Featuring: Kim Rohrer

From Dramaturgy to drawing up business, Kim Rohrer takes us on a journey starting in the theater into People Ops and then to the winding world of launching her own business.

Check out her stuff here:
https://www.patchworkportfolio.com/
https://icaretoomuch.substack.com/
https://www.peakhrlearning.com/

Or her Journey Line here

Transcript

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camera so that we're like approximately the same size but it's hard to do that. Hello and welcome to Journey Lines. I'm your host Kim Minick and this is the show answering the question, how did they get here? I am so excited to introduce the other half of Kim Witted, Kim Rower. Kim, how are you? I am great, because I'm here with you. I just wanted to call out that when you record in Riverside, when you start recording, there's a little note that pops up that says actual recording is higher quality. And I just find that so funny because I know they're referring to the like the video quality, but I like to think that the actual recording is going to be like even better than what we're saying. It's like higher quality content, magically. That's the AI I actually use. It's higher quality. Enhance, enhance. It does. It makes us better people. It saves a tree. No, it doesn't. How are you today, Kim? You know, I'm pretty good. I got to drop my kids off at school today because our bike is in the shop, so I'm driving the kids to school. Usually my husband takes them on our bike. But I got to take them to school, which means I got to walk my little four -year -old into his TK classroom and see his friends and see how he signs in his little name on the sign-in sheet. And like, it was very cute. I got to see them give each other like a big hug goodbye when my second grader walked off to her lineup. Like, it's a little peek into their world that I don't usually get to see. It was lovely. I was like, all right, you seem happy playing with that pirate ship. I'm going to go now. See you kiddos. And they're just like, okay, it's very cute. So that's lovely way to start a day. lovely way to start the day. Speaking of starting, no other way, let's get started. Before we dive into your journey line, which looks so fun, tell me what you got going on these days, personally, professionally, holistically. well, start with personally, cause here I am in my living room. If any people watching this follow me on the internet, you have seen this living room before. an internet friend of mine came over to the house recently and she was like, I feel like I know your living room from zoom. I don't know that's a good thing or a bad thing. Yeah. currently you can see, I'm going to do this weird camera thing. So this is my commute through train town. a highly complex. series of train tracks to step over. So personally, things are a little chaotic, so much city planning. My four year old was homesick from school and we just built a really epic train track with multiple sets of toys. So that's a good metaphor for my personal life. Super chaotic, lots of kid stuff surrounding me at all times. My little desk space here is in the corner between the couch and the wall. and you know, we make it work. We, I feel like there's this thing that you see on the, on the LinkedIn's and the Instagram's, I'm very cool, clearly, on the socials, on the internets, where you think that people who run their own businesses, like have all their stuff figured out, right? You think people who run their own businesses, like have all the stuff, but like, got a couple of businesses I'm running right now and My husband and I both work from home in a thousand square foot apartment where we have lived for 13 years and we have two kids here and you just do the best you can and you make it work however you can, right? That's all you can do. It's a cozy life. Yeah. don't know, part of the adventure, adventure of starting out and, you know, getting some businesses up and running as you just make it work and survive. That's right. but professionally, things are really fun right now. I love my co -founders at PCHR. I love working with them. They are the greatest. hi ladies. it's truly a testament to the theory that if you build a team that is diverse in many ways, through many lenses of diversity, your team will be stronger and better. the amount we have been able to achieve, the quality of work we're able to put out there. It's just unlike anything I've ever experienced. And a large part of that is because of our diversity in experience, but also our diversity in skill and interest. like building a team where everyone has different skills that they bring to the table, but also everybody wants to do different things. It just blows my mind. Like, why are we not building companies this way? Why is it like such a, such a monoculture, not just in like race and gender, but like everyone is a top line achiever in this specific formula with these specific skills. And it's like, you, just get so much more when you don't do that. Yeah, work was really built for... for the ideal worker, the one style of white man. one style of human. And yeah, it always reminds me of that silly quip that's like, you can't judge a fish by how it climbs a tree. Yeah. Exactly. man. And you and I have talked about this off pod offline, but off pod. but like coming into the realization as, as an adult in my late thirties, that I was a fish trying to climb trees. Like game changer. now I'm like, I want everyone to figure out whether they should be swimming or climbing when they're in their Like late twenties. I feel like before your late twenties, you maybe like don't know who you are yet. Totally. but like, yeah. I have gotten excited in different ways. Like I've certainly grown into, and what I need to your point, what I need professionally has developed and changed and grown over the years. and creating work environments where it's, it is not just okay, but it is accepted and it is celebrated that who you are and how you show up at work and what you need to be successful at work may change over the course of your career and should as you grow, right? Like. Like, if you're still working the same as when you were 22, like, I don't... Let's talk about progression. But with that, let's talk... wrinkly shirt. So just, you I like to keep it very real. Can't even tell. Due to the lighting and darkness of higher quality. is kind of like AI out the wrinkles. No, it is only for our conversation. Let's dive into the journey line. Something very early on I learned about you, and I love that we're starting here, is that your background is in dramaturgy. And sure is, so excited to dive into the theater to people pipeline later. But you actually... You actually start off kind of at a low point. This is not the highest point in your journey line. You're a little bit on a low end at grad school. Hashtag nevermind. Nowhere to go. When you start low, great. like to keep my bars reasonably low. Yeah, so I had gotten into college for acting. I was gonna be an actor. This was my pre -Journey Alliance. was like ballerina turned musical theater person turned actor. And then in my, yes, then in my second year of college, I realized I didn't actually want to be an actor. And luckily the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television is a very flexible program and you can change tracks. So I wasn't stuck in the acting track forever. And that is when I discovered dramaturgy, which is for those who don't know, I love taking any opportunity to give people a new word to know. Dramaturgy is the research and study of theater, but also like being the historical consult for a production. So if there's a production that's taking place in, for example, 1970s Los Angeles, the dramaturg's job is to make sure everyone involved with the play knows everything they can possibly know about 1970s Los Angeles, to really immerse people in the world of the play. And I just found that fascinating. And I loved the research. I loved researching, like going super deep on a different thing every couple of months, which now I'm like, hey, ADHD that was undiagnosed. Like, no wonder you liked that. But it also involves often literary management, is like the theater criticism, editing plays, working to develop plays with new playwrights. I loved all of that. And I did an internship the first year after college at Berkeley Repertory Theater. And by the end of my internship, I was quitting the field, which I think is a more common experience that is not celebrated as reasonable because sometimes you're in an internship. Sometimes you're an internship and what you learn out of that is like, this is not the job for me, actually. And what a great place to explore that. And I don't know, so I also, as a part of my bachelor's degree program, had to do