Outro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha, the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.
Amy: When I first met Merci Victoria Grace, She was fresh out of school and leading a wildly innovative game project.
Fast forward to today. She's a talented and accomplished product manager, most recently leading growth at Slack. Her blend of creativity, strategy, and development chops gives her a great foundation for leading product teams.
Merci: You know, I've had the joy to work with some really talented, really product oriented QA engineers and designers and front end engineers.
And I realized that oftentimes the best ideas come from other people and the best solutions come from other people. [00:01:00] And if what you do As a product manager, especially is own the definition of the problem. That's really your service to the team. And that's the thing that you can do that other people can't do.
And what that also does is it leaves the stage open for other people to step up and say, Okay, well, here's a solution. And here's another solution. Here's another solution. And then it becomes this incredible, almost magical collaboration, because you've constrained. The problem enough that really great solutions can come out.
Amy: Join us and discover how a fast rising product leader integrates vision with collaborative leadership.
Thank you for joining us in the Getting2Alpha podcast, Merci. Oh, I'm so happy to be here. You've had such a fascinating career. You know, like me, you've gone back and forth between building games and building products. [00:02:00] Can you give us a whirlwind tour? How did you first get started in this crazy world of design and tech and startups?
Merci: So in college, I went through, uh, two majors, uh, journalism and then creative writing. And, uh, And didn't feel like I really had something to hold onto that I really liked doing. I decided pretty early on, I didn't want to be a journalist because, uh, it is a very difficult and depending on, you know, what kind of things you're working on, um, not super rewarding career path for me, at least.
And then I decided my senior year that I wanted to be a creature designer and at the same time I was designing a game with my boyfriend at the time and playing a lot of Dungeons and Dragons and, uh, I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons quite a bit ever since high school and really getting into both You know, the look and feel of games, uh, as well as, [00:03:00] uh, the game mechanics themselves.
And I felt like there's something about game design and a combination of psychology and creativity and art that really turned my brain on in a way that nothing else did. At that point that I'd experienced turned my brain on. I remember going to the game developers conference for the first time when I was maybe a junior in college, and just thinking, these are the smartest people I've ever met.
And they were smart, not just in an aggressively analytical or even a deeply creative way, but in a combination that I found so compelling, so I ended up working more and more on my game and less and less on on the creature design stuff that I was doing at the film and television production company called Bad Robot, where I was also the front desk receptionist.
And, uh, I think, you know, I learned that in film and TV, the crews are really massive. And the pay is very bad and [00:04:00] you go through this big endeavor together. You create something and then you release it. And then it's too late. You know, if people don't like your show or if they don't like your movie or if they like it, but it has some problems, you just aren't getting that feedback.
And that loop of showing people something, and especially having a game where you get so much engagement and so much interaction and the emergent behavior that you see is just absolutely fascinating. And it was really then that I got hooked. And while I was working at Bad Robot, my co founder and I got the opportunity to make the game into a business.
And a couple of investors wanted to give us money and have us move up to the Bay Area from Los Angeles. Uh, and I was just on cloud nine. I think um, it was $500,000 seed round in 2007, which now sounds hilarious because seed rounds are something like seven, 8 million today. Um, but it was the most money [00:05:00] that I'd ever seen or heard of in my entire life.
And someone was taking a bet on me and I was just absolutely excited to get started. And then, you know, running the business, I think one of the things that I have spent a considerable amount of time, you know, going doing my sort of retro with myself and my career is I just didn't take, I think, any of the advice that very smart people were giving me.
And I really wish that I had, but we ended up creating this game that a lot of people got into and it was a kind of a critical hit, but it wasn't something that made a lot of money and it wasn't something that really was commercial at all. And by the time I, you know, was really learning on my feet and by the time we had to shut down the company, I'd been working on that game for about three years.
And then I went to Electronic Arts and designed and produced The Sims Social, which was the Facebook version of The Sims. And by then I was ready [00:06:00] to take a lot of advice from people. And I think in part, it wasn't my company anymore. And that I think was a weird, but important shift that now I was just trying to do a good job and I didn't have that often harmful aura around you when you're a founder.
That makes people, you know, both afraid to give you advice and makes you frankly, pretty resistant to taking it as well, or at least that was the case for me.
Amy: What do you think that's all about the, that when you're a founder and you're, it's hard to take advice because you've also learned a lot since then.
And you, you give other people advice now, right? It's true. Looking back on that and thinking about the people you run into in your life who also do that, what's that about? And like, How can we all get beyond that? Cause it is a really destructive thing.
