Meet Our Weirdos

Michael Green

Wed, 26 May 2021 12:00:00 GMT

Michael Green has been passionate about writing since his teenage years. Crafting fiction revealed itself as “a way to have conversations about magic,” and to build different worlds in his stories.

A data scientist by day, Michael found himself intrigued by the complexity of weaving together characters, plots and ideas, and the possibilities for infusing some of data science’s analytical frameworks into the artistic process of storytelling. He built a tool to help organize his writing ideas, and after showing it to a few other writers and hearing their enthusiasm, he fleshed it out into an app called Lynit, which is now in beta.

We were introduced to Michael by fellow weirdo, Chanita Christmas and her description of him was so wonderful, we sent him an invitation immediately:

“His mind is so weird, beautiful, and brilliant. Sometimes I feel like we could be subspecies of humans, and if so, we definitely belong to the same tribe. He’s the person who introduced me to the world of sci-fi and fantasy in the first place and I am forever grateful. We have moments of random dancing in the apartment to all types of music as he does a perfect pirouette while I usually stumble to the ground in laughter. He’s just… a phenomenal human being and so interesting. I picked him because more people need to know about his magic. I can only imagine there are Black kids somewhere who think they’re too weird to fit in but don’t realize that being weird is their superpower and I honestly think Michael can be one of the people to show them how truly spectacular they are.”

🤓 I geek out about…

Magic. I love creating systems of magic, applying as much science to it as possible, then picking apart the practicality of using it. If I ever ask someone,”if you could have any super power what would it be?”, it’s a setup question. Then I will have fifty follow up questions about why they want it and how will they handle various practical concerns.

🎒 I collect…

I’m not much of a collector, though I should probably start, my home is pretty sparse.

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

just about anything, from tax questions to how to get an idea off the ground to what to wear. It doesn’t mean they always take my advice haha, but I have opinions on a lot of things. I have been single most of my life, but I do love giving advice on how relationships should work in theory ha.

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

My obsession with magic and world building show up in the types of stories I write, but also they were the catalyst for me creating Lynit in the first place. While writing my first book, I created a world with six different forms of magic that all have their own complex systems of how they technically worked as well as philosophies of how people believed they worked. I had theories on what type of person would be good at each type of magic and then had to create a world that would make those sort of people. I had all these different interconnected story elements that had to work together and drive the plot. I needed a brand new tool just to keep up with it.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

We are still in the early stage of honing our MVP. Growth for us would be making more writers happy than we are now.

🚶 I would walk/drive/travel 500 miles to…

Find a clear sky and setup my telescope.

You can learn more about Michael at lynit.app.

Soushiant Zanganehpour

Wed, 26 May 2021 11:00:00 GMT

We first learned of social scientist and entrepreneur Soushiant Zanganehpour through his interview on the Make Things That Matter podcast. We were fascinated by his bottom-up approach to ideation and innovation, which deals with the bias and disengagement problem that often comes with traditional hierarchical decision-making processes.

Throughout his career, Soushiant’s experiences working in senior management roles led him to realize how poorly designed decision-making processes often led to poor decision quality and organizational performance. Because he felt organizations could not fully tap into the full breadth of available human talent, potential, and collective intelligence from all of their employees, he started to think through a new model, technology, and vision for 21st-century decision-making. In late 2018, he founded Swae, an AI-enabled platform that allows anyone in a company or organization to meaningfully participate and influence the decision-making process. Swae helps employees turn their feedback into well-written proposals for improving the organization.

Soushiant geeks out about social injustice, systems design, bottom-up innovation, and empowering people to have a voice. He also loves to travel and collect photos of doors.

🤓 I geek out about…

Broken systems and how to fix them. I geek out about how systems were designed, by whom, with whose assumptions and interests in mind, and who doesn’t have a seat at the design table. I’m not a religious person but you could say I have as close to a religious experience as one can imagine when I find systems created with really beautiful feedback loops, where the participants with the least amount of power in that system have a non-tokenistic, meaningful, and substantive ability to input into how those systems evolve. The elegance of design, the dignity they enable, the opportunity they afford us to hear trapped insights and unheard solutions, are so beautiful to me. Whether those “systems” are decision-making processes or how the company is structured (whether it’s a cooperative or community-owned organization or entity or a commons), I geek out about how people are included in important decisions.

I also geek out about how bottom-up collaboration can reveal innovations and solutions we hadn’t thought of before by giving people a chance to piece together disparate insights. The collection of these weird motivations is what lead me to build Swae, and it’s been my passion and obsession for a long time. I care about people having a voice, and see a future where that voice can emerge organically into high quality decisions, to help meaningfully shape the directions of organizations and large collectives of people.

🎒 I collect…

(weirdly enough) pictures of ornate doors. When I was living abroad in London UK, this obsession emerged quite organically. I would take 1 Sunday a month or 1 day out my travel itinerary to go to cool neighborhoods and take close-up pictures of ornate doors (and sometimes some street graffiti). I later began posting the doors from my Instagram account called The Door Hunte r, which is not active at the moment because I’m not traveling. I am completely obsessed with shabby, broken, reconstructed, super beautiful, rough doors with a lot of history and character. I think they tell fascinating stories about the people that choose to live in those homes. They can tell you stories of the generations or things they have witnessed through time. It’s just fascinating to me the different designs of doors that exist.

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

Complicated problems, like planning a career change, a life change or going through a multi-variable, complicated work or life situation that they need to sort out. I am good at breaking down problems into smaller parts and helping people isolate the root issue from the symptoms, so they can see the bigger picture or understand better what they are reacting to. I’m also good at helping people see the potential they may not see by using words and illustrative metaphors to paint a different picture for them.

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

– from breaking problems down to root causes, to designing better systems, aesthetics and fonts, and user experiences – all the stuff I geek out about privately shows up into my work.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

The form of growth most important for Swae is deep usage and engagement, not shallow and broad signups. We’d rather be working with 5 companies using Swae for precisely what it’s been intended for, which is to make more inclusive decisions, than 50 companies using Swae to replace the way they do an employee survey. Swae allows users to test new decision-making processes where people are involved from the bottom and trying to piece together disparate insights to de-risk ideas through collective intelligence. Research shows that having the opportunity to feed views and opinions upwards and involvement in decision making is one of the most important drivers of employee engagement and can minimize bias in core decisions tremendously.

sources: (1) Markos, S. and M.S. Sridevi, (2010). Employee engagement: The key to improving performance. Int. J. Bus. Manage., 5: 89-95 & (2 Robinson D., Perryman S., and Hayday S. (2004). The Drivers of Employee Engagement Report 408, Institute for Employment Studies, UK

So we are looking for a handful of organizations that are wed to the intended use of Swae—not just using parts of Swae for feedback collection or consultations. This is how we imagine we would grow. It will give us the most meaningful feedback regarding our feature sets, gaps, and UI/UX areas to improve. We’d love to see conscious leaders and evangelists who have a similar worldview to ours to use Swae to bring that worldview to life in their organizations.

🌤️ A thing that makes me hopeful about the future of business:

Millennials and younger people are rising into more substantive decision-making roles where they have a lot more power and autonomy. That’s really exciting. I think there will be a tipping point where in the next five years, the majority of senior executives will be from our generation versus the baby boomer generation. Some of the more systemic issues that we’ve been dealing remain stuck because of values of past generations or because of an inability to see systems or recognize their negative impacts. Hopefully, with this “changing of the guard”, there will be greater tolerance to re-think the costs and benefits of the old systems, and an appetite to create different structures, organizations, and values that create positive outcomes.

💭 I wish more companies would…

Pay attention to the negative impacts their businesses and organizations produce as much as they celebrate their positive impacts.
Be honest in how they speak to people that are impacted by them. I wish more companies would speak to their fans, stakeholders, customers, and employees like humans do - like friends do - instead of hiding behind safely crafted language and messaging put together by corporate communications teams or legal counsel to help limit their liability on a matter.
Create systems and invite approaches that open them up to constructive criticism and dissent, to help them find problems and create new solutions faster than they would otherwise.
Have employee ownership as part of the way in which they finance themselves or grew so that the economic benefits would be more distributed and inclusion in decision-making would be a natural part of the expectation.

💛 How can companies and industries take better care of people?

The basics like a living wage, giving people more economic mobility, giving people opportunities to grow as individuals (formal or informal learning), providing incentives to own, including them in the decision-making processes but not in tokenistic ways - in ways that are useful.

Through the products that they design, the choices a business or industry makes are choices that scale. They are not small choices but big choices because they can impact millions/billions and because companies emulate one another in their choices. Some industries are consciously avoiding taking responsibility for the environmental or health impacts their products contribute directly to. To solve for this, we need to be honest. A company doesn’t need to have the answer to “How do you solve for those impacts?” but their approach should be that of honesty, saying, “Our industry/company creates these impacts, and we don’t know how to mitigate them effectively.” This allows people to have an honest conversation about how to fix them. We need to create a safe space to think of solutions, not just hide behind language, rules and laws.

I wish more industries and companies would have workshops together to figure out solutions for these industry-scale and humanity-scale problems that have been created because of the negative impacts of systems. For example, think of the amount of plastic and garbage in the Pacific Ocean, environmental waste, and the effect of screen time on teen psychological health and development. These are massive problems that need an equal amount of intelligent thinking, time, and resources to solve. But, the first step is honesty (explains why I believe hiding behind corporate communications teams and corporate counsel perpetuates the problems).

❓ A question I love:

What advice would you give your 18-year-old self given everything you know today? What’s one sentence you would tell that person? What would you ask them to do more of, less of, or pay more attention to? What’s important for that person to know?

I find the answers to those questions really fascinating.

You can connect with Soushiant on Twitter or read more about Swae on Medium.

Guan Un

Wed, 19 May 2021 12:00:00 GMT

How we first befriended Guan Un is lost to the sands of time, but we know this: it feels like he’s always been one of our weirdos. This, despite our living in different hemispheres of the globe and highly incompatible time zones; and despite long stretches where one or another of us takes an extended break from social media.

Sometimes those things don’t matter much, because you’ve found enough common fascinations to geek out on together that the bond becomes a lasting one.

To wit: Guan is a coder (we ❤ code), a writer (we also ❤ writing), an avid reader (someday, maybe, Sarah will show you her reams of book notes), and an encourager of creative souls (us too). And as he himself wrote in his contribution to our Find Your Weirdos project, “a weirdo’s love can show you how to love something.”

Guan continually teaches us new ways to love the things we love, how to get up close and examine a single sentence from every angle, and still confess to the mystery of its full meaning. His work, and his presence, always leave us feeling heartened and curious, like a welcoming library filled with cozy chairs, or a teacher who loves learning with and from their students.

