May 17, 2023 • 60 mins
In this episode, we explore interruption with Andrea Michalek. A serial entrepreneur, Andrea started her career as a software engineer working on innovative search algorithms. Early on, she was tapped to lead a spin-out, and she was hooked. Andrea has led spin-outs, start-ups, and a major acquisition (twice), all in the space of search technology, research literature, and more recently in scholarly reputational management. All that stopped abruptly in 2020, when Andrea suffered a traumatic brain injury from which she emerged over the course of three years. Join us as we talk about her career of interruptions and diversions, and her experience re-starting her own life.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:04):
Without being interrupted,
we all just keep on going down the same path we've been going down more often than not.
And it takes those pausings, those big moments, to step back and reconsider and re-evaluate.
Hi! Welcome to We Interrupt.
(00:26):
I'm Laure Haak, your host.
In this podcast, we explore the ins and outs of interruptions to understand more fully what interruption is and how it may be useful or even necessary for enhancing creativity,
connection,
reducing power imbalances and even building inclusive communities.
(00:46):
In this episode, we explore interruption with Andrea Michalek.
A serial entrepreneur, Andrea started her career as a software engineer working on innovative search algorithms.
Early on, she was tapped to lead a spin-out, and she was hooked.
Andrea has led spin-outs, start-ups, and a major acquisition,
not once but twice, all in the space of search technology,
(01:08):
and more recently in scholarly reputational management.
Her career has had many overlaps and touch points with my own,
which made this conversation even more fun.
However, all of that stopped abruptly in 2020 when Andrea suffered a traumatic brain injury from which she has emerged over the course of the last three years.
(01:29):
Join us as we talk about her career of diversions and interruptions and her experience restarting her own life.
(01:56):
Andrea, thanks so much for joining us today for We Interrupt.
I wanted to start off with having you tell us about yourself, and then we're gonna get into your roles over the years that have had just a lot of interruptions and phoenix-like rebirths.
I'm so looking forward to this conversation.
Great.
Thank you so much, Laure.
(02:17):
It's really a pleasure to be here.
So I am, as you mentioned, a serial entrepreneur.
I've joked that I'm a recovering entrepreneur, and in a phase of life at the moment,
helping other people, through coaching --
leadership coaching, product coaching -- be more successful in what they're doing and why.
I started my career as a software engineer,
(02:46):
as a woman in technology,
which has had some interruptions of itself just being in that space,
but progressed from there to a technology manager,
to a product leader,
to a founder and a series of different companies that I've founded.
Some have had exits and had a really interesting career progression through all of those different changes in my own life.
(03:14):
One of the things I really love about what you're doing in addition to the coaching work that you're doing now,
which is so important for others of us who are also entrepreneurs,
is to have somebody like you,
we can talk to who helps us understand that we're not crazy and and can also encourage us on this pathway and provide some specific examples and support
(03:37):
saying I've been through this,
here's some things you might want to think about.
There's that, but there's also the fact that you offer part time in person support services to organizations that are moving through these initial start ups, which is also so important.
I think so many start ups don't take the time to work on actual product development,
(04:01):
which you do.
But in my experience,
it's also a lot of the operational guts of organizations, people tend to ignore.
They've got a really great idea and an MVP and then they don't have a plan for how are we gonna increase staff support and scale and support our user base, that ends up in disaster.
So I love that you do both of those things,
(04:23):
the coaching and also,
hey, I can help you on the ground.
A lot of why I focus my practice that way is because as an entrepreneur,
that's what I needed.
I didn't need more frameworks or books or guidelines.
A lot of times I needed someone in the trenches with me helping navigate the really complex decisions that you're faced with and decisions that often have a lot of opportunity cost,
(04:54):
right?
It's not just should I do this or not,
but if I'm going down this path,
I'm explicitly not going down this other path and how do I make those decisions?
There's an aspect of both this cyclical rebirth,
this phoenix-like component, as well as disruption throughout your entire career.
(05:14):
And you mentioned one piece that for many of us feels disruptive, is just being a woman in tech.
I think another one is being a woman in a leadership position,
particularly a woman in a leadership position in a tech start up is
such a purple swan kind of event.
(05:34):
I have been a leader in tech start ups, several times as well.
And there is this feeling of loneliness,
being taken seriously, how you are perceived as a,
a leader versus a harridan.
And I'm wondering if you can talk a bit about this idea of disruption or interruption,
(05:56):
both in terms of how you are interacting with people around you,
but also in how you perceive yourself and have learned and grown in your career.
