My Origin Story

In 2003, I went to college for communications, but like many people, I held off on declaring an area of focus. Radio, TV, PR, Journalism… nothing felt like “The thing.” Toward the end of my first year, I started making stupid videos for fun. At the time, Windows Movie Maker was the best software I knew of, and I was essentially just using photos I had googled, and adding the Ken Burns effect.

Two of my friends had a comedic band, and expressed a desire to have a music video. I raised my hand for the task immediately, citing that I had no idea how, but wanted to figure it out.

During the three-hour process of making that video, I was so lost in creative flow that I forgot to eat (😳 I love to eat). It was a feeling second only to the way I had obsessively played video games growing up, yet it was something I could potentially do as a career. (Of course, people DO play video games as a career now, but that wasn’t a thing yet)

I decided in that moment that I would declare my major in filmmaking. It wasn’t necessarily my life’s dream, but I had always been into movies, and time was running out for me to decide what to focus on.

Where it led me wasn’t Hollywood, but to a new platform called YouTube.

The YouTube Days

I began making sketch comedy videos with my friend, Grace Helbig, who I later decided to move to NYC with. My main goal was to make a name for myself as a video editor, with some acting and comedy on the side, whereas Grace was the inverse.

This combination made us the perfect team to launch a comedic vlog channel on YouTube… not that that was “a thing” yet, either. The majority of people we knew at the time did not understand what we were doing. For example, here is a common interaction I had back then:

Me: I make internet videos

Them: …are you clothed in these videos?

🙄

For the first few years, not much happened. I would go to work at an editing internship (which I turned into a paid gig within a few months) and then come back to our Bay Ridge Brooklyn apartment and edit YouTube vlogs. It was a lot! At one point, I had four jobs just to make ends meet. Still, it was SO fun, I felt like I could go on that way forever.

Exponential Growth + Tragedy

In 2010, we got our first big break. A channel much larger than ours talked about us in a video. Overnight, we went from 2k subscribers, to 10k subscribers. This meant that we could monetize our videos as part of the YouTube Partner Program, which we did, and our channel continued to grow exponentially in the months following.

Around the same time, however, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

I started blogging about my experience on tumblr, and for the first time, amassed a large audience that was solely mine, vs the one I had created with Grace. From there, I created a solo YT channel called Fart with Headphones On and got into the YT Partner Program on that channel as well. There was also a singing channel, and a sketch comedy channel, so there was a ton going on, and growth/success all around.

It was such a confusing time for me. On the one hand, the career I had worked so hard for was taking off. On the other hand, my entire world was shattering.

There are too many stories from this time to tell here, but the most pertinent is this:

When my mom first went to the ER, I rushed home to New Jersey to see her. I slid into the tiny nook they had her in, only slightly wider than the stretcher she was on, and shimmied over.

She was very weak, and could barely talk above a whisper, but managed to look up at me and say, “You’re the last person I expected to see here.” She was often on my case about not coming to see her, and being so wrapped up in my whole “getting famous thing.”

I ignored the comment, looked around the “room” and said, “Well, this fucking sucks.”

Her response to this floored me:

“Yea… but at least I’m not at work.”

My mom was overworked, underpaid, and hated her job. Money was never abundant in our household, and both of my parents were workhorses. I learned my work ethic there, but I never accepted the message that life had to be hard.

I couldn’t even respond to her comment, I just laughed it off on the outside, while inside, my soul was screaming.

My Career Shift

At this same time, I had just been hired to edit a handful of mini-documentaries. The one I was working on was about a woman named Marie Forleo. She called herself a Life Coach, which was a term I’d never heard before.

I showed my mom some of the raw footage of Marie from my laptop in the hospital room.

My mom’s exact words were, “She’s special. You need to meet her.”

And meet her I did. It only took a few Tweets to get Marie’s attention, and before I knew it, we were having lunch at her favorite Italian restaurant in NYC. “I don’t know what we’re going to do together, but we are going to do something big,” were her parting words after that initial meeting.

I ended up working alongside Marie to start her YouTube channel. She interviewed me once, though the video makes me cringe now. We gained copious awards for her channel, and I was at her side for moments like being contacted by Richard Branson and Oprah. [Marie was amazing to work with. She even came to meet my mom while she was still alive, and attended her wake.]

But doing this work with her made me realize that I wanted more from my own career. I started building a team around me, because I knew that one day, I wouldn’t be doing video anymore.

On December 18, 2011, my mom passed away. I could write so much more about this experience, but there isn’t space to do it justice here.

On February 18, 2012, I started a coach training program, gave up my entire video production business to my assistant editor (he still works for Marie), and became a full-time coach.

Fast-Forward

Over a decade later, I remain an entrepreneur. I’m also a wife and a mother myself. Both of these roles require leadership, and gave me a whole new appreciation for what my mom was contending with.

Professionally, I have attained the highest level of credential possible as a coach (there are a little over 1k of us in the world) and I am a Senior Training Program Leader with Accomplishment Coaching. I get to go into huge companies and work with leaders on how to build more effective teams. I get hired by entrepreneurs and startup execs who have plateaued, and want to explode into their next level.

The best part? These leaders are also creators.

Much like my days in video, these people are dealing with exponential growth, tons of external feedback, and the challenge of inspiring a team into effective action. They have few people to talk to who “get it,” and they are often blazing a trail that has no set blueprint.

I absolutely love coming to work. These conversations about leadership light something in my soul that video production only made me yearn for. Don’t get me wrong, I still love creating video. And comedy. And music. And writing.

Partnering with impactful creators to get out of their own way and making unimaginable things happen, however… is the reason I love coming to work.

If you got this far, I imagine you’re thinking about hiring me… or else you’re just very nosey, which I also enjoy.

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