We hope you’ll learn how to love one of Guan’s favorite things, just as we did.

🤓 I geek out about…

Great sentences and sentence structure—have you ever considered how everything that you’re ever read has been delivered to you in a sentence? And how the form of those sentences affected the content of what you read? And how the right sentence in the right place can shift your view of the world? Also: theology, mental health, story structure, speculative fiction and tabletop rpgs.

🎒 I collect…

Examples of great writing; writing reference books; newsletters from interesting points of view; weird story games.

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

How to write, what to read. (And if you ever need a reading recommendation, feel to say hi! It's my superpower.)

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

I have a newsletter called Topic Sentence (currently on hiatus but returning soon) which collects great sentences. I’m also working on starting my fiction career—I’m working on a novel and various pieces of short fiction. And I’m also pushing a small book on anxiety towards publication. I think the thing that links them all is writing—and paying attention to what’s going on under the surface: of language, and of the human heart.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your work?

Making a connection with people: helping them understand something more of themselves and their work and writing.

🌤️ A thing that makes me hopeful about the future of business:

It’s hard for me to look beyond the spectre of climate change. I am not by nature an optimist, but it seems like more companies are starting to realise they won’t have a business if we don’t have a planet, and that makes me hopeful.

💭 I wish more companies would…

Switch to a circular economy
Focus on kindness and virtue as a business plan.

💛 How can companies and industries take better care of people?

Treat people as people rather than sources of capital.

❓ A question I love:

What have you been reading recently? Also, how are you actually doing?

🚶 I would walk/drive/travel 500 miles to…

Be with creative souls, spend time with my wonderful family. (Also, have you ever noticed in the song, he says he would walk 500 miles “to be the man who walked 500 miles”? In my head, he’s one of those people who would not shut up about it, and bring it up every chance he could.)

You can connect with Guan at guanun.com, or on Twitter at @thisisguan.

Chanita Christmas

Wed, 19 May 2021 11:00:00 GMT

We were first introduced to Chanita Christmas thanks to Mat Paterson, who made an appearance earlier in this series. Chanita and Mat used to work together at HelpScout, but these days she’s dedicating her time and energy to building Melanin.Tech, a community dedicated to accelerating the growth of the Black tech ecosystem.

We knew Chanita was one of our weirdos when we saw that her definition of growth includes finding inner peace, and “protecting the peace of people around me.” (There was some celebratory “YESSSSS”-ing in the &yet Slack when we read that line.)

A world traveler, photographer, self-described “mediocre salsa dancer” (honestly, we aspire to mediocre), and a voice that will not be silenced: Chanita is making the tech world more equitable and inclusive one deep breath at a time.

🤓 I geek out about…

Reincarnation
Is this whole thing a simulation, or are we actually living life
Why is it so hard for us to rid things like capitalism, racism, white supremacy, poverty, and homelessness (spoiler alert: it isn’t hard)
The stories behind random photos
How unrealistic monogamy feels
Love. On every level (romantic, platonic, family, animals, possessions… stuff like that

🎒 I collect…

Art from my travels. I’ve collected wooden sculptures from Belize, graffiti prints from Colombia, paintings from Vietnam, feminist postcards and tiles from Portugal, beadwork from Thailand, poetry from New Orleans, and everything in between. I like to be reminded of where I’ve been, but even more, I love to be taken away in the middle of the day just by looking at the art I’ve collected.

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

Traveling the world, how to fix their computers, and their wild ideas. I LOVE talking about travel. More so, how to do it without breaking the bank and how to find comfort even when you are so far away. Anytime I can help someone relocate to their dream city or country, I feel so magical. I’m guessing this is how Whitney Houston felt as Brandy’s Fairy God Mother in Cinderella. A lot of people also ask me how to fix their computers, and I laugh every time. Working in tech gives you a rep that you know how to do all the things. Which, for me, is SOOOO false. I dig it when friends come to me for advice on their wildest dreams. They know I don’t always have the answers, but it’s so cool to see them light up and want to bounce ideas around.

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

I’m obsessed with obtaining some form of internal peace. I’ve had moments where I stop whatever is going on so that we can breathe and re-center. I’ll usually say something corny like, “Do you know what time it is?? Time for us to chill TF out. Three breaths now yall!” just to keep it light, but deep down inside, I’m serious as hell about those three breaths. I don’t believe in making life harder, especially for the sake of work. That concept seems ridiculous to me. So, by all means necessary, I’m going to protect my peace and do what I can to protect the peace of people around me.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

Our most significant initiative of the year is to turn Melanin.Tech into a community hub. We want to bring in all communities with an aligned focus on the personal and professional advancement of Black people in tech. So growth for us looks like expanding our resources to our friends in the fight and make sure every community leader has what they need to succeed.

🌤️ A thing that makes me hopeful about the future of business:

That people are no longer staying in toxic work environments for the sake of a paycheck. We’re realizing our worth and making these companies step their game up to take care of their employees.

💭 I wish more companies would…

Chill with the performative ally crap. We don’t believe you. Just do the work behind those words, k?

💛 How can companies and industries take better care of people?

Focus on creating a psychologically safe work environment for ALL people. It’s worth it, yall!

❓ A question I love:

Question: Where do you see yourself in 5 years? Answer: I don’t fucking know. But wherever I’ll be, I’ll be joyful as hell and in a state of peace. Because I’ve worked hard for both of those things, even when society does its best to take them away.

🚶 I would walk/drive/travel 500 miles to…

Eat amazing food and to see my babies. I have 7 nieces and nephews that I adore. I’ll do anything for them at anytime.

You can connect with Chanita at Melanin.Tech.

Brian Bailey

Wed, 12 May 2021 12:00:00 GMT

By creating a small social network that encouraged healthy boundaries, Brian brought people together in meaningful ways, including our team members. He kept the best aspects of social media, and made Uncommon a thoughtful and intentional space where people could share who they are and what fascinates them. So it’s no wonder that his core values include empathy and trust.

Brian is also a product leader that is currently bringing his talents to Pingboard, a workplace tool that surfaces the essential information employees need to be successful.

Brian loves live music and short novels. He geeks out about process and collects writing advice. Ask him about his favorite standup comedy special.

🤓 I geek out about…

Process, specifically the way the how of the work infuences the outcome of the work. Products reflect how they’re built, meeting outcomes are tied to how they’re structured, a company’s culture can be traced to how it hires, and what kind of feedback is given is connected to the ease and expectations around feedback.

I don’t believe in complex processes with multiple checkpoints—often the best process is the simplest one. I do believe, however, in thinking deeply about your systems because the desired outcome isn’t possible when the process is in conflict with the goal.

🎒 I collect…

Writing advice. I’m enamored by the writing life and greedily consume stories about how writers approach the craft. Partly because it inspires me to write, but also because so much of the advice applies to life as much as writing.

“To partipate requires self-discipline and trust and courage, because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?” — Anne Lamott

Also, notebooks. So many notebooks.

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

Standup comedy specials. I used to memorize standup bits when I was a kid. During the pandemic, I started watching standup every Friday and it’s brought so much joy. I love the mastery of the form that creates a perfect bit—the setup, rhythm, timing, and every carefully chosen word. There’s nothing quite like one person making hundreds or thousands of people laugh for an hour by just talking into a microphone.

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

My fascination with how systems inform outcomes means I’m immediately curious when either falls short. Since humans are continually changing, as is the context, that’s pretty often—no process guarantees the right outcome.

I have to remind myself that perfection isn’t the goal. There will always be ambiguity and things that could’ve been better, and that’s okay. I try to get better at knowing when to rethink things and when to embrace the inherent messiness of humans making things together.

🌱 What form of growth is most important for you and your company?

My goal is to continuously grow my understanding. I want to understand our customers and their unique struggles and motivations better. I want to increase my understanding of our team and how to work together effectively. And, of course, I want to have a better understanding of my own strengths, skills, and shortcomings so I can continue to improve.

💭 I wish more companies would…

Not do what everyone else is doing. There’s a remarkable amount of sameness in how businesses are run and decisions are made; formulas are followed and assumptions aren’t questioned. We need companies that are willing to be uncommon and stop relying on old blueprints.

💛 How can companies and industries take better care of people?

By seeing customers and employees as people instead of means to an end. Customers don’t exist to click the right buttons in the right order. Employees don’t exist to reach a growth target. Each is an individual with strengths and struggles. We should support, empower, and trust them—listen to and learn from them.

❓ A question I love:

Questions are one of my favorite things. A great question during a conversation can be magical.

So, if you’ll indulge me, I’ve narrowed it down to 3 :)

If you could teach a class about anything, what would be the topic and title? What’s the title of the book about your life? What do you wish people would ask you, but no one ever does?

🚶I would walk/drive/travel 500 miles to…

Spend the day talking about writing, fiction, and the writing life with Jenny Offill, Molly Young, and Robert Caro.

You can connect with Brian on Twitter.

Natalie Nagele

Wed, 12 May 2021 11:00:00 GMT

As a woman who has built a bootstrapped, people-first software company that most recently celebrated 20 years in business, Natalie Nagele is someone we’ve looked up to for a long time. She is working to prove that you can grow a profitable company that prioritizes people.

Wildbit began as a small consulting business but soon started creating products like Postmark, Beanstalk, and People-First Jobs. As she’s built the company, she’s constantly asked herself, “Why do we exist?” and “How can we do it better?”. Answers to these questions have driven significant decisions in the business, including the move to a 32-hour workweek that prioritizes deep work and increases productivity. With changes such as these, Wildbit is not following the traditional business success checkboxes. Instead, Natalie and her husband and co-founder Chris are stopping to ask “Why?” along the way so that they can build a genuine, honest business that is true to their values.

Natalie believes that businesses should be human. She recognizes that people are most fulfilled when they get to do meaningful and challenging work. So, in addition to creating valuable products, she wants to understand how businesses can be a vehicle for impact not only on their customers and employees but also on their communities.

Natalie geeks out about human behavior, travel, and ethical capitalism. She loves connecting with people and makes space for intentional thinking time.

🤓 I geek out about…

Human behavior, travel, ethical capitalism

🎒 I collect…

Moments with my family and friends

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

Relationships with family, business direction, cooking recipes

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

I like to think about the gray area of all things, and don’t live in black and white. That causes conversations to get very broad before they get narrow.

