MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers
Join hosts Joseph Itaya and Anika Jackson as they dive into conversations with leaders and changemakers shaping the future of digital media. Each episode explores the frontier of multimedia, artificial intelligence, marketing, branding, and communication, spotlighting how emerging digital trends and technologies are transforming industries across the globe.
MEDIASCAPE is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. This online master’s program is designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.
MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers
From Teen Startup to $500 Million Exit: Catherine Connolly's Journey
Catherine Connelly's remarkable journey began at age 15 when she and her siblings created a digital yearbook website to make friends at their new high school. What started as a simple solution to a teenage problem evolved into a social platform that would eventually sell for $500 million.
During our conversation, Catherine shares how despite having no coding background, she and her siblings built their platform by using Google to answer every question they had about website development—from "how to buy a domain name" to creating specification sheets for developers. This resourcefulness, combined with early exposure to entrepreneurship through her older brother's success, gave her the confidence to pursue her idea without waiting to acquire all the necessary skills first.
The evolution of her platform offers fascinating lessons in adaptation and growth strategy. When their initial plan to expand high school by high school didn't work, they pivoted to acquiring viral quizzes that brought users from MySpace and AIM. Later, they rode the Facebook app wave before successfully transitioning to mobile and eventually pioneering livestreaming features with virtual gifting economies years before they became mainstream.
What's particularly striking about Catherine's story is her perspective on success and work environments. After leaving the company she built for 18 years, she authored "Designing Success," which explores how anyone can create environments where they can thrive without burning out. She challenges us to define success on our own terms—not just through career achievements but through family, community involvement, and personal well-being.
Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur or someone seeking better balance in your career, Catherine's parting advice resonates deeply: "Just go for it. Waiting until you feel ready is often waiting too long." Through her newsletter "Growing Up Startup" and monthly office hours, she continues to share wisdom that helps others design their own paths to success.
This podcast is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. An online master’s designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.
Welcome to Mediascape insights from digital changemakers, a speaker series and podcast brought to you by USC Annenberg's Digital Media Management Program. Join us as we unlock the secrets to success in an increasingly digital world.
Speaker 2:I'm so excited to have this conversation with Catherine Connolly, who I've been getting to know over these past few months. Catherine, I've read your book Designing Success a bestseller and I think that this conversation is going to be really inspirational for our students and our alums at USC. So thank you for being here. Thank you so much for having me. So this podcast, mediascape, is sponsored by the Digital Media Management Program. Thank you so much for having me. I'm like, yes, we have to have you on and talk about this, because you created a product at the age of 15 with your siblings and had a very successful time exited. I want you to share a little bit about that journey with this audience and then we can talk about how you're using that for good now to inspire others.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that sounds great. Yes, so my company started back when I was 15, as you mentioned, my brother and I were actually new in our school, so we were trying to make new friends and I guess we had a underlying bit of nerdiness about us and we're like, why don't we make a website to do that? And so the idea was a website that would make meeting new people fun. That would be kind of like a digital yearbook where you would learn more about each individual classmate, and so we called it my Yearbook, and individual classmates and so we called it my Yearbook. And for that to be what we were working on would have been a certainly was a shock to like everyone that knew us, because we weren't coders Like we have the typical amount of, you know, tech skills of any other high school student. You know we were on MySpace, we had AIM profiles, which were, you know the platforms of the time, but you know, we didn't really have any qualifications to start a website. It's not like we were the kids that were doing coding boot camps or something like that, but what we did have was our oldest brother had started his first company from his Harvard dorm room and he grew up successfully, had a successful exit. And so we grew up because he's 11 years older than me, so we grew up watching him do that and thinking, you know, why can't we start our own thing? You know Jeff did and so kind of moving into it. That's very important early exposure to entrepreneurship.