an internship. I switched from musical theater to hospitality management because I hate money, I don't know. No, not lucrative careers. But I do recall not treating my internship with the respect that maybe it deserved, and it sounds like you did because that's a really... scary thing to realize. Well, part of it too, is that the internship at Berkeley Rep was a very serious internship. It was an 11 month internship. You live with the other interns. You work on the plays. Like I was the associate dramaturg on all the plays for the season. I was part of the process of choosing the plays for the next season. Like working very closely with the artistic director. like, there was, you worked, like I was writing pieces for the program. I was in the rehearsal room putting together the binders of research. you take it very seriously. And by the end of it, what I learned was not that I didn't love the work, but that I didn't love it enough to make the sacrifices required to have a career in it. So when we talk about the grad school piece, like, there's this one program at UMass Amherst, that's like the dramaturge program that people go to. And I joined a listserv, which is a great way to date myself. I joined a listserv. This was in 2006. Perfect. And I, it was a listserv for people who were interested in the program. And this was sort of an early education for myself. I'm realizing now into like, into the world of expansive community building for the sake of educating yourself, which is now like something I take for granted in the HR space. But at the time I was like, I get to talk to all these other people who love what I love, who want to do the same program that I do. And what I learned is they loved it more. These were people who woke up in the morning and could not think of anything else they could possibly do with their life except pursue this passion. And my boss at the time, who was the dramaturg and literary manager at the theater, said like, you just have to go into this with your eyes open. There's a limited number of positions in this country. And often you only get a job if someone retires. this is not, there aren't a lot of these jobs. There's a lot more people who want them than there are jobs. And you'll probably get laid off many times and you'll probably work a second job. At this point in my career, my first year out of college, I had been working at least one job, if not two or three jobs at a time, since I turned like 12. And I was really tired at the ripe old age of 22. I was like, I just want to work one job. I want one job where I go to my job and then I come home and I don't go to a second job after that. Like, what are those jobs that I could have? super similar realization. I had to apply for the Bachelor of Fine Arts program, which included a theater test. You do a monologue, a song, a dance, whatever. Everyone told me freshmen's, freshmen's never get accepted. and like everybody understands that this is how it works when you're going to college for the arts. Like, yeah, you do your interview, you do your monologue, you do your song, you do your dance. Obviously, everybody knows that. Because I'm just sitting here like, yes, I know the process. For those who don't. And I remember, one, I had horrible stage fright. I don't know what I was doing up there. I was like literally trying to go to a hypnotist to get rid of stage fright. So shockingly, I was not accepted into the Bachelor of Fine Arts program. And I remember talking with somebody and they were like, okay, so. you're working in restaurants now, I was, similar to you, took on a couple jobs and they're like, you just got rejected from your first theater gig, so you're gonna go to your restaurant gig now. And I was like, this would be my whole life. I'll just go get a degree in restaurant management instead. I'll just skip that whole theater middleman with the fame and the enjoyment and the arts and just do. funny. Like I'll just skip the part where I pretend to have a career in the arts and just go straight to the hospitality job that I know I will end up in. But again, though, that comes down to recognizing like, I don't want this bad enough to go through that rigmarole of the actor's life or the dramaturg's life. And that's where, you know, they say like, If you wake up in the morning and the only thing you can think about is being a writer, then you're a writer. Like it's, there's the line from Sister Act Two, like wake up in the morning and all you can think about is singing, you're a singer. Like if that's not the case for you and the work is going to be painful and hard and like, then don't do it. Find something, find something you like more. Just find something you like more. You don't have to like it perfectly or wonderfully, but... Find something that you like enough and that maybe has less friction. Yeah. And so taking your own advice and recognizing that that's not your favorite, we start seeing some pretty cool logos on your journey line with some pretty downward lines. I see Pixar, I see Google, administrative assistant extraordinaire, and down to the EDD, economic department. development department. For Californians, it's where we get our unemployment insurance. So tell me about this. for them. I was unemployed. To be clear. Well, walk me through it. So you leave behind the glamorous life of dramaturgy and you join a scrappy little company called Googs, Google. You know, it's so funny. I love telling this part of the story because A, it's like give props to my mom and B, it's very of an era. So this was 2007 as I was winding down my internship and my mom was like, isn't that Google company up in the Bay area? You should work for them. And I was like, yeah, they are. I'll go work for Google. Sure. But I had someone I knew from college worked at Google and I sent him an email. I hadn't talked to him and like, two years, but we had done a study abroad program together. So we knew each other. I was like, Hey, you work at Google. I want to get a job at Google. Can you like refer me or something? Is that a thing? And he was like, yeah, we do. We have an employee referral program. Like, let me submit you and grueling application process. Just, know, when they talk about like the tests that Google had people doing in like 2007, she's like, it was like, questions like how many nickels. logic questions. was the one I remember the most was, cause I was, I was, I was at auditioning. I was applying for an executive assistant role as it was an audition. and one of the tests was we're organized. So, so stupid. You're organizing a talent show for your team. These are the names of the five people who want to perform. These are the names of the songs. This person can't go before this person. This song has to go after that song. This person has to go last, like, etc, etc. And then it's like, what is the order of the performers and what songs are they all singing? You were like, I was told there was gonna be snacks here? I was like, but I had, I had tried to study for this. I'm notoriously terrible at studying for tests. I hate it. but I had, yeah, but I had a friend who had done the LSAT and I was like, I hear I'm going to have to do LSAT questions. Like, what does that even mean? what am I doing with my life? and it like, my methodology was not sure there's some like formulaic way to do this, but I was just like, mix and match. We'll make it work. Follow all the rules, check all the boxes. and miraculously, I got the job. I did not get the job I wanted, which was administrative assistant for the Google books team, because I was a very bookish library person. instead I got placed with, yeah, and I worked in library archives in college also, former librarian. but I got placed with AdWords front end engineering. And I was like, fuck, I don't know what this is. I don't know what front end is. I barely know what engineering is. I don't care about AdWords, like fuck. I mean, honestly, like it was one of those blessings and disguise moments because for anyone listening who was familiar with the trajectory of Google 2007, 2008 was like, if you worked in AdWords front end engineering, you were like the gods of campus. It was like, that was the brand new shiny thing that was making all the fucking money. And This is how we're gonna get known. This is gonna be it. real estate in the center of main campus. was like two levels removed from Sergey and Eric Schmidt and like working with really cool people doing, who were doing really cool shit. And I got to do stuff like take a, borrow a work car to drive to the toy store and buy Legos. So my team could do a team building activity. It was horrific. It was. What a job. like there were things about the jobs that I didn't love. realized like, okay, I don't think an executive assistant career path is for me, but