I also really love connecting with people, so I love to ask folks to unmute on big calls to share jokes or just hear each others’ voices.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

Personal and professional growth in our teams - people-first means people, first. We love to help folks find new career paths/change jobs inside of Wildbit.
Revenue growth from different products in a single portfolio - gives validation that we’re producing work that is commercially viable and providing value to people (people first, all people, not just employees)

🌤️ A thing that makes me hopeful about the future of business:

More people are asking for meaning and purpose in work. And more theory, science and literature is showing the commercial and societal value of re-examining the purpose and meaning of work, to support a future of work that prioritizes all four human constituents (shareholders, employees, customers and community) above the business in and of itself.

💭 I wish more companies would…

Implement a 32-hour workweek.

💛 How can companies and industries take better care of people?

Stop and truly evaluate what enough is - instead of measuring progress by hours spent in front a screen.

❓ A question I love:

What did you learn that surprised you?

🚶 I would walk/drive/travel 500 miles to…

Try a great new restaurant.

You can connect with Natalie @natalienagele or subscribe to Wildbit’s newsletter.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Wed, 05 May 2021 12:00:00 GMT

You may recognize Anne-Laure Le Cunff from her Maker Mind newsletter, which provides over 30,000 readers with mindful productivity tips at the intersection of neuroscience and entrepreneurship.

Earlier in her career, Anne-Laure led Global Marketing at Google for their digital health products, including Google Fit. She realized that she wanted to help people become happier and healthier humans but felt she lacked the qualifications. Since she had always been curious about how the brain works, she left Google and decided to go back to school to study neuroscience.

She realized that a lot of what she was learning about the brain could be applied to the everyday life of entrepreneurs and knowledge workers such as herself — because in those lines of work, our brains are our biggest asset. She started documenting her journey and learnings online. What began as a personal blog, Ness Labs has become a platform featuring content, coaching, and a community for people who want to be more productive and creative without sacrificing their mental health.

Anne-Laure geeks out about creativity and is a big fan of note-taking as a way to collect and connect ideas.

🤓 I geek out about…

Metacognition, mindful productivity, creativity, tools for thought, and in general anything that can help us make the most of the human mind.

🎒 I collect…

Notes! I’m a big fan of note-taking to collect and connect ideas. It’s such a powerful way to get compound interest on your thoughts.

💬 My friends ask me for advice about…

Relationships, career stuff, and mental health.

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

I’m obsessed with the brain, and it definitely shows in my work. I write about neuroscience, I tweet about brain myths, I post pictures of psychedelic mushrooms, and I create videos explaining how the mind works.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

The cornerstone of Ness Labs is its community, whether it’s readers of the newsletter or members of the private forums. I’m not talking about the size of the community, but rather its quality: how engaged are people, how much value are they getting from interacting with each other? This is the kind of growth I truly care about.

🌤️ A thing that makes me hopeful about the future of business:

Seeing so many successful bootstrapped businesses. Of course, venture capital is essential for some types of businesses, but the Internet has made it easier than ever to create a company without raising capital. The increasing diversity of entrepreneurs makes me hopeful that we will see lots of innovation in crucial yet traditionally poorly covered areas of innovation.

💭 I wish more companies would…

Take the mental health of their employees seriously. Too many companies are paying lip service by offering a workshop or two a few times a year, but very few are really investing in their employees’ mental health and offering substantial support as well as the psychological safety needed to speak up when one needs help.

❓ A question I love:

What is your biggest fear?

You can connect with Anne-Laure on Twitter.

Amanda Kao

Wed, 05 May 2021 10:00:00 GMT

When was the last time you were bad at something — and fully enjoyed the experience of learning without trying to be perfect? Amanda Kao has made it her life’s mission to create a safe space for women to do just that.

After moving from New York to Vancouver, Amanda wanted to learn more about her new home and meet new people. She started attending workshops but found that most classes focused on topics like cooking and crafting. While Amanda appreciates those topics, she wanted to learn more offbeat skills in a judgment-free environment.

Knowing the magic that happens when women get together, Amanda launched The Bad Academy, an organization that hosts workshops to teach self-proclaimed “bad womxn” new skills and experiences. Some of the first workshops she organized taught male-dominated activities like car maintenance, skateboarding, and cannabis. Learning these skills helps women become more self-sufficient and empowers them to believe that they can do anything. Being “bad” at something is merely part of the journey to becoming badass.

Amanda loves connecting with people and building community. So when she’s not running workshops or planning events, she is a workplace consultant helping businesses with best practices, operations, and all things culture. She geeks out about pop culture and film and collects vintage ceramic mugs.

🤓 I geek out about…

Pop culture and film

🎒 I collect…

Vintage ceramic mugs

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

Everything… I used to work in HR and I’m a pro at navigating tough situations!

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

The workshops I create for Bad Academy all stem from my obsession to dabble in everything! I’m curious about all subjects and so now when I find something interesting/want to learn more, I run a workshop about it 🙂

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

I appreciate the “punk rock” aspect of Bad Academy, and although there are many avenues I can take when it comes to growth in terms of profits, I want to keep pushing the boundaries of subject matter and influence. I want to see growth of people’s minds! I’m not sure how that translates? Maybe Instagram followers? Kidding 😉

🌤️ A thing that makes me hopeful about the future of business:

More women in business, hopefully.

💭 I wish more companies would…

Pay women what they’re worth.

💛 How can companies and industries take better care of people?

Oh boy, I could ramble about this for DAYS, but at the core of it, treat people with respect and try to meet them where they’re at. People are what propel any company forward. Pay people what they’re worth. Make sure they’re happy and can grow with your company, and recognize that they will grow your company. When we treat people with respect, integrity, and love, true community is built and as Audre Lorde said, without community, there is no liberation.

❓ A question I love:

What have you learned today?

🚶 I would walk/drive/travel 500 miles to…

Eat something I’ve never eaten before 😛

You can connect with Amanda on Instagram.

Mat Patterson

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 12:00:00 GMT

We can all remember a bad customer support experience. But what about a good one? Good customer service is often invisible, but can mean the difference between a one-time buyer and a loyal fan. In people-first companies, customer support professionals are the front-line workers who manage everything from polite questions to emotional outbursts from frustrated customers. Mat Patterson recognizes the critical importance of people who form a kind of bridge between what the customer truly needs, and what the company has offered.

If you ask his colleagues to describe Mat, you’ll hear phrases like, “does right by the customer,” “customer-centric,” and “cares as much about the customer as he does the people providing support.” He started his career leading a small tech support team, before becoming a web designer and running his own business. Later, he returned to his support roots, joining Campaign Monitor and growing their customer service team from one person to 26.

Bringing this depth of experience to Help Scout, a platform for customer support professionals, Mat has been able to level up his own customer success skills, shining a light on customer service teams and their work, and helping to provide them with the tools they need to do their best work. Through his writing, speaking, and work in the community, Mat is constantly sharing ideas, strategies, and tools to change the perception of customer service.

Besides collecting nice notepads he may never write in (we can relate!), Mat loves non-fiction books and stories about “boringly competent customer service.” He’s also a pro at making educational materials fun: you’ll find lots of pop culture references and storytelling woven into his articles and videos.

🤓 I geek out about…

Mars robots, people who can make amazing scale models of buildings, and the live shows of Finnish symphonic metal superstars Nightwish.

🎒 I collect…

Non-fiction books, stories about boringly competent customer service, and nice notepads that I’m too afraid to actually write in.

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

How to avoid deadly Australian animals. I think I might be the only Australian they know.

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

I enjoy sneaking character and business names from favourite books and shows into my articles and videos.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

For me, what I’m trying to grow at Help Scout is a group of people. Specifically, people who believe, like I do, that customer service is undervalued, under-resourced and under-utilised in business, and who want to see that change. The greatest value I can create is to help those people connect with each other, and share with them some ideas, strategies, motivation to make that change happen.

Many of them will never pay for our products, but everyone benefits (including our companies and our customers) if we can shift that mindset together.

🌤️ A thing that makes me hopeful about the future of business:

More companies are admitting (whether by choice or otherwise) what has always been true - there is no “keeping politics out of business”. There is only “we do not acknowledge the politics inherent in every business”. I am hopeful we will hear from a wider range of voices.

💛 How can companies and industries take better care of people?

An enormous number of customer service issues could be resolved just by being a better listener. Companies can build better listeners by training, and by giving people the time and the authority to listen first and not rush to respond.

❓ A question I love:

“What have you been excited about lately?” - It lets people choose any number of directions

🚶 I would walk/drive/travel 500 miles to…

Meet with other people who love what I love. I really miss the hallway-track element of real-world conferences and I am looking forward to their return.

You can learn more about Mat at mrpatto.com.

Shenee Howard

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 11:00:00 GMT

If you’ve ever had a bad day and struggled to turn it around, Shenee Howard would encourage you to think about Why Today is Awesome. It’s an approach she embodies and teaches in her book of the same name to find the good in every single day. And if you’re willing, to share it in public to inspire others.

Being an author is only the tip of the iceberg for Shenee. At the beginning of her career, she talked to 100 people for 15 minutes to better understand their struggles. This undertaking led to her creating a signature branding course. Over the last ten years, she has shared strategies to help entrepreneurs sell more products, get more clients and do business in a way that works for them and their lifestyle. While there are a million people dishing out marketing and sales advice on the internet, Shenee has been one of our go-to experts for a decade or more; in a sea of gloss and inflated claims, her unwavering realness is nothing short of a life raft.

In 2019, Shenee wrote and produced a popular audio fiction series called Fan Wars - The Empire Claps Back, a romantic comedy based on two Star Wars fans debating over Skype. (Spoiler alert: sparks fly.) She also recently directed LIFE WITH LEO(h), a podcast series about a lawyer falling in love with a robot.

When she’s not sharing her love of k-pop on TikTok and in her Grown Ass Fandom podcast, Shenee is watching nature documentaries and waiting patiently for the next John Wick movie.

🤓 I geek out about…

K-pop, sociology and psychology, brand strategy and analysis, Star Wars, movies, romantic comedies, nature documentaries — especially marine biology!

🎒 I collect…

Hmmm don’t think I collect anything.

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

Oh gosh….a lot of things! I get a lot of questions about business and relationships and also life perspective things! Empathy and understanding is my superpower.

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

I analyze everything and I’m always interested in the “why” behind things. I’m always digging and wanting to learn more and I also have an obsessive personality. I like to learn EVERYTHING about a thing.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

For me it’s always about growth that is in alignment with my values as a creator. I don’t love empty engagement or growth. Just having MORE people doesn’t appeal to me. I like to attract the right people. That means my numbers aren’t as big as other people but I have better engagement.

💭 I wish more companies would…

Not be so reactive! Don’t follow every single trend. Ride waves that make sense to you and your business vs. trying to catch everything and having it not make sense for your business.

❓ A question I love:

What made you happy today? What made you smile today?

