To compromise

Last day at Salesforce and I’m still at the office at 6:50pm, babysitting a deal.  My last deal.  My last month end.  Last person in the office.

Reluctantly, I sent off the obligatory goodbye email last night telling people I’m leaving and where I am going.  I received some really wonderful and heartfelt responses.  Particularly from the management here.  For as bitter as I have been and unappreciated as I have felt these last few months, it was nice to hear that my value here was high and my impact was felt.

I had offers for lunch today but I decided to end my time in the financial district the way that it started – at the San Francisco Soup Company, where I have dined no less than 2 days a week for the last 14 years.   As I drove in this morning, I thought about how much excitement and energy this part of town used to hold for me.  I loved commuting on the bus with the rest of the business professionals in the Marina.  I loved putting on my fancy work attire and feeling important.  I loved meeting my friends for drinks after work at the Royal Exchange, talking about our days and feeling proud of each other for all that we were accomplishing as working women.  This part of town, this part of my life was such a HUGE and defining part of who I was, and how I saw myself.  Powerful.  Impactful.  A force to be reckoned with.

It makes me happy that this has all sorted how it has.  That I don’t have to say goodbye to those three things.  That I still get to feel powerful and impactful and like a force.  That I don’t have to change my entire identity just because I don’t want to wear a suit and sit in an office anymore.   That while part of me has changed so very much, maybe it’s not as much as I originally assumed.  I just needed to find a better compromise.

To compromise .. and the promise you hold.

Irish Goodbye

I can’t thank everyone enough for the encouragement, excitement and overall cheerleading that I have received over the last week.  It makes this all so much more fun, more real, more exciting.

I’m at the “oh sh$% what have I done” point in the program, as I think through all of the perks and little luxuries I’m used to with my job.   I have to buy my first computer since college this week.  Bye bye expensed cell phone, gym, mileage.  Small potatoes for all the flexibilities I’ll be gaining but I’m definitely having a bit of an “oh $%^&” moment!

A big thanks as well for the encouragement to keep writing.  I LOVE writing and now that I made it a regular part of my life, I can’t imagine letting it go.  Also, I hardly think the journey stops here or that this is some big panacea.  It’s a step, a big one, but I am sure it won’t be EVERYTHING.

Tuesday is my last day at Salesforce.  I had breakfast this morning with two great buddies that I met at Salesforce and one of them asked me if I felt sad or nostalgic at all about leaving.  I didn’t even have to think about it.  I don’t.  I have never been attached to Salesforce or, for the most part, the people that work there.   It about broke my heart to leave Softchoice – I grew up there, they gave me so much… I felt like I owed them so much of who I was and where I was.  But Salesforce… it’s like I’ve always been hardened to it.  I always swore I’d never work there and maybe part of me never let that go completely.  Whatever the reason, I will of course miss a few choice people very much but as a whole, I don’t feel the slightest pang about walking out the door on Tuesday.  In fact, in my dreams, I don’t even have to tell anybody that I’m quitting… I can just fade into the sunset.  A big goodbye sounds painful.   Are irish goodbyes acceptable when leaving a company??

I’m a single parent this week as J is off heli-skiing in Alaska.  My little guy is keeping everything in perspective and my mind off of the chaos that is about to ensue.

Here we go…!

Rocket Ship

Ok.

All pieces are in.  I know what the final offer is.  I know the risks.  I know what I’m giving up.  I have a vague idea of what I’m gaining.  I know that what I don’t know is likely what is going to make this one heck of a ride, one way or another.   This could be the turning point in my life where I look back and think “that was one of the major crossroads of my life – what if I hadn’t turned in the direction that I did?”

I started off this whole writing project talking about a crossroads.  I remember last summer I was on my first business trip away from Cooper – just one night in Provo, Utah – and I was with my boss.  I really enjoy spending time with her and always love hearing her wisdom on parenting, work, life etc.  She has a very no-nonsense way of looking at things that I find refreshing and inspiring.   Anyways, we were talking about turning points in one’s life.  Usually people only have a handful, maybe even just one or two, of real true decisions that were made that changed the course of their lives.  She spoke of her decision to leave chemical engineering to move into tech sales, and of her decision to date and marry her husband.

Ever since that conversation, I’ve given considerable thought to what MY turning points have been.  What are the decisions I have made that have altered and changed the course of my life.  I thought of one immediately – J.  J was not who I expected my husband to be and yet I’m pretty sure he was brought into my life to change me, to open me up, to get me to rise up and see all that I had been missing, living as I had been.  And the second thing that came immediately to mind was RIGHT NOW.  I don’t have a second turning point yet, but I am at the crossroads, and the decisions and changes that come out of this soul searching, fact finding mission that I am on will likely be what I look back on and say “that year changed the course of the rest of my life”.