I got to do so many cool things. and there was a lot of, because I was the first EA that my team had ever had. They didn't totally know what I was and wasn't supposed to do. So they were, and they were engineers. So they got to do whatever they wanted. So they're like, yeah, 20 % time you should totally be doing projects like anywhere for the rest of the company that you want to do. Did you fully know what you were supposed to be doing as an administrative assistant? So this feels like a really great opportunity to build your role. Yes. And for someone like me who likes to fly by the seat of my pants and likes to make shit up as I go along, it was fantastic. I had great, a great mentor. had great partners on the admin team who knew more than I did, but we also had a lot of latitude to do things. Like we realized this is Google was very small. There were 300. admins worldwide at the time. And we realized we're all doing things slightly differently. What if we had one unified way that was like, this is the protocol for scheduling meetings. This is like the guardrails for doing team building events, whatever. So my friend and I were just like, let's just make one. And they're still using it in 2024. Like they're still using this like shitty little thing that we scrapped together in 2007. And we like the authors at Google library was didn't exist. We had authors talks and I was like, instead of having all of these books from this talks, just like sitting on random people's desks, desks based on whoever planned the event. What if we like put a library, we have a badge scanning system for taking out equipment and shit like, how about a library system for books? Yeah, and they were like, okay, find a spot on campus where it can happen. And like, you can work with the like the tagging team to like, do it. And so I did it. And my one of my proudest moments was I was standing chit chatting with Eric Schmidt's EA and he walked by and he's like, Hey Pam, I checked this out from the library. you return it for me? And I was like, it's happening. Honestly. So it was the first like six to 12 months or so it was just like a magical wonderland of all of this cool shit happening and feeling like I had the coolest job ever. and then tragedy struck. I know. Yes. So I had been hired as a part of what they were calling the administrative associates program, which is by definition, Larry and Sergey's way to bring in smart, talented, motivated people who didn't have traditional backgrounds, get them in integrated into the company, get them doing like admin work, but lots of other side projects, and then see what they can do. Yeah. And then after a year and a half to two years, transition them out into other parts of the company. right as I was about to hit that 18 month mark, the executive assistants decided they were tired of cycling out admins every two years and canceled the program. And so all of us who had been hired with the idea that we were going to get to grow our careers in magical ways all over the company, we're now told, no, actually you have to stay in your job and there's no career development for you outside of this path. and I, at that point I was like, off a great opportunity to, to your point, build a non -traditional background pipeline. exactly. And I was already like talking to the marketing team about moving over to a marketing job. I'd be doing projects with them. I was super stoked about it. And they were like, no, we don't want you to leave the engineering admin team. no. And so then I quit and I went to Pixar. Just as one does, as one does. Again, but it's again, it's the like, it's the network effect. right. I, I wasn't going in cold. I knew someone at Pixar because she had come and done a talk at Berkeley rep when I was an intern and I like, she was involved with Berkeley rep community. It's like, I knew her, I could connect with her and sent her a message. I was like, I'd like to come work at Pixar. What now? and she, how do, so she in like, She flagged my resume when I applied for a production coordinator job. was like lowest rung on the totem pole. Not quite. was the second lowest rung on the totem pole. Production assistant was the lowest rung. But a whole body in the door. Unfortunately, they hired me on a production that then they realized they had overstaffed and then didn't have another role for me. So my tenure there was a beautiful six weeks long. I mean, longer than the average person has worked at Pixar. True. And I got a lot out of that six weeks, I will say. Like I got to work on some really cool shit and I learned a lot. It was a really great stepping stone for me as I was thinking about employer brand, which is I've realized is a huge part of what I look for in companies and what I look for in an employee experience is what do you do as a business? What do you do as a company? How do you get your employees excited about that? What is it like to work here and how do you get the public excited about that? Like the interplay between HR and marketing is super fascinating to me. And it's where I'm like, we'll talk about this later, but it's like where I'm focusing a lot of my energy right now. but going from Google to Pixar, two places with incredible employer brands, incredible brands in general. Like I really got a crash course in what does it mean to have an employer brand that matches your external brand and how do those things play with each other? I was very bummed when I got laid off. They had said, we're going to pay you for the next two weeks, but you don't have to come in if you don't want to. And little like eager beaver me, I came in for like three days in a row. I was like, I'm just going to come in. I'm going to work really hard. They're going to realize that they need me to do something and then they'll find something for me. And then like by the end of the third day, was like, fuck this. Nobody's like, they have told me in no uncertain terms, there is no job for me. Like, what am I doing? something else. Yeah. No. had you have gone every day, no. No. No, no, because on the third day I met with HR and the HR lady was so nice. And I wish I could remember her name. She was a lovely woman with like a mane of reddish curly hair. And she showed me something that has influenced the way I think about internal mobility to this day, because that she had, again, this was like 2008. So technology was different. She had a literal whiteboard in her office where they had mapped out the next like two or three known productions that were happening with little magnets representing the main people who were working on each one. So as you were moving from story development into animation, now your story development people were free to work on the next project. And she literally moved people's face magnets around on a whiteboard to plan out internal mobility because you would work on a production for four or five years or a production would have would take four or five years, but your part of it might only be like one or two years long. So she mapped out this internal mobility pathing by looking at career path against work needed, against skill and interest. She'd be like, I know that you are interested in doing this. We're going to have this show start. That's going to be in the development phase coming up. We're going to need someone with your skillset and your interests. So we're going to earmark you for this job that's opening up in a year. And it was really, really cool. The downside was that she was like, but there's nothing in here for you. So sorry. Yeah, she was like, I was like, but what if I work really hard for the next two weeks, like maybe something will open up. And she was like, I can tell you that nothing is opening up. And maybe there would be a PA job for you, but that pays $30 ,000 a year. And I mean, at the time I was I was only making 40. I was like, I can't go back to 30. miles. And yeah, I mean, it was, it was wild. I had some amazing boss stories there and some terrible boss stories there, but ultimately I was on my couch applying for hundreds of jobs. had a spreadsheet where I was tracking my hundreds of jobs I was applying for. was awful. Ugh, and which is probably why you have the EDD, the Economic Development Department, unemployment. Yeah, where you're certifying that you're looking for a job while you're looking for a job. you had to fill out forms that were like literal paper forms they would mail to you and you had to write down three jobs you had applied for in the last week or last two week period and you had to mail it back and then they would send you your check. Can you believe that's how we used to do things? like to know the cost of administering that program versus just, you know what, that's not for today. Nope, no, not today, Satan. they randomly selected