from established and exited operators, business academics, and industry thinkers. Anyone, not just portfolio companies, can access the videos from this event.

These efforts cost money and pay dividends not only in raising VC profiles among prospective portfolio companies, but in raising the games of the companies they are already supporting.

3. VC doesn’t fully leverage (acknowledge?) the institutional knowledge it has access to.

I’m encouraged to see that VC in general has placed much more value on bringing in partners with operational expertise along with the business analysts. But there is still a lot of experience being left on the table.

Donna Novitsky, CEO and founder of Yiftee, built her career as a scaled company operator at Sun Microsystems and Clarify before spending nine years as a Venture Partner at VC Mohr Davidow. Her role was to embed with MD’s portfolio companies and help them achieve growth milestones.

“I’m a builder by nature and wasn’t as interested in the investing side,” she said.

It seems to me that this is a powerful strategy and differentiator for VCs to offer up in a competitive marketplace: If we back you, you get to access our operational expertise.

And some firms do this to varying extents with EIR programs, Venture Partners, and one-off arrangements: For example, my C-round investor “lent” us our acting CFO as we prepared for exit. He was very familiar with our company and could hit the ground running; and we, the portfolio company, covered his salary. Many later-stage, and some early-stage, firms have in-house resources that offer recruiting.

Though it’s often unclear to what extent these firms flex their in-house muscles. Most peers who took EIR jobs with top firms did so for three to six months, or until they could find their next permanent role. Some in-house leads shared with me that they are there for recommendations only, not for any actual placements or partnership implementations. In many of these cases expertise comes in the way of informal mentoring networks, or introductions to experienced, out-of-house operators that can provide much-needed advice. (For a full-on critique of this most common form of VC operational support, refer to Point 1 above).

Novitsky admits that her gig was quite rare: VCs typically do not provide embedded operational support, even if subsidized by the startup, and portfolio companies are left to their own devices for scaling. Which means a high percentage of first-time or early-stage founders suffer from the aforementioned Brick Wall Effect.

4. VC prioritizes home runs over base hits.

I should caveat here that I actually like generating revenue and having big outcomes. And I encourage entrepreneurs to think that way. But I do not support stupid, unethical, or unsustainable business models. No VC would, either … publicly.

Still, I suspect that some of the unspoken resistance to diversity in VC is a presumption that certain sectors (Impact, or niche commerce, for example), run by certain entrepreneur profiles (women, or minorities, for example) won’t lead to big outcomes.

It has nothing to do with the entrepreneur, a VC would argue. Yours is just not a big enough business for VC.

To this argument I would submit Sallie Krawcheck’s rationale. The former Wall Street top executive-now entrepreneur, whose company, Ellevest, provides investment products that better match women’s investing styles and objectives sees a big, fat market in amassing smaller-cap opportunities. Not just for rich women, or women with rich husbands, but lots and lots of women who find the products valuable. Women who, by and large, prefer to make smaller-yielding, less risky investments.

This model flies in the face of the prevalent VC model of investing, which largely supports riskier bets. More will fail, but the ones that succeed can go supernova. This is a great model if your company is considered a big bet by investors and you are showered with nine-figure capital rounds. But if you are merely building a sustainably profitable, successful company in a lower-multiple category, notsomuch.

I suggest VCs be more like Sallie, and seek a big outcome by supporting many smaller successes.

Since I don’t run the backoffice of a VC firm I may not know the heresy of which I speak; I’m sure there are more costs involved with evaluating and supporting more companies. But along with more successful outcomes there would be fewer outright failures, no? And there would be many more people who amass wealth and keep their jobs, across a much larger swath of the economy. There would be more problems solved by more companies solving them.

And we would suffer fewer of the uncalculated costs of the “Go Big or Go Home” strategy: the fallout of companies (perhaps whole industries) that probably should not have taken VC money under the expectations of delivering a 10x return. These companies build before they get their sea legs and truly deliver sustainable value. If that anticipated arc of expected exit trajectory could change, or be aggregated with more longer-arc bets, we could start to see an industry supported by overall excellence.

And, OK, maybe a few more women and minority founders in the mix.

Or … adventures volunteering in my daughter’s 1st Grade classroom.

One of the gifts that comes with consulting is a flexible schedule that, barring any important investor or client meetings, has afforded me the chance to do pickups and drop offs, chaperone on field trips, and volunteer in the classroom. My favorite activity is assisting the kids in small groups during learning activities. I can see how they interact with each other, what concepts they struggle with, and I even get to witness some breakthroughs.

This week, in my daughter’s first grade classroom, I oversaw a group of four girls and one boy who had a four-page math exercise. The concepts were “fact families” or groups of numbers that could be organized as addition or subtraction problems, followed by a Base 5/Base 10 exercise and a “More than/Less than” exercise for numbers up to 100.

I watched the kids mull over the instructions on Page 1 and begin to fill out the fact families. Of the five kids, one or two had their fact families memorized and could fill in the numbers without resorting to counting their fingers or using an adding tool. Some I could hear counting to themselves. I encouraged each child to use whatever method worked best for him or her. While some of the kids were slower than others, it was clear that all of the kids understood the concept.

After about 10 minutes in, I had been working with one of the girls who was more methodical and stood up to survey everyone else’s work. Of the five kids, three of the girls and the one boy were plodding away on Page 1, while one of the girls was starting Page 3. I almost didn’t believe she had completed all the work, given the pace the others were working at.

I subtly peeked at her first two pages and found them complete and correct. And while the others needed some time to understand and integrate the instructions on page 1, she had quickly skimmed the instructions on page 3 and was already filling in “pumpkins” with Base 5 numbers and coloring the Base 10 pumpkins green, as instructed.

“Wow! Nice work!” I said, almost reactively, realizing I also needed to encourage the others who were working more slowly but thoroughly. At this, a number of the kids looked up and saw that the girl was far ahead, my own daughter being one of those kids. My daughter and the boy started to pick up their pace, continually eyeing the work of the girl who was on Page 3.