🚶 I would walk/drive/travel 500 miles to…

See a BTS concert, see my family! (it’s been a year)

You can connect with Shenee everywhere @heyshenee.

Kristina Halvorson

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 12:00:00 GMT

You can’t have a conversation about content strategy without mentioning Kristina Halvorson. She is an industry-recognized content strategy expert, advocate, and educator. While her book is called Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina believes that content strategy is an essential practice for any organization that creates content across any medium or platform.

Despite the ebbs and flows of different content trends on the web, we appreciate how Kristina has stayed true to her north start of putting content first. Every few months, there is a new “must” for sharing ideas online: Video-first! SEO! User-generated content! Social media influencers!. Throughout it all, Kristina has remained steady, staying focused on the deeper truths and the bigger picture of meeting people where they are and helping them get where they want to go.

As the CEO and Founder of Brain Traffic, Kristina’s work focuses on creating useful, usable content. She does that through consulting engagements, workshops, and events. Kristina founded Confab and Button, content strategy conferences focused on helping content strategists, designers, and writers create content along the customer journey.

It might be evident that Kristina geeks out about content. She is also interested in creating safe spaces where folks can geek out about content together and share her love of cake.

🤓 I geek out about…

How people work together to make digital content more useful, usable, and accessible for everyone.

There are so many different roles involved here, and they’re all so interesting and awesome: content designers, UX writers, content engineers, content marketers … then we have website content strategists, enterprise content strategists, product content strategists … information architects, UX designers, SEO specialists, and on and on … THESE ARE MY PEOPLE. They love words! And meaning! And connections, and big questions, and how to collaborate! Also, they are often hilarious and kindhearted.

Right now I am most geeked out about creating inspiring, inclusive spaces where people can gather and geek out together about all things content. My passion projects are Confab and Button, the two big content strategy/design-focused events my company Brain Traffic produces. Those conferences really are a celebration of community and craft, and the people who attend and speak are always fantastic folks all around.

I’m also restarting The Content Strategy Podcast soon, which is mostly just an excuse for me to have super geeky conversations with people I admire.

🎒 I collect…

Before March 2020: frequent flyer miles

Since then: dust

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

Glasses

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

I really love cake. Like, a lot. So when we launched our Confab conference in 2011 I promised cake to people who helped us promote it. We have therefore served cake—sheet cake, coffee cake, cupcakes, etc.—at every Confab since. Cake is part of the Confab brand. If we didn’t serve cake, people would demand refunds.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

Right now, we’re the smallest we’ve been since 2007. When the pandemic hit, we had to transform our beloved Confab into a virtual conference in about six weeks. Then we launched Button, which is our brand-new conference (that was supposed to be in Seattle)—again, virtually. We barely held it together, and we lost a lot of money in the process. Basically, my business strategy in 2020 was “survive.” In 2021, it’s “stabilize.” Thankfully, things are going well.

In the future, “growth” for us might equal more revenue, more event types, new service offerings … lots of different options. I’m figuring that out. What’s most important right now is that we stabilize, and part of that process is creating new, repeatable processes that can scale over time. For a bunch of social, creative people, it’s SO FRUSTRATING and SO BORING. But we have to do it. Then we can grow however and wherever we want!

I think that the other form of growth that’s going to matter in the near future is really more re-growth, and that applies to us individually and as a team. As it did for so many, this past year really beat the hell out of us. (If the spirit is a garden, our gardens were fully uprooted by like ten tornadoes.) I’m closing the office down for a week in July so everyone can hopefully just rest for a bit.

🌤️ A thing that makes me hopeful about the future of business:

I’m wildly encouraged (and inspired!) by the focus the content strategy/content design community has placed on ethics and inclusivity in digital spaces, and how we can play an important part in helping build better experiences for everyone.

💭 I wish more companies would…

Pay their content people what they’re worth.

💛 How can companies and industries take better care of people?

Make employee mental health a priority beyond just offering yoga twice a month or putting up posters for “mental health awareness month.” People should be able to talk about depression and anxiety without worrying it will make them appear unstable. People who struggle with substance abuse should feel safe going to HR for support. It should be normal for people to cry at work. Especially now! Also let people go to therapy (and medical appointments for that matter) without taking PTO, what is this the 1800s

❓ A question I love:

Can you tell me more about that?

🚶 I would walk/drive/travel 500 miles to…

Hug my kids. Well, okay, I would walk/drive/travel to Mars for that.

You can learn more about Kristina on Wikipedia.

Rob Sicat

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 11:00:00 GMT

Rob Sicat is a self-proclaimed “product manager who designs.” Doing everything possible to make products great while ensuring everyone is having a good time is his reason for living. His entrepreneurial spirit and passion for leadership shine in everything he does. His coworkers know they can count on him for both nuanced insights into how organizations function and brightening up the office atmosphere with hip-hop deep cuts.

Rob currently is the lead product manager at Koan, a software company whose mission is to help organizations achieve their purpose. Their OKR (Objectives & Key Results) platform is an &yet staple, helping us manage our quarterly goals and set strategic priorities while helping everyone on our team feel connected and valued.

We can appreciate someone who “geeks out about geeking out,” and we are looking forward to seeing what Rob builds while he’s at Lambda School over the next year. In the meantime, you might find him moonlighting as a DJ, checking out pizza ovens, or collecting recipes that never disappoint.

🤓 I geek out about…

It’s very meta, but I geek out on geeking out. That’s to say, I’m curious about everything around me, and I love to reverse engineer how things are made.

It could be literally digging in the crate to find all the samples and interpolations from a particular music record; to learning and researching general management origins (Thank you, Daniel McCallum).

Things I’m geeking out on at the moment:

Building tools that enhance productivity and wellness
Video editing
Pizza ovens

🎒 I collect…

Words, phrases, and sayings that inspire me.
Questions that spark conversations and engaging discussions.
Books. Some I’ve read, and many I still hope to read someday.
Videos that I can watch with my kids that help us both grow. One of the best resources out there is https://thekidshouldseethis.com/.
Recipes that never disappoint.

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

The perfect soundtrack for an event, also “Hey, what’s that song again that goes like [proceeds to hum]?”
Must have gadgets/apps that save you time/improve your life.
Practical tips on a career transition into Product Management.

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

Story is the one thing that ties all my weird obsessions together. Music, art, cooking, film, books… they all center around great storytelling. As a product person you need to tell stories to succeed. Whether it’s communicating product updates or motivating others to take action.

It always comes back to story.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

Our most important form of growth is word of mouth from individual contributors and small teams. If people care enough to share Koan with colleagues, then we’ve proven ourselves to be the leader at delivering something that a well-defined set of customers cares a whole lot about.

That type of growth is slow and steady, but intentional and sustainable; compounding in the long-term.

💭 I wish more companies would…

Design meetings with intention and full awareness of the message, medium, and environment.

💛 How can companies and industries take better care of people?

Normalize bringing your “Real Self” to work. Incentivize good behaviors and habits. Focus the number of things down to what truly matters—few things matter. If you can successfully tie your employees’ and colleagues’ work to what truly matters, you’re on the path to working with purpose.

❓ A question I love:

Some of my favorites:

What would you love to find at a yard sale?
What book dramatically influenced your life?
What was your first Amazon purchase?
What’s the best thing you discovered this year?
What was your favorite band 10 years ago?

You can learn more about Rob at robsicat.com.

Clarinda Braun

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 11:00:00 GMT

The tagline for #TheMatriarchalBusiness is “Decolonizing business with Matriarchy.” Clarinda Braun teaches workshops and works with clients to think differently about their businesses in a more sustainable, personal, and meaningful way. She brings indigenous and matriarchal values to the business growth and marketing process.

Clarinda’s ancestral exploration informs her work. A Fijian and Samoan woman born in Aotearoa and raised throughout Oceania, Clarinda draws from her roots the perspective that every action taken has a multi-generational impact. As a young girl, Clarinda saw her mother work several jobs to provide for their family. She trained and worked with numerous entrepreneurial mentors, soon becoming a speaking and marketing consultant and educator. For a long time, she believed her success in that field was because of her education. At one point, she realized that so much of the powerful wisdom and insight she shared actually came from what she learned from her mother and her family, emerging from her lineage of orators, politicians, chiefs and healers.

Foundational for Clarinda’s outlook was learning from the women in her life what a privilege it is to witness birth and the role of protection and facilitation that someone plays as part of that process. This concept is a big part of what guides her consulting. While she teaches entrepreneurs how to grow and make good money, she also helps them impact their community in positive ways.

Clarinda geeks out about Oceanic stories and histories told through song and dance and is so proud to be in a generation of indigenous revival. She admits she probably has too many Polynesian earrings and would travel over 5000 miles to a dance class!

🤓 I geek out about…

Stories from throughout Oceania that talk of creation, science, genealogy, history, love and tragedy. Our songs, chants, dances are rich with them. My favorite bedtime stories!
Learning about the many deities and spirituality throughout the many cultures in Oceania, and really all stories and perspectives that further highlight our rich cultures and intelligence, our differences, our closeness, and our ancestral relationships all throughout the islands. As a Samoan and Fijian woman living throughout the Oceanic diaspora, this is particularly enriching for me!
The many ways in which we can creatively oppose capitalist and colonialist methods of trade, business, marketing, while working “within” capitalist frameworks. The possibilities are ENDLESS ❤ and we only need to look back in time a little to find successful alternative life ways.

🎒 I collect…

Earrings made by Polynesian artists/jewelers. Not sure if that’s something to collect but I have a ton of them lol

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

Sometimes entrepreneurship, sometimes culturally specific advice/direction, but most of the time it’s just venting about life, relationships, all the very human stuff we face… but often it’s just to be heard, and they know I’m listening.

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

Uh… all of them do! Ha! My work brings my whole self and is very personal. It’s an idea I oppose - the idea that business is business and personal is personal. That dehumanizes business to maintain the focus on bottom line, vs centering people. And if we are to center people, then that means to center our humanness, our own personhood.

So to answer the question more specifically, I do workshops, courses and 1:1 work with folks in the business community as we work collectively to decolonize business and specifically our marketing methods, through a social framework familiar to my culture — Matriarchy / the matri-focal.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

What a loaded question! And a good one. Two things come to me from the hip.

One growth “form” that I appreciate is maintaining a rich, small model. So opposing the ever-niggling “scale” temptation preached by many marketing and business coaches. The rush to scale is too often a sure way to NOT bring people with you. Our speed of growth centers our people, lest it is not FOR the people.
The second thing that comes to me is - what grows long and strong is what is rooted, well, in a rich environment, inter-connected and supported and fortified by what is in it’s vicinity. Establishing all of these things takes significant time, working with others, knowing where you’re rooted. Knowing your place and how you root yourself through stories and making sense of your life experiences and expertise is a significant part of the work I help folks with.