Merci: Yeah, it is destructive. I, I think one of the drivers of that, the founder block around, you know, getting or receiving feedback [00:07:00] is that we put them on this pedestal and we use this word vision.
They're a visionary founder. They have this vision and we have this pretty clear shared mental model of what it looks like to be visionary. And it's a man by himself, you know, on a mountain taking dictation from God or, you know, coming up with this thing that never changes, right? It's a vision that you had one time and now you're executing on that vision and it doesn't change.
And to question the founder and their behavior or, uh, any of their decisions is to question, you know, essentially the word of the vision and the, you know, the clarity of the vision. And then, if you, uh, I think that, you know, both founders will often feel this way when they're getting feedback and people feel this way giving feedback to founders that the founder will just dismiss them from the company.
And that does happen, you know, but, and so to a certain extent, founders [00:08:00] want to be seen as being these visionary people. And I think often if you want to be something, it prevents you from actually becoming who you are.
Amy: What a crazy paradox. So, uh, what happened after that? So you went and had this probably incredible experience working on SimSocial and then what happened?
Merci: I made it to about a year at, at EA. Uh, the GM who I had come to work for left the company actually, uh, not super long after I joined. And working at EA was a brutal, very bro ish, very negative experience, uh, all told.
I still have a bunch of good friends who I made there, but the structure of EA is, first of all, it was a very massive company and I was pretty lost within it. And then I felt like there was a lot of, I want to say politics, but really it's just lack of transparency more so than, you know, anything nefarious.
And it was [00:09:00] very hard to learn. And at that point I felt like I had to shut down my company and, you know, these people that I care about lost their jobs, you know, however, briefly that may have been, uh, because I didn't learn fast enough and I didn't, you know, find feedback fast enough and I didn't run enough, do enough user research and run enough usability studies and dig down to what the truth was.
And the structure of EA is really, you know, it's not a culture I don't think that has a growth mindset. And I was actually warned against working there by people who had worked there previously, who are friends of mine who said, you know, if you take this job at EA, you're going to leave the games industry because essentially it's, you know, one of the worst cultures in the game industry, which as you know, uh, is not known for having really great growth mindset, you know, open cultures and especially cultures that, you know, You know, are relatively hostile to women, specifically.
Uh, and you know, my friends were right. I did get really burned out on, on the game [00:10:00] industry, and I haven't worked on a game since. So what did you do after that? It was a funny time to be someone who had a couple of years of game design and really also production under her belt because people wanted to gamify their applications.
So I did some consulting for about a year or so. And was able to then use my consulting, uh, trying to essentially convince people not to put progress bars and point meters and sound effects and coins into their otherwise bland enterprise software. Uh, and then I got a role as a product manager at the travel company couch surfing.
And then after that, I worked at, uh, an enterprise workforce company called gig walk. While I was at Gig Walk, I started using Slack and absolutely just fell in love with it.
Amy: What made you fall in love with it? What was it about it that was, was so alluring to you?
Merci: It's funny, I think that, you know, we [00:11:00] both internally at Slack and, and before I joined, we spent, I've had, you know, many conversations about what is it about Slack that really inspires love and I think first of all it just works.
And especially at that point, you know, it was really early on. It was all these like early adopters and, uh, the competition around consumer re enterprise things hadn't, hadn't really heated up. And so here was the thing that was obviously for that, you know, most people used for work. And it was just really seamless.
And then after really learning a lot about product design from Stuart and all of the other, especially the early members of the, of the Slack team, I came to understand that Slack feels like it just works because it almost always meets your expectation about what's going to happen next. So if you see a button or you open a menu or you poke on something, it really does what you thought it was going to do.
And [00:12:00] it's funny because it sounds simple, but that is a great user experience. And that's actually pretty hard to deliver.
Amy: It sure is. It's easy to poke it slack or critique it, but it's incredibly hard to make something that seems that simple.
Merci: Yeah, exactly.
Amy: So you got that job because you knew Stuart, right?
Merci: Yeah.
Amy: And you had met him previously through your other company.
Merci: Yes. Yeah. We shared an angel investor, Joey Ito, who's now the head of the MIT Media Lab.
Amy: So when you first joined Slack, were you joining as a designer, as a producer, as a product manager, and how did that happen? And then how did your roles change while you were there?
