My #FirstSevenJobs

A brief recounting of an not terribly intentional career-so-far.

In my ranch hand days. (But these particular horses were mine…)

Ranch Hand

It began as an unpaid internship. Once it turned into a job, I charged my babysitting rate of $2.50/hr. Traveled to shows with a United States Equestrian Team member. Handled her horses, warmed them up for her to show, cleaned stalls, slept in the trailer, threw hay, doctored wounds, and once got appendicitis during State Fair.

My boss was upset at having to finish loading the trailer without me because I was laying in the back of the trailer’s living quarters screaming doubled over in pain. She calmed down later and bought me some French fries. I had surgery the next day for an appendix that was necrotic and rotting away inside of me. The doctor said, “It’s amazing it didn’t burst, if you were vomiting 24 hours ago.”

I got a raise to $5 after I returned from surgery. I was 13.

Trail Ride Guide

No salary — worked for tips and my own horse’s board at the ranch. There were no heated buildings. If it was too cold for trail rides, nobody came to ride and we didn’t get tips, but the horses still needed care. The business wouldn’t have survived without unpaid child labor.

A new girl came along and the owner took a shine to her. After that, when he disappeared mid-day to go to the biker bar, she was on the back of the bike. She didn’t talk much to the rest of us teenagers after that started. I told her parents. They said, “We know, but we’d rather she was out with Garth (name changed) than with some boy her age.”

Garth’s wife died several years before I knew him. She kept rabbits. He couldn’t bear to get rid of them, so he turned them loose on the ranch. They bred like… (you know). Sometimes we found them frozen to death in the winter. You could buy a baby for $5.

I left after Garth said one day, “You have pretty hair. I like it braided like that. We should go camping sometime with some horses.” I was 17.

Petco Cashier

I thought, “I love animals, I’ll apply to work for a pet store.”

Don’t do that.

Pet stores have animals that die. The animals that die go in a chest freezer in the back until one day the freezer is full and someone has to clean it out and box all the animals so the manager can drive them somewhere to be incinerated. The first job of the day was removing the dead animals before the store opens and kids see them.

The store manager was an enormous advocate for animal rescue. She wrote two books about adopting pets, and held a huge adoption fair for all the shelters and rescues in town every year. Our store was always one of the regional leaders in raising money for animal rescue. (I was #1 cashier at fundraising time, mostly because my coworkers didn’t bother asking each customer to give.)

But no matter how much the store manager cares, Petco is a business based on selling animals in bulk like cereal, and when you do that, a lot of them die.

Door-to-Door Fundraiser

It was a good cause: shutting down a horrifically polluting, non-compliant cement plant. The plant director had once been caught repairing a million-dollar air filter with duct tape. Actual duct tape!

You get 50% of the donations collected, but there’s a minimum you have to collect each day to stay employed. If you’re under the minimum they have to pay you minimum wage. They don’t like to do that, so you get fired.

I got really good at finding my way in strange neighborhoods. One time, someone couldn’t donate cash but gave me a bunch of plants for my garden instead. Another person lent me an umbrella in a hailstorm. I returned it to her porch at the end of my shift. Occasionally, I got offered hot chocolate on cold days.

I was good at it for about two months. Then I burned out on asking strangers for money, and something changed. Maybe my body language or my eye contact. They stopped giving me money. I had to leave. I supplemented my meager donations with my own money on what I knew was going to be my last shift, so I didn’t have to go out on an under-minimum day and demotivate the rest of the team.

I now keep power bars and cold drinks around for people who come to my door, whether they’re evangelists, salesmen, politicians, or whatever else.

Yelp Scout

I reviewed businesses in bulk for $15/hr when Yelp launched in Denver. The idea was to make sure that every cool spot in Denver had loads of Yelp reviews, let search engines pick up on that, and then, with time and good examples, real Yelp users would start posting reviews. Looks like the strategy worked :)

At the time, I saw Yelp Scouting not as a direction, but as a way to pay rent and stave off panic while I figured out what to do about my future. I had just failed Public Speaking 101 at the local community college, which was supposed to be my “Easy A” for the semester. The plan was to keep a 3.5 GPA at the community college and get a guaranteed transfer to Colorado State University after my Associate’s Degree. Not easy to keep a 3.5 when you fail your gimme class.

Yelp turned out to be probably my most pivotal career move. (And I won a statewide public speaking award in 2013 — so, there.)

Social Media Marketer

Applied to a “social marketing” job on Craigslist because I was curious what “social marketing” might be. To my surprise, landed an interview. It was 2007. The hiring manager wasn’t really sure what social marketing was, either, but he was sure he needed some of it at his fledgling social network for the disability community.

I had no intention of accepting the job when I went to the interview, but they offered me a salary of $29,000, which seemed like enough money to buy the world. I took my then-boyfriend out to dinner at a nice Italian place and accepted the position. I didn’t even have a Facebook account and I was now in charge of social media marketing for a startup. They liked my writing and that I had some exposure to the startup world through Yelp. (Like I said: Most pivotal career move.)

It was incredible. I thought I had no experience, but as I got into the swing of things, I realized I’d been a member of so many forums, online conferences, and blog communities that this was second nature to me. More importantly, I noticed, to my surprise, that having a massive online network of loved ones wasn’t second nature to everyone. (2007, remember.) Suddenly, I had a rare and valuable skill. I was so good at driving traffic to the site that I occasionally DDOSed the network by myself.

Like all the other niche social networks of its era, Disaboom got crushed by the one-two punch of Facebook and a global recession. We IPOed in December 2007, the month I was hired, and I was laid off with my whole team in June of 2009.

Community Manager

A year before getting laid off, I interviewed with Associated Content for a job I didn’t want. They had a content partnership with Disaboom which nobody was happy with. I was curious about AC’s side of the story, so I called them about a job and landed an interview. I met the CEO and told him that I wasn’t a fit for the junior editorial role, but asked him to call me if he needed someone in social media. He called me the week after I lost my job.

What started out as “get us a bunch of social media traffic” turned into community management. I managed contributor forums, built out education modules to teach writing fundamentals and social media best practices, and worked with the Featured Contributors program to keep high-value users engaged.

We got bought out by Yahoo in 2010 and rebranded with plenty of purple. Yahoo had a tuition assistance program that allowed me to finally finish my Associate’s Degree, get that 3.5, and finish a four-year degree with CSU. I freelanced after hours, ghostwriting for various CEOs, and bought a house in December of 2010.

Yahoo was the most fun I’ve ever had at work in some ways, and a disappointment in other ways. I met incredible people that I hope to keep in touch with forever. I got to visit Silicon Valley and feel the thrill of a huge tech campus — all the more exciting to me as someone who never got a real “living on a college campus” experience. I was a part of big things that were seen by hundreds of millions of people.

And yet, by the time I left, I was eager to go pull up my roots, move to LA, and take on a massive new challenge — but that would be job number eight, so I’ll say no more.

Thanks for reading, and please do give that green heart a little tap! If you enjoyed this, maybe you’d enjoy my thoughts on a totally different aspect of pursuing a career in startups?

Surviving #StartupLife as a Teetotaler_When I read Sarah Jane Coffey’s take on not drinking in #startuplife, it took me back to the first time I met another…_medium.com