In any case - growth that questions and opposes growth standards and expectations according to colonialist business standards is where I like to live, and get curious. 🙂

🌤️ A thing that makes me hopeful about the future of business:

Indigenous women rising… this generation is strong, and I’m proud to be a part of it, fiercely.

💛 How can companies and industries take better care of people?

I don’t think this is a difficult question. The problem is questioning the systems we have in place that are NOT centering people. When we are centering people, this is not a question. We can’t be following government mandated minimums and standard hierarchical structures.

I believe we can better take care of people by unpacking the systems we’ve been conditioned to operate with, identify how specifically they are NOT centering people, and go from there. That unlearning is the more difficult work, but it’s necessary. Anything else is a band-aid, unsustainable solution.

❓ A question I love:

Who is missing? I love the disruptiveness of this question. I recently heard this articulated by a local policy advocate/community activist, Jenn Jenkins, and I just love this reminder we are receiving and need to continue hearing - who isn’t with us? Who is assumed to be with us, but is unable or we’ve (and/or society has) made it unusually difficult to? What changes can we make that may be slightly inconvenient for us, but majorly transformational for others?

🚶 I would walk/drive/travel 500 miles to…

A dance class! Ori Tahiti, contemporary, jazz, hip hop. And I’ve traveled 5000+ miles for that, more than once!

You can connect with Clarinda on Instagram and Facebook @clarindatusitala.

Kate Strathmann

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 10:00:00 GMT

Farmer. Yoga Teacher. Artist. One-time stilt walking teacher. Those roles merely scratch the surface of Kate Strathmann’s experience. Her mission is expanding entrepreneurial imagination, guiding entrepreneurs to their best path of doing business.

Kate believes it’s crucial for business owners to understand their profit structure, which allows them to care for themselves, their employees, and their customers. Her consulting and bookkeeping practice, Wanderwell, helps business owners grow and scale while impacting their work and their communities. It owes its name to Aloha Wanderwell, the first woman who traveled worldwide in a model T Ford.

There is a lot of toxic information out there, and Kate reminds us to find more ease in our businesses. She’s not only helped her clients turn a profit but also helped them take a vacation.

Kate geeks out about economics, anti-capitalism, and rusted nail collections (fun fact: she has two!).

🤓 I geek out about…

Economics… I’m really interested in the systems underlying how we “do business” for better or worse. I spend a lot of time studying and reading about different forms of anti-capitalist, feminist, Marxist Economics.

🎒 I collect…

My house is basically a wunderkammer, but my most infamous collection is probably my two separate rusted nail collections: one, a huge pile of hand-hewn square nails in an old wooden dynamite box; purchased about 20 yrs ago for a quarter at a yard sale on the White Earth Reservation in Northern Minnesota. The second, smaller collection is various hand-hewn square nails found on the mean streets of Philadelphia over the years.

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

My friends ask me about a lot of things, but strangers ask me for relationship advice; Lyft drivers, random people sitting near me at a bar. In the #beforetimes I definitely could have launched a whole podcast called “Dump Him: advice from the road”

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

Wanderwell derives its name after Aloha Wanderwell, a woman who once circumnavigated the globe in a model T Ford.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

We still track conventional metrics, but for me, “right livelihood” building is where I ultimately look— can we create robust, supportive, flexible, autonomous livelihoods?

🌤️ A thing that makes me hopeful about the future of business:

Seeing the discourse change in the past year — the number of people reaching out and asking about cooperatives, redistribution and reparations, equitable business structures and compensation, etc… there’s been a palpable shift in people awakening and wondering about shifting their business practices.

💭 I wish more companies would…

Become worker-owned.

💛 How can companies and industries take better care of people?

One of the aspects of Wanderwell’s culture we’ve been discussing a lot lately is the importance of healthy, clear boundaries with clients — that a work culture optimizing towards focused, effective work, and a space where people can set their own schedules, requires clear boundaries with clients. The company itself has to create those guardrails and good relationships, so that other’s urgencies don’t become our emergencies.

❓ A question I love:

What would each of us build if the goal was to care for everybody?

🚶 I would walk/drive/travel 500 miles to…

For an intriguing dinner invitation.

You can connect with Kate by subscribing to her “irreverent email newsletter.”

Tara McMullin

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 11:00:00 GMT

If you’ve ever been curious about what’s working for small business owners in terms of marketing, hiring, sales, and productivity, talk to Tara McMullin (formerly Gentile). She has produced over 300 episodes of her What Works podcast — one of which includes our CEO, Sarah Avenir — asking hundreds of business owners the “nosy questions” most of us have about what happens behind the scenes.

Tara is the founder of the What Works Network, a membership community that connects small business owners to support each other and share their expertise. By running her business this way, Tara puts power in the hands of those she wants to serve, to connect, share and help each other grow. She can also take all the latest business and management research, and apply it to the needs and contexts of creative, personal, and small-scale businesses.

Tara makes business principles accessible in ways that don’t require a power suit or a conventional career track. For example, her book, Quiet Power Strategy, teaches the importance of self-leadership and “seizing the power of quiet.” By focusing on questions like: “What do you want to create?” and “How do you want to connect?” Tara encourages leaders to build a business that aligns with how they want to show up in the world.

When she’s not having candid conversations about running a small business, Tara is an idea collector and geeks out about podcasts and fitness. She’s on a quest to visit all 59 U.S. National Parks by 2027.

🤓 I geek out about…

I geek out about second-guessing institutions and long-held beliefs. I geek out about finding out what’s going on behind the scenes or beneath the surface. I geek out about finding the right words and examples to share big, complex ideas in an accessible way.

I tend to geek out more over context than content—but when it comes to specific subjects, I love to geek out about religion & theology, podcasts & podcasting, politics, and fitness.

🎒 I collect…

Ideas. Okay, I know that sounds super pretentious. I’m just not sentimental or precious about material things. I’ve purged my worldly possessions twice already and don’t regret a thing.

But ideas thrill me. I love learning about concepts in a wide variety of fields and finding the connections between them. I love when an idea I’ve “collected” pops back up after months or years in the back of my brain to fuel something I want to share or teach.

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

Pretty much everything. I’m the kind of person who gets asked for advice a lot—whether it’s what kind of beer to get at a brewery or how to train for a race or how to parse what’s going on in politics or what to do with their small business.

One thing I do not get asked about is where to go dancing or partying. That is just not my jam.

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

I’m constantly making connections between the random things I learn and concepts I want to share with small business owners. I’ve written about running, climbing, hiking, road-tripping, epistemology, kayaking, and all manner of other things in order to make a business idea more accessible.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

We’ve been working really hard at growing our capacity for meaningful & inclusive community-building at What Works. Now, we’ve turned our focus to gathering the next generation of members for our community—which means our primary goal right now is growing our audience. For me, it’s really easy to keep talking to the same people, the weirdos who have been around for a long time! But it’s much more challenging to create for people I don’t yet know, even if I know they’re just like the weirdos I already love.

At YellowHouse.Media, we’re focused on growing capacity while maintaining the high level of strategic guidance we’re able to give the podcasters we work with. That means exploring how new clients can work with our talented team members and how those talented team members can grow into new responsibilities. It’s a fun challenge!

🌤️ A thing that makes me hopeful about the future of business:

I’m hopeful about so many things—but one of them is so many business owners who are willing to talk about the very human side of running a business. It’s not all marketing and money mindset… there is so much more that can muck up the waters or create beautiful results.

💭 I wish more companies would…

Hire appropriately. Some small businesses put off hiring completely, others do everything they can to avoid hiring employees, and still others spend tons of money without ever really building their team. Of course, this extends up to much bigger companies too. I wish more companies treated their people like humans instead of resources to be optimized.

🚶 I would walk/drive/travel 500 miles to…

Portland, Maine. My usual go-to destination is the Flathead Valley in Montana… but that’s a few thousand miles away! I love Portland’s vibe, the fact that it’s right on the water, and how close it is to some of the best (and only) wilderness on the East Coast.

You can connect with Tara on Instagram.

Zvi Band

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 10:00:00 GMT

“It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.” That’s a popular catchphrase in the business world, encouraging folks to build relationships. And Zvi Band saw this to be true. Throughout his career, he realized that many of his opportunities came from knowing the right people and being in the right place at the right time. He started asking himself what he could do better to improve his ability to connect with others. This eventually led him to create Contactually, a CRM platform that powered over 200 million relationships when it was acquired in 2019.

Zvi’s focus is not just on building relationships but nurturing those existing connections you have. His book, Success Is In Your Sphere, shares habits and strategies to deepen those relationships. But it starts with understanding your goals so that you can identify the right people to connect with regularly.

After an introduction to Zvi from fellow weirdo Danielle, we were immediately captivated by his relationships-first philosophy and his plans for “bringing humanity back together.” He is currently building TalkSocial, a platform allowing folks to gather in small groups and have deep and fulfilling conversations, which we’ve had the pleasure of experiencing. Zvi is also a mentor and advisor to early-stage startups and helped co-create the DC Tech Meetup, the largest meetup of its kind in the country.

Zvi is always on the lookout for technology and systems that help bring people together. He’s also a huge hot sauce fan, and you may hear about it the next time you chat with him — especially if you mention breakfast burritos.

🤓 I geek out about…

Technology and systems that help bring people together.

🎒 I collect…

Way too much hot sauce.

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

Starting a company. Growing a relationship-driven business. Riding the rollercoaster of a new venture.

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

I will randomly insert hot sauce references in nearly every written work.

🌤️ A thing that makes me hopeful about the future of business:

New technologies completely shaking up the chess board of business, at the same time the convergence of post-pandemic, post-Trump, Conscious Leadership and its kin, and newer generations entering the work force can lead to a complete re-thinking of whats important in our professional lives. Deeper connection and meaning in our work over ratcheting up profits at the expense of others.

💭 I wish more companies would…

Have more ambition about their world impact - building a business is hard no matter what!

💛 How can companies and industries take better care of people?

One simple idea I’ve been thinking of is a push for digital detoxes. Emphasize that they need time away from notifications, and to a lesser extent technology in general, to rest their brain.

❓ A question I love:

What would most people say about you that you’d disagree with?

🚶 I would walk/drive/travel 500 miles to…

See Daft Punk live.

You can learn more about Zvi at zvi.band.

Kai Brach

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 10:00:00 GMT

Kai Brach spends a lot of time thinking about how humans shape technology and how it shapes us. He is the creator of Offscreen Magazine, a printed publication that invites you to step away from your device and think deeply about your role in the tech community. The people, projects, and ideas featured in Offscreen “put impact and purpose above growth and profit…offering a more inclusive and equitable vision of the future.”

