HappyFunPeople: Jen DiGiacomo

How HFC is like peak-era AOL, mid-COVID Cannonball Runs, and management lessons from Vince Gilligan.

HappyFunPeople is a series where we talk with HFCers about their life experience, what motivates them, and what it’s like to work at HFC. Jen was a client of HFC in its early days and is now Director of Production. The interview took place in early May, 2021, so some references to current events may be dated at time of publication.

HappyFunCorp: I’m going to start out the way I always do, by going through your story from the beginning: where you’re from, and how your experiences have informed the work you do and the kind of person that you are today.

Jen: I’m definitely a vagabond. I was born in New Orleans, grew up in the Philadelphia area, went to college in Philly, ended up moving to the Maryland/D.C./Virginia area to get married and divorced and work at AOL. And now I’m in New York City, Lower East Side Manhattan.

HappyFunCorp: I’m curious what you studied in college in Philly.

Jen: American history major, Japanese history and Japanese culture minor.

My dad was a doctor and my brother is a trauma surgeon, so I was expected to go to med school or law school. I remember taking my first college chemistry course — and I was a very good high school student; I mean, I was a top-of-the-class high school student — [laughs] “wow, yeah, chemistry! I’m not going to be a doctor, there’s no way I’m taking this”. I didn’t want to be a lawyer and being the youngest, I was always a rebel. I was always happy to tell my dad “no”, which no one else in the family ever did.

I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, so I just took a lot of fun courses, but ended up being an American history major, which gives me an interesting view of politics. It gives me an interesting view of the pandemic because I take a long view of the world. I understand that bad things will have ramifications, long-term, that will be good. I tend to take a step back as world events happen.

I’ve always been fascinated by Japanese culture. My dad and I used to go see Kurosawa films back before DVDs, back before you could really get them. So, it was always like, “let’s travel somewhere to see that.” I tried taking Japanese — it did not go well but it was fun.

HappyFunCorp: I have to say one of my favorite memories of my late dad was going to see The Hidden Fortress. That was a special event.

Jen: Yeah. For us, it was Yojimbo, it was Sanjuro, it was Toshiro Mifune as the tough guy. Our holy grail was Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo. I actually have the poster in my living room, which my dad gave me probably about five years ago as he was downsizing stuff. Not a great movie, but it was fun to try to get and finally see it. [Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo was, of course, not directed by Kurosawa, but rather Kihachi Okamoto — ed]

HappyFunCorp: How did you end up coming to AOL and what kind of work were you doing? And just for readers that are maybe too young to remember or were living under a rock, AOL was the Internet for most people for a period of time.

Jen: I took a very circuitous route. I really tortured my poor parents by going to an Ivy League school and then not doing anything with it.

I ended up working in a restaurant; I worked in kitchens. I was a dishwasher and then became a sous chef for a while, then started waiting tables and bartending, and managed a bar. That was over a three- or four-year span, and it was fun. I was young. It was bartender money and free food, and that was great.

Then I got in a relationship and ended up moving down to D.C. and knocked around a lot of different jobs. I worked at the National Academy of Science installing phones, and I was obsessed with this thing called the Internet. I was on it every night. I had an account with a company called Digex and had a shell account. We were downloading games via FTP — sort of the precursor to Zork and things like that. My first email service was Pine, so we were using Unix to get emails. You would send emails back and forth to people just because you could, and be like, “Did you get this?” And then you’d call them, “Hey, I just sent you an email.” It was fun.

I was into gaming at that point: I was doing LARPS, live action role playing games. We actually did Wild Cards and got the license from George R. R. Martin back when no one knew who the hell he was. One of those folks who played started to run AOL Games. They had a job opening and everybody in this group applied for it, and I ended up getting it. I remember asking, “How did I get this job? Why did you pick me?” and they were like, “Every job you ever had, you got promoted, like, immediately. Every job you showed all of this progress.” I started as an assistant programming manager and I did a lot of writing. That was sort of when I first dipped my toe into digital and I ended up being at AOL for 11 years.