people to attend career development workshops. And the career development workshop was like how to use Microsoft Word to create a resume. And I know this because I was randomly selected for a workshop and it was, if you were randomly selected, it was mandatory. So I had to go to this like terrible office building down by the airport. and sit for like three or four hours pretending to learn how to make a resume in Microsoft Word. And I was like, I've been wearing office jobs for like five years at this point in my career. was like, there is someone else who would benefit from this more than I am. I am taking the spot of someone who needs this. Like, yeah. There should have been a thing where you could be like, I know how to use a computer, give this spot to someone who needs help. Yeah. All right. Look, I'm a terrible test taker, but I think I can nail this one. out of printing out my resume. Yeah. But nothing lasts forever. Unemployment, whereas clearly educational, led you to discuss? Discuss? Fantasy studios. Okay, sorry, I don't know how to read. recording studio in Berkeley. Cool shit, literal journey, bad job. Yes, literal journey. They literally journeyed the band was in house for a month recording their album. And yeah, yeah. My job duties ranged from printing the, on Hell, but not the original thing, but on Hell, Angel, the new guy. he was so, so nice, so sweet. He would bring me his thumb drive and be like, can you print out the new lyrics for me? And I'd like, he, remember he had a little, his little thumb drive had like, was like a little rock hand signal. I'd like plug it into my computer and print out his stuff. Dean, the drummer, had a massive sugar addiction and would send me out to buy him sweet tarts. They were just like, I know, you can buy them in bulk at the 99 cent store. Fun fact. But to quote him very famously, he said, it's better than cocaine for his health. please. I was like, this is a lot of sweet tarts Dean. Like, do you want me to find you other snacks? And he was like, it's better than cocaine. Like this is my vice. Like, okay, I'll take it. but they were a, I don't know. They were a delight to work with. They were so fabulous. and really like I credit fantasy studios as mind numbing as the job often was working the front desk. it was really my introduction to HR because I was not. allowed to, it's not that I wasn't allowed, I wasn't allowed to hire interns, we didn't have budget to hire interns, but the job was like, way more than one person who could reasonably handle. And I knew from growing up in the entertainment industry that unpaid internships were illegal in California. And I did not want to be a part of continuing to perpetuate exploitative labor practices. I would like to pay someone for their labor. Yeah, but I was like, but there's got to be a way to do this. Like, there's got to be something. And so I started looking into it. And the only way to do unpaid internships in California is to have them be students who are receiving college credit. And I learned through some research, pulling on those dramaturgy skills, that there is a local community college that requires their audio engineering students to do internships as part of their degree. And I was like, well, we could partner with them and then they will send us interns and I will write up a little report card for each intern at the end of their thing. Great. So that was like my first foray into compliance and labor law and like employee handbook documentation because these interns would start and they would need like a getting started guide and I needed to make sure they had their stuff. And I was like, I really like this. I like documentation. I like knowing what the rules are so that I can figure out how to get around them. I love like from the start you were just like, dramaturgy skills, pulling that in real quick, who knew? hindsight, this is what I love about the Journey Lines idea is in hindsight, I can see how all of these things built on each other. I can see how all of these skills came into play, how one thing led to another in the moment. I have no fucking clue what I was doing. I was just like, I like this. I'm just riding the ride. But then you can look back and see the themes. So yeah, I was there for almost a year and a half and I loved being around creative people and I... knew that I didn't want to be a front desk office manager forever. So I decided to go back to tech. And after many, many interviews, I ended up at Disqus. Everyone thinks it's Disqus because of how it's spelled, but it's Disqus. Like Disqus, you know. It was an era, man. I feel like it. It really had a moment and this was 2009, 2010. Like it was really the moment for like, it's the word but with no vowels. It's the word but with a Q. Yeah, like, my God. I do feel like I should have seen Discuss because you know it's a little on the journey line. It's a little chat bubble, and it makes sense and But throw a cue in there try to like, teach people how to spell it. It was a huge branding problem. No one could spell it. But one of the reasons that they chose it is because the URL was available. And this is the kind of practicality that I love about Daniel and Jason, the wonderful, wonderful co -founders have discussed. were like, We were all figuring it out together. So I think when I started there, I was like 26, 25 or 26 and they were like 24, 25. We were like in our mid twenties together. They had dropped out of college to start this company. It was 12 dudes in a small room in San Francisco. I was the first female hire. I was the first non -technical, non -sales hire. And we were all just learning as we went, but Daniel and Jason were two of the kindest. most humble, most creative people I've ever met. And when I joined them, we kind of agreed like, we're going to figure out how to be a company together. And I know more than you guys know about this area of office management and HR. But I certainly don't know a lot. And they were like, cool, we also don't know anything about building a company. So let's learn together and we'll all be better. And you spent eight years there. Yeah. I went from, I think the official title was general manager or like office manager who wants to do HR. Like I had so many weird titles there. but when I left, I was a seasoned VP of people who had been through series A through series D and acquisition, opening second location, closing second location, two rounds of layoffs, massive, massive product development. we had a huge, opportunity during when Trump got elected because we were dealing in a space of online commenting our values. One of our values was to speak your mind respectfully and our values and how they related to our product and our business were really put to the test. And it was a very cool journey for us to go through to think what is our stance on hate speech? What is our stance on hate speech in the context of this election? What is the concept? What are the confines of our, of our values and where do our values bump up against our very real business needs? And do we start refusing to take money from publishers who are publishing hateful content? It was wild. that I worked with once and she said, never waste a good crisis. And it gives that similar vibes like that. You know, I worked at Patreon in around 2017, a similar and you do you kind of have these business strategy discussions based off of values and what you're seeing. Yeah. What are some of that like hindsight 2020? What are some of those decisions that you were kind of like? I can't believe we did this. I mean, one of the decisions that we made that I'm very proud of that I kind of couldn't believe we did, cause you know, we were at that point, think series D thinking about potential acquisition, like trying to figure out what the future of the business was going to be like. And we made the decision to, to not allow. There was sort of like a short list of companies that were like, you're on the hateful company list, like Breitbart and basically like sites that were Nazi and. childhood porn and like, bad. were like, we, we allowed the product to exist on their site, but we started reinforcing moderation rules. And like, if you are going to have use our product, you have to abide by these moderation rules. And if you don't, then we like, you can't use it anymore. But we also turned off ads for all of those sites so that we were not directly profiting off of those websites. interesting. and it was a hard decision because we were making a lot of money off of Breitbart. Like they got a lot of traffic, the ads got a lot of hits, but we were like, just, yeah, we just don't feel right. We don't feel good as a company profiting off of hate. We can't do it, with a clear conscience. and we thought sort of naively, I guess we were like, but if