You might also know Kai through Dense Discovery, a weekly curated newsletter filled with apps, tools, art, and thought-provoking things to read, listen to and watch. It’s a favorite for many of us on the team.

Design. Architecture. Climate. These are just a few of Kai’s interests. He is a fan of living lightly, collecting experiences and friends and having adventures on foot. Ask him about that time he walked across Germany from Passau to Hamburg.

🤓 I geek out about…

Passive design in architecture. While I currently prefer to live in inner-city apartments and therefore have limited influence on my built environment, I love reading up on new, innovative ways of creating homes that are not just super comfortable to live in but also cause minimal damage to the planet. It’s a nice overlap of my interests in architecture, design, and the environment/climate. Once you understand the basic principles of passive building design, the way you look at houses, even – or especially – the expensive designer mansions, will change forever.

🎒 I collect…

Very little. I don’t really subscribe to modern minimalism (because it’s depressingly sterile as an aesthetic and dogmatic as a lifestyle) but I do like the feeling of living lightly, of not being beholden to too many objects, whether they are physical or digital. It sounds trite, I know, but I like the idea of collecting experiences and friends.

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

Living on a smaller footprint. Navigating modern life in a reasonably ethical and less environmentally destructive fashion in a capitalist society is a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. I have the privilege (time, money, education etc.) to figure out some of this stuff and share my findings with friends that don’t have the brain space to do it. Whether it’s finding a bank that doesn’t invest in fossil fuels or sourcing a kilo of butter beans without plastic packaging – I’m your guy.

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

Usually by being opinionated. As you can probably tell from my answers, I often let my strong, somewhat idealistic views, especially about the climate crisis, show up in my editorial work. I’m sure my readers don’t mind (or maybe even like it) but when I look back at some of my old writing I sometimes wonder if I’m being too absolutist about certain things. As we all know, the world isn’t black and white. Nuance is crucial.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

To be honest, I feel tired of hearing and talking about growth. I truly believe that the biggest problems as a society and as a deteriorating planet stem from this relentless pursuit of growth. Not just as a corporate construct, I think we’re way too obsessed with growth in all its forms: the idea of constantly improving, of becoming better, faster, smarter, more productive, etc. It’s not natural. I recently saw this person on Twitter saying: “I don’t think your life has to have a purpose, or you a grand ambition; I think it’s okay to just wander through life finding interesting things until you die.” I’m all for normalising tiny ambitions. Let’s do more stuff that has no potential for growth.

🌤️ A thing that makes me hopeful about the future of business:

Things like the degrowth and doughnut economics movements.

💭 I wish more companies would…

…pursue human-scale success.

💛 How can companies and industries take better care of people?

Regulation. Vote for people/parties that prioritise people over profits. The conversation about so many issues – from labor rights to environmental damage to health care – needs to move on from focusing purely on action on an individual or private level. We need to direct our focus towards the upper layers of power: governments, CEOs, lobby groups, etc. Deep structural change emerges from the bottom but it needs action at the top. Let’s start punching up!

🚶 I would walk 500 miles to…

Be with nature and myself. A couple of years ago I did exactly that. I took two months off and walked 1000 kilometres across Germany (from Passau to Hamburg). It was one of the best things I’ve ever done for my mental health and it also helped me better understand the culture, history and geography of my home country. It left me hungry for more adventures on foot!

You can connect with Kai on Twitter.

Paul Campbell

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 10:00:00 GMT

If you want to know what goes into making a great live event—or remote event, for that matter!— talk to Paul Campbell. He’s the CEO of Tito, an online platform for selling tickets to events. After starting as a side project in 2012, Tito has grown year over year to become a small, sustainable business bringing people-first values to the event space.

Paul’s journey started as a musician in a teenage band and making student films. From there, he taught himself how to code and ended up building apps for everyone from startup founders to big companies. He paired up with Eamon Leonard to create the Funconf event trilogy, “a conference shrouded in mystery, in Ireland.” Yes, there were castles and DeLoreans and helicopter rides to islands full of ancient lore.

Paul also co-founded Úll, a conference about building great products, heavily inspired by Apple. During its second year, he partnered up with our founder, Adam Avenir, to host Brio, a conference about the future of being entrepreneurial. We were inspired by Paul’s events and we work to infuse that same spirit of boundless freedom and joy into our gatherings.

Paul and Team Tito are currently building Vito, a new platform for live-streaming delightful events and growing a community online. Besides building apps and geeking out about tech, Paul loves music, meals with friends, and collecting regrets, but not in the way you might think.

🤓 I geek out about…

Tech, music and television shows. I love building apps, and I use Ruby on the backend and these days Vue.js on the front end.

🎒 I collect…

Regrets. Well, not so much regrets as staring down opportunities that I may have taken if I was a different person, and looking back and seeing where they would have taken me. There are a few! I don’t actually collect any kind of objects or things like that.

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

What computer to buy, what audio / video equipment to buy and how to set up websites.

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

I’m a horrible hybrid of perfectionist and non-completionist, so there are so many examples in my work of things started with the best of intentions: projects, CSS refactors, code reorgs, … but they never get finished, so they end up looking like a chimera with really pristine foundations and many ugly heads.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

I think in the past I’ve really only valued ethical and aesthetic growth, but like the above question, focussing 100% on intangibles has meant that things like revenue growth have suffered. Don’t get me wrong: pre-Covid, Tito growth averaged 30% YoY, but we couldn’t shake the feeling that the opportunity was far greater and our own perfectionism and commitment to intangibles was more of a hindrance because had we put more work into financial growth then we’d have had more creative freedom to purse our value-driven goals.

🌤️ A thing that makes me hopeful about the future of business:

I guess I have an anecdotal awareness of folks building more values-driven companies. There are still a lot of profit-driven businesses out there, and it’s hard sometimes to see through clever marketing spin, but overall I think there are probably more ethical choices across a broader spectrum of businesses than before. One example I recently found was Zambrero a chain of Mexican fast-food restaurants from Australia that donate a meal to someone in need for every order. They’ve been around for 15 years, but only just came to Ireland. Other examples like Stripe lead the way in helping their customers reduce and offset carbon emissions and being a role model for basically every internet company gives me hope too.

💭 I wish more companies would…

Consider the impact they have on the world and not just their own perspective. Or even simpler: if leadership would put themselves in their customers shoes. I’ve heard stories of everyone in leadership in McDonalds having to run the tills. This is great, and in general, customer service at McDonalds is fantastic.

So many customer experiences are terrible though, and needlessly so. I feel like it’s almost always possible to see what companies are run by folks who sweat the bottom line rather than the customer experience, where you can almost see their priorities in how their websites, marketing etc. work.

💛 How can companies and industries take better care of people?

There are so many ways, but much like customer experience, leadership could do well to consider people’s actual lives when they design their work experiences. As a leader who has effectively full control of my own time, I’m often bamboozled when I do things like take the car to get serviced, or go to a morning session at my kid’s school or something. I’m often left with the question: “how would I do this if I had a job with a manager?”

So: building flexibility around the tacit acknowledgement that people have lives and things to do in those lives.

There’s also the idea that folks have to show up to work: bar nothing. We all have days that work is just too much, and we show up and get nothing done, for whatever reason, be it personal health, mental or physical, or burnout, or just general stress. Fuck those kinds of days!

Finally, things like mandatory generous vacation time or (something I’m considering) a shorter work week set people up to do their best work while they’re “at work”, rather than trying to squeeze as much time out of folks, causing burnout, resentment and ultimately diminishing returns.

❓ A question I love:

I was asked on a podcast I did last year “Who are the creatives who you admire or have inspired you on your journey?”

Such an open question that makes a whole load of answers come to mind. For the podcast I drew on “traditionally marginalised people who I have started listening to more”. When I thought about it just now, Jim Henson came to mind, and then a cocktail of creative figures featured in Apple’s “Think Different” campaign like Gandhi and Einstein. There are so many inspirational people. One for every season and every minute of every day.

🚶 I would walk/drive/travel 500 miles to…

A great meal with friends.

You can connect with Paul on Twitter.

Laura Garnett

Wed, 17 Mar 2021 10:00:00 GMT

“What am I best at? What am I meant to do? How can I create the kind of career and success I dream about?” Laura Garnett asked herself those questions early in her career in her quest to find the work that was right for her. After working for two authors in the personal growth space, she realized that what excited her was helping people discover who they are and how they could use that information to enhance their careers.

When we met Laura, we were struck by how passionate she is about helping leaders develop their self-awareness and self-knowledge — and lean into what makes them different, so they can lead more authentically and honestly. We’re big believers that building people-first businesses starts within ourselves, so Laura’s approach really resonates with us.

Before launching her company, Garnett Consulting, Laura built her marketing and branding skills at companies like Capital One, American Express, and Google. Armed with the knowledge she gained in her career, she wrote two books, The Genius Habit and Find Your Zone of Genius. Her work guides CEOs, executives, entrepreneurs, and teams to identify their genius (what they are best at) and their purpose (the impact they want to make on the world). Then together, they create a plan to use those skills in their day-to-day lives.

Laura believes that “greatness is within everyone” and that work can be one of the most rewarding aspects of life. It’s no wonder that she helps others answer those questions she asked herself in the beginning.

When she’s not helping others own who they are and finding their dream jobs, she fills her days with reading about the science of love and happiness, self-tracking in the pursuit of self-knowledge, and sugar-free desserts.

🤓 I geek out about…

Owning who you are in every aspect of life, maximizing my own and others potential in their careers and in their relationships, achieving visions and goals in half the time I or others expect. I am a growth junkie and constantly analyzing my own and others habits and behaviors. I geek out about building the Genius Habit (a habit of being who you are), rewiring our brains, creating visions, experiencing more joy then I can imagine, happiness, emotions, the science of love and success, psychology, diversity and inclusion, anti-racism, social sciences, data, tracking everything, sleep hygiene, healthy eating, longevity, sugar-free desserts

🎒 I collect…

Data via research and reading, virtual books and virtual everything because I want a clutter free space and home

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

Work, performance, work experience refinement, relationship clarity, identifying their blind-spots, seeing unconscious repeated behavior patterns, identifying their Zone of Genius in 15 min, Uncovering their core emotional challenge, where the best restaurants are in NYC

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

My performance trackers are a way to analyze and get data on things like your work performance, motivation, job hunting process, how often you’re being who you are in your relationship and how often you’re showing up as you are at work. I want everyone I work with both on my team and with clients to be in their dream jobs and dream relationships.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

Making sure that I’m regularly engaged intellectually with the thinking and problem-solving I’m doing and that I’m having an impact in the world that is aligned with my purpose. If that is happening, things are moving in the right direction. I also monitor growth metrics to see if my team and I are moving forward and growing consistently. There should be a balanced combination of both individual engagement and purpose and consistent business growth for myself and my team.