Speaker 3:That made it so that when we had an idea, we're like why not build it? But of course we didn't know how to do it. So that's when we started. Really we used Google to be kind of the age equalizer. We Googled literally any question you could have about. You know like even like you know how to buy a domain name, things like that. Like what does a specification sheet look like? Because, yeah, we're talking to developers on Elance, which became Upwork, and we're like, okay, well, we need to send them something. And so that's how we started looking into how we were going to build it. And it was just through asking lots and lots of questions. It's not because we had any of those skills ahead of time, it was just because we knew we could ask the questions. And now, of course, there's AI and you can kind of supercharge that a little bit better. You don't have to parse through all the search results. But you know we did what we could and so, you know, we're not designers. So when we were making up our specification sheets and wireframes, it was, you know, pen on paper wireframes, but we detailed, you know, every aspect of the site, how it would look, how it would operate, and it took about a few months to build.
Speaker 3:And we launched in Just Our High School, which is a public high school in New Jersey Montgomery High School in April 2005. And so when we launched, you know, we had our friends were like, wait what? Because they knew we were working on something Right, I actually had a few people who were like, I thought what you were to be working on would be some type of, like, you know, fashion thing, which I thought was weird. I am not fashionable at all, never was, but I think it's because they thought that would be, you know, girlier. You know I didn't fit the mold of, like tech entrepreneur. So they're like, oh, it must be like some fashion thing or something about clothes, which is, you know, harmful stereotypes. But you know, obviously that wasn't what it was, and if that was, that would be fine, but not an interest of mine, not something I can speak to intelligently.
Speaker 3:And when we launched we didn't have a marketing budget, so it was all about how do we get people to sign up. We kind of discussed going back to fashion. We wore fun T-shirts to school every day that said things like answering the questions that matter most who are your friends' friends, and are they hot? And they were silly, but we gave a few shirts to our friends, to other friends too. We were able to get about 400 people to sign up in the first week, and so that's when I started really feeling real.
Speaker 3:It's like, oh, now there's people actually using it and it was honestly the best place to kind of beta test it because as the company evolved, it became very much not for teenagers and we became, you know, 18 plus. It was more of a dating app, but at launch it was, you know, for teens, by teens, and so being in a place where you're surrounded by your core demo was so critical to just getting all the feedback we could and we were just able to, you know, come home that night, mock it up, send it to our developer team and you'll get it live on the site soon after. So it was basically iteration after iteration to hone the product while we're in kind of that beta mode, which I think really made it a super strong feature.
Speaker 2:Or a super strong initial product anyway, you had 400 people testing it and saying oh, I wish that you had this feature or that feature.
Speaker 3:So how fantastic that feature sucks, yeah, okay, teenagers but, but but it's helpful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you created this to solve a problem that you had, which is where everything should start right. You figured out how to create it, using your skill set, but also finding outside experts. Then you beta tested it. You had the people in your community to test it on and give you that and do all the iterations. At what point did you go, wow, this is something we can monetize and take to other schools and start thinking bigger about the product.
Speaker 3:So we were always thinking kind of big about it, in the sense of we always want like. When we got started, I mean, we took some initial investment from my older brother and when he joined us, like we were aware of Facebook and how big that was now. So we did not become as big as Facebook, unfortunately, but that was kind of where we're like maybe we can be the Facebook for high school students. So we were kind of aiming big and actually like within the first week or two of launch, we got our first offer, acquisition offer. Now, it was an insulting offer. It was very low, very, very low, but it was still like okay, this could be something real.
Speaker 3:So when we were initially starting, even in those early days, we would write fake press releases as just something to have on our press page and they're all tongue in cheek. But one of them was clearly, like you know, focused on who could be acquiring us. So one was like by the author's name, was like Jostenshurst or something like that, just to try to like. You know, maybe their Google alerts will be pinged and they'll be like oh, what's my ebook? Let me find out about that. And so you know, we were very much like it's going to be a business. But it didn't really feel like that until probably until we got our first million members.
Speaker 3:That's when it was like, oh, oh, this thing's actually like this is really real, because, talking with my brothers ahead of time, you know we were like a million members. That's a great goal to go, goal to have. You know it's hard to picture what a million members looks like. Like I still can't really picture a million people. It's just a lot of people. And when we were but when we ended up actually hitting that in the first year we were launched to all schools and so that was kind of shocking to us. But then it was like, oh, now there's higher stakes. Now it's like, okay, we're opening an office, we're getting a team stateside, and I think that to your question. That's when it felt like, oh, this is my career, this isn't just like the side thing I'm building in school, this is like, oh no, this isn't just what I'm doing as a fun sophomore year project, this is going to be my life, for it ended up being for the next 18 years.