Merci: Yeah. So I met up with Stuart, uh, Sunday afternoon. He was at the office. We talked for a couple of hours. There, and it's not like there was a job description or even a job listing, but I had been using the product and I came with some [00:13:00] concrete ideas about what I thought could be improved. And we talked about what different parts of the product I might be a good fit to work on.
He and I were both former game designers, and I think it was really that shared background that led both of us toward me working on the new user experience. So I went back home and I put together a deck, you know, coalescing a lot of my opinions about the product and suggestions for, uh, improving, uh, growth and retention and onboarding.
And then I came in and I met with a couple other people and, uh, there wasn't, you know, A process or anything like that. So we would do kind of the interview, small talk about your background. And then I just said, uh, so I have the deck to show you if that's okay. I did some work. They're like, Oh, great. And I think, you know, I often give this advice to people, both who, especially are trying to get their first product management role, [00:14:00] but also just any product management role at a company that they really like that isn't necessarily hiring is Doing work ahead of time will both help you really understand the product and the company and come with good questions because it's absolutely a two way street.
Do they want to work with you? But really, do you want to work with them and spend your precious life that way? But also it really, it shows that you care. And it's still to this day, I think the best way to figure out if someone really is any good at their job is to just have them do it a little bit in front of you.
Amy: Absolutely. So you came in and started working on the new user experience and then you became a director of product management, I think.
Merci: Yeah. Yeah.
Amy: So did you just keep working on things, get more responsibility, take on more challenges?
Merci: Yep, pretty much showing up, uh, asking a lot of questions, um, and, and working really hard.
The company I was [00:15:00] at before I joined Slack, I was the head of product and I, the, had hired a PM and, um, had designers who reported to me as well. So I think part of my joining Slack was just, I wanted to work with Stuart and Cal for quite a while because I'd known them for so long. And really enjoyed the community and the type of people that they tended to hire really like my type of people.
And then I, you know, show up and I start working and I just. Plugging away at it. And I think, you know, really I took a product management. I just was an, uh, an individual contributor, uh, an ICPM, and I didn't care about what my title was. Uh, I was excited to have an area of the product, but I also would have joined if they just said, Oh, just come on board and we'll figure it out later, uh, because I just wanted to work at that company and work really on that product so much.
So I, uh, I didn't care about the title I joined and then within six months. The rest of the PM team was reporting to me instead of to Stuart. [00:16:00]
Amy: Nice. I bet Stuart was happy about that.
Merci: Yeah. Yeah. There's nothing like that feeling when you can find people who you trust to delegate to.
Amy: It's really interesting that you come out of game design and Stuart comes out of game design.
And slack is so not gamified to me. Slack is game like in its interaction style and in its clarity, but it's not gamified. There's not a point or a badge in sight. Right. Yeah. So I'm ho I know that was partly Stuart, but it's so interesting that people that aren't game designers that really look at games and think they're cool, but don't, don't actually design them and go through all the stages of what it takes to bring a successful game to market, but you've done that.
And so when you look at Slack now, and you look at what's made it successful, because honestly, you're part of what's made it successful at this point. How do you [00:17:00] feel that the, the core use case, you know, like that crisp vision of what is this for, what are we trying to do, how does that core use case play out in actual day to day decision making?
Like you and I talked, Slack is great as a work group tool for getting work done with your team. And it breaks down in other use cases. And it would be tempting to try and make it everything to everybody.
Merci: Yeah.
Amy: Part of its magic is it's really good at the thing it does. How does that play out in practice when people around you want to gamify it or want to address this thing over here that's not really in the core?
As product manager, you're right in the middle of those decisions.
Merci: So I think the two things that in my mind have really contributed to Slack success is one, the commitment to that core use case. And that was a mandate from the founding team. We referenced it constantly. There probably was not a week at Slack Where I didn't say to someone, to a designer and engineer, another PM, well, we're not doing that [00:18:00] because this is for work or, yeah, but that's really more of a social use case.
Don't you think? So that was, you know, that focus I think was. Everything and constantly referenced and the other thing that we did from the very early ages from the very early stage of the company was treat people with respect and treating your customers with respect, having really high quality customer service and then the language that Anna Pickard, who really is the architect of.
The personality of Slack that people love so much. And she herself is of course, a very lovable person, but she created this world of, of language and a very strong personality that we all used in responses to customers and it's obviously in the UI and it also framed how we thought about the people who were using our product and on one hand, you know, we had, okay, here's our values as human beings and how we treat other human beings. [00:19:00]
And then here's also, here's the special place, the high stakes, high stress, special place that people are going to be using Slack. And I think both of those two things were the touch points that I referenced constantly in making decisions when we're building that product.