🌤️ A thing that makes me hopeful about the future of business:

Companies taking diversity and inclusion seriously, people owning their desires to love work, job-hopping being a positive and psychological safety of every employee being a priority.

💭 I wish more companies would…

Walk their talk and that executive teams would model the behaviors they want from their teams boldly

💛 How can companies and industries take better care of people?

Give them budgets to manage their own career development and the autonomy to hire their own executive coach or to participate in a group leadership development program.

❓ A question I love:

How often are you energized by the work that you’re doing?

🚶 I would walk/drive/travel 500 miles to…

Have a life-changing or mind expanding experience.

You can connect with Laura at lauragarnett.com.

J. Zakira Wise & Cliff Atkinson

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 10:00:00 GMT

J. Zakira Wise and Cliff Atkinson are trying to make the world a better place by helping leaders create sustainable communities.

J. has been involved in community work from a young age. Helping her high school buy a new building helped her see the power of community and how getting everyone on the same page could effectively create change. Her career has also included film production, progressive activism, and marketing and business consulting. All the while, J. has seen friends who were brilliant content creators build online communities but struggle to monetize. She saw that tech had created this massive wealth divide and started thinking about making tech, specifically social platforms, more equitable. This is how Mesh Communities was born.

Cliff’s career as a digital marketing executive has given him experience implementing digital strategies for some of the world’s largest brands. His analytics background and media and messaging strategy experience make him extremely well-rounded in digital media. After talking with J. and hearing her mission for Mesh, Cliff saw a way to honor his need for making an impact and focus on people-first values while helping underserved and marginalized markets.

Together they are reimagining advertising to benefit people, communities, creators, and brands. When they are not doing that, Cliff collects bobbleheads for his office, and J. adds plants to what she lovingly calls “the full-blown jungle” in her loft.

🤓 I geek out about…

J. Zakira Wise: Data. When you ask the right questions, data tells a story. So maybe more than the data itself, I geek out about asking the right questions.

Cliff Atkinson: Digital media and marketing.

🎒 I collect…

JZW: Plants. My loft is a full blown jungle.

CA: Bobbleheads and put them all over my office.

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

JZW: Relationships. I think a lot about the ways we bond, in business, in friendship, in love.

CA: The decisions they make or are about to make.

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

JZW: I'm fascinated by the intersection of centralized vs decentralized systems. I'm always measuring endeavors in this framework.

CA: Everyday via how I dress, talk and act. I try to be me at all times which includes my weird obsessions.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

JZW: Social impact x company sustainability.

CA: Growth of people’s usage of our platform is important but we also want to grow and develop meaningful relationships between people and brands.

💭 I wish more companies would…

JZW: Measure impact.

💛 How can companies and industries take better care of people?

JZW: Companies can take better care of people by reinvesting in their local communities.

CA: They should focus on people first for all aspects of their business. Understand what’s in the best interest of the people and listen to the people when they share thoughts and feedback.

You can connect with J. everywhere @Jzakirawise and Cliff on LinkedIn.

Cali Harris

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 10:00:00 GMT

“Lead with integrity. Curiosity, always. Connect the unexpected.” These are just three of the five values in Cali Harris’s personal values framework. She believes that our values shape so many of our life decisions, from goal setting to getting unstuck. They are the key to creating a career we love.

Trained as a social scientist, Cali has spent most of her career in strategic partnerships, communications, and program design roles. She’s lent those talents to organizations like Techstars, a top-ranking university, and several social impact startups. She believes magic happens at the intersection of relationships and systems.

The last time we spoke to Cali, she talked about the potential of transitions and the lessons we can learn from those experiences in our lives. She shared some questions we can ask when we’re undergoing a shift of some kind: What are the parts of this transition? How have I been thinking about my accomplishments, and what may need to shift? How do I want to mark this moment of change?

Cali recently had a transition of her own: leaving her 9-5 and starting North Star Rising. She lives her life with a blue pencil, a lesson she learned from her grandpa, looking for the best in every person she meets and making them feel extraordinary. Her current focus is helping others get clear on their core values. Because in her words: “Values matter.”

What else matters to Cali? Motorcycling, bourbon, and salsa dancing, to name a few.

🤓 I geek out about…

…people who geek out hard about their own passions. You know, weirdos. The more obscure your Thing is, the more I’ll lose my mind with delight, asking & bugging you about that Thing. #weirdosunite

🎒 I collect…

…Kentucky bourbon!

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

…business growth strategies, how to salsa dance like you’re on Dancing With the Stars, the best secret camping spots in Colorado and southern Wyoming, and how to find the (and their) North Star.

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

…as a point of connection with someone else. I believe we’re all deeply curious beings. We perk up at novelty. Our weird obsessions lead to faster and deeper connection with each other.

Let’s take one example: My bookshelf is organized by color. Yes, it’s aesthetically pleasing, but I organize it that way because it’s the easiest way for me to find a book. I’m a visual learner and remember-er. In our current world of zoom and video calls, I sit in front of this bookshelf to take calls. Inevitably, the color-arranged bookshelf sparks a conversation: Why is it color coded? That’s so weird! That’s so cool! Isn’t it hard to find books? Isn’t it easy to find books? I recognize that yellow book on the second shelf—let me tell you about how it changed my life… And so on and so forth. We connect the unexpected, and we’re immediately in a meaningful conversation. I love that this shows up in my work conversations—and wouldn’t have, were I sitting in a conference room or a coffee shop!

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

I believe personal character development is a powerful form of growth. Webster’s dictionary offers a (somewhat vague!) definition of character: “the attributes or features that make up and distinguish an individual” and “moral excellence and firmness.” I tend to think of personal character development as a dance between my learning, beliefs, words, and actions. To develop character is to adhere to my values while also being open to having my mind changed by new facts, perspectives, or stories.

How does that apply to a people-first company?

My growth: As the leader of my business, I’m focused on building my character. If I’m unable to act with integrity, that will surely seep into every corner of my business, corroding the values that drive my work. Fortunately, I believe the reverse to also be true: If I’m acting with integrity—full of character and curiosity—the company will evolve, shift, and grow in generative ways.
Product/service growth: Through my business services and products, which are focused on professional development, I help folks develop their character.
Community growth: I support the character growth of anyone I work alongside and hire. When I meet new folks, I remain open and curious to discover the shape of their character. I hold myself—and others—to compassionate accountability.

❓ A question I love:

If there was a global competition with three “feats” to pass, what would be the three things that you would win at above anyone else in the world?

🚶 I would walk/drive/travel 500 miles to…

I’d hop on my motorcycle for 500 miles (technically 593 miles from where I sit right now!) to White Sands National Park in southern New Mexico — it’s a place of magic and awe.

You can connect with Cali on Twitter.

Chris Bowler

Sat, 20 Feb 2021 10:00:00 GMT

The Internet and its constant need for connection have changed how people work, for better and worse. We continually switch between email, phone calls, and notification pings, and it can be incredibly hard to focus and do the deep work that’s required to accomplish our goals.

Chris Bowler loves the internet and deep work. He believes that the right software tools can help us do our best work and enjoy what we do. He explores these ideas in his newsletter, The Weekly Review, where he writes about the intersections of technology, spirituality, and depth. His readers are encouraged and inspired to pursue a productive life and share their insights with the world.

Chris has a background in IT, but left the corporate world in 2009. After starting (and selling) a boutique advertising service, he worked for several software companies before finding his way to Wildbit. Their focus on people-first values, including creating a family-friendly environment, caught his attention. He started on the customer success team but has since shifted his focus to content marketing, writing about people-first culture at Wildbit and beyond, and how companies can best support and care for their employees.

It's no surprise, then, that Chris geeks out about software tools, productive living, and Nacho Libre.

🤓 I geek out about…

PKM (personal knowledge management), productivity, reading, writing, and thinking (not necessarily in that order). Theology. Process. And epic fantasy!

🎒 I collect…

Books, quotes, and URLs. Oh, and Nacho GIFs.

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

Software and paper notebooks 🤓

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

I’m always the team member suggesting we try a new software tool.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

“Slow” growth: is our increase in revenue outpacing our ability to do what feels right?
Team engagement: are we still enjoying what we’re doing? Are we growing our skills and interests?
Customer happiness: nothing makes our team happier than hearing a customer rave about our product or service.

💭 I wish more companies would…

Learn about and invest in the cradle-to-cradle approach to business. This applies directly to manufacturing, but all companies contribute indirectly. Example: the healthcare industry is one of the biggest contributors to environmental waste.

❓ A question I love:

How do my current beliefs and ideologies help me be more inclusive and compassionate? And how do they hinder me from the same?

🚶 I would walk/drive/travel 500 miles to…

Learn about the history of a place/people I’ve never visited before.

You can connect with Chris on Twitter.

Saya Hillman

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 10:00:00 GMT

When Jessica met Saya Hillman years ago, she had no idea she would be meeting someone who would facilitate so many opportunities for personal growth. After being fired in 2004, Saya founded Mac & Cheese Productions℠ and has been self-employed since. She took all of the things that frustrated her (networking and "getting out there") and created experiences for people to face their fears, build community, participate and grow. Fear Experiment℠ comes to mind: it's an opportunity for strangers to come together, learn an art form (i.e., dance, improv, storytelling) over ten weeks and then perform in front of hundreds. This adult recital allowed Jessica to live out a secret dream of being a Broadway performer. Rehearsing week after week with others who were equally scared and excited to step out of their comfort zone was a life-changing experience.

Saya is known for helping people conquer their fears or try something new in safe spaces. Her Life of Yes℠ philosophy believes that everyone has a choice in how their lives are designed (even when it feels like they don't). She's seen the power of what can happen when you put yourself first and are vulnerable and transparent in a way that lifts other people. By being her authentic self, she encourages others to value themselves and use their gifts to put good into the world.

Saya’s one goal is to help her community of Cheese-Its create and lead fulfilled lives. She geeks out about so many amazing things, it’s hard to pick just a couple of shared fascinations — but we never tire of hearing her perspective on cleaning, improv, and embracing what makes you happy.