our product is there, at least we have some control over. what kind of hate is allowed to exist on the platform. And we have some things built in that stop certain things from appearing. And if we take it off, they'll just use somebody else who won't put controls in place. So as a VP of people or wherever you were in that career arc, you talked about content moderation in Disqus and some of that practice. How that can be a really emotional strain on folks. I'm curious, what a fucking time to be alive. How are you managing that approach to content moderation from a VP of People lens. Yeah, I mean, there were two things we did. One was we were actually partnering with a team at Google that was developing early AI essentially to, to flag content so that human eyes that were connected to human hearts and minds would not have to read all the trash. but you know, something that we didn't do well enough, I think we could just because of a lack of experience, lack of being informed, we didn't put in enough, I think. Yeah, like enough mental health support for our customer support team. They, we like, we, we gave them lots of flexibility, ability to take time off, ability to time out from a project, ability to say like, can't do this. Like we basically gave them the leeway of if, if you can't handle it, if it's too intense, like, let us know. We don't want you exposed to things you can't like that are too much, but. I think we could have built knowing what I know now, you know, 10 years later, I would have put more explicit protections and more explicit mental health support because some of the stuff they were exposed to is just unspeakably awful. And we happened at that point to have several people on our customer support team who trying think of the right word for it. They were like, sort of radical activists in the way they thought about this stuff. So like they sort of delighted in taking down the Nazis. Like they, there were parts of them that really liked that, but it's a lot of exposure, right? Exactly. Exactly. And so I had, I remember many conversations at lunch being, and I'm like, yeah, I got to go home and bleach my eyeballs. Like I saw some really nasty shit today. And like, How are you doing with that? Like, can you, do you need anything? How can I support you? Like I didn't know what I was doing enough to really know, but we did have a cross-functional team to address all of these, all the decisions we were making around it. And we had, think two people from the customer support team who were a part of that team. So, because that was, that was what was important to me is that we had our CRO, we had someone from engineering who was working on. the anti -hate speech engineering work and people from the customer support team who were on the front lines of experiencing it, that we were all in this discussion together about how the company wanted to handle this stuff, how the company wanted to address it. mean, at least you have that like large conversation, a thoughtful approach. And, you know, I kind of learned this working at Patreon and other content generation places. The depths of the internet. But outside of work, you're also, let's just, know, back that train out. Outside of work, you are buried. You have a baby. Yeah. It was an eight year. Eight years is a long time. Like the eight years from like mid twenties to early thirties. That was a time. Yeah. of in a startup sort of world. think we see a lot of some of the expected 10 years don't come from the internet, 18 months, maybe 24 months. So, you eight years, you go through some personal life growth too. Yeah. It was, and I mean, I'm still close with people I worked with at Discuss. I'm still very close with Daniel. Like this is, these are people that, you know, we grew up together and we, learned a lot together. I think we did five offices in that time period. Like I was very well versed in the San Francisco commercial real estate market. But I just, learned so much and I had the latitude to explore things that were interesting to me and build things in a very trusting environment. I say, I say this all the time. Like I was very spoiled by my first tech HR job. It is not like that everywhere. Yeah. We, we got acquired and the acquiring company was trying to get rid of me for many months. and there was a, I was there for about six months post acquisition and Really, a lot of that is largely credited to Daniel for recognizing that I was adding important value and for fighting for me to not get laid off. Shout out Daniel, best bro I know. He really fought for me on a monthly basis until we both felt that it was going to be the right time for me to leave. Part of that was continuity of care for our team. Mm. who had been absorbed into this very different corporate culture that was sort of trying to keep San Francisco as an office hub the same as we had had it, but they also merged us with another company they'd acquired in San Francisco. So there was a lot of like cultural balancing that needed to happen. And he was like, like, if you want to stay to do this, like, I will keep fighting for you to stay until you're ready to leave until I feel like we're in good place. And so, you know, I started looking for other things, as I was fulfilling my duties as the head of business operations for Disguise. It was my official title. Like I said, lots of weird titles over the course of my career. At one point, my title was just HR. That was my title. And I was like, that's not a title. That's a department. He's like, well, I don't know what your title, I don't know what your title should be. So for a while, my title was just HR, not even human resources, just HR. so yeah, I left post acquisition. yeah. And is that when you go to stride? Cool product bad fit. Man, that's cool product bad fit been there. That's tough. work because I still really believe in the product, like democratizing access to healthcare, decoupling healthcare and employment. Like I am so on board for that. And it was, it was not a good fit. just wrong. I was not right for that team culture. I was not a right match for the CEO. I did a lot of really good work there. And I think I. I was one of those executive turnaround jobs for the first six months where it was like, come in and fix all of this broken shit. Like we clearly have some problems. We clearly have, you know, yes. And so I came in and I did a lot of firefighting, executive team turnover, firing employees for the first time in the company's history, doing like the first engagement survey and having to the executive team reconcile their personal experiences with what was being reported by the company. yeah, and like, yeah, I really like doing that work. I like kind of coming in and bad copping a bad environment and being like, listen, if this is the company you want, great job. But if this is not what you want, like then things have had to change. But just ultimately, like it wasn't, we weren't a great fit for each other. But then I got pregnant with my second child and I was planning to stick it out for a while longer. I was, I was training people on my team in a way that I felt really good about. And I was really excited about growing the people who reported into me. And then it was March, 2020. And then, it was so weird, right? I will remember forever because it was Friday, March 13th. was my last official day of work before going on pre -birth maternity leave, and it was the first day of lockdown. I had just spent two weeks taking the company remote because we were like, okay, everyone's got to go work from home. Came up with COVID policy, came up with like did this whole thing. I remember back at the time, the Amplify community with Lars Schmidt, we were all collaborating on these resources in CODA to try to share with each other, what are you doing about work from home? What are you doing about safety protocols? How do you handle all this? This was all very new. And I had just spent like two weeks or so doing that. And then I was like, okay, I'm on maternity leave now. Okay, it's locked down. My preschooler is home with me and I'm very pregnant. And then I had my baby in April of 2020. And then three weeks later I got let go. Casual. Super, super casual. breastfeeding him on a rocking chair in his bedroom, in the kid's bedroom when I got a call from CEO saying they were going to be making some announcements at all hands and he wanted to talk to me first and let me go. And that was that. And then I did my own exit paperwork because they didn't have a VP of people anymore. And so they didn't know all of the things they had to have an exit paperwork when you're terminating someone while they're on maternity leave. There is a weird thing that happens to a lot of PeopleOps leaders. And it is the day that you are involuntarily terminated