Amy: That's fascinating. It really, it comes back to vision. It's a form of vision to have a clear brand voice and it makes everybody's job so much easier because they know what to write. Yeah, so you've recently left slack and you're considering some new challenges as you're looking at the landscape of opportunity in front of you.
What are the signals that you're paying attention to when you're choosing who to work with and what you're going to work on? What it is, what is it that pulls you in?
Merci: Yeah, so the things that I really love when I'm evaluating both teams and, and areas to work in. Are whether there's a very clear [00:20:00] vision shared by the founding or executive team on what the company is doing.
And I also like things where what the company is doing is solving a specific problem instead of, well, we're building a solution that does this thing. It's like, no, what, what problem are you solving? Because solutions are whatever, but if you're very clear on what it is that you are. Fixing, then I feel like both you're open to the kind of iteration that you have to have, and you're open to conversations with customers and to, you know, just getting better at your job and building something that's really high quality.
When people aren't focused, another, another sort of red flag that I see is if they have too many business lines or too many, you know, kind of disparate things that they're working on. And I will often just ask people, I think Bradley Horowitz wrote a Medium post. That, uh, that I became kind of eye rollingly famous for at slack [00:21:00] for referencing, which was the, uh, the habitable planet.
You know, if you're going to make a stack rank of plant of habitable planets in our solar system, the first one is earth. And it doesn't matter what the second one is, because it's only slightly, you know, more habitable than, you know, total death. You exist for two seconds on it instead of, you know, half a second.
And I think really, you know, I ask people that question. I frame it for them. I reference Bacchus and I say, you know, what is your habitable planet? And not surprisingly, actually, a lot of people can't answer that because They do want their product to be, well, it's really for everyone. Well, it's really for, and it's like, no, nothing is really for everyone.
Um, you have to be really clear about who it is that you're building for, because that's what enables me to do a good job when I'm working for you.
Amy: It's so appealing when you say it, and it's actually really hard to do in practice. Absolutely. On the flip side, what are some of the red flags when you are, you know, you've had [00:22:00] this really amazing experience working for these different companies.
Yeah. Now you're looking at new situations. What are the red flags that stop you in your track when you're having a conversation, you're considering something you're like, Nope, not going to go there.
Merci: Yeah. The red flags that I look for when evaluating companies I think, you know, I would be remiss to not lead with, I listened to the whisper network of underrepresented minorities and other women.
And I look at the composition of the team, and I tried to listen to how they speak to each other, you know, whether it is respectful, um, you know, whether they value non technical people, um, whether they've hired any of those people. And then, you know, also specifically, um, if there's anyone who I need to avoid working with who works at that company, that's a real thing that I think people should be aware of happens all of the time because it's how [00:23:00] women and underrepresented minorities protect ourselves from abuse.
And then I think on a product side, the other thing that's a red flag for me is when people create their own heavily biased metrics. And really dig in and commit to them. There's a lot on the internet, social capital, for instance, one of Slack's investors have a really killer growth team and they have written extensively about the kind of growth accounting that they do, which is at this point, really industry best practice.
A lot of people don't have those numbers for themselves. You know, what retention looks like. And even some of the old stalwarts that were so useful to us building social games, like the percentage of DAU or the percentage of your MAU that's also DAU to look at how engaging you are, things like are people active on four out of seven days or three out of seven days, if you have something that is actually a daily use case, people will [00:24:00] instead create these metrics That make them feel good about themselves when they look at them.
And really, those are the metrics that I never look at because there they are and that's fine. And, you know, there's absolutely used to tell that story depending on, uh, you know, what the company is going through, but if internally, you know, in your cone of secrecy, um, If you are not looking at the ugly truth, then you're never going to fix it.
And you're just, you know, you are getting nowhere fast.
Amy: And building a leaky bucket potentially.
Merci: Yeah.
Amy: So you've been working at the forefront of innovation for many years now, starting with that visionary game that you worked on out of college. Looking back, what do you know now about successful innovation that you really wish you'd known earlier?
Merci: You know, I have never once thought to myself, Oh, this is innovative [00:25:00] or any, anything like that. And it's funny, I, you know, when I think about the words like, Innovation is just not something that I typically apply to myself. But then I think about, Oh yeah, you know, game layers and PMOG, my, my game was very weird and very innovative.
And, and obviously Slack is, uh, is innovating and really changing the way that people work with each other. But I think a lot of that. Is that I was never comparing myself to exactly what other people were doing. And I didn't have a sense that other people had it more figured out.