🤓 I geek out about…

Cleaning — doing the actual act, talking best practices and supplies, helping others clean better, Before & After photos
Travel hacking
Airport lounges, especially if I can hack my way into them
Swanky hotels, both staying in and working from them, especially if I can hack my way into them. I do my best work in a hotel lobby — the background noise, the seating variety, the people watching, the fruit-infused water, the pervasive “May I be of service” wafts.
Well performed improv (I’ve watched the Netflix show Middleditch & Schwartz more times than I can count and laugh as hard the last time as I did the first time)
Sayatime — getting to do what I want when I want (which is why I’m self employed, petless, and kidless)
People pushing themselves to do the thing they know they can’t do, doing it, and getting addicted to that rush and then continuing to push, freak out, succeed. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Being a thoughtful host who makes everyone feel welcome and comfortable due to attention to detail, organization, and the ability to chat with anyone
My husband — he’s my bestest friend and I’m so grateful for him

🎒 I collect…

Mixtile photos of trips and foster puppies that my husband and I have turned into wall collages (Mixtiles are sticky photo tiles). It’s one of the most commented upon features of our home.

Nice things people say to me/about me — a “bag of goodness” which sometimes is a literal bag but more often an Evernote note. I peek at it when I’m having a bad day or when I need reminding of why I do what I do.

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

Cleaning
Productivity
Running a business, specifically how to make money doing what you love; multiple income streams especially of the disparate variety; how to do sales, networking, and self promotion when you loathe sales, networking, and self-promotion; systems
Travel
Creating community
Service provider recommendations
Figuring out what you want in life and who you are

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

~~I don’t know what weird obsessions I have!~~ ~~Maybe this is better asked of my husband, peers, or clients. 😂~~

I’m obsessed with simply being happy and that shows up in my work in that I do whatever makes me happy. Regardless of whether it fits in a box, makes sense to others, on paper has nothing to do with my other income streams. I see so many people feel they have to choose between being a dog-walker and a coder and a baker, or at least keep them separate (“What will my coder clients think if they know I also walk dogs and bake cakes?!?”). I’m all about ease, efficiency, and being a whole person — one website/one company that houses all of me, not three websites/three companies that house part of me.

I’m also a huge proponent of self-sufficiency and boundaries and have set up my work to reflect that. One of the ways this manifests is training clients and collaborators to head to the gaggle of resources I’ve made available before/instead of reaching out to me.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

Do the seeds I plant grow without my needing to water them? I adore providing the initial space for people to connect with others, opportunities, and themselves and then watching them spread their proverbial wings with their newfound confidence, direction, and community, flying off on their own with occasional returns to the nest for updates and refuelling. Nothing makes me squeeeee more than when I see people who met through me cohabitating, dating, traveling together, collaborating, hiring each other, promoting each other, grabbing coffee, being friendsssssss.

I relish being able to reuse and repurpose material of mine, generating additional income streams by simple tweaks of content. For example, turning blog posts into book chapters, classes for individuals into corporate sessions, and curriculum into video tutorials and ebooks. I just expanded from one city to twelve cities with a Chapter Leader at the helm in each city with my hope being that I’ll turn my sixteen years of experience and knowledge into Mac & Cheese Productions℠ world domination but with the twist that each Chapter Leader will bring to the table their version of Life of Yes℠.

Organic growth is my fave, both in the referrals sense and in the blow with the wind sense. I’m 100% word of mouth and have been since Day 1, spending $0 on marketing or advertising; I exist because people share me and because I’m good at finding the people who’ll share me. I love growing branches and lopping off branches of my tree depending on where I am in life, what I value, what I prioritize, what brings me joy, the people in my orbit, what knowledge I have.

💭 I wish more companies would…

…recognize that people don’t need to be in an office 9-5 M-F to be productive employees or feel a part of a community.

Hire me!

❓ A question I love:

If you could move anywhere, where and why?
What’s your favorite cleaning hack/tip?
If you could build your dream house, what would it include?
What’s a recommendation you’d give someone who’s looking to meet others? A class, organization, activity, group, book, podcast, etc.

You can find Saya on Instagram; be sure to check out her Stories.

Danielle Maveal

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 10:00:00 GMT

When Lauren first met Danielle Maveal, she was leading Etsy’s seller community and education efforts, and was at the hub of a bustling, global community of makers who were building businesses and side hustles on Etsy’s platform. A jewelry designer and former gallery owner, she’d joined Etsy as employee #12, when the marketplace had just a few thousand sellers; by the time she moved on, it boasted several million, thanks in no small part to the efforts the seller education team put into helping sellers succeed.

Danielle often says that community is built one conversation at a time — and she’s put that belief into practice through customer and community roles at Barkbox, Lyft, AirBnB, and as a consultant on all things community-oriented.

Three things we turn to Danielle to geek out about: rescue dogs, all things handmade, debating whether and how care and human relationships can scale.

🤓 I geek out about…

I love digging into research done on belonging, connection, group dynamics.
I’m constantly learning new crafts.
I also geek out over the data behind the animal ‘homelessness’ problem.

🎒 I collect…

I collect concert tees, and absolutely nothing else! My favorite concert tees are a Sonic Youth Dirty tee, a classic Nirvana tee (can’t help myself), and an original Lollapalooza tee. Besides that, I live a pretty minimalist life. (Oh, I suppose I should say art and craft supplies!)

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

My friends call me for career and work advice. My specialty is negotiating salaries and raises! They do not call me for relationship advice. 😅

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

I’m always pushing for creative and crafty solutions. Why not play while coming up with solutions? I also once convinced a company I worked for to let me develop a Tinder-like app that showed you rescue dogs near you. 🐶

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

I’m continually playing with the idea of a ‘Sense of Community’ index, tied to these survey questions. I also look at transformation by monitoring the percentage of members that move through the community member journey.

💛 How can companies and industries take better care of people?

True communities care for each other. How do the web of people that impact and are impacted by this company’s mission, work to become one true community? I always say community happens one conversation at a time. To take better care, it starts with creating opportunities for all members of the community to deeply listen to each other. This includes leadership, team members, users, community members.

❓ A question I love:

What can we do together that we couldn’t do alone?

🚶 I would walk/drive/travel 500 miles to…

…help a friend (or a rescue dog).

Danielle’s newsletter, Community Feelings, is an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to build stronger, more connected communities. You can also find her on Twitter.

Suzanne Siemens & Madeleine Shaw

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 10:00:00 GMT

We hadn’t heard the term “radiant growth” before Madeleine Shaw and Suzanne Siemens shared it with us — which feels apt, since these two humans embody both radiance and a commitment to growth.

They joined forces in 2000 as co-founders of Aisle, a groundbreaking manufacturer of sustainable, ethically produced menstrual care products. Aisle (short for ‘period aisle’) is the rebrand of Lunapads, one of the first companies worldwide to champion reusable menstrual products, now a thriving part of the $20 Billion ‘Femtech’ sector.

Madeleine’s background in fashion and textiles complemented Suzanne’s financial acumen (she’s an experienced CPA who left the corporate world for entrepreneurship) — but their business partnership stemmed from much more than well-matched skill sets. It was their shared commitment to leveraging business as a vehicle for social and environmental good that convinced them to join forces.

Together, they have grown Aisle into a company that creates positive social change while being financially sustainable, and empowering people who menstruate to feel more at home in their bodies. They champion issues like period equity, transgender inclusion, and social justice both within their business and beyond.

Beyond their insights into business that supports social and environmental well-being, Madeleine and Suzanne are two of our go-to geek-out buddies when it comes to exploring the great Pacific Northwest outdoors; creating work spaces that are more inclusive of parents, children, and caregivers; and mutual mentorship with young people.

🤓 I geek out about…

Suzanne Siemens: The intersection of business and impact and using B Corp principles to change the face of capitalism.

Madeleine Shaw: Natural patterns of growth and evolution, especially cycles. Seeds, plants, trees. Lunar, seasonal, tidal, menstrual, sleep. Considering how we can apply their lessons to businesses and other types of organizations.

🎒 I collect…

SS: Tiny shells on the beaches of the Pacific West Coast.

MS: Fragments of pacific oyster shells that I call yois. The name is a play on ‘oyster’, inspired by the fact that yois are smaller, pared down and adorable. As another tidbit of geekery, pacific oysters are protandric hermaphrodites, meaning that they initially mature as male, however migrate genders to reproduce. I have collected and given away thousands of them, and maintain a collection of a couple hundred at any given time. Weathered for decades by the endless rolling surf on the stony shores of the Salish Sea, to me they are metaphors for life and the aging process. While they were originally parts of something larger, the wearing process softens their edges, revealing countless luminous layers. Rather than seeing them as broken, I understand that they are in a process of becoming revealed, hence their luminosity. They populate my bags, coat pockets, garden and random places in my home as talismen, reminders of their timeless world that ceaselessly churns on, alongside and yet so separately from my urban existence.

💬 My friends ask my advice about…

MS: Things that have an interesting way of not turning out to be about the issue that they thought that they were bringing to me in the first place.

SS: How to find, build and maintain a successful partnership with a co-founder.

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

MS: Refusing to be limited to binary or linear thought patterns. Questioning assumptions. Factoring in emotion, intuition and being open to what wants to happen, as opposed to pushing toward a set of fixed goals.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

MS: I think a lot about what I call lateral or radiant growth, or what post-growth economist Kate Raworth calls Thriving. This stands in contrast to the rapid startup > ’up and to the right’/hockey stick growth > exit model of scale that currently defines it, at least in a business sense.

Raworth points out that literally nothing in the natural world (ok, other than diseases, most notably cancer) embodies this growth pattern. The Thriving model mimics the natural growth patterns of trees, humans and animals, where once they are mature, there is a long period of relatively ‘flat’ (yet healthy) growth, followed by a reproductive stage, where the organism/organization spawns new entities.

I think of Thriving as Radiance, because — assuming that the organization has positive impact as its objective — it radiates out in multiple directions, in ways that we are only just beginning to value and measure.

🌤️ A thing that makes me hopeful about the future of business:

SS: Folks involved in the Zebra movement, B Corp movement, etc.

MS: Zebras Unite, SheEO, B Corp, House of Beautiful Business and other feminist/regenerative/post-growth/emergent etc models and movements. Initiatives like this one.

💭 I wish more companies would…

SS: Be more transparent, anti-racist and act on climate.

MS: Incorporate social and environmental impact into their purpose and KPIs. Imagine if companies like Apple, Nike or Amazon undertook B Corp certification?

💛 How can companies and industries take better care of people?

SS: By acknowledging and seeing them as people with a unique social history and help them find ways to deliver their true gifts.

❓ A question I love:

MS: What are the assumptions? What’s a different way of looking at this? What wants to happen?

🚶 I would walk/drive/travel 500 miles to…

SS: See lush parts of the earth, untouched by humans.

MS: Or considerably further, to be with my daughter.

You can connect with Suzanne on Twitter and Madeleine on LinkedIn.