from your role and you complete your termination process. It is such a stra - You know, I've written my severance agreement a few times. I've, you know, I've had systems yell at me because the account owner can't terminate themselves. Right? And you're like, I promise I'm not saying this because I'm being self -serving, but this is just legally incorrect and you owe me more money. Yeah, and how would you like to approach that? Can we make it easy for everyone, please? Can I just make it right or do we have to go through a whole thing? wild. you, you mentioned something briefly and I actually want to rewind before we go forward. you talked about the Amplify community and Kim, was as a, as a baby HR generalist in 2015, I moved to San Francisco and people were like, you need to join the org org community. gosh, you're gonna make me very uncomfortable right now. I get, no, no, no, no, no, please. I don't do well with gushing, but I'm trying to be a better person. Yeah. It's a growth moment, a growth moment. at that time, that community wasn't quite right for me. I was a little bit more on an HR nerd track and that was a little bit more of, you know, just a different ops. Yeah. But I remember like, this was my first exposure to operational community collaboration, not a... this is my secret sauce and I'm not sharing, but more of that if we pooled together our Lego blocks, it becomes better. So I'm curious, like a little bit, since you mentioned Amplify and COVID and surviving, a little bit about the community thread you've had throughout your career. Yeah, I, you know, it's something that I never really put my finger on until recently, that this has always been a part of everything I do. And I think it honestly, I think it comes from growing up in theater. think this like, let's all bring what we have to the table. I'm like, fuck it, we're going to put on a show. Like, I think I would have done really well in like a summer stock environment, but I was always on the West coast and not in upstate New York. I just, that element of like, we are all people. We are all equal people who are trying to create something together and we all are different. We have different parts to play, but we can only do this if we all cooperate. Like that is very theater to me. That is very much like the ethos of creating theater and community. And I grew up in theater, like I should specify in Shakespeare. I grew up in Shakespeare theater in Topanga Canyon, which is like outdoor hippie Shakespeare theater. So my sense of community in theater is also very informed by that. But when I was starting out as a baby office manager who wanted to do HR, I was having some very basic issues with things like the freight elevator is broken. Where do I get a cake for this person's birthday? How do I do I -9s? And I was just Googling, right? I didn't know what I was talking about. Then I made friends with the office manager on the floor above us. which at the time was GitHub back when they had a 2000 square foot office was their only office. and she had a friend who was at Heroku and the three of us got together for lunch and we're like, let's talk shop. Let's figure out. Like we all don't know what we're doing. And within like a couple of weeks, we had a group of like five or six of us on, on a email thread. And I mean, this is. When I talk about fly by the seat of your pants, like we were just emailing each other and I kept getting worried that someone was going to accidentally get off left off the list because it was just copy paste emails. So, so I put us in a Google group. I was like, we're in a Google group. Now we can just email this one thing. And then people kept wanting to add their friends and they added their friends. And suddenly we had like almost a thousand members and then we had 2000 members and then we had three that, and it was like, this is a thing. Like, and I'm. I'm really good at starting stuff. I'm not super great at maintaining stuff. Yeah. It's a different skill set, right? I didn't know at the time that it was a different skill set, so I just kept trying to do it myself. And the community is still around today. It's still thriving today. It's been acquired twice. Not for lots of money. I'm not, I still can't buy a house. community is not lucrative. It's right up there with theater and hospitality. right? I'm really good at choosing things that don't pay. but the core ethos of it was the work that we do is not proprietary in most cases. The work that we do should not be the thing that differentiates us enough to like lose out on, on talent and lose out on business and like. Not that the work doesn't impact that, like asking for help on having a recruiting process that doesn't shit the bed is not like, if I share with you, here's how to make a good candidate experience. That's not going to take away from my candidate experience. And so it's this like abundance mindset, right? It's that the rising tide lifting all the ships. and I was very lucky in my early days to have a friend group that was. extremely talented and capable and like a year or two ahead of me. like, Caitlin Holloway was one of my very first HR friends when she was at Clout and I was at Disqus and we were just texting each other being like, what the fuck are we doing? Like, this is how you're supposed to do HR, but I don't want to do it this way. like, I'm not going to do it this way. Are you going to not do it this way too? Like, okay, if we both don't do it this way, then that's fine. And fun, fun fact. The reason I became friends with Kara Alamano, who's what is most recently the CPO at Lattice, is because I was, I thought I had to get my HR certification. And UC Berkeley had an extension program and she was one of the guests. She was like one of the lecturers and she gave a talk about the program. And I was like, I'm going to go learn about this program and get my certification. And at the very end of her talk, she said, if you are looking to do startup HR, come talk to me afterwards. So I went up afterwards and was like, I'm at a startup, what do you want to tell me? And she's like, don't do this program. This is not going to help you. And I was like, okay, will you, will you be my friend then? Like, tell me what I need to know. And she's like, yeah. So instead, we just became friends. I love that. was first, I haven't yet to meet Kara, but I was first exposed right after the org -org recommendation was to join a startup HR list. similarly that kind of died off and came back a couple of times. And it was, again, just a really cool, okay. Thanks for indulging me. always and forever. I have a problem with joining communities because I get very excited and then I join them and then I can't keep up with them and then I feel guilty and then I go into like a shame spiral about being parts of things that I'm not contributing to. So I am not in as many communities now as I would like to be if I could just all the time do it. But. I think that's okay, because I think there are certain communities that are right for certain people. And part of finding your people is also realizing when you're in a community that's not right for you, whether it's because of the way it's run or the stage you're in your career, or what's required of you to be a part of it. Not every space is right for every person at every time. Like you might be there and then grow out of it or need something different. I feel like with communities, there needs to be a level of mutual benefits, right? Like fill my cup, I can give back and we can grow. Thanks for indulging me. We'll get back to your life story. And after you leave Stride, we get on the up and up, Tend Lab, Oyster. Yeah. I decided when I got laid off, I was like, I have maternity leave that I was planning on taking anyway, right? I was going to be on maternity leave for like the whole summer. We were in a pandemic. I have a newborn and a preschooler. I'm just going to not work. I'm going to take care of the kids and be in a pandemic. And I don't know if anybody else remembers spring and summer 2020. It was not an easy time. so hard not to. Yes. So we moved in with my in -laws for what was supposed to be a couple weeks and ended up being seven months up in Washington state because we needed help with the kids and my husband had to go back to work. And while we were up there, I started having a little bit more space in my brain because I was now like, four, five, six months postpartum instead of like freshly postpartum. And we were living with my in -laws. We had a little bit of help with the kids. And I started thinking about what I wanted to do when I was going back to work. I did not want another series B VP of People role. I was still burnt out and tired. I was watching all of the Black Lives Matter, all of the like... political shit, of the