Speaker 2:Amazing. And how did you decide on monetization strategies from the beginning? Because obviously there's subscription models, there's the the customer is the product, so you have a lot of advertising model and everywhere in between. So what was the thought process behind that? Because obviously you said you had investment, you had hard costs, you had to pay for your developers and your team and then you had to figure out the t-shirts and any other way that you're promoting it and getting that word of mouth out there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so our model was purely ad-driven in the beginning and the reason for that was just because, well, teenagers didn't have a lot of money and also again, this is 2005, when we started out they also didn't really have access necessarily to a credit card or any way of paying you. I got my first debit card when I was maybe 16. Card when I was maybe 16. So the subscription options would also be very high friction. So we were always like, okay, ad driven is the way to go. When we first started out one of the ways that we actually started attracting advertisers because we had a lot of users in a core demo that advertisers very much wanted Exactly, we would go to the what Teens Want conference and be shocked by how little people understood teens as teenagers. It's always weird to go into one of those situations and hear them talking about you like a foreign species. So we would hear how badly they wanted to reach teens and we had this network that was all teens and so some of our initial things we actually did as like let us show you what we could do, and there was like a custom thing and you know, that's how we would get repeat clients, and so we do like big homepage takeovers and things like that with movie studios. Eventually, it became more of, like, you know, filling out inventory, which is, you know, less flashy but also optimizes very well, and so that ended up being where a lot of the revenue came from, until mobile. When we launched our mobile apps in 2010, they became our biggest platform within two years. So by 2012, web revenues and web usage has hugely declined. Almost everyone's on mobile for our platforms, and mobile advertising wasn't really a thing in 2012.
Speaker 3:Yet it was just starting out, and at this point we're public. We had already gone public. We went public in a $100 million SPAC-like deal in 2011., and so our initial months being public was acknowledging to the investors. The story was like all our members are on mobile. We don't really monetize there. You know. We would say, you know we would present there's this famous Mary Meeker slide that we would present and say, okay, this is the $20 billion opportunity that's going to be there. You know, within this industry, once the eyeballs match where people are spending their, you know, once the dollars match where people are spending their time. But it wasn't there at first. We had to, you know, to survive we had to launch, you know in-app purchase units, like you know freemium products as well. As you know, we did launch a subscription product, but really ads continued to be our most important driver until like 2017, 2018.
Speaker 3:So it was like yeah, and that's when we launched our live streaming business, and then what was so? It was one to many live streaming which now, talking about live streaming, it's like oh yeah, everyone does that In 2017, it was a very bold risk to build it, like people weren't really on video, at least in the US. It was actually very big in Asia markets and we that's actually where we had seen it work really well we're like, oh, this could solve a lot of problems in the dating industry here, so that's why we wanted to adapt it. But what's great about that model was because one we knew we had to get away from advertising, because there had to be this huge supply of inventory and basically ad rates were just low across the board, and so we wanted to get away from that. And the model that's super popular for dating, of course, is subscription.
Speaker 3:But our members liked us because we were free. We were free, they could have chats. We weren't so much dating as like even Tinder, like you're not really on there for dates. You're on there to find friends and a lot of times, friendships between single people can lead a little flirtatiously. So you know, we were dating, but only just dating, like it was more of a, you know, a friendly social app. It didn't necessarily have the strings attached of everyone here is looking for a relationship or like someone to go on a date with this weekend. It wasn't that transactional, and so if you're looking for your spouse, you might be willing to pay $30 a month. If you're looking for like a friend and to talk to someone, you're generally not like that, and so what we wanted to do is with the live stream product was, you know, monetize a significantly smaller percentage of our users than you know, subscription driven products, but do so at a higher rate for those people.
Speaker 3:And so what this product allowed? So basically, you could send gifts to the streamer and within the platform and the streamer would earn money. You know, create our economy. Then they would also want to create better content, and so it was nice, nicely reinforced there. But from our business perspective, it also monetized each user up to their willingness to pay, because you could use the features completely free, and you people did, or you know, you could be like no, I love the streamer, I've been following them for a while, I'm a huge fan. I'm gonna send them this 200 dragon, so we would start to see. Uh will like behavior.