I think at the same time, you know, there's like on the positive side, that means that you're not going to just copy stuff, but then the thing that I wish that I knew now is, is that that needs to be tempered with, you know, some of the like really classic through lines of, of good product design, uh, and including, of course, you know, taking the advice of your elders when they give it to you.
Amy: Yep. Speaking of which, you know, you're still [00:26:00] young, but you're becoming one of the elders because you've got now several, uh, Really, really interesting gigs under your belt.
And you're pretty senior leader as a, in product management and in design. What are some of the really common mistakes that you see entrepreneurs and product owners make when they're in the early stages of bringing their ideas to life? What do you wish they did? That you could like intervene and get them to do instead.
Merci: I feel an almost physical desire to like shake the shoulders of a young entrepreneur when I hear them say something like, well, I talked to a bunch of people at this. at Blue Bottle in San Francisco about it and they all liked this idea. Um, I think, you know, it's really easy to, to get caught in the bubble of Silicon Valley and to not get outside of either yourself or people like you.
Uh, and I think I have found Big actual like statistically [00:27:00] significant geographical differences from the way that users in the Bay Area behave and their reactions to even things like landing pages versus people from Iowa or Nebraska or even other tech centers like Boston.
And so I think, you know, first of all, having a really a much broader sense of who your users are not in terms of function or, you know, the, you know, where they work or, you know, what kind of area that they're, they're in, but really having a wider aperture in terms of it's just location that people will come from the fact that, you know, women and men are both going to be using your products. That people, you know, who are Christian and Hindu and atheist and Jewish are going to be using your products.
And when you start to learn to take a different lens and to try to become someone else, when you look at a product and not just yourself, you're going to find incredible things that are going to move you toward that product market fit [00:28:00] that you want. So I think that's one of the biggest ones. And then, you know, people don't build prototypes often, they get really excited about their specific solution. And they defined the hell out of their specific solution.
They haven't defined the problem that well, and maybe not even the market, but they feel like they need to, that, that makes them a visionary founder to have a very specific product idea, which I don't actually think is the case.
And then they, you know, they don't want to like they're, Oh, well, we're going to skip the prototype stage and go right to, and it's like, no, dude, no one skips the prototype stage.
Amy: It's such a common problem and it's something that comes up a lot. It actually came up like three times yesterday in meetings I was in with various clients.
So let's dig into this a little. Um, one thing I know you've said that I just couldn't agree with more is Fall in love with the problem, not your solution to the problem. So how did that come alive for you? [00:29:00] Cause I think when we're all young, eager product creators, we, it's very hard not to fall in love with the solution.
Yeah. You know, I know I've been there, but as you grow and become more senior and sophisticated, you see how important that the problem is. So how did you learn that? And how do you now counsel? How would you counsel someone who doesn't really know how to do that? How do you learn how to do that?
Merci: Yeah, that's a great question.
I think part of learning that you need to fall in love with the problem. Is in part watching your own work age and getting distance from it, you know, the, because oftentimes, you know, if you write an article or design a product, and then you go back and you look at it 5 years later, you're going to cringe a lot.
And hopefully, right? Hopefully you're at your cringing a lot because it means that, you know, you recognize the flaws in your work. So I think in part is just, you know, watching the things that you've made poorly age can help you realize, like, [00:30:00] Oh, maybe that solution wasn't the greatest. And then I think to working with.
You know, I've had the joy to work with some really talented, really product oriented QA engineers and designers and front end engineers. And I realized that oftentimes the best ideas come from other people and the best solutions come from other people. And if what you do. As a product manager, especially is own the definition of the problem.
That's really your service to the team. And that's the thing that you can do that other people can't do. And what that also does is it leaves the stage open for other people to step up and say, Okay, well, Here's a solution and here's another solution. Here's another solution. And then it becomes this incredible, almost magical collaboration because you've constrained, you know, The problem enough that really great solutions can come out.
Amy: Oh, that's beautiful. I love [00:31:00] that. So as you reflect, you know, back on where you've come from, but looking forward to the choices you're making, what do you really feel as your superpower as a creative person, your sweet spot? What is it that really lights you up?
Merci: You know, part of the thing that I've been realizing, especially as I am now, uh, you know, in between jobs and working on stuff just by myself too, is that I just love working with people in part because I think, you know, I'm a one of seven kids.
