A New Beginning
Probably the most unoriginal title to grace this platform, but it’s true.
I am thrilled to announce that I will be moving on from Creative Commons to invest in my own vision, mission, and business.
But before I get into that, I’d like to reflect on an important ending — the end of my journey with Creative Commons.
I never intended to work at Creative Commons for as long as I have. My first job with the organization was technically an internship, and I thought I would be done in six months. I would then move to New York and figure things out, like so many in every generation have!
I did end up moving to New York, and I only figured some things out, and they were unrelated to CC. The recession hit, and my boss at the time kindly offered me a new position and the opportunity to stay on remotely. So I stayed, and I weathered the recession. Living in New York was amazing and awful, sometimes both at once, and never predictable.
My bosses changed and my positions changed. I got to travel to Berlin, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, London, Seoul, Vancouver, Warsaw, up and down the east coast, and even to the midwest. I entered and left multiple projects better than I found them, and some I created out of nothing, and those were the ones I learned from the most, about myself and others. That feeling of conceiving an idea, blowing it out to its full proportions, getting other people excited about it, and making it happen in real time and over time, was something I never got bored of, because it was a different experience every time.
And I guess it showed, because I kept moving through and up the org, to where I am now — CC’s Director of Product and Research. I also left New York and never looked back. I started living in Los Angeles back when New Yorkers were still denigrating it, and now that there are op-eds about the migration west, I feel both validated and a little sad, because I see the landscape here changing as well, in contrast to the burgeoning homeless population on LA’s streets.
During this time, I never seriously considered another job at another organization. I would see opportunities from time to time, but none of them really appealed to me. I always wondered, when my peers were moving up in tech companies, getting directorships at other NGOs or academic institutions, getting MBAs and law degrees, and even working in foreign countries, why none of these things made me envious.
Jennifer 8 Lee gave a talk at last year’s xoxo festival in Portland that proposed envy as a possible metric for what you might want to do next with your life.
“Who do you envy?”
This was in September, the same month I stepped into my 8th position at Creative Commons to lead CC Search and the product team. Things got crazy, and crazy busy, but I kept the question mulling in the back of my mind.
The people I envied were not those who worked within the structure of an organization or institution. They were artists, musicians, writers, directors — people who struck out on their own and risked their livelihood for their own creative vision, or vision of how the world could be. Creative people with an entrepreneurial spirit, but with egos tempered by kindness and keen emotional intelligence. I more than envied them — I admired them. I wanted to be them.
So all’s that to say…
I’m stepping out on my own to write a book that has been a decade, or more accurately my entire life, in the making. It is a highly personal book, one hundred percent mine, and one hundred percent the people I have befriended along my journey.
I am also taking clients for my new business, where I provide high-level vision and strategy recommendations backed by real person research. I won’t go into detail about my proven track record for bringing projects and products successfully to fruition here, because you can read about that at my site, which has all the information you need. But chances are, if you’re reading this, you already know what I can do. And trust that I will deliver for you, if we find an opportunity to pursue that is of mutual benefit, and that is about making a difference in this current climate of too many things in need of change.
So with that, I thank you for reading, and I thank those of you who have supported me along the way and been not only my cheerleaders, but my well-meaning critics and most importantly, my friends.