Speaker 3:So some like really big spenders, which you know you don't see in social apps. You see in like gaming apps or right, you know, if you're playing games like that's, that's a much more typical thing where you see that whale behavior. But we started to see it too, because it was. You know, when you allow people to say how much, basically set their own price, then you're not limiting them at 30 a month, so they're going to set that significantly higher and you know of the streamers were happy and the users were also happy because it was for our big gifters. It was generally the way that they like there was definitely some like altruism impact for why they were gifting the streamer. It's because they loved supporting that streamer. They loved their stories. The same way that you know you might follow an influencer on Instagram and share their things Like you, if you've been talking to someone following them and with live being such a personality driven product like you're invested in them. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so you, you know that's what we see today, right, and that's that's what we see on TikTok or Instagram or any of these socials, or even YouTube. So you were very much at the forefront of this and I love that you talked about the transition in ad revenue, because I was thinking like, well, it had to be web-based, because we didn't even have smartphones technology when you created this, and then I was going to ask you about that transition, because that can be difficult and it's actually something we talk about in our coursework is how do you monetize? You know, and we have to be mobile first. We know that now and that, thinking about different socials, you know MySpace had to make a pivot to mostly being about musicians and bands from what it was before, friendster. For how long that was around.
Speaker 2:I, some of my friends today, are people that I met on Friendster because you know, I put like, oh, I love drinking wine and boogie boarding and somebody's on like I need, I'm looking for some new friends and oh, she likes two things that I like. So let's become friends and you know these funny things. I want to ask a little bit about that, moving from being in the youth, the teen, the high school environment. And then did you keep that product and then just create new versions that were for meeting older friends, dating these other areas, did you just completely morph and transition? So what was that experience like?
Speaker 3:So it happened sort of naturally. So, you know, early on I said, oh, maybe we'll be the Facebook for high school students. Yeah, we learned early on. I said, oh, maybe we'll be the Facebook for high school students. Yeah, we learned very early on, we're not going to be the Facebook for high school students. Growing high school to high school was very difficult, so that was our initial goal. It was like, oh, let's go high school to high school.
Speaker 3:The way Facebook had grown, college to college, high schools didn't have the same type of network as a college. You know, college you have, like this walled garden. If you're, you can block things with an email address. You know, ramp up demand only open your school when it's ready. We didn't see that behavior at all at the high school level and we just couldn't figure out how to grow that way and so. But we had to grow some way and so we, we just pursued a different strategy. So instead we're like okay, well, let's use we. Um, we acquired a whole bunch of like, and by saying when I say a whole bunch, I mean like 80 000 future generated quizzes from another property and as well, so some of their other content, but the quizzes were the most important piece and they were kind of like buzzfeed.
Speaker 2:Quizzes are today like right, you know what or I mean in the way that facebook, to grow out of the college environment, went to FarmVille, right and everybody's making farms, and that's how they got a lot of traction. And then they eventually did away with that relationship, but the people stayed. So you bought quizzes and like fun things for people to do and share with each other. Yeah, and the?
Speaker 3:quizzes were naturally viral and they had, like this you know there was a social element, because sometimes it's interesting to see, well, who scored the same way as you in your you know in your area, like that, and scored I shouldn't say that Like what friends character you are. Hey, here's the other Phoebe's in your area that you know. That adds like a little extra something to just taking the quiz. But people would like to share their quiz results because you know, whatever quiz they took, you know they felt like, oh, I want people to know that my, you know that this is the Hogwarts house that represents me, or you know, like whatever it was, and they would share their pro. They would share it on AIM and MySpace for the dominant platforms at the time, and so that's how we would get new members.
Speaker 3:Was they? People would click through, we'd have a signup flow, they'd join, but they'd see other value, they'd find other quizzes, they'd keep sharing, and so it became kind of this. We call it engineering morality and we did the same. So we created. So, after the quizzes thing was doing well, we also created something that a layout site specifically for that as well, so people could get cool layouts for their MySpace pages on our platform. So it was finding the things that the MySpace users wanted and kind of coaxing them over to us with something that they understood and then finding ways to keep them.