The Girl on Page 3 had no idea she was so far ahead and kept plotting her numbers. Once she finished she went back and started tracing over her work.

“Aren’t you going to start Page 4?” I asked.

“Nope,” she said. “I want to do bubble numbers.” She started converting each digit on Page 3 into a puffy, 3D version of its original self.

I noticed my immediate reaction: Such a shame, I thought. Here she was so far ahead of everyone else. She could breeze through the assignment with time to spare, but instead she wanted to decorate her work. In truth, she had plenty of time to finish all four pages, but I had this compulsion to coach her to finish. NOW.

By now the boy in the group was on Page 2 and working his way through quickly. I turned to the Girl on Page 3:

“But you’re almost done! Why don’t you start Page 4?”

What I wanted to say: “You can be first! YOU CAN WIN THE MATH ASSIGNMENT!”

The girl thought about what I said for a moment.

“Nope, that’s OK. I‘ll finish it later.”

Soon most of the kids in the group had seen the girl’s Page 3 and started coloring in pumpkins to match hers. My daughter started to draw bubble numbers in her pumpkins when I nudged her and said “focus on finishing, please.” She and the boy proceeded to page 4 and completed the whole assignment before time was called.

As I recalled this event to a friend later that day I wondered why this situation bothered me. Should I have encouraged the Girl on Page 3 more to finish the assignment? Should I not have given it another thought?

Or was I frustrated by different numbers? Numbers of girls with natural competencies in math and science who will never have careers that utilize these strengths? Or the numbers of women entrepreneurs who won’t get funding because not enough of us have made it to the finish line to convince largely male investors we have what it takes to invest in us?

Was it right to encourage a six-year-old girl to buy into a narrative that finishing at all costs — not the quality of the journey — was the only way? Is there really any harm in a little artistic flourish, some initiation of personal style enroute? It was clear she understood the principles that were presented. The others had even copied her work to complete theirs.

But I keep coming back to the reality: The burden of proof, and understanding the metrics that matter, even when they don’t necessarily matter to you.

I think, if I had a do-over, I would have suggested to the girl: Finish the assignment, then go back and make like RuPaul with your numbers. Show everyone you can pull it off with sparkles — but first, just pull it off.

No, this isn’t another apology from a male VC; it’s a woman’s attempt to stop blaming herself and get about the business of change.

Four years ago I appeared on CNN representing BlogHer, and, I suppose, an executive woman’s take on all things women and business. Marissa Mayer had been making sweeping cultural changes at Yahoo. Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, had just come out. I was to address the mixed feelings behind it all. Were we, in fact, turning a corner? Was this really an inflection point for women in business? In the world in general?

“More pressing” news got in the way, and two hours before I was supposed to appear, on my way to the studio, I was told that I would be reacting to other stories — Justin Bieber’s latest arrest being one of them.

The past five years have been missed opportunities and, frankly, opportunities I may not have optimized had they materialized. Why?

Because, even with 5 minutes of a national platform I would question whether it made sense to address the issue of discrimination against female leaders when I still felt the underlying cause was in my inability to get the job done.

If I had performed better, or been more competent, I could stand in front of you all and say, with utter certainty, that there’s a problem with women being embraced in top leadership roles and as entrepreneurs. If I had done a perfect job and still been denied funding or a top role, I would have a leg to stand on.

I have this recurring vision of me on TV speaking my true feelings on why we haven’t reached parity: What I’ve seen, and who I’ve seen affected. And I envision being questioned for proof, and being asked to address my own shortcomings and how they may have contributed to the problem. My questioner? A not unreasonable white man. Well-educated. He’ll invoke his wife and daughters while sharing his views on equality. But, he’d say, he also sticks to the facts, and without facts, how can you really prove what’s wrong?

By facts, he’d be referring to numbers. Performance. And while my personal brand is about starting something from nothing, about high performance, I’ll often look at my past accomplishments and wish I’d done more. Closed more. Blown through more doors.

The TV fear is not unlike what a rape victim might be feeling when she’s confronted with the possibility of testifying against her attacker. Might this never have happened if she hadn’t had three drinks that night? Or not invited him back to her place to talk? Or if she’d been clearer and more direct? Did she remember things exactly as they occurred? The crime gets lost, made irrelevant in her mind, in the wake of her seeming mistakes.

Likewise I have wondered if my mistakes have made me an incapable advocate for women’s equality.

In a current piece in The New York Times some competent women who almost made it to the top role in their company shared similar feelings; they were unsure of themselves. Some almost half-heartedly asserted their competence, as if they were saying, “Hey, I did better than my male counterparts, but if I had just done slightly better this would not have happened.” If I had just gone out for drinks at that offsite, or not missed a number despite overall growth.

She’s bracing for the facts — the facts of what she did not accomplish — to wipe out all that she did do.

In my post-exit life I’ve been exploring. New technologies. New roles. And I’ve been going back to a place I used to go to a lot before I ever co-founded a company and became a “pioneer in the women’s space,” when I felt I had nothing to prove to anyone, but everything to prove to myself. In this space of no relevant accomplishments to fall back on I just did. I just called people, raised money, talked to anyone who wanted to talk about my “project”. I didn’t screw up because I had no point of reference, only a desire to build something for women. I had nothing to lose.

The only way to get back to this place is to forgive myself for all my perceived shortcomings, to go back to when I had nothing to forgive.

It’s only from this place of forgiveness that I can actually get shit done. I suspect that it’s from this place of forgiveness that this is the only way we women will get shit done, and call out what we see. Regardless of our mistakes, which — if we really think about it — were not so big.

Some unsolicited Advice

Yesterday I read Ev Williams’s post about Medium discontinuing it’s current native-ad supported business, (and laying off staff and shutting down two offices as a result). While it must have been very difficult to let so much talent go, and a blow to the company’s collective morale to have to so publicly admit that something wasn’t working, I see this as a positive move for Medium and even for the publishing industry.