I come from this big family, so I sleep well if I can hear the murmur of other voices in the next room, you know, and I just love being around other people and their creative energy and having. Almost like a coach kind of a role is something that I really enjoy because nothing makes me happier than watching other people do the best work of their lives.
And then I think, you know, the other thing is, I try to be, I don't know if humble is [00:32:00] the right word, 'cause I don't know that you can like try to be humble, but I try to be open to being wrong and to hopefully being wrong quickly and being wrong a lot so that I can learn from it. Having that growth mindset and having the, you know, the thing that I think I really learned from game design, which is that the emergent behavior is, is what is so incredible.
And the emergent behavior is really what makes a product really great. And I like to put myself and my team in that discovery driven mode. While you're trying to figure out what's wrong, because then when you find some interesting gnarly problem and you constrain it deeply, and then your teammate comes up with this awesome idea.
And you're like, yes. And then you chase that down a little bit and you find another problem. I feel like I am pretty good at creating environments where that can be your [00:33:00] daily working life. And when that is your daily working life, when your leader is someone who consistently admits When she is wrong and takes responsibility for, uh, you know, for the group and is willing to also just make a decision because a decision needs to be made so that you can continue learning, uh, then I have seen people get so much better at their jobs working on my teams.
And that really brings me so much joy.
Amy: Wow. What is your attention in the tech and design world these days? What are you seeing that's new and exciting? And what trends and people are you following? What's inspiring you?
Merci: Yeah, the things that I find really inspiring in tech these days are probably unsurprisingly The fact that enterprise applications and especially self service enterprise applications, things like Slack or like Figma are really great, really thriving businesses.
One of the things that attracted me to [00:34:00] Slack in the first place and kept me there was I love the sense that I'm making someone's life. Life better because we are at work a lot of us, you know, honestly like 10 to 12 hours a day and a lot of, you know, people who have kind of more normal non tech schedules still like that's most of your adult life.
Uh, and you know, depending on what your childhood was like and depending on whether you're, you're ever going to be able to retire. If you make a product that people use to get work done and it's not slowing them down and it's making them better at their jobs and bringing out the creative and the joy of the lived human experience, then that's really, I think, what really turns me on intellectually about working in tech.
I like those things, too, because it's, it's funny. And the, you know, the last year and a half, we're at just at the, the year mark of, of Trump being elected. And I'm [00:35:00] honestly just feeling for myself, obviously there are a lot of, you know, people who work on, on these products, but, but for myself, I, I don't feel like I can work on something that is, um, supported by ads.
Because I think we've seen really the natural extension of when human attention creates money just from the human attention, the things that humans like to look at are, you know, are often not things that we need to bring more of into the world. Uh, and so I think, you know, the, when you're designing product organization and you have an end user who you're ostensibly building for, but actually your customer is someone else.
And your goal is, you know, quite honestly to keep people in your app for really long sessions for them to be in it all day, like forming an addiction and not a habit because habits can be pretty neutral, right? They can be good or bad, but for me, an addiction to [00:36:00] your, I just don't want to, I don't want to be in there doing that.
I want, you know, to, to build things that are really intentional.
Amy: That make the world a better place.
Merci: Yeah, I know, right? As hackneyed as it is, I'm like, I do want to change the world.
Amy: Oh, yeah. What's coming up for you? I know you're considering new opportunities. You recently got married. Congratulations.
Thank you. Is there anything that you'd like to share with us, uh, that's coming up for you? Are you doing any writing or speaking?
Merci: I have been writing more on medium and I have a couple of kind of, uh, half baked Medium posts that I continue to tool on. I'm participating in NaNoWriMo this November as well.
So, working on a book, really dusting off my creative writing degree. The other thing that I'm spending time doing is mentoring people of color and women. Trying to really give back to the next generation or even, you know, my peers, but trying to be someone who people can [00:37:00] trust to treat them well, especially now, but you know, but, but really always.
And to that end, I'm a relatively active Twitter user. My handle is just my first name and my DMS are open for people to contact me. And, uh, it's surprising, you know, how few people do. And most of the messages that I get begin with someone saying, I'm sure you're busy. I'm sure you get a lot of these, but you know what?
I don't, because, you know, you're brave enough to step into the arena with me and ask me some questions. You're actually way ahead of your peer group.
Amy: That's fantastic. I can't wait to see what you do next. And I really appreciate your spending some time with us today and sharing your stories and your wisdom.
Merci: Oh, thank you so much.
Amy: Talk soon. Cheers.
Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim. The shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com. [00:38:00] That's getting2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast episodes.