HappyFunCorp: What year was this that you joined AOL?

Jen: May 1996.

HappyFunCorp: OMG!

Jen: Yeah. I was like 10 years old. [Laughs] We had just announced five million members when I joined. I was programming Windows AOL 3.0 and Mac 2.7. You had to have a Mac and a Windows machine, and we were using Rainman/FDO, so that was my first coding language. I had to build forms in FDO and it was very fixed fields. It’s great training as a writer because on the web now, if you write something too long, it sort of pushes to the next line. It’s not a big deal there, back then it just cut off.

HappyFunCorp: This is well before the responsive web [laughs].

Jen: Yeah, we had 32-by-32-pixel icons.

I managed the programming for AOL Games. This was when people were paying by the hour — it was $9.95 plus something like $2.95 per hour. We had a game called GemStone III, which was a text adventure game, a D&D-style game, and we literally had people with thousand-dollar phone bills playing that.

I would program Simutronics; Neil from Simutronics used to call me up because they always wanted to be on the homepage and I would assign whatever would be on the homepage. Every time we did, we’d bring down their servers. I’d be like, “Neil, we’re going to crash the servers tonight,” and so, we’d stick it on and boom! Then I’d block them for whatever, three weeks. It was a lot of fun. I was young and it was a group of really smart people.

I mean, it’s funny: a third of my friends on Facebook are all the people I worked with at AOL. At AOL, we did layoffs every six months and would reorg every six months so you ended up meeting all of these different people. Whoever wasn’t good enough to keep up got laid off, and everyone who could figure out how to lean into change and work without a boss — because we effectively didn’t have bosses at that point — those were the people who stayed, and I still have lifelong friendships from that. Sue Poulton, who works with us? I knew her from back then.

HappyFunCorp: It sounds like it was a really special time.

Jen: Yeah, it was.

HappyFunCorp: You also survived the big tech bubble which I think was in 2000.

Jen: Well, we bought Time Warner right before the bubble. I think we were part of the bubble. We were one of the reasons for the bubble, but Steve Case could not have timed it better. In fact, the joke was that the Time Warner merger worked because AOL bought them, because they were in-fighting. They never worked together until AOL bought them and then they had a common foe.

HappyFunCorp: Do you have favorite memories or projects from that era? I know we’re supposed to be talking about HFC, but…

Jen: Definitely. I guess probably the coolest thing I did is that I created the first online reality series. I was running AOL Small Business and I was bored with it, because it wasn’t exciting. It wasn’t like games, it wasn’t all these other things that I’ve done. So I tried to figure out something to make it less boring, and I said, “Well, what’s it like to start your own business?”

I couldn’t get the AOL Video team to do it, so they just gave me a budget and I hired a film director, Steve Gibson, to work on it with me. We found four small businesses and followed them over the course of a year. We shot video and had message boards and what is now [called] a blog post each week, and we would tie that together. AmEx OPEN did a $5-million sponsorship of it each year and I would fly around the country and interview these people. We went down to New Orleans, Corpus Christi, Colorado, and all these different places and it was a huge hit for AOL. It was a lot of fun. I learned a lot doing that.

And then the second season, I only had three businesses. I couldn’t find a fourth business — and then Katrina hit. The business that was down in New Orleans in the French Quarter — I went back with them the first time they were going back to see if their building was still standing. We flew into Baton Rouge and drove in with cameras and followed them. That was this unbelievable experience because we drove by the Superdome and the top sort of plastic covering of the Superdome had been pulled off. I remember driving through and it looked like God had pulled the top of the Superdome off and it was just — we had this amazing footage and obviously it was a tragedy but it was, from a filmmaking perspective, it was spectacular.