Ad-supported media needs to collectively get its act together, and while some long-established publishers seem to be sitting pretty, they are getting their asses handed back to them and have to lean on their legacy businesses (print/TV ads, search engine traffic) to mask the dry rot deep within the bowels of their programmatically-run, data-compromised, Facebook/Google-arbitrated ad operations.

Medium’s eight-month experiment into a non-intrusive monetization model is, by comparison, short and non-life-threatening. It failed, but it failed quickly, and with its core product intact. When I go to Medium, I still get great content that I subscribed to, and I’m directed to content that is relevant. As a content producer I benefit from distribution and discovery. The value proposition hasn’t changed.

As I’ve shared with the Medium team I’m a fan, even when I’m a critic. I still get more feed love from LinkedIn; more in-depth reporting and breaking news elsewhere. And for the life of me I can’t figure out why anything I share from Medium on Facebook gets no views while things I share from other pubs do. (Is it me? My friends?)

But as an early proponent (and OK profiteer) of blogging culture, I see Medium as the next frontier. With so many of even the biggest bloggers divesting from ads as their sole source of revenue, and frankly kind of sick of having to keep up a blog that fewer and fewer people go to, Medium has become the platform of choice, the inheritor of our hours spent troubleshooting broken HTML/CSS scripts on our blogs.

With 60 million monthly readers the product is definitely going in the right direction. But what’s next for Medium? Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Get out a bit more.

Yes, even Hillary posted on Medium in 2016 because she’s, you know, a woman of the people. But Trump got to the masses in Appalachia, the Rust Belt, and beyond. There’s a sensibility among Medium readers that may not immediately translate in these demos, but Medium could cultivate influencers, publishers, and content that will resonate in these hard-to-reach spots.

This may sound a bit kumbaya, but you can cultivate a common thread of civility and inquiry among many more than just us venture-capital-seeking, stock-option-vesting, DUMBO-dwelling, Phillz-coffee-drinking crowd.

To be fair, I do see standout writing from authors that are not based anywhere near a U.S. coastline, though I’m always amazed when I come across local people in tangential industries who could use Medium but don’t know it exists.

I recently conducted a marketing workshop for a group of senior female executives on promoting their professional platforms. The workshop was billed by the organizer as “Blogging Strategy 101” and I felt all controversial saying in my opening statement that I recommended little to no blogging and use of multiple platforms, for publishing such as LinkedIn, Quora, or Medium. Approximately 80 percent of them had never heard of Medium. None were publishing on it. One of the women, a friend of mine, didn’t realize that she was on Medium when I sent her a link from it.

I know: Raising awareness among this crowd doesn’t solve your revenue problem if you are no longer ad-supported, but actually it can. See next.

2. Monetize publisher services.

Recently a book agent (or so I thought) contacted me to talk about a writing project. Her specialty, she explained, was helping writers tease out book concepts, developing them, and then leveraging her extensive experience in the book publishing industry to secure guaranteed shelf space in bookstores. I would just need to pay her $50k.

She approached me as both a potential client and as a source of more business, since I knew so many great bloggers who undoubtedly needed help getting published in print format.

My immediate thought (other than fuck no) was: While there may be digital influencers who want this service, most are already published in print and can secure their own distribution, online or otherwise — hence their status as digital influencers. Her best option, in my opinion, would be to offer paid development services where needed, and to front the publishing costs, taking a steep revenue share on sales.

The point is: She wasn’t crazy. There is a market for publishing services. But you have to be realistic about how to value what each party brings to the table.

Publishers know what they bring (and don’t bring) to the table: Medium brings distribution to those who haven’t yet built an audience and it simplifies the publishing process. Publishers would be willing to pay for tools that enhance distribution…to a point. Not talking thousands here, I’m talking a few bucks per month for access to the publishing software, and a premium option ($10-$20 a month) for access to a distribution mechanism (after all, we bloggers paid fees for premium blog products for YEARS).

Professionals would gladly pay this as a cost of maintaining a professional platform. Companies/consultancies could purchase whole licenses, with upgrades for building their own publications. You open the door for additional services that publishers can opt into to further enhance their presence.

Note that I’m not suggesting that Medium become Ad Words for content (also known as Native Advertising). Audience generation would still be organic, but access to the distribution tools would be part of a hosting fee.

Admittedly this may not work for the pubs that Medium pulled into its Special Snowflake program, nor will it work with publishers/bloggers with any literary or blogospheric imprimatur.

These folks would graduate to a paid subscription model.

Which leads to my last thought:

3. Consider a tiered, subscription model.

Cable and OTT models have provided some interesting precedents. I may not pay for all Medium content, but I might pay $3 a month for access to BackChannel, or $12 a month for access to all its premium offerings (which would include access to the free stuff, of course).

The onus would be on Medium to keep acquiring the best content, packaging it effectively, and enabling the most relevant content to reach its readers. This, I think, is doable. It has been a great discovery service of independent publishers thus far.

A freemium version is still available, of course, lest Medium suffer from Vessel’s issue of monetizing content no one knew they wanted. Perhaps free trials, or free versions of content are available when a piece is shared (like with The Information) to enable awareness and upgrades.

I’ll be very interested, indeed, to see where Medium takes things in 2017.

Step 1: Identify there’s a funding problem.

This is Part 1 of a 2-Part Series

In November I got to see female founders in action at The Scale Collective, an inaugural event I co-hosted meant to help women scale their early-stage startups.

In the opening talk I called TSC a “live beta” because it was. I and my TSC partner had suspicions that women grow companies differently than men. Not all women, but enough do to merit us wanting to delve into what makes us tick as founders, and why we don’t scale or raise capital at the same rate as men.