This is all exceptionally dramatic.  But if you’ve been reading along on this journey, you know how torn up I have been about the state of my professional affairs.  And how that relates to me.  And who “me” really is.

When I was speaking to Katharine for our interview, as the call was wrapping up and we were more just chatting, she made a comment about how much things had changed just in two weeks.  She said “two weeks ago, we were just a startup that had gained solid traction in our 7 months as a company.  Now… now it’s like we’re on a rocket ship”.   Instantly, a Sheryl Sandberg quote that my current boss and mentor uses all the time popped in my head.

“If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat.  You just get on.”

I think it’s time to take my seat.

Decisions, decisions.

You know that time in your life when you first start making big decisions for yourself – teenage years or slightly older – and you feel so wise and in charge of your destiny?   And you chat with your parents, adult to adult, about what you’ve decided and their first reaction is to ask challenging questions?  “Well have you thought about this?”  “What happens if …”  It used to drive me crazy.  Your first response is to bristle and feel completely shut down.  In your teenage years.

Then you grow up and you realize they are right.  Critical thinking…it’s a great skill!  Think about it from all angles.  If it is an emotional decision, make sure you are bouncing it off of someone who can help you see it logically.  Think through the pieces to which you might be blinded.

My dad was the king of critical thinking.  He approached every decision, big or small, with research and an analytical approach.  When he came to his conclusions, he had a million data points to back it up and could feel confident that he left no stone unturned.   How that played out when he was advising me was to challenge me on every single aspect of whatever decision I was making.  To ask me every question he could think of, to make me think through every consequence this decision could have.  To talk through every worst case scenario, the pros and the cons.  Everything.  What usually ended up happening is he would completely wear me down with doubt and right as I was really wavering and thinking to myself “he’s right, this is a horrible idea…” he’d flip and say “You’re crazy if you don’t do this”.  And relief would flood through me, because I had what I had been looking for all along – his stamp of approval and his confidence that I was making the best decision I could make.  But he wanted me to come to those conclusions on my own.  And think through it like he would.  He was teaching me.

Because of the weight his opinion carried with me, his words are still the soundbites that go through my head when I think back on my biggest life moments.    When I was contemplating moving to Chicago and was so torn up about the idea of leaving the Bay Area, he said “Babe, it’s not like they are asking you to move to Cincinnatti…this is Chicago for god’s sake!  Take the job!”.   When I was buying my first condo at 27, he scared the HELL out of me, asking me if I was ok losing money on this investment (no!), whether I could pay for my mortgage entirely on my base salary (no!), why this place was $200k more than a place right around the corner from it (I don’t know!!).  And finally, when I was about to back out completely he said “you’ve got to buy it… it’s got panache.  Whether it’s a good investment or not down the road, only time will tell but you are making the right decision for right now”.

I miss that sounding board.  A lot.  But, he taught me to think like him, approach problems like him.  And by the time he passed away, I felt confident that at 28, I had gone through enough life moments with him to KNOW how he would think.  How he would approach the problem.  How he would respond.  He taught me well and I carry those skills in my heart and mind every day.

But I sure do wish I could talk with him about the decision that faces me today.  Even though I feel confident that I know what he would say, it would be nice to have some reassurance.

The good news is, my decision-making is not so single-threaded these days.  The influencers and sounding boards that I have today give me such a different perspective that rounds out the analytical approach.  He used to say to me all the time “take emotions out of it..you’re too emotional, think about it rationally” (also, anybody find it ironic he used to tell me I’m too emotional?  Perhaps he beat it out of me in my youth…!).   But the truth is, following your head all the time does not always lead to a happy life.  It leads to a safe life, but perhaps not the BEST life.

I’m thankful to have been taught such a critical foundation for making decisions.  I’m thankful to have a new appreciation for old influences that were always there and often drowned out by the “logical approach”.   And I’m very thankful for a husband that let’s me go through my old ways of analyzing a situation while providing a totally new world of color and perspective for me to think about.

Look at me.  Evolving as I type.

The process

So much to say.  So much going through my head.  So much.  So much.

It’s been a whirlwind of emotion.  It took some time to connect with the CRO, the gal that would be my boss.  She kept setting times to talk and then I wouldn’t hear back – unbeknownst to me, she was up in Vancouver speaking at the TED conference and was incredibly busy.  My brain started to whirl – were they looking at another candidate and were trying to buy some time?  Did they have questions about my ability to do this job?  Had I said something wrong in my conversations with them?  I said to J that it was clear that I REALLY wanted this because I found myself checking my phone every 30 seconds, refreshing my email constantly and feeling something that reminded me of what it used to feel like waiting for a guy I REALLY liked to call.