Speaker 3:But it's funny that you mentioned FarmValueless, because we were actually also a top five Facebook app developer as well.
Speaker 3:And that's where we got a lot of new users, really, yeah, amazing. So we had two popular Facebook games and it was, you know, a lot of people joined through those Until Facebook was like, okay, you got to stop, because all those, because they want to keep every spammed users, like that's how they worked. So much sharing, but that's how it worked. And you know, eventually facebook was like, oh, we're not going to do that anymore and so, but you expect that and you, you.
Speaker 3:But you know you hope you can ride it for as long as you can, and then you find the next. You know the next platform, but it's, it's always. I think you can, and then you find the next. You know the next platform, but it's always. I think you know the analog is it doesn't really matter. You know what's the currently the big thing is it matters, like how you can think of, how you can use it, because there's always going to be. You know, we're in the business for 18 years. How people changed on our platform changed significantly over 18 years. Yeah, I can't even imagine.
Speaker 3:But the why they were there was always the same they wanted to meet new people. So the core of their user experience was pretty much the same. So it's finding the features to build for that experience and then also finding where people like them were hanging out. And so I think it overcomplicates it when you start thinking. A lot of times, when people are thinking about growing a platform, they start going straight into like the tactical, like oh, I need Snapchat ads, I need TikTok ads, you know, whatever you got to kind of go a step. You know that's, those are things you can use, but that's, that's the tactics, that's not the strategy.
Speaker 2:And you need to find those you know. You need to have like a cohesive strategy that actually fits for. Well, why do they want to come to your platform? What you know kind of, what's the bridge from what they're currently using to you? Yeah, and this is the same thing we see today. Even though people are on digital platforms, it's still about driving connection, whether it's with family members who live overseas like myself with you know or who live all over, because every time I turn around, I feel like I meet a new family member from my Asian side. So it's from that to now. I mean, obviously there's Facebook dating and Bumble right has I don't even know if they still have these, but they have like EFF, and they have a business one also, so they have all these.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, bumble Biz. I don't know if I haven't been on. I haven't been on Bumble in a while, just funny, because I had been on hundreds of dating apps because of you know, I've been married for a while but I've been on hundreds of dating apps because of you know, market research and all that. But now that you mention it I was like, wow, I haven't checked out Bumble in like, at least in like over a year, because I haven't had to, well, talk about that, why haven't you had to?
Speaker 2:Oh well, because I don't work on a dating app right now. Yeah Well, because talk about that transition from building something from the time you were 15, growing with it I mean growing up with it really changing the business, multiple iterations based on now we have mobile, you know, we have smartphones, everybody's mobile. First, now, people were seeing different behaviors and different things that we need to create or incentivize people to stay on app and growing with like, just like you were growing up, other people were growing up too and using your platform. So I'd love to hear because you had a big exit and you also used to do it with the company but to tell our audience a little bit about that from your perspective. And then, when you kind of said maybe it's time for something new, yeah.
Speaker 3:So we kind of almost had two exits. So there's a deal that brought us public, which was like kind of a natural chapter end, I guess, in how we were building the company. So once you're a public company, it just feels very different from when you were in your initial startup days, even if the culture of the company is the same, even if the people are the same. There's kind of short-term goals in a way that there hadn't been before. Like you know, if things weren't going well when we were private, we just didn't say anything about it. Of course, when you're public, you have quarterly results that you have to be putting out there and they better be going up, which, like I mentioned before, they weren't. For us during the transition from web to mobile and I really did just kind of when we became more officially in the dating space became much more like intertwined. It's kind of funny to think about, like how much of my identity was not only being an entrepreneur but specifically when people would join the product, I was the first person they would get a message from, like it wasn't just you know something, but it was like well, it was an automated message, but it came from Catherine C and you know that. So it was funny, so that sometimes we would go to you know, so we would hold like streaming events and have our streamers there and you know I would be there because obviously I'd work for them, you know, to get their feedback on the products. You know, you know, wearing like my work hat, and I'd like they'd treat me like I was famous because I'm like this is the Catherine C, she's real, and I'd be like hi, I'd like, yeah, let me talk about this product with you. And it was funny because I also had a mutual fangirl moment with, like one of our top streamers, because I loved her as a streamer and she loved me as, like, the platform creator, and it was very like. You know it was surreal, but as I, you know, so then we had, so we were a public company for about nine years before we were acquired in a $500 million deal by the parent company at eHarmony, so that you know it's a large German media company called ProSieben and you know that would be the largest US brand. So that would bring us back private, which is good At this time.