Some don’t understand my fascination with this issue. I’m a female founder, but I co-founded and built a company that scaled and exited. We closed four rounds of venture capital.

Still, throughout that process I observed pivotal points on our trajectory where growth slowed or was not the hockey stick we (female founders) expected. I can point to many factors, not the least of which was a full-on market collapse and recession, and perhaps some founder first-timer-itis.

But now, as an advisor of both male and female-led startups, I’ve seen in some instances diametrically differing approaches to building teams, fundraising, and achieving scale. And while I’m not sure my co-founder peers would agree with me, I do believe these discrepancies are largely due to gender.

It took me and my BlogHer co-founders 9.5 years from first coming together to pursue a “passion project” to exiting our startup. It took us 18 months to decide to seek venture capital. A male friend and entrepreneurial peer liked to remind me that he was “three startups in” by the time I’d sold my first company.

“If I was you, he once said to me, seven years in and pre-exit, I’d take stock off the table now and hedge my bets. Any guy would.”

The thought of doing that was painful to me at the time. Cashing out before exiting would have meant that I was giving up on my baby. What would my investors have thought of me?

I also recall fundraising with my partners and us bragging that we had the “jobs of our dreams” and no intention of leaving them. We meant that and wanted to assure our investors that we were in it for the long haul.

It occurs to me now that we may have been freaking them out. If we never wanted to leave our jobs, how hard would it be for us to willingly exit, or bring in new management if necessary?

These are things I think about now and warn female founders about, not to discourage them from building venture-backed companies, but to give them a realistic assessment of what they are signing up for, and the kinds of expectations they will encounter when taking VC investment.

There are other tendencies that I’ve observed and will assert that female founders own. Having been on my share of panels and discussions with other female founders I realize that some of these observations may be controversial. I’d been on a panel where it was agreed upon in advance that we not take a “victim”, or self-critical, stance on our fundraising style — after all, we were the beneficiaries of VC money; we’d figured out the system and prospered. For years I kept my mouth shut when asked for my opinion on why women do not get the same level of funding as men.

Female peers of mine thought that to respond would be to bite the hand that funded them, or to not give themselves credit for having figured out the system.

I didn’t respond in part for those reasons, but mostly because I just didn’t know why there was such a discrepancy. I mean, I read TechCrunch, Re/code (then All Things D) and every other tech pub out there and it seemed as though there were investors who actively sought female-founded startups to fund. Leader investors like Jason Calacanis consistently spoke of inclusion and a desire to support them.

At the first BlogHer Conference in 2005, when we were just pursuing a passion project — before we founders even decided to build a digital platform for the influencer community — investors approached us to ask if we were “seeking a round”. Apparently we had unwittingly built and demoed a live influencer community. I personally was a beneficiary of press celebrating female founders. Why those intentions failed to lead to more capitalization of women-led companies dumbfounded me.

Part of my ignorance stemmed from not having gone through a seed-funding process. We were already building audience and generating revenue and press when we decided to fundraise. With revenue already in hand we found it was not difficult to get meetings with investors. The time it took from the day we decided to fundraise to accepting a term sheet on a Series A round was about five months.

But, years later, and perhaps a bit wizened by the whole process of starting and selling a digital company, and advising others on how to build theirs, an opinion formed.

Next in the series: Female founder “tendencies” that may keep them from getting funded; and rest-of-the-world tendencies that are equally to blame.

Part 2: Acknowledging differences in how men and women build companies.

This is the second part of a two-part series. You can read the first part, here.

As I said in the first part of this series, I’ve noticed tendencies in female founders that I think partially answer the question, Why aren’t more female founders funded? None of these tendencies are “bad,” by the way. Most contribute to our collective strengths as founders and business-builders. But they speak to a mismatch in assumptions between investors and entrepreneurs. They should not be avoided at all costs but rather noticed and accounted for when necessary.

1. Women favor functionality over cool new shit; but many investors prefer cool new shit.

As an company founder I can attest to this: When my as-yet-unformed-startup held its first blogging conference, in 2005, we were simply attempting to create a meeting forum for a vast segment of the blogging population that was largely ignored. There was no business plan behind it; in fact, it was roughly six months before we thought our passion project as something other than a nonprofit (BlogHer’s first URL was blogher.org).

At my most recent event, The Scale Collective, which was created for female startup founders, I matched a later-stage male investor with a seed-funded female founder for a one-on-one chat. I wasn’t expecting a term sheet from this meeting, but this founder had received great press and a healthy amount of seed funding for her rather brilliant family finance startup; I wanted her to get a sense of what it would take to close a Series A or even B round, and this investor is known for candor with founders.

The founder was grateful for the opportunity, she told me, but seemed genuinely shaken up by the feedback.

“(The investor) said anyone could have built my platform,” she said. “There’s no new technology there.”

This founder, a former NYC media exec, admittedly had no hard-tech background. But she knew her market — parents — and the banking industry. Her passion for her product was apparent — I signed up for it a year ago after hearing about it, before there was even a completed beta. Having secured numerous national magazine articles about her company and a segment on one of the major morning TV shows, influence and subject matter expertise were her superpowers.

But no, the investor thought, her tech wasn’t innovative enough.

I think that this objection is fair. Many investors are passionate about investing in emerging tech, but there are plenty of talented, nontechnical female founders who started companies to address a problem and are tech agnostic. We find the resources to build the tech that enables our solution and leverage our other strengths to establish market differentiation.

…there are plenty of talented, nontechnical female founders who started companies to address a problem and are tech agnostic.

(Apologies in advance to the femgeeks reading this who feel I’m generalizing and whose startup aspirations really are to build cool new shit around AI/VR/AR/IoT/etc.)

And to female founders seeking to pull in top-tier VC funding: Your tech matters. If you have replicable tech, you must have a differentiated way of reaching audience, first-mover status, or valuable data that others with your tech do not have.