COVID shit. I was just like watching all this stuff happen that my colleagues in HR were having to deal with day to day. And I was like, I am not ready to jump back into that role. I am still too burnt out. Like, and it's only gotten harder. So I can't jump into that now. Thank you. I'm very mature. Just have a couple, have two kids and then you're like, what the fuck is my brain? No. No, not for me. it for me was like realizing that in this new world I was in, where I wasn't just contending with myself and even myself and my one kid, I was like, I have now two children and that has changed me in a way that like, I can put up with a lot less than I used to be able to put up with in terms of the stress of my work and the time of my, the time that my work is taking and the energy and the mental load that I'm carrying at work. The combination of taking care of people at work and taking care of people at home just was burning me out. And so I ended up doing some volunteer work that turned into co -founding TendLab, which is a company focused on making the workplace better for caregivers. We were sort of a think tank slash advisory company slash like we were really trying to sell a service where we would go into companies and help them. rethink their benefits, rethink their policies, implement new programs. I mean, just there was not enough business there. Companies unfortunately wanted to hire us to come in and do a one hour like lunch and learn. And then that was it. Right. Exactly. Right. Right. So we did we did a lot of work over the course of about two years together. Some of which I like you can find on my website. we released with Time's Up before Time's Up sort of collapsed. We released an employer's guide to taking care of working caregivers. We started working on an initiative to track caregiver status. So companies could be tracking caregiver status because most companies don't even know how many caregivers they have. And we were doing a lot of really cool stuff. And then ultimately, I was after about a year, we had the hard conversation that founders often have where you say, we are not making enough money to sustain this as a business. Do we want to give up on this or do we just want to find ways to supplement our income? And we started out by supplementing our income. My co -founder, Amy, one of my favorite people in the world, started doing her own thing. I spun up a very quick consulting website and I got my first consulting client, which was Oyster. They asked me to come in basically full time as their fractional interim head of people. And I was like, sick, this consulting thing is easy. You put up your website and then you get a client that's full time. Amazing. I don't even need to, I don't even need to build a book of business. Who needs a pipeline? I just got incredibly lucky. and it was a really good fit. CEO and founder, Tony and I are very like -minded in terms of, Just in terms of vibes, I'll say, like we talk about like making decisions based on vibes and like trusting the universe and like we're both very intuition -based in that way. So we got along really well from the start and what they needed was exactly my experience. was exactly what I said I would never do again. They were a series B startup that was growing and they needed their first time with people. But it was going to be a six month contract. And so I told myself, you can do this. You can go basically in house for six months. doing. Like three weeks in, I was ready to work there full time. I fell in love with the product, I fell in love with the company. But ultimately, they needed a chief people officer who had much more experience than I had in hyper growth global companies. We were when I joined 75 people in 35 countries. And by the time we hired my boss, Mark Frein, our CPO, it was like, call it six months later, we were almost 400 employees in like 60 countries. And then I went in -house as the head of employee experience. And within a year, like that is just wild because now people like me have oysters or deals or remotes to facilitate that, but you were or oyster was. it up. I we weren't making it up as we went. We had a legal team. General counsel was the first hire that they made. within a year, by the time I had been at Oyster for 13 or 14 months, we were at 650 employees in 70 countries. And this hyper growth was something I'd never experienced. The extent of the globalization of the company was something I'd never experienced. And it was fucking wild. It was also the first time in my entire career and I'm counting like everything except for when I worked like retail. So like every like corporate type job I never had. This was the first job where I had a boss who knew what my job was all about and was more senior than me in my current role. I'd always reported to CEOs, founders or even at Google as reporting to engineers, not admins. And I had a team of peers. So when I went from interim head of people to head of employee experience, we, I now was on equal footing with all the people I had hired. So when I was the interim head of people, we had hired a director of people ops. We'd hired a head of talent. We had hired, like a head of community and internal communications. We had, we already had a head of remote and now all of these people who had been managing were my peers. And I was like, holy shit, I have a team of people who are all at the same level that I'm at with like similar experience. had a little bit more experience than they did, but like not by decades. Right. And I, it was just, it felt like a revolution. It felt like, like, this is how all companies should fucking be. You should always have people who do your, like, who are your counterparts. And like, we could, we got so much done. And we had to because we were hiring like 200 people a month. but to have this like team of peers who are all reporting into someone who really deeply understands your job and has been there and that we were all expected to operate largely autonomously because we were asynchronous and across the globe. Like. It was magic. Like we did so much. got so much. We had to build everything. Nothing existed when I joined. There was no comp plan. There was no performance review module. were one of my very first tasks was implementing high bop. Like we didn't have anything when I joined and we built everything. And when you are with a trusted group of peers, I imagine you built trust and it didn't just come with hiring. But when you... Yeah, when you have that... We also had to redo all of our values. That stuff didn't exist. We did all of it. I mean, I would bet most startups need to redo their values incrementally. Yeah, or with large employee growth or with something because what you valued at 10 people might be really different than 100 people. Or even how you operationalize those values, how you define those values might be different. We did this exercise at Disqus when we, right around when we hit like 25, 30 employees, we realized that one of our values was to be humble or humility was one of our values. And we realized that that worked really well when it was like me and Daniel and Jason being like, we don't fucking know what we're doing. yeah, we're humble. Like we're really good at stuff, but there's a lot we don't know. But what that turned into when we hired more and more people, was that new staff didn't realize that really what we meant by humility was like low ego and curiosity. Because we noticed like people were reluctant to share their successes, to share their wins, to like celebrate things that they didn't want to be seen as not being humble. And so we rethought it. We were like, let's rebrand humble as curious and talk about that curiosity is about having a low ego and about recognizing that there is always more to learn. And I love that. When you think about, you know, gathering groups of humans together and the words that we use, you start to see how like, that idea has kind of sprung its own. No, we want you to celebrate. We just don't want, yeah, don't be a dick. interpret things in so many ways. And at Oyster, because we were in over 70 countries at that point, there's also the language barrier. There's also like translation. There's cultural understanding of different things. Like you have to be really explicit and give examples. Like what does it mean when we say we build trust? What are the behaviors? What are the tasks that represent that? That's why I'm so stoked to be working with Pando to develop competencies. for performance management because you have to be explicit. can't just say like, we value building trust and you're not building trust because who's, who's defining trust? What does it mean in your organization? What does it look like in practice? How do you build trust with your customers? How