HappyFunCorp: And you were giving people a window into this thing that wasn’t just the same few news clips that everyone had seen —

Jen: Yep. It was actually interesting. They were a biracial gay couple who I selected in 2000 and featured them on the welcome screen of AOL. I sat down with them and I said, “Guys, I love you. You guys are awesome. I’m sorry, but we can’t talk about gay marriage, we can’t talk about this, can’t talk about that, because people are going to start posting.” And they’re like, “Well, won’t people figure out that we have the same last name?” And I’m like, “No, they won’t.”

I used to joke that they were related, that’s why they have the same last name. No one ever posted about it and it’s just because they were really a cool team working together. They were funny and so, it was neat. It was neat to be able to do that 20-plus years ago.

HappyFunCorp: Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me that you had an experience like that. You’re definitely entrepreneurial and really get storytelling and seem really passionate about it.

Jen: Well, yes, I’ve done some short films. I’ve won some awards for screenwriting, and in fact, I worked on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul after I left AOL. I did a second screen app for AMC, which integrated real-time content. I got to read scripts before the episodes aired. I had to sign a contract that had a $1-million fine if the script with my name on it got out. I had to destroy them afterwards. I love storytelling and I try to weave it into anything that I do.

HappyFunCorp: The second screen app is how you initially got to meet Ben and Will, right?

Jen: When I left AOL a group of us worked together as consultants. It was mostly content people, and we didn’t have any developers. That’s how I ended up meeting Ben and Will, who were just Ben and Will.

I think it was nominally HFC, but it was two guys in an apartment working together coding stuff. I remember we built an iOS app for CBS, SpotDash. We needed an Android app, and I remember Ben called me up, he said, “Yo, there’s this guy Jon Evans who can build the Android app for you.” And that’s how I met Jon, who’s our CTO.

So I worked with Ben and Will on basically any project that came across that needed something built. I ended up working on a project called YEAH! Movies where we were taking modern classic films and doing something like VH1 pop-up video as sort of subtitles and integrating that. It was a cool technology stack because we were doing Brightcove and using their cue-point technology, which was supposed to be for advertising, but we were using it for content.

So, we did this as sort of the first OTT streaming service that AMC had and the developers we were working with down in Costa Rica could never get this product out the door. I wasn’t actually working on this project; I knew Lisa Judson, who was running the project. I was friends with her from AOL days, and we were chatting one day over lunch and she’s like, “Yeah, I was supposed to launch and it didn’t launch”

She asked if I wanted to work on the project during that conversation and I couldn’t figure out why shit wasn’t getting done because we would do reviews. We did code reviews and would sit down and run through stuff, and it wouldn’t work. Why are we having this meeting if it doesn’t fucking work? That’s when I called Ben and Will, and I said, “Look, I don’t know if it’s bad code. I don’t know if it’s bad management. I don’t know what’s going on.”

They went down to Costa Rica and met with the team and said, “No, they thought they were building a prototype. They didn’t realize they were building something for launch.” Eventually, they ended up taking over but it was funny — this project was the reason we had the office that HFC used to have because AMC wouldn’t hire them until they saw the HFC offices, which was at that point an apartment. So, I called Ben up and I said, “How quickly can you have an office?” And he’s like, “Why?” “Because if you have an office, the head of IT is going to check it out next week and if he likes it, he will hire you for this project.” And so, that Monday, Ben had the office across from Dynomighty. That building was my fault.

HappyFunCorp: At the beginning of my tenure, we still had that office on the second floor and it was small, though we had a third floor space as well.

Jen: My oldest [child] was the first intern and he put the passcode to log into the Wi-Fi up on the wall in tape.

HappyFunCorp: Which survived until that office’s final days and we moved to the first floor. For YEAH! TV, you basically ended up hiring an early version of HFC.

Jen: Very early. Yeah

HappyFunCorp: That was an iPad app, right?

Jen: Yeah. It was a great experience. I mean, it was funny because, again, I knew Ben and Will while they were coding, right? I was a much smaller company and I just always had a great experience because Will had this uncanny knack that his estimates were always right.