2. Women often have different milestones than investors.

I used to joke that the BlogHer audience was the “uncut rock cocaine of community.” No weird shit in there; 100 percent organic. We grew our audience to 100 million monthly unique visitors, without gaming numbers, buying traffic, or spending on media.

But alas no points are given in this realm for uncut rock cocaine.

While some deserve to get their hand smacked for nefarious growth-hacking practices, and value is attributed to organically acquired users, no investor would have taken issue with us buying Google/Facebook ads to supplement our traffic and ensuring we were top of the heap in the women’s digital lifestyle category, where media buyers with deep pockets look before deciding where to spend their money.

Now, if I could have a do-over, I would have allocated a nice amount of money on marketing spend. Sure, we were doing great on our own, but building mini-waves of momentum at the right time would have gotten us there sooner and triggered the hockey-stick effect that VCs look for.

And if this bit of realism is still utterly unappetizing for you, then I would look for funding sources other than VC.

3. We ask for what we think we need; and that’s often less than what a VC thinks we need.

Another bragging point we used to make was how LEAN we were. We got to be as big or bigger than others in our space for far less capital — in some instances a tenth of what our closest competition raised. I bragged about this like my Nana liked to brag about how many sets of pajamas she could make from only one bolt of fabric.

But unless you are in the hot dog manufacturing business, bragging about how much you can make with so little is far less important to a VC than how much you can grow quickly.

Of course you don’t want to blow your wad irresponsibly, but as the male peer I mentioned in Part 1 of this series also said to me: Your valuation goes down with even the appearance of slowed momentum.

What I think is uniquely feminine (or uniquely Midwestern, I’m not totally sure yet) is our/my propensity to say, “Things are great, why ask for more?” And this is a healthy propensity: Why give up equity you don’t need to? Why not see how much you can do with a bit of capital before asking for more?

Unfortunately this translates to investors as: You don’t want to, or don’t know how to, spend what you need to get to a massively large scale.

I will say that I am forever grateful for us going against this propensity in 2009 when, nine months after the 2008 market crash and kissing profitability, we decided to close a C Round. I won’t sugar coat: It saved our ass. And not because our bottom fell out, but because we had survived and needed to prepare for the next wave in our marketplace, requiring new talent, new technology, and fresh perspective.

Guys, you may not understand why this is such a revelation for us women, but trust me, it goes against our base instincts to ask for more than we think we need.

For other seemingly counter-intuitive insights into how VCs keep score, check out Elizabeth Yin’s piece on how VCs keep score.

4. We prefer base hits to risking it all for the homerun

One of my heroes, and a speaker at The Scale Collective, Sallie Krawcheck, built her company, Ellevest, on this simple fact: We women are more risk averse — more willing to forego big upside at the risk of losing our shirts in the process. And because of this we don’t invest the same way as men, just as we don’t make the trade-offs articulated in the “Bro’s Guidebook to IPO Superstardom” as willingly (that last bit I made up, not Sallie).

One of the women I advised earlier this year, a founder of an AI-powered mobile startup (and, a former fighter pilot, so not particularly averse to risk) was contemplating joining an accelerator program that would have required her to relocate and be away from her family for the summer. It was at this moment that she discovered what she was not willing to do to grow at all costs and decided not to participate in the accelerator.

And yet, this flies in the face of the narrative of “what it takes” to be a successful entrepreneur. Jason Calacanis, a supporter of female founders (though he didn’t exactly have the most welcoming live interface in the four or so times I’ve encountered him), wrote in an essay entitled, “You don’t have what it takes”:

Look yourself in the mirror and ask:

“Am I willing to sell everything I have to get one more month of payroll for my team to keep this company going?”
Then ask yourself…

“Am I willing to max out my two credit cards and go $20,000 into debt to keep this startup going?”
Then ask yourself….

“Am I willing to ask everyone on the team to work for deferred salary for the next 90 days while I try and save this company?”
If you’re not able to do those things, YOU DON’T HAVE WHAT IT TAKES.

Period.

Are all female founders not willing to risk it all? Of course not. I know when I built my first company — pre-marriage, pre-kids, pre-mortgage — I was willing to forego a real income for 18 months. But given the majority of female founders are starting companies at later stages (after building the skills, competencies, and perspectives needed for building a company, you could argue) the typical female founder — a late-30-, 40-, or 50-something — is often the go-to for emotional or even financial stability in her household.

We “risk” by working hard, and at totally inconvenient hours; by forgoing new clothes and wearing the same suit to every investor meeting, by keeping that 10+-year-old clunker, by selling our timeshare and downsizing the house, by investing in more child care, by switching to new health insurance and forgoing dental for a few years, by not heading-up the school fundraiser this year, by arranging for someone else to do pickups and drop-offs, by reducing — but not eliminating — the monthly payments going to the kids’ college funds, and by no longer hanging out with friends that associate hanging out with shopping, fine dining, or weekends in Cabo.

Or maybe that was just me and my co-founders.

5. Bullshit is not our native tongue

One of the male investors at my event provided written feedback on insights he gleaned after five one-on-one meetings he had with female founders:

“…I also discovered a pattern of how differently women founders pitch — there is more humility, more acknowledgment of challenges, more honesty. Does that hurt them in pitches compared to the guy pitches (we are awesome, we are going to be huge, no way we can fail — which make them sounds (sic) totally immature and more likely to lose my money…)

I couldn’t help but notice that the investor did not answer his own implied question: Does honesty hurt female founders? He may have appreciated our honesty and seen past male braggadocio, but what about VCs in general?

This is a conundrum I struggle with, as I think honesty is a true strength of any founder, but usually one that proves valuable in the long-term — and many startups don’t get a long-term. I think about opportunities I lost to others who were willing to “game the system,” exaggerate their numbers or appear more competent and confident than they actually were. In truth, plenty of these folks lived and prospered.

