This post is several weeks overdue. Weeks ago, a friend of Lindsay and myself was generous enough to invite me to her podcast to talk about my experience changing careers. The whole being recorded thing was a new experience for me, and one I am curious about moving forward.

Here is a link to the podcast on the career clarity website. It is also available wherever you listen to your podcasts searching for Career Clarity. I encourage anyone who stumbles on this to listen and read my additional comments below for some brutal honesty. Thanks again for the opportunity Lisa, I look forward to following Career Clarity and cannot recommend her or her company enough.

It is funny the things you say when you are put on the spot sometimes. I don’t know that the microphone contributes much, but I am sure it plays a part. As I listened back, there were a couple of points where I was uncomfortable with how I presented my situation:

  • I presented my foray into the blog platform business as something I financed myself. My dad gave me cash to explore this idea (I want to say 10k). He always played these games with money, some fruitful, some not. During this time, the game was keeping small sums of cash out of banks to avoid higher tuitions on the FAFSA. This money went primarily to legal fees (people posting content on YOUR site can land you in jail quickly without some terms of use documents), domain expenses, and some other expenses (some stupid as I look in hindsight). My dad has always fixated on helping my sister and I pay off our student loans, so I think he saw the money as an investment in either me or the business. Hopefully, I can make this one of his best investments even though the corporation is no more.
  • I also presented this as something I came to myself. The idea itself is not novel, providing a content platform that returns ad revenue to its members. What made me take “the leap” was the people I had around me. I had a friend (Alex Eisenach) who was confident in his ability to deliver the technology in a short time frame if I could remove business hurdles. We both learned an immense amount. He put in tons of hours to build something fun; maybe we will get it back out there one of these years.
  • I presented my year off as being one which I was primarily able to finance. While this is true, I had the support of my family in a few key ways. First, my grandmother was near the end of her life and spreading money to her children legally in increments each year. I probably benefited to the tune of 10-15k during the period of attending school and working for next to nothing for a startup, making this a more comfortable experience.

Link to Career Clarity

Link to Lisa Lewis on LinkedIn