I’d be like, “Hey, can you come down? Can you do this? Do you think we can do it this way?” It’s like, “Well, we can, but it’s going to be this.” He always joked that he was always right about it, and Aaron worked on it. It was a great experience. I mean, I work at HFC because of those experiences, because it was smart people doing good work and there was no bullshit involved.

I always knew I was going to get the truth which, as you know, in engineering and in this industry is not common. You get a lot of people who are going to give you a story in order to close the deal. I wanted the unvarnished truth because that made the project easier to run.

I think it helps me now because I know what’s going on in the client’s head. I know the various pressures from having worked at AOL, AMC, and CBS. It’s why I enjoy kickoffs on projects because I want to go, “Okay, great! Tell me what’s actually going on in your work life. Tell me who your boss is. Tell me what I can do to make your life easier because I know what’s written on the paper for the SOW is not necessarily the problem that we’re trying to solve.”

HappyFunCorp: I think your insight and client empathy runs really deep and it’s been an asset to the product team for sure because you’ve been through this every which way.

Jen: Yeah. It’s fun, though. It’s fun also because I don’t have to be in that role anymore; you have bureaucracy and people asking, “Why isn’t this done?” and “What about this budget?” And there’s just so much bullshit. You get paid very well, but it got so tiresome. Once you see the scaffolding, it’s kind of hard — I like to say once you see something, you can’t unsee it, and I just don’t enjoy that. I don’t enjoy the amount of time that gets wasted trying to keep your boss happy. It’s such the polar opposite here and it reminds me of the old days at AOL — again, when you didn’t have a boss. “Let’s get work done. Let’s dedicate 90% to 95% of our day to actually solving problems and moving the rock forward” — and that’s exciting.

HappyFunCorp: How did you end up working at HFC?

Jen: Well, that is an interesting story because in 2014, I made a very big life decision that I had sort of realized despite knowing this all along: I came out publicly as transgender and decided to transition. That was not a smart career move, let me put it that way. A lot of companies and a lot of people I used to work with didn’t know how to handle it. I still got work, but it was really stressful when you’re trying to keep your job as opposed to trying to excel at your projects, right?

And so, I bounced around to a couple different places. Early transitioning is tough because you look like an aging Brooklyn hipster, it’s not like you’re instantly cute. I had a deep voice and I was struggling at living full-time as a woman and doing that in a work environment.

You get to be “The Trans Person” in the office even with well-intentioned, well-meaning folks, and I went through a couple of gigs. It was tough because you’re dealing with transphobia. There was one company that someone wanted to hire me and couldn’t because I was trans and they didn’t feel it was going to be the right cultural fit. Again, that was five years ago, six years ago. It was a different world than where we are now. You can sue, but you don’t want to sue to make someone hire you. Not only is it an awkward situation if you win, but people don’t like to hire people who are litigious.

There was a lot of learning. You start to modulate your voice. You start to pass a little bit more and you graduate from transphobia into sexism: [a milestone was] having my first meeting where I said something and was told it was a horrible idea, and then 20 minutes later with new people in the room it got presented by the person who told me it was a bad idea as their own. I remember Slacking with someone in the back of the room like, “Did that just happen?” And they’re like, “Yeah, that just happened.” Then I’m like, “Hey, it’s no longer transphobia now. It’s sexism. Go me!” So, there was a lot for me to process.

I always stay in touch with people who I work with, so I stayed in touch with Ben and Will. We were grabbing coffee one day and I had taken some time off from work. They asked what I was doing and I’m like, “Well, I don’t know, but the bank account’s getting pretty light and I think it’s probably time for me to get back to work.”

So, the three of us had a long conversation of “How is this going to work? Is this going to work?” Again, I appreciated the honesty in it; there’s some level of political correctness where these things shouldn’t matter, but when you’re dealing with clients, you’re dealing with clients who are paying. You don’t know how it’s going to play out and I like to put cards on the table.