I encountered a male-founded startup who, as part of their marketing plan for launch, added views to their public-facing engagement numbers, not for investors’ sake, but to build the impression among users that the site had strong reader engagement, and thus eliciting more views. When I questioned this tactic, citing my experience building a 100-million-monthly-user community, they were earnestly incredulous: At every startup they’d been involved with, this was an expected engagement tactic and as necessary to the launch strategy as having a web server. I started wondering, in what universe had I built my company and survived?

This also made me wonder how much harder I and my predominantly female team had to work to build our numbers organically, and for potentially lower outcomes.

I’ve also seen women swatted away when they walked into the meeting with the kind of swagger you’d expect from a Type A male. There’s a nuanced middle ground that we women are expected to tread, where we impart confidence and check investor boxes of competence and pedigree while still being deferential, even humble. Most of us have the latter part nailed. It’s the former part that the majority of us lack. For most of us, this is like being a pinup Mother Theresa: An impossible idyll. And not one we necessarily aspire to.

As female executives we coach each other to make the big asks and promote ourselves, so we do, and perhaps our awkwardness shows. I belong to a women’s networking group, where seniority and a high level of business achievement are required for membership. And yet, even in this environment, any personal announcements we share on our listserv comes with the requisite hashtag: #ladybrag, to acknowledge the paradoxical state, I suppose, of being a lady who talks up her accomplishments.

Having articulated all of these “propensities” have I generalized about women? Yes. Have I generalized about men? Yes. I’ve become less concerned about that though, and more driven to explain what I think is a complex issue. And I don’t have the answers. But I do see some people and organizations chipping away at solving the problem, such as:

The Circular Board, who help women in the early stages prepare for larger scale conversations with investors;

Sandy Carter, formerly of IBM and founder of Silicon Blitz, who has been conducting research with actual female founders to come to a better understanding of our strengths, using data;

Indie.vc — part of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, that focuses on doubling down on base hits and sustainable businesses;

Julia Pimsleur of Million Dollar Women, who helps women build high-income generating businesses;

Elizabeth Yin, who is helping to demystify the early stage fundraising process for all entrepreneurs;

and Dell Entrepreneur in Residence Elizabeth Gore, who espouses both revenue and impact — and self-defined growth.

Would I ever raise VC capital again? Absolutely. For some companies I don’t know any other way to grow. But my eyes are opened to other visions and other avenues. VC is no longer a do-or-die scenario to me. It’s a could-be scenario. An imperfect solution. And one that will, I suspect, look different as more women succeed on their own terms.

Female founders have come too far to fail. But give me a moment…

Last week I and my Virago Co-Founder hosted our launch event for 250 people in New York City — men and women, all in service of helping female startup founders succeed. In the aftermath I received notes from men and women alike thanking us for the opportunity to be a part of it.

That night after the conference, I sat with my co-founder having a glass of wine at the hotel bar recounting the day. We touched on what went wrong (acoustics) and on what went right: The spirit of camaraderie was palpable among everyone in the room. Women of extremely diverse backgrounds — white, black, and brown; Millennial, GenX, and Baby Boomer; mothers, divorcees, and singles; many of whom had been C-level execs in their previous lives — were now on the same learning level as other women starting their own enterprises. They shared contacts, stories, struggles, and made connections on the spot.

I felt we and our colleagues were touching on a new model of business building. One that didn’t exalt the home run at any cost so much as support meaningful, profitable change. One that truly leveraged our differences to help all boats rise.

I looked up at the television — the Cubs were about to win the World Series — something that I, a native Chicagoan, thought I’d never see in my lifetime.

And, in a week, we would likely be electing the first woman as President of the United States. I always said, “likely” thinking I didn’t want to jinx anything. But really, it was a given.

“It’s time for us,” I thought to myself. “It’s time for change.”

Today is day two of my numbness. The pragmatist in me is still picking up the phone, making calls, and having conversations about how to expand upon what we did last week. But the weight in my gut is not going away. It slows me ever so slightly.

This feeling is not new. The last time I had it was in 2008, when, in reaction to a market crash that leveled many startups, I sat down with my co-founders, our company in the midst of a massive growth phase, talking about how we were going to take pay cuts and dismantle a new extension of our business.

Like in 2001, when I walked around Pacific Heights in a daze, having just seen a plane on television crashing into the second World Trade Center tower. I had been at a startup that was starting to see difficulties, and I had dug in my heels to help generate new business. And yet this plane struck me somewhere deeper, exposing the absurdity of my assumptions of invincibility in the face of challenge. I wondered if I would ever go back into the office again. I wondered, what’s next? For the first time in my risk-riddled life, I felt unsafe.

A Trump Presidency does not in any way meet the level of tragedy that we experienced on September 11, 2001. It can’t be an American tragedy when so many of us chose it. But I have a similar feeling of fear, deep in my gut, that things are not what they seemed; women are going to lose the priority we gained these past few years, when we shed light on the shortcomings of the corporate and investment worlds and showed how powerful alternatives could be. I’m now realizing that we didn’t power through this alone, but in tides of warm water that helped move us along. Those tides, I suspect, are going to run cold.

I just watched the end of the Netflix series Stranger Things. Without giving away the plot, it’s about a small Midwestern town struggling when the reality of an alternative universe is revealed. A girl who can access this alternative universe with her mind calls it “The Upside Down”.

I’ve been stuck in my own version of Hawkins, Indiana, thinking that progress looked one way, while in an alternative universe it looks very differently. I thought we as a nation were on a similar path, acknowledging that racism, misogyny and economic inequality existed, but we were on a shared trajectory, a new way of being. But I see that’s not where we are…yet.

And scarier still, we are not now becoming aware of The Upside Down. To most in this country, we ARE the Upside Down.

Am I done? Nope, not even close. I know that, just as I remember all the other times I’ve been knocked on my ass, it will hurt for a while. I’m slowed but not stopped. We have an alternative universe that’s not going away. Seeing it comes first. Now to breathe in it.