do you build trust with your clients? How do you build trust with your product development team? Like what do these are the, these are like everything goes back to goes back to fucking fantasy studios and my love of documentation and clarity. Like it's, it all comes together. But yeah, I was, it does. so true. So true. Goes back to dramaturgy where it's all about providing clarity. It's all one thing. But yeah, I was there. I, did two layoffs in 2023 and I was a part of the second layoff again, laid myself off. an end. It's true. I'm still consulting with oyster. We're funnily enough working on a project that I started while I was employed that we never got to finish. I love them dearly. I have so much love for that team. It's ridiculous. Like full disclosure, I'm an advisor. I'm an investor. I'm a consultant. I'm working with them in lots of different ways. But that's on purpose. Yeah, but it's because I want to be, it's because I asked to be. It's the same thing with Pando. It's like, if I'm an advisor to a company or I'm involved in the company, it's largely because I have reached out and said, I would like to be officially involved with you because I like you and I like what you do and I believe in you and I want to champion you. And I know the value of my participation in this way. So 2023 happens. I can't hear you or see. You look like you have frozen and I can't see or hear you. no, trying to reconnect. Can't see, can't hear you anymore. Bye. Let's see. Are we back? We're back. I'm back, but I don't... There we go. What? That's okay. That's wild. Well, you're back now. I can see you. think I still have your other recording is fucking shit. It still says it's, on my end it's still recording. It never stopped recording. well that's good. I guess... So where we were, and I'll figure out how to piece this nail together... we're technical difficulties, but we're back now. It's fine. It's going to be fine. Good to redirect us towards kind of what's next. So 2023 happens, you lay yourself off whilst still sort of embedded. And now you've got some cool stuff you're patchworking together as your peaking interest of HR. What you got going on today? got so many things going on. had to name my business patchwork portfolio because I could not land on a single one thing because I want to do all the things because that's my personality and because of ADHD and general enthusiasm for life. So Through my patchwork portfolio, which is my, like, I started out as a fractional HR business. I really wanted to hone in on the types of fractional HR that I loved and not just like blanket. can do everything. because my dear friend, Aaron Marshall, who's the current VP of people at oyster introduced me to the concept of genius zones and, my my pal Natasha Kahimkar over at Melita Advisors, shout out Natasha. When I was first starting to get back into consulting after oyster, she was like, don't start out by offering to do everything, only start out by offering to do the things that you actually want to do. And combining that with Erin teaching me all about genius zones, I really, really wanted to give myself a chance to focus on only the things that I am like uniquely qualified to put out there in the world, the things that I love that get me excited, that I'm good at, that will help people. And what that looks like for businesses is employer branding, internal communications, ghost writing, executive coaching, leadership development, and then culture and values work. So this is all up on my website, patchworkportfolio .com. That's the primary focus of that side of my business. I've done some writing for HR tech companies. I've done some ghost writing for executive social media. I've done some work doing, helping companies figure out what the hell to do with their values once they create them. And I just, I love that work. It lights me up. I know that I'm really fucking good at it and I want to do more of it. And I had started out also offering, and I still do offer an HR advisory and consulting. But now I'm doing a lot of that through PQR. So PQR is the other business that I am running. Although it's not fair to say that I run the business because really Morgan and Catalina do all the heavy lifting on the business operations side of things. But I'm there. I'm bringing so many vibes. I'm our token California girl. We have two arms of our business that we're running now. We have our flagship offering scaling HR, which is a An alternative to SHRM for mid -career HR professionals, it's equity forward, diverse speakers and topics, all about propelling your career, helping you scale your HR expertise and knowledge outside of the HR team and into the rest of the company. So learning how the work you do in HR scales out to the rest of the organization and how to be the most impactful HR leader as you grow. It's not executive training. It's not like VP training. This is... explicitly for the forgotten population of mid -career HR professionals who are like HR VP, HR generalist through director level who often get forgotten about. That's right. Yeah. And then we also have our co -pilot offering where we're working with businesses who need fractional HR support on any number of topics. We can plug in and help folks. cover a maternity leave, spin up their HR ecosystem if they don't have one. We haven't done this for a client yet, but I'm really excited for when we do. A lot of companies will hire like a mid -career HR person and then that person has no scaffolding and they have no coaching. And one of the things we've talked about doing is taking people who have essentially graduated from our program or who are at that same level and then being available as advisors in a very fractional way. So not being a full fractional VP of people, but helping that person grow into the role that they are probably being asked to do, but they're not ready for. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I want to pick out something you said early, being introduced to this idea of Ikagaki and your zone of genius. But it's so funny because way back in your dramaturgy days, back in your internships, you mentioned, you're like, I was with people who could not love this more. who woke up every day and this is all they wanted to do. So I'm curious, like now that you have seen that in the dramaturgy world and given it a name with Zone of Genius and Ikagagi, where are you at in finding your could not love this more work? You know, you know, what's funny is I, I'm finding it. Over the last couple of months, especially, I've really been like locking into it. And now I'm in the scary phase of I need to do business development around it to tell people to hire me for it. So thanks for having me on this podcast, Yay. But we do different things so you can hire us both. Just two Kims. That's right. we're so fun. You can tell, some of the work that's, that's right. some of the work that I've been doing lately, just sort of accidentally for friends is in what I consider like the employer branding realm. So I've been working with friends on visuals, like graphics to go with their social media posts and brand identity stuff. So that when they're like making templates or they're doing a slide deck for presenting and pitching and stuff that it's, it is a uniquely identifiable brand for them. Like brand design for individuals. But also I have done this in the past for companies and I'm realizing like, that's what this is called. Like making the career page awesome and carefully choosing the language you use to talk about your values and creating programs that brand your values internally so that people remember them and know what they are. Like, I love that shit. I can do it all day long. I stay up late in Canva when I should be going to bed, finding just the right arrow design for someone's arrow pointing at their thing. I love it. Well, Kim, thank you for sharing your journey line. Thank you for telling us all about Patchwork Portfolio, which folks can find at PatchworkPortfolio .com. And P -H -R, P -E -A -K -H -R. Thank you. put the links in the show notes, right? That's a thing you can do on a podcast. That's a thing. Yeah. Yeah. You can also find me on Substack. I have a newsletter called I care too much at the intersection of caregiving and culture and corporate cultures and HR specifically. I care too much .substack .com. and find me on LinkedIn and pro tip, if you connect with me on LinkedIn, say you found me through this podcast so that I make sure to know that you're not spam. Why is there so much spam? in the LinkedIn connections? I don't know, but yeah. And then I will absolutely connect with you. right. Well, thank you so much, Kim. Thanks, everyone, for listening. Check out those links in the description below, and we will see you next time. Thank you. World's