I remember Ben saying, “Hey, how do you feel about working with us?” And I was so struck by that turn of phrase, not, “why don’t you come work for me,” but “why don’t you work with us?” And I think that’s part of what HFC is about — we work together. As Will likes to say, you hire grownups and you let them do their job.

So yeah, it came from that. I took over a project from you — you were, I think, going on sabbatical. It sort of snowballed from there but ended up hitting I think all of my good points. I get bored easily. I like working on lots of projects. I like solving problems. Maybe more than being a product person or a project person, I like solving problems. And to me, that’s the fun part: let’s throw a lot of people in the room and figure out how we solve it.

HappyFunCorp: What are your highlights now? Because it’s been almost three years now?

Jen: I like working with grownups and I like being treated like a grownup. So many agencies I’ve worked at, you have the founder who has to show up for big meetings and you do all the work and then you hand it to them and then they do their razzle dazzle in the meeting. It pays well but it gets tiresome. I like being trusted with the project from soup to nuts and certainly, you have to run the gauntlet.

We used to joke, there was a gif of someone being thrown in the deep end of the pool and hitting their head on like the side of the pool at the same time and that’s kind of how we were a couple of years ago — just “can you swim.” That’s not for everyone. I certainly think we’ve made vast improvements in our onboarding process so that it’s not like that, but at the end of the day, [it’s still] “here’s what you’re doing, go and do your job”. We’re not going to handhold you — dazzle us as an engineer, a designer, a content writer, a product person, a project person. Dazzle us: do your best stuff.

Standups are sort of a safe room and that to me is the joy.

I learned this from Vince Gilligan, on the Breaking Bad Insider podcast. It’s a brilliant peek into what storytelling is like, what narrative is like and how to run a successful writer’s room. Part of that is having a safe room. We use that phrase a lot, but I don’t think a lot of people do it, and when you have a genuine safe room, you can toss out bad ideas, you can toss around this stuff and you figure out how to solve things. I think we do that from an engineering perspective and a product perspective and again, that’s a joy to work with. I mean, my motto tends to be I want to be the dumbest person coming into a meeting and the smartest person coming out of a meeting.

That means asking dumb questions because at so many other places I’ve been at, I knew people who were afraid to ask questions and acted as if they knew what certain terms meant when they didn’t and had disastrous effects because they didn’t understand what they were actually approving.

I tell Will all the time that HFC is a special place, and he just sort of scoffs at me, and he’s like, well, we don’t do anything special. I’m like, “Well, yeah, you do. You’re not trying to be in all of these meetings and you let talented people be talented.” Certainly, that means we have a high bar to be able to work on teams, but it makes it joyous to come to work. You don’t have that anxiety if your boss is going to be pissed off at you. You’re trying to solve problems every day, and I think COVID has certainly brought us closer together. One of the teams, I have someone from Italy, someone from India, someone in Ireland, someone in Wyoming and I’m in Manhattan, right?

We all had vastly different views of what was going on in COVID because it hit Italy first. It was just starting to hit us, hadn’t hit Wyoming — never got to Wyoming –and now India obviously is just such a horrible state right now, but I took time. I took the first 15 minutes to stand up and just had everyone share what was going on in their lives and it was very emotional those first couple of weeks. After a while, it became a meeting you look forward to. You were sharing.

A lot of people with kids — as you know –you have a crying child and you’re trying to hit mute and not disrupt a meeting. I have a really annoying cat, very passive-aggressive. So, I invited everyone’s kids to meetings, and it took a lot of stress off of life. The kids would look forward to the next meeting for them to show pictures and things like that, and I think we bonded as a team. I think when you’re happy and you’re not stressed about your job, you do your best work.

There’ve been a lot of projects and there’ve been neat projects. Kura Labs, something we’re working on right now, is meaningful work: teaching people of color at night and on weekends how to do infrastructure engineering and helping people get their first job out of college. This is transformational work because we have people getting hired who are making more money than their parents combined — at their first job. That’s generational wealth.