And then I got the offer.  She said some incredibly complimentary things.  It was a great conversation.

Yesterday, J and I had a nice 7 hours in the car driving home from Mammoth to discuss all the ins and outs of the role.  What an opportunity – to build out a team and strategy, all from the ground up for a company that supports something I’m very passionate about.  To be offered the opportunity to get back to management and still not have to be in an office all day.  To feel 100% certain that there is a major need/hole in the business world that needs filling and to be apart of something that could potentially address that void.   To do all of this from home…. and to finally see through the haze that the one thing I know for sure, the one thing I’ve never wavered on – that when kids are in school, I WILL pick them up after school…I will be home with them or driving them to sports or participating in after school activities – might actually be a reality WHILE keeping something for me.  So many of my stay at home mom friends have said that what they didn’t anticipate was how strongly they would desire something just for them.  Something that exercised their brains the way they used to in their successful careers.    Could it really be possible to be building something incredible, feel successful and driven in a career while being present for my kids?   Time will tell, but this is the first glimpse of potential I’ve seen.

But like everything, I approach this with a healthy dose of skepticism, analytics and wanting to think through every aspect.  Am I caught up in what a great story this is and not thinking through what this would actually be like?  Did I just get competitive and want to “win” the position?   Have I taken this focus on serendipity too far – am I doing this because I’ve spent the last 9 months developing this spiritually fruity outlook on life and am not approaching this from a rational perspective.   Does this sound amazing to me because I’m so focused on the ability to work from home that I can’t see past that?  Do I actually want to DO the job they are offering me?  And then there’s the risk.  Talk about a departure from everything I know.  Big corporations, process, infrastructure, an HR department.  Into a super risky situation – unpredictably risky compensation, no process, wild wild west.  I spent all last night reading up on how to negotiate an offer from a seed funded startup… because I have no idea!  The startup world is completely different than what I know…options and equity and tax implications and series A funding and benefits (or lack there of) and on and on.  I have no idea if the offer they gave me makes any sense.  I only know the risks I’m taking.  Would I take these risks if I were single?

J could not be more supportive.  He is so encouraging of all of this.  It’s clear he thinks this is a no-brainer and in fact I think he’s frustrated with my consistent questioning, trying to poke holes in what looks to be an amazing opportunity.  But he’s letting me go through the process because he knows that this is how I come to a decision I can get behind and stay behind.

Decisions will be made soon.  I’m still waiting for the offer in writing and then I plan to counter.  What I do know is that I am still very, very impressed with the woman that I originally contacted on this and feel excited at the opportunity to learn from her.  She wrote me the following email yesterday morning.   Nice confidence boost for me and for me to have in her.

Hi Kylie – just wanted to send you a quick note and let you know how excited we are about the possibility of you coming on board to build this company with us.

I’ve been involved from the ground up  with a number of startups. HuffPost was my first and PowerToFly will hopefully be my last!   We want to grow this into a company that can change the lives of countless women for generations to come.

It goes without saying you’d take a big leap… but with a very strong team that has generated an amazing amount of traction in just eight months. We hope you join so we can be even stronger together.

Let me know if you have any questions for me as you speak with Nathalie.

Katharine

Well

I got an offer!  A real official offer.  To be the head of sales and run/build their sales organization and strategy. 

Details to come.  Head spinning. 

Serendipity

Ok so here is what has been going on.  It seems a little nuts to be documenting this before anything is actually official (I’m so superstitious) but I guess this blog has been just about documenting the process and this is as part of the process as anything.  So here goes.

That article I posted here (and also posted on Facebook).. it really got to me.  I felt like I had written it myself – how she felt in her 20s, how she feels now, what’s wrong with today’s companies.  All of it.  It is exactly what I have been yelling from the rooftops ever since coming back to work in June – why don’t we make it easier for women to come back to work from having a baby?  Why are there not more part-time, job-shares, work from home opportunities?  Why are we actively pushing people like me, who have spent the last decade building up a successful career and arsenal of skills and talent, out of the workforce because we are no longer willing to conform to an antiquated infrastructure.  Who, if forced to choose, will always choose their children but that does not mean they don’t have a strong desire to work.  Who want to be valued and contributing members of society but have to put their kid’s needs first.   It seems completely illogical to me.  And almost like a waste of money when you think about it.  Companies have invested a lot of money in my career development…was that money all for naught if you won’t then be flexible enough to let me do the work you trained me to do, but in the way I choose to do it?  I digress.  But suffice it to say, this is a passionate topic for me.

