Leaving No Stone Unturned
Steve Jobs said it best:
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
Today I return to Dialexa as VP of Strategy. I wrote a blog post when I left Dialexa back in 2016, so naturally this career boomerang deserves some words.
When I reflect back on my life, I’m in awe of how everything works out according to a plan. It is almost as if I am being led by an invisible hand that knows what is best for me, even when I don’t.
In 2011, I was a female founder of a technology startup, Blurtt, and was told several times that I didn’t know what I was doing. Well, did anyone actually know what they were doing other than Instagram back in 2011? My app was one of the first ones to hit the app store and many years later, a company called Giphy (you send memes via text right?) launched at the right time and in the right place. What people don’t tell you about startups is that timing is critical and one of the top reasons for why most startups fail. Through it all, Mark and Scott (founders of Dialexa) believed in me and when I couldn’t raise more money, they invested in me to help me get my app into the market. We were on Mashable’s Top 6 Apps to download along side Angry Birds.
As I was getting ready to leave for NY to try to raise money for Blurtt, Mark and Scott pulled me into a conference room and asked me me to join them in building Dialexa and eventually, Dialexa Labs. In 2012, while everyone else was busy building mobile apps, Dialexa was playing in the IoT space. Once again, we were ahead of the times which caught the attention of several writers at TechCrunch and the doors began to open.
Dialexa started getting featured more and more in the press, we launched Vinli, a connected car platform and Robin, an autonomous lawn mower service. We went from six people to over 65 people in four years. Through that entire time, we never had a human resources person on staff. It was the wild wild west. I gave myself my own title because I wanted to remain function agnostic. I never wanted to be X of Marketing or X of Finance. That was part of the issue I was having when I left in 2016. We needed people who could help the company grow in their area of expertise and I wanted to think and write about the future.
The future is finally here. Dialexa doubled in size in the middle of a pandemic and this opportunity to help lead the execution of our growth strategy is the job I wanted five years ago.
If you follow me on social, you know I’ve had an amazing five years of accomplishments I could not have dreamed up on my own. I am grateful for the experiences and lessons I have learned both professionally and personally. From returning to competitive figure skating after 30 years (and winning Regionals and Nationals my first season), to ending up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal for my biohacking hobby — it has been one wild ride.
I’m excited that the time has come for me to re-join Dialexa. It is a homecoming, although it is an entirely different company now. I look forward to getting to know everyone again — new and old and helping the team achieve some big audacious goals.
