Bio
Professional: Director of Marketing for Twilio
Side Projects: Seattle 2.0, TweetToCall
Goals for 2009: Be hot, go deep, don’t stop.
Working with Startups
Twilio
I joined Twilio in March 2009 as their first non-founding employee (woo!) to help bring our cloud telephony product to market, and to engage with the growing developer community. I love working here because I get to spread my wings and learn about marketing a B2B product, with a consumer twist. I also have found opportunities to learn to code and have launched projects like TweetToCall and EscapeMyDate, which both use the Twilio platform. Twilio tooks Series A venture financing in December 2009 from Union Square Ventures, and is also backed by Dave McClure, Mitch Kapor, Manu Kumar, David Cohen and others.
Seattle 2.0
Through my growing experience with startups, I’m actively putting the foundation in place to build businesses of my own in the future. I also invest time in the Seattle startup community as the Editor in Chief for Seattle 2.0, a local resource for entrepreneurs and I am looking to expand the same community-minded services to the Bay Area and beyond in the future. I joined Seattle 2.0 in October 2008 as Events Editors, and became Editor in Chief in March 2009. Seattle 2.0 is published by Marcelo Calbucci.
Pelago
While I was on my honeymoon I did a phone screen with Pelago, mainly because I wanted to sign the NDA and learn what my friend Blake had been working on. Less than a month later, I joined Pelago’s data team in September of 2007 and began working on content acquisition for Whrrl, the location based social networking app that launched in October 2007. A lucky break shortly after the launch of the Whrrl iPhone app in July 2008 at Mashable’s Social Media Camp lead to an interview that changed my career path and I became the first community program manager for Whrrl until March 2009.
Pelago is backed by leading venture firms such as Kleiner Perkins, Trilogy, T-Venture, Bezos Expeditions, DAG and Reliance Entertainment
Working for Myself
Social Kind
Before joining Twilio, I was briefly self-employed as a consultant working with web development, livestream broadcasting, and experimenting with applying social media to marketing and other business needs. During that time I formed a holding company for these projects: Social Kind, which is now run by my husband Kevin and specializes in building applications on the Twilio platform.
Working with Fortune 500
Expeditors International
An argument within the family business about how much I was being paid ($15/hour) lead to a challenge – if I could land a job that paid more then my Dad would give me a raise. I bought my first suit and headed straight to the offices of Expeditors International, Reliant’s first customer, and landed a job as an intern… for $9/hour. Three months later I was promoted to full time customer service representative, where I was instrumental in the turn-around of an unprofitable team. After the turnaround, I was promoted to Business Process Analyst where I got to spend all my time coming up with ways to save the company time and money, and then implementing them. Needless to say, I was making a fair bit more than $15/hour and had found a my passion for helping people be more productive.
Dropping Out of College
Olympic Community College – Bremerton, WA
I attended from September 2003 to March 2005 and then took a quarter off to do an internship at Expediors. The internship became a full time job and I never looked back.
Work with the Family Business
Reliant Consulting & Research
The company was founded by my father following several failed financial service startups where he had been co-founder or employee. In my household I knew a thing or two about the stress of teaching a fledgling company to fly. Following its founding in 1998, the consulting firm quickly took off, and I helped my Dad with automating grunt work (Excel macros and Visual Basic) and generated fiduciary documentation that is sent to hundreds of thousands of 401(k) plan participants each month. He had always worked very long hours, so I didn’t really know him until I worked for him. At first we shared an office so small that we sat at the same huge oak desk bumping elbows. The business still operates today with over $3 Billion in assets under advisory.
Work Before College
From doing jobs off the “price list” I had my mom create to paying for my riding lessons as a stable hand (yes, I literally shoveled shit at 5am). Receptionist, cashier, McDonald’s crew member, tennis instructor, you name it – I loved to work. If I could have picked working over going to school I would have. Web design and development with Macromedia Dreamweaver – sure (visit DiscoverLavender.com – the first site I launched for a client).
Life Beyond Work
When I’m in Washington I live and work from our beautiful Cape Cod style house Kirkland with my husband Kevin, best friend D’Laina and sister-in-law Jill . When I’m in San Francisco I live in Potrero Hill with my fabulous roommates Katrina and Michael, with our peek-a-boo view of the Bay Bridge. I work at Pier 38 near AT&T park.
Aha! Thank you – that’s a bit ironic after the post I made last night about getting it right the first time, and making good first impressions. Fixed now, I’m glad you let me know. I’m not sure if you intended to be snarky by asking how I’m an entrepreneur (since this was left without a legitimate email address), but I’m going to take the time to answer the question seriously, because it has got me thinking about whether I can legitimately call myself an entrepreneur right now.
I wonder whether what I do now, outside of my day job (which definitely doesn’t “count” since I’m not a founder), is best described by the word entrepreneur. The definition of entrepreneur (according to dictionary.com anyhow) is “a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, esp. a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk”.
If I’m managing things that aren’t making money yet (blogs, fiction writing) am I an entrepreneur? If I’m developing business plans, mocks and prototypes, and exploring the options for potential business ideas of my own am I an entrepreneur? What am I between the times when I have businesses of my own (as opposed to projects I’m not talking about), and am working for equity in other peoples businesses (as I do for Pelago)?
Am I an ‘entrepreneur-in-training’ right now, would that be a better way to describe myself? Perhaps a ‘wantrepreneur’ – if you can get past the immediately derogatory association people have with that word? Learning how to pitch, making necessary connections with future investors, partners, employees, and finding a place in the local business community. All important, but on their own not enough to make one an entrepreneur?
I really don’t know, I guess I didn’t give it enough thought when I used the word. The intention, in labelling myself at all, is to make it so people understand what I’m about and can figure out how they relate to me. Maybe calling myself an entreprenuer is misleading? That’s definitely not what I want. This seems like it deserves a blog post of its own, especially since it pings on something I’ve been struggling with so much lately – how to explain to people what I do for a living. Thanks for the food for thought.
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You misspelled ‘entreprenuer’. Also, how are you an entrepreneur?