So, the article.  It got to me. I mean when do I post articles on Facebook?  Not very often.   All of a sudden a thought popped in my head “I have to write this woman.  I have to write her and tell her that she has started exactly what I’ve been contemplating all year.”  So I started drafting an email.  It flowed fast – it was like it was pouring out of me.  When I reread it after I was done, I barely touched a word.  So I sent it.  To every variation of Katharine Zaleski @ PowerToFly I could come up with.  But they all bounced back.   So I went to her LinkedIN and Facebook – both VERY corporate looking, meaning the type that were more for show vs. something that she was using for personal use, ie: checking messages on.  But I cut and paste my email there and sent it to her.   I went to her website and thought about using their one “contact us” submission form to send the same letter.  All of this took well over an hour on a random Tuesday night.   At the very last minute, I checked our salesforce database to see if they are a customer and lo and behold, they are and THERE was her email address.  Hark, I have found it.

I sent the email and it didn’t bounce back.

The very next morning, we were going through our normal morning routine with the Today Show on in the background and all of a sudden I hear “the article that is sweeping the country, and here we have Katharine Zaleski to discuss”.  Well shoot.  That combined with the fact that people were posting and re-posting that article every time I checked my facebook feed… I figured my shot of hearing from her now was pretty darn low.  I was sure my email would get buried amidst all of the correspondence that she’d received from this huge media frenzy.

But yet something in my gut said…”I kinda think you’ll hear back”.

Fast forward 10 days, just this past Sunday.  I was up at Sugar Bowl trying to entertain a very busy and restless toddler while J competed in the Banzai races and on a rare quiet moment, I checked my email.  She responded!!  I opened it, read it and truthfully, felt a little bummed.  She was absolutely appreciative of my note and loved hearing my story, but she ended with saying she’d “love to see me on her site”.  That wasn’t what I wanted at all.  I didn’t want to be one of the moms working on PowerToFly, I wanted to be a mom working FOR PowerToFly.

I sat on it for a day and then decided to respond.  I clarified my intentions, stated that I understood that they were likely a very lean organization right now but that should they have any West Coast needs, here is my resume and to let me know.  If not, I’d love to be a part of the conversation moving forward (they are starting a forum to foster this type of discussion).   She wrote me back in less than 5 minutes, thanking me for clarifying and said that as a matter of fact, they have a huge need right now to address their sales strategy.  And could I speak with their Chief Revenue Officer, cc’ed.  The CRO responded within 10 minutes to that email and the next thing I know, I have a call set with her for the very next day at 10:30am.

So now it’s Tuesday.  My call with this gal (talk about an intimidating resume..!) is set for 10:30 and it goes pretty well.  She had a ton of questions about my resume, my management experience etc.   At the end she asks that I speak with one of the founders sometime this week.  I say sure.  I write a thank you note and send it off within an hour of our call, to which she responds immediately and says “actually, can you speak with our founder this afternoon?  How’s 1:30pm?”

1:30pm comes around, and I’m on the phone with another incredibly impressive woman with an intimidating resume but the call goes great.  It was so inspiring to hear her story, why she started the company, the potential she sees and the whitespace that needs painting.  She had a ton of questions about whether or not I can really run a sales organization.  Have I ever built a comp plan?  Can I put together a training program?  Do I hire well?  Yes, yes and yes.  This is right in my wheel house.  I’ve done all of this before, and I’ve done it well.   By the end of the call she says “well, listen here’s the deal.  You seem like a very smart and driven girl who knows exactly what she wants”.  And then she says that she is going to put together an offer letter for me.  An offer.  Like, a job.  I thanked her profusely and then she went into a little speech on serendipity.

She said “listen it was serendipitous how Katharine and I even came together to start this company…she sent me a birth announcement on the birth of her first child and it reminded me that I wanted to run some ideas by her so I called her and set up lunch”.   She said that she thought it was extremely serendipitous that they had found me.  That my email had surfaced given how much correspondence they’ve received since the article and news frenzy began.  That I had the exact experience they were looking for, the passion for the project etc.  It was all serendipity.

We ended the call and she said “I guess you should probably also speak with Katharine, so I will set that up”.  Katharine and I spoke this morning – I think it went well.  She definitely was much more focused on determining whether I can actually DO this job.  Can I really build a sales organization?  Put a scalable and sustainable structure in place?  Will I roll up my sleeves and help them solve their immediate problem of too much demand and not enough people to facilitate it?   Unfortunately, while my resume looks good, none of these ladies come from the tech industry so the names and positions on my resume don’t speak for themselves as much as they might in my own field.  But I did my best, and that is all I can do.