Speaker 3:Being public was there was definitely issues. I don't want to say issues, but like when you're public company, you have to deal with short sellers, you have to deal with sellers, you have to deal with, you know, activists. And you know it was a well-timed deal in the sense of just like we had just had this huge feature launch and it, like live, was doing incredibly well, we had just launched a bdb feature with it, and so it was like, oh, this is basically a great time to come, can kind of continue the market consolidation that we had already started. So we had acquired other apps, so started that consolidation that we were required. And then so I, but then I did work for the company for an additional three years and you know, of course, like I mentioned, with the transition from becoming, you know, from being, you know the startup environment to being a public company, there's also an environment from being, you know, still you know, to kind of still have that autonomy to all of a sudden be part of a larger organization. And you know, still loved it, still love the team. I think you know.
Speaker 3:Especially, as you know, I think I was very much ready when I left, especially because I had a.
Speaker 3:I had two kids at that, point out, but my daughter was just four months old, and so it was also just like great timing was just like you know what I've had write a book on my to-do list since 2010.
Speaker 3:I think I'm gonna write a book, nice, and so that's why you know, and so it just like worked out really well for, like you know, kind of like the book ends for like one, two, like it felt like the work that I had been doing at the company, like there was going to be more transitions happening and it's it's.
Speaker 3:I felt like the work that I had been doing at the company, like there was going to be more transitions happening and I felt like it was just a good time. But, with that said, like I still care so deeply about the product and it's so I'm not logging into Bumble ever. I mean, maybe I will if I ever, you know, do some type of work that involves that, but like, yeah, not just logging in to check it out, I do log in to meet me just to check it out, just to see my favorite streamers, like cause it's still so you know I love them, I love what they built and you know, I love the team that's working on it. Still, and even though I'm not a part of it. I'm just like, oh, this is still you know, it's the products is still incredibly important to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, it was your first baby. Yes, in so many words. What are your siblings doing now? Are they still involved with the company? Have they gone on to other pursuits as well?
Speaker 3:So Dave is actually still involved with the company and Jeff is actually the CEO at Noom. Oh, okay, fantastic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, health and wellness app.
Speaker 3:Yeah, nice, and you were talking about you figured this is the right time to write your book that you'd had on your mind. So talk about the book and what will we learn from reading it? I Like I do tell my story, of course, throughout the book, but really it's about how anyone can design an environment where they can thrive. Because I feel like and I opened the book talking about how we kind of feel like we're on like this treadmill a lot of times at work and someone keeps increasing the speed and you know you keep adapting, you keep trying to, you know keep it up and but eventually you're just going to fall off. And you know you keep adapting, you keep trying to, you know keep it up and but eventually you're just going to fall off. And there's a huge issue with burnout right now and part of that is like the expectations are just well, let's just continuously work harder. A lot of things that were released to make you know work easier whether it be like Teams or Slack or you know your office chats, even email like, are now anxiety inducing because we haven't learned how to set those boundaries, how to basically design environments where we can work the way that we want to. Because I think back about how we created the company and so many of the lessons I learned from that, like setting boundaries, for instance, is important for no matter what you're doing, whether you're want to be an entrepreneur or whether you want to just have a career where you're, you know, focused, but also have the rest of your life that makes you you, because I think it's so important to have those other identity pieces and making space for them all to survive.
Speaker 3:And so one of the first things I talk about in the book is how do you define success? Because so often we don't pause to think about that. Like what does success actually look like for you? Because what success looks like for you shouldn't be what success looks like to you know someone else that isn't you. It should be unique to you. It should be about like what you actually, how you actually want to feel, how you actually want your life to go, and not just wanting, not just like a title at a company, but like what does your home life look like too? How are you involved in your community? There's so many more pieces and facets of you that I feel is kind of forgotten, and so the book is really about the lessons I learned from building the company, as it relates to how you can set boundaries, how you can make better decisions that free up your time, how you can create more time by using different tools, be more authentic and also, you know, towards the end of the book I do talk about some of the issues that I had specifically around. You know, being a woman entrepreneur, which is different than you know some of the challenges that my brothers had, and so how I kind of navigate this, but also how you know we could think about supporting and thriving together, because you know a lot of the things that you know.