Meet MegaBot, the New, NEW Native Ad

Originally published at www.linkedin.com.

This is the fourth in a series about the digital advertising industry.

• The first post you can read here.

• The second post you can read here.

• The third post you can read here.

Since leaving the digital media company I co-founded and sold, earlier this year, the question I’ve been asking myself is, “What’s next?” Being a digital media geek, most of the entrepreneurs and visionaries I encounter will tell me about a new mobile or video content play, or some new ad format. And I, being a bit tired of talking about digital advertising for reasons I’ve well documented, proceed to pepper the conversation with skepticism: No, but REALLY, is that something new?

Reading about the latest innovations by media players at the Digital NewFronts last week I confess I was not blown away by what I consider to be just updated flavors of branded content (I’ll be curious to see if Saturday Night Live really can pull off sponsored replacements to commercials that don’t feel like ads).

On a coffee date with an investor in my previous company, I hit paydirt.

“You’re gonna think this is crazy,” he said.

“Crazy in general? Or crazy for someone in media?” I thought.

He started searching on his phone and handed it over to me. I saw what I can best describe as a Transformer for grown-ups.

“Meet MegaBot,” he said.

MegaBot is what entrepreneurs call a “Minimum Viable Product” or MVP. It is 15 feet tall, 15,000 pounds fully loaded, and its operator sits in its head. If MegaBot’s creators play their cards right, it will be the genesis, not only of a robotic version of the WWE, but of an entirely new media franchise that lives on TV (think live streaming on OTT), virtually, in real life (IRL), and in some combination of all three.

I would argue, MegaBot is the Web 3.0 version of a new media platform.

We’ve just scratched the surface on digital ad alternatives, such as experiential marketing, and native advertising, but by and large publishers and advertisers are still interrupting a user experience, not enabling it.

Speaking with MegaBot co-founder Brinkley Warren, you almost forget that the franchise currently exists as only a business plan and one MVP, initially funded via just over $500k in crowdsourced funds and now with a $2.4 million seed round of funding. Warren explained to me that the plan for world domination starts with an invitation to robot makers in Japan to a fist fight that will take place in the fall.

As stated on the MegaBot Website:

“MegaBots is not about building a single robot or fighting a single duel against Japan. MegaBots is about empowering robot pilots and teams from around the world to field their own giant, human-piloted robot, and then hosting epic live-action sporting events where teams compete for glory, the honor of their fans, and the chance to become the world’s ultimate mech champion.”

It’s an inverted form of VR, where the sci-fi robotic creations of a generation of young geeks are brought outside the virtual world to duke it out in real life.

“This is a whole new form of entertainment, “ Warren says, “blending reality and fiction. We took advantage of something you see in every sci-fi franchise and brought it into the real world.”

From here, the MegaBot team will issue more challenges, and presumably gain more audience. And like with any emerging medium, standardization will be applied. The MegaBot team will license a kit of parts (or an API, if you will), to other developers to set the baseline for innovation and partnered with NASA to develop 200 safety protocols for manned robots.

Growth-hacking an engaged audience won’t be a challenge, but scaling the product will be. It’s hard for many independent developers to get access to warehouse facilities and welding equipment to even meet the baseline standard, but that doesn’t mean there are no takers in some of the least expected places. In addition to the Japanese team, oil drillers in Texas with access to facilities, Iraqi developers who have collected busted tank parts, South Korean roboticists, and Russian investors have also shown interest in adding to the franchise.

And MegaBot is in conversations with a global game developer and distributor, who is interested in developing a game that enables users to customize their own virtual robots with a digitized version of the MegaBot kit of parts.

So, why is MegaBot the shiny new answer to innovation to the digital ad industry? It may or may not be. Ultimately MegaBoth is a metaphor of the thinking that will have to be applied to brand experiences in the future.

Megabot, itself, is a native ad for its sponsors: Companies such as AutoDesk and military-grade vehicle and robotics manufacturer Howe & Howe Technologies supplied software and hardware for the prototype. Shell is providing the gasoline powering the MVP and, perhaps, the new additions to the franchise.

This begged the question for me: how does a non-tech, non-gaming, non-mechanical brand integrate into the experience without deferring to the age-old billboard model of slapping a logo on a pre-conceived, pre-built product?

Warren turned the page of the business plan in his mind. It would be entirely possible for other brands to participate, he explained, as the franchise would extend to other media — TV, for example — and as additional dimensions of engagement would be made possible at MegaBots live events. For example, borrowing from virtual gaming, all spectators at a live event could participate by engaging via mobile app, where they can assist robots by providing much-needed virtual supplies from their personal control panels, which, in-turn, could be supplied by brands.

MegaBot is an example of the innovative thinking around content, audience, and distribution that will have to be applied to this platform-agnostic, ad-blocked world. There’s no way back in with consumers who have opted out of an experience without traversing between the physical and the virtual; without enabling an ecosystem on whatever platform it uses.

And what does it mean to enable an experience, or a robot? Will brands spend thousands — or even millions — on building content, virtual goods, or robots? We half-joke that brands are the new publishers, but will they also become game developers, inventors, or world changers? Will the next cure for cancer be brought to you by McDonalds?

The short answer is, probably not, but co-creation — and co-innovation — with brands will be table stakes for digital publishers moving forward.

Originally published at www.linkedin.com.

This is the third in a series about the digital advertising industry. The first post you can read here. The second post you can read here.

A commenter of one of the previous pieces in this series wrote that it was “irresponsible” of me to use hyperlatives such as “Free Fall” in my title when describing the Digital Ad Industry.

Reading between the lines, I understand this comment to mean, “Please don’t create a panic. Not when our occupational existence is so precarious. Not until an alternative route has been figured out. Not until I get a job at Uber.”