My grandfather came to this country in 1921 with a third-grade education and was filling boxcars full of coal for 50 cents a boxcar. He ended up working at the Ford factory in Dearborn, Michigan and was able to help my dad go to college. It’s being able to help people along that path I think is what makes life worth living. Obviously, all of your projects are important but being able to dedicate part of your life doing things like that, I think, is important.

HappyFunCorp: Yeah, that’s definitely a special one. I think we try to create opportunities to do work that has an explicit social value.

What keeps you at HFC?

Jen: Again, I get bored easily and there’s always a new challenge here.I remember before I started working at HFC, I was looking at the corporate route and going, I wonder if maybe I want to go back to corporate, pays well, blah blah blah. I was talking with recruiters about it and they’re like, “Well what are you looking for?” and I said, “Well, I’m looking for something challenging and I’m looking to work with good, smart people.”And they’re like, “No, like what kind of industry and what kind of this?” And I’m like, “No, that’s my answer.”

Again, it is a joy to have conversations. It’s a joy to try to solve problems when you’re working with smart people. A lot of companies have people who have cracked the code as to how to keep their job; it doesn’t mean that they’re good at their job. Working with Milos, who’s an amazing designer to work with, and working with Ravi and so many other engineers that I work with, it’s just fun to say, “Hey, here’s what we’re trying to figure out.” That’s what you dedicate your time to doing: working with smart clients and working on interesting projects.

I think that’s what keeps me, because I get bored easily — very easily — and I’m always sort of looking for the next challenge. Juggling projects at times is terrifying for some people. But for the people we have who do this role, I think we all enjoy that. We enjoy juggling and fire drills and, again, knowing that people have your back. That you’re trying to solve problems and not mollify people internally is a special experience that again, I haven’t really experienced maybe since my early days at AOL — and that was just because we had such hyper growth that there was no way to keep tabs on people.

HappyFunCorp: What are you excited about in the future? What are you looking forward to? Whether it’s industry or technology trends, or stuff that’s on deck at HFC?

Jen: That’s a good question. Again, I’m driven more by problem-solving than necessarily by technology and coming trends. I look at stuff that’s interesting. What I’m looking forward to, I think, is a little bit more personal. My kids are up and out of the house now: my oldest is married. My youngest graduated from art college and is paying her own phone bill, which makes me very happy. And so I’m sort of in the second act of my life because again: AOL, age 10. I’m young enough to be able to enjoy life single and also transitioning. I have enough confidence in myself now that I’m not caught up in being trans and “is someone going to clock me?” and is this going to happen? I am at peace with who I am. I think I have what’s called gender euphoria now instead of gender dysphoria and so, I just enjoy life.

I like to do crazy stuff. I just did a Cannonball Dash a few weeks ago: driving from New York City to LA in 35 hours and 56 minutes solo, and then taking three weeks to drive back. That was a blast.

I am starting to stretch my writing chops a bit. I have a novel that this trip was informing and so, finding time to work creatively and write and be challenged at work. I mean, I think that’s where I am right now, and we’re still in the middle of COVID.

HappyFunCorp: Hopefully we’re near the edge and not totally in the middle but —

Jen: The US, I think, we’re coming out of it. In the past couple of weeks it’s more clear that the world is not out of this — I was reading an article that with the past two weeks, we’ve had more cases of COVID than the first three months or six months or something crazy like that. So, from a world perspective, I think we’re still in the midst of this. The good news is I think we have light at the end of the tunnel — which a year ago, we didn’t.

New York was getting hammered so badly and you didn’t know when we were going to hit the top of that curve, right? We didn’t know when we’re going to bend the curve if we ever were going to.

That was scary but, again, there’s no place I think I’d rather live than New York, where we were banging on pans and applauding at seven o’clock at night for people coming off shift or coming on shift. In fact, I still have a sign in my window because I live in a high school that got converted into apartments — so I have windows across from me, but have a lot of kids there. And so, I put a giant heart in Post-It notes, which as you know, I have stock in, and it said “Jen and Shadow”, my cat. And so, the kids across the way, they started to put stuff up in the window to sort of respond.