She said to me at the end “if we were to offer you a job, how soon can you start”.  I, of course, wanted to say “oh hey wait, you already offered me one!”  but I get that they need to vet me fully.  It seemed awfully crazy to me that they wanted to hire me after 60 minutes of discussion, so having a bit more process in place is not a bad thing.  That said, of course I’m nervous and stressed that maybe they didn’t like me as much as I liked them.   What if I didn’t convey my experience appropriately or they want someone who has worked at a start-up before?  Why does the brain always go to self-doubt?

I also need to pull back and really be sure that this is a leap I’d be willing to take.   It’s a HUGE risk.  They are VERY small and have grown exponentially in a VERY short amt of time.  It’s make or break time.  I’m going to have to work REALLY hard – am I up for the challenge?

Here’s what I do know though, that gives me comfort and peace in all of it.  Whatever is supposed to happen will.  If this is the job I’m supposed to take, an offer will come through and I will feel an overwhelming push to take it.  If it isn’t, then something will fall through and this won’t pan out.  And that’s ok too.  I feel like I am past the point of wanting something SO bad and feeling nervous that it might not come through.  I did my best. I put my best foot forward.  That is all I can do and the rest will play out as it should.

At the very least, it has proven to me that all of what I’ve been writing about is actually true.  That there is something out there for me.  I’ve been so locked in this circle of thinking that what I am passionate about doesn’t necessarily translate into what my skills are.  Yes, I LOVE photography.  But I’m not really that good at it!   I love cooking and entertaining, but do I really want to do that for a living?  And what I’m good at – sales and business – that is what I DON’T want to do because I can’t imagine selling widgets forever.    But what if it isn’t widgets.   What if it is a belief that I am selling.  A belief that is so core to who I am that I’ve been bitching and moaning about it for close to a year (to ANYBODY that will listen), and really, longer than that.

Apparently I’ve been confusing my disgruntled and irate employee behavior with real, true passion.    Who knew?

I don’t know what will happen.  But remember that post I wrote on trusting your gut?  I have that feeling.  The one I felt in my sorority house.  The one I felt when I walked into Softchoice for the first time.  The one I felt when I walked into the condo on Avila.   The one I felt when J came over the night I was sick with strep throat.

And from there, all I can do is give it my all.

Details to follow..

I’m super antsy right now.  I’ve got something brewing… I’ll share it regardless of what happens but I’m not ready to share it yet.  Suffice it to say, it’s the first act of real, true serendipity/fate/enter-fluffy-word-here I have had in this whole process.  The first time I have actually seen evidence of this all not being for naught and that I might ACTUALLY get some clarity, realize my passion and find something that compliments it.

I talked to my mom this afternoon about it all and she said “You’ve been waiting for a sign…this couldn’t be more obvious”.

Details tomorrow or Thursday.

Champagne on Monday

Today is a pretty monumental day – we paid off the last of J’s student loans today.   Over the last two years, we’ve been taking it down chunk by chunk and today, we submitted our very last payment.  It is unbelievably amazing how good it feels.

I remember when we first started dating and got to that point in the relationship where it’s appropriate to share balance sheets.  From minute one, I assumed the debt as my own and we talked about our plans to pay it down.  Our projections were so far in the future, it scared me.   It is the best kind of debt for the very best reasons, and has paid off in spades for my very successful husband, but thinking that we’d be paying something off so far into the future really rattled me.

But we focused, we saved and we prioritized.  And it’s gone.

So tonight, Monday or not, we celebrate.  We opened our very best bottle of champagne that has been in the cellar for years, waiting for something SO special that it warranted opening.

Cooper got in on the celebration as well.

No good terrible very bad…

What is it about bad days?  I’ve always wondered that, about good days and bad days.  Those days where you should literally go out and buy a lotto ticket because you just can’t lose – everything is going your way down to the timing of the traffic lights.    And then the days were you just can’t seem to do anything right and people are waiting in line to push you down.  What is that?

I get the whole energy in the universe thing, but I’ve never thought about it from the standpoint of a delayed response.  Am I paying today for energy I put out there a month ago?

It’s little stuff, nothing catastrophic.  But it’s one of those days where I just feel like putting my head down, shutting my eyes and tuning everything out.  If you are sleeping, customers can’t yell at you, kids can’t fall off the bed and deals can’t go south.   You can’t drop an armful of clean laundry on a wet, dirty bathroom floor.  You can’t hit your head on the dryer door.  Hard.  Your kid can’t squeeze an entire pouch of pureed food all over your newly dry-cleaned sweater.

Sleep.  Sleep is best.