Speaker 3:When you think about designing for more inclusive environments, most of the things that help one group actually end up helping all of the groups. So it really helps everyone to think of ways to just make an environment accessible to all, because then you know whether you need. You know so, for instance, when you take, like, flexible working environments, you know, obviously, parents. That's very appealing to parents. It's also appealing to people who have an aging parent or you know. So that's another caregiving role. It's also appealing to someone who might be, you know, training for something that you know, that you have that flexibility to, or even someone that wants to pursue, you know, further education and just needs that flexibility from their role so that they could actually become an even better team member by, you know, furthering their skills in some way. And so my book is really about how to kind of navigate those and prevent burnout as you do it.
Speaker 2:Nice, and what does that look like for you today? You have your family life, but you're also coming on podcasts. You're also speaking at universities I saw you had a recent talk and you're doing a lot of other things. So what is your focus now? Is it really on helping get your message out and helping other people, whatever stage they're in right If they're in university, high school, trying to figure out how to pursue their dreams to people who've been in their careers and still need this?
Speaker 3:advice weekly newsletter called Growing Up Startup, where I share, you know, other things that, yeah, I haven't talked about in the book.
Speaker 3:And then I also do monthly office hours where I just and other than monthly, I just connect with people a lot.
Speaker 3:I'm talking about how we can, you know, build better environments for everyone to thrive, because it's so important to me, and also I just have a soft spot too, for talking to any aspiring entrepreneur or someone who's already currently in the thick of it and finding ways to any way, you know, to be useful where I can. And so that's one of the reasons I do the office hours is to, you know, kind of provide that place to just connect with others, and because I also find it to be incredibly clarifying for me Whenever you're trying to, like, teach someone how to do something. It helps, you know, it helps you think through it too and I think it becomes so. You know, I don't do it just because I'm trying to learn too, but I think it actually, you know it's rewarding to me both, you know, not just from like, oh, I'm helping someone, but also because it helps me. It helps me figure out, like you know, exactly what I'm working on, exactly why I'm doing it, and so I find it very fulfilling.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's the best way to look at it, because that's the same thing I get every time I have a call or every time I'm in class and meet with a student afterwards. It's not just about me helping give information, it's about me sharing somebody else's information or learning from them as well. So it's a really beautiful place to be in.
Speaker 3:It is. It is Especially because you know there's so many people that have different, you know different challenges, no matter what they are, that you know. I don't have lived experience. I live my own lived experience. But just hearing you know what other people are struggling with also helps me realize, you know, this is what you know. These are the spaces that we need to design better. These are the things that we need to be thinking about.
Speaker 2:And I will share. I love your last post that was from an hour ago. I was reading through it, actually about stress and working out and making sure to take care of yourself. So you have the links to your newsletter, your book, your office hours in there. I will share them all with our audience and show notes. Is there any last piece of advice that you would give to that young entrepreneur or somebody who's just starting out in their entrepreneurship journey, whatever their age? Is somebody who's listening, who is one of our students in the master's programs at USC, who just needs that little nugget, that little push from you right now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would say just go for it. Just do it, Because waiting until you feel ready is often waiting too long. You can't really wait because everything's going to like as soon as you launch. Everything's going to change. Expect that, and so get to that launch point as soon as you can, because after that it's iteration, it's learning. They give everything you do as an experiment so that you can tinker, you can play with it. But don't overthink the launch, because you're always going to be in the process of launching.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's one lesson we've definitely learned from listening to you today.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Well, this has been a really fantastic conversation, catherine. I always love it when we get to chat and I know that our audience at USC is going to get great value USC and beyond, I should say out of this conversation. So just thank you again for being here and thank you to everybody who's watching this episode or listening to it.
Speaker 1:So just thank you again for being here and thank you to everybody who's watching this episode or listening to it. To learn more about the Master of Science in Digital Media Management program, visit us on the web at dmmuscedu.
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