I understand the panic. The outsized reaction to Mashable’s recent round of layoffs and shift to more video and social platforms (what start-up folk refer to as a pivot) has business press freaking out for being, well, just like every other digital media company. But should this be a shock? Covering the latest in tech for 10 years doesn’t mean you get emerging-tech multiples. Just ask Om Malik. The HuffPo sale happened years ago; Tumblr hasn’t lived up to its sale price. (Pulling out the harmonica) the irrational upside of media startups is gone.

(Along these lines, Alex Magnin wrote a fantastic piece explaining why digital media founders are like heroin addicts (my analogy, not his), upping the ante and chasing the capital dragon, making heftier promises with each funding round that current business models can’t keep.)

Mark Zuckerberg didn’t make digital media companies feel any better when he recently shared that the Instant Articles capability would now be available to all publishers. Bloggers and small independents jumped out of their chairs for the new, shiny, traffic-generating tool, but more mainstream media companies have a more measured reaction. Are we trading “audience” for “traffic?”

The New York Times validated the paranoia by sharing some disturbing data indicating that digital media companies are maxing out on audience, and increasing percentages of traffic — as much as 40% — on some sites is attributable to Facebook. Facebook has become, in essence, like a virtual mall, providing everything consumers need — or a path to those needs — within it’s virtual walls. We can eat (ordering via Instant Messenger), read our favorite magazines (via Instant Articles), watch TV (via live in-app streaming), fantasize (Oculus/VR), and hang with friends — all within its environment.

So our readers need us…Why?

When I sold the blog-supported media company I co-founded, in 2014, there were grumblings of change in the industry. The exuberance around blogging as a competitor to mainstream media had dissipated, but by and large we’d seen new areas of growth around optimizing our programmatic advertising, building proprietary tools that enabled us to perform media campaigns effectively and efficiently, and licensing our content for native advertising campaigns. In essence we proved that New Media and New New Media could co-exist and add value.

But fast forward to the end of 2015, when I was determining what to do next, and I’ll confess it was a different story. For one, necessary-but-inconvenient ad standards had caused even some of the best content providers to stumble and reconfigure. The new normal was more about compliance than content. It seemed that a preponderance of new media aggregators (or reiterators, as I like to think of them) had cropped up that shone brightly at the onset of funding but then quickly sputtered out when no unique voice or platform could be found behind them. Mobile and video, the darlings in the VC world and full of potential, were riddled with measurement issues and still hard to monetize or scale via the ever-present, ever-despised pre-roll format. Ad tech was no longer a sexy differentiator, but rather like that cousin you saw at every freaking family gathering who ate the food but offered no new conversation — a staple that you put up with. And platforms were becoming so large and established they felt siloed, unapproachable, even corporate.

I wondered, what’s left? Where is there still room to grow? What’s a media innovator to do? And then I remembered: 1999.

That’s when I started my digital career. That was the year when inordinate amounts of capital were put into digital companies, and when best practices in online media were still fairly new. No one yet knew that throwing half your fundraise into a portal deal to stimulate traffic growth was unsustainable, or that dumping millions of random email addresses scraped from a CD-ROM purchased off the Internet was a bad idea.

At least we pretended we didn’t know.

I was on the launching team of a startup that needed to ramp up quickly. We had approximately ten weeks to hire writers, train them, and post approximately 2,000 articles onto our Website. I’m not sure where the founders got that number, but I’m guessing that’s what they determined was a launchworthy threshold and what, from a pageview standpoint, backed into their revenue projections. Doing the math, it accounted for about eight articles per writer, per day.

Our content acquisition strategy consisted of hiring anyone crazy enough to agree to attempt eight articles a day and constant use of the phrase “Chop the chicken multiple ways.” I recall our editorial director attempting to mitigate my concern by assuring me, “These articles don’t have to be long.” On my team of writers: One ad copy guy, an out-of-work chef, an adventure tour guide, a former elementary school teacher, and a lit major just out of college. All but one was under 30. All but one had written professionally before; none of them knew html.

I remember having a bit of an existential crisis, having come from established publishers such as Time Inc., and The New York Times: Is THIS what it will now take to succeed in digital media? A total disavowal of the meticulousness we applied to every word, phrase, headline, and fact? Is sheer volume the most relevant metric?

It got better.

Seven years later, sitting on a panel representing my company, BlogHer, alongside “traditional” media luminaries, I was asked if user-generated content, or UGC, was now the new normal. Would it overtake professionally produced, copyedited and fact-checked (read: expensive) content? My answer: Of course not. If anything, UGC would be the ants that carry the messaging of traditional media out into the corners it couldn’t see. Though the best content, wherever it came from, would always win. The cream, I said, always rises.

All this is to say, should we be panicking now?

I say, let’s not panic, digital media friends. This isn’t 9/11, or a market crash, or anything like what left us unemployed in the past. It’s a warning shot, and a not-so-subtle nudge from our users to stop futzing with user experience and to streamline immediately before they leave us forever. But at least they care enough about the content to want to ad-block it.

OK, Facebook is eating our lunch. But we’ve been eating the equivalent of a soggy baloney sandwich; they can have that lunch. Maybe we ought to change our diet, change the way we monetize, and change what we are monetizing.

And remember: We thought Yahoo was eating our lunch back in 2001, and if we’ve learned anything from Yahoo it’s that you can’t be all things to all people. Facebook would love to do original content, but it doesn’t. In fact, that is the one area where their numbers are declining. Facebook built the perfect content engine, but you still have the gas.

Just don’t raise VC capital while building this content, unless you are planning on building a proprietary distribution mechanism, analytics platform, marketplace, or VR-enabled on-demand food-delivery service on top of it. And think of a new way to get people to pay for it.

And don’t forget: The cream always rises.

If you have managed to figure out how to do this … Call me?

_______________

NEXT: I know, I promised you happy news, in the form of innovation; things that are going right in digital advertising. I’ll share some more on what is getting me excited and The New, New Native Advertising.