But yeah, that was neat to see how this city tried to respond. I read somewhere that it was in Italy that people were singing and in LA, I have a friend in Laurel Canyon where they would text the song that people were going to sing each night. They tried doing that in New York and people got shouted down like, “Shut up!”

HappyFunCorp: What advice would you give to somebody who’s either starting out in their career or starting at HFC? Usually, I’d focus only on HFC, but I feel like we’ve covered so much other ground where I kind of just want Jen’s Life Advice.

Jen: I am a big fan of Joseph Campbell and he advised, “Follow your bliss and doors will open.” I have always encouraged people to follow their bliss, especially at the beginning of your career. Because you can always go a corporate route, you can always go to law school, you can always do all of these sort of traditional paths later in life, but if you have a passion, figure out how to fuel that passion.

For me, I’ve been a writer since I was eight and I’ve always written in some capacity. I’ve written professionally full-time; I’ve written recreationally and am just trying to figure out how to fit that into my life because it doesn’t pay well. I’ve had two kids in college simultaneously. You probably don’t want to be a writer at that point in your life.

My life advice is: Find what makes you happy and figure out how to do it even if it’s part-time, even if it’s at night. It’s authenticity. I hid who I was in my life for more years now than I care to admit, and I’ve never been happier. I’ve never been more fulfilled in my life now living an authentic life and following your bliss.

As it pertains to HFC, bring your A-game. Don’t worry about what other people think. One of the things I love about HFC is our diversity. When we talk about it in a public sense, diversity is LGBTQ, it’s Black Lives Matter, it’s people of color. But I think HFC takes it and has always taken it from a longer view: different backgrounds, different life experiences, and different cultures, and I think there’s so much value in that. Especially when it comes to problem solving — not everyone thinks exactly the same way and I think that gives us such an advantage when we’re trying to solve something complicated: new technologies, new products, a new product space and come at it from so many different directions.

I like how we use Slack, having an engineering channel or a random channel and being able to throw problems in there that people chime in on because again, everyone has such varied experiences that at other places I didn’t see. [It was] “this is the way you’re supposed to do things.” It’s why I love talking to the PM team every week, talking to you and Holly and all these different folks: because it’s always a different perspective, right?

When you can synthesize that, I think you can do amazing stuff. I mean not to get too high in the clouds, but if you come and work at HFC, be who you are and bring your special sauce to any project that you work on. And I think we end up with a Hermeneutic spiral, I think that’s when 1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 10 instead of sort of dumbing down the room. I think when you can create that sort of environment, special things happen.

HappyFunCorp: You made the job of interviewing you very easy because I think you understand your story really well and you understand how to communicate it in a way that I think — it’s taken a lot of work to get there, but it’s very natural. So, this was a fun interview — this is your natural element.

Jen: Well, it’s funny. I used to work with an Australian CEO coach and ghost wrote for him for nine months; it was this amazing experience. But one of the things he talked about was to “be the author of your own story. Be the author of your own life. Don’t be a journalist and say, ‘This happened then this happened then this happened.’”

You need to be in charge of your life and you need to tell yourself a better story.

Four or five years ago, whatever it was, I was struggling in my transition. I was struggling to pay for college for my kids. I was struggling in every aspect of my life and that was the story I kept telling myself. I woke up every day depressed and I went to sleep depressed and — I changed. Same set of facts, but the story was “I’m a trans mom putting her kids through college, achieving her dream of being a full-time writer.”Instead of “struggling,” it was “I’m living my dream” and “I’m a working mom. I’m doing all these different things.” And it really was an attitude shift for me.

I think that’s something that we can all do because we all like to get down on ourselves and tell ourselves how we suck. It took me a couple of years really to understand how to tell myself a better story and to practice gratitude. That’s something I think that did help to change my life. I don’t think this is a good closer for an article or for this, but there was something in there that did help me view myself in a different light.