So I grew up as the youngest child with two older brothers,
I was as likely to be out playing football or climbing a tree or,
(06:19):
having a sword fight with the other neighborhood boys because that's just the environment I grew up in.
And so I was somewhat taken by surprise that I was not taken as seriously as a man in a role, because it wasn't the way I was raised.
(06:39):
It wasn't the way I was raised by my parents.
I was the annoying little sister,
of course,
but that was not because I was a girl, but because I was the annoying little sister.
And so you fast forward into a professional setting where often I was the only woman on the team.
(07:00):
One of my first jobs, I was in a department of 300 engineers,
one of two women. That is a ratio that was not atypical. And not only was I one of two women,
I was young,
I had big froofy hair,
a dark tan.
(07:21):
And you know,
when I would show up,
people would be like,
wait,
you're Andrea Michalek?
You're Andrea?
Wait,
this can't,
this doesn't equate to the person they heard over the phone -- because it was a somewhat of a distributed team.
So when I would go to the main office, they'd be very surprised.
Those sorts of interactions weren't negative,
(07:44):
but yet you were always a little bit of an outsider.
As you would come in or,
even speaking up,
sometimes the sound of a female voice when they're expecting a male voice would make people react in a very different way than you would expect.
So you started off as a member of a development team,
(08:07):
software development team,
and gradually moved into more positions of leadership, as well as starting your own company.
So, how did that happen?
How did you move from being a member of a team to
Oh, I have this great idea for a start up.
(08:28):
It was very evolutionary, and at times I was drug kicking and screaming to the next phase.
Early in my career, I was a developer building search technologies.
My background is search and machine learning and deep algorithms to solve very specific problems. I loved my job.
(08:52):
I really did.
I was building a search product at an early dot.com and it was one of those moments where the parent,
the company had a major project that wasn't just the online dot.com,
but we were trying to do an enterprise-grade search service.
And they had hired for their start up that I was at,
(09:15):
they had hired a very well seasoned project manager to come and manage this project,
whose skills and techniques were not at all a match for the fast paced start up that we were in, and the project was in dire straits.
And if coincidentally that project failed,
the revenue wouldn't come in,
(09:36):
they wouldn't make payroll,
the company would go out of business, all of that.
So the GM of the company and a senior leader pulled me aside one day and said,
hey,
Andrea,
guess what?
We'd like you to lead this project.
And I said,
oh, thanks.
But no,
And the punch line really was, well,
(09:57):
if you don't,
I hope you enjoy the next month at the company because after that,
it won't be around.
And I decided to leave my first project.
And when I did and we,
you know,
of course,
it wouldn't be a good story without a great ending.
And of course,
it launched on time the customer loved it.
(10:17):
We made payroll, all of that.
The learning I took from it was, I loved it.
I love the fact that the impact I could make was bigger than the impact I alone made with my hands on the keyboard.
It was all of my colleagues, and wow, that was great.
How do I do more of it?
(10:38):
And that was the seed that happened.
And the very first company I started was again for that company.
At that same company,
a couple of years later,
we had way too many consumer facing products that we were marketing.
And I came to the decision that what we really needed was to market the engine that would power all of these products.
(11:06):
And I went to the CEO of the company, and he said that's a great idea.
I have this other guy in another part of the company who heads up our affiliate marketing, who wants to start a company.
Why don't the two of you get together and maybe spin this out.
That was built for purpose.
Not like, hey, I wanna be an entrepreneur, let me go and do this.
(11:26):
It was much more, here's an opportunity, let me go and seize that and go from there.
That's really neat, that you were able to do essentially two spin outs where as an entrepreneur,
you got to refine your skills at project management without the craziness of trying to find the funding to get the idea started.
(11:47):
It's a nice way to go.
And the second one as well.
Also getting paired with somebody else that you can partner with on the on the launch of that. That's awesome.
For people inside of companies thinking like, oh, I need to go out and become an entrepreneur,
there's definitely pathways,
career pathways for intrapreneurship, that is a type of way to disrupt your own career,
(12:12):
but not
OK, let me go quit my day job and go all in and do it.
I have done that path as well later in my life.
But learning the ropes,
I was able to have a little bit of the best of both worlds,
the corporate support,
the mentorship right in place and then the opportunity to go and,
(12:37):
and really try these things out.
We've been talking and using the word disruption.
And I'm wondering if any of the experiences thus far that we've talked about,
you would have considered either at the time or in hindsight to be more of an interruption than a disruption or do you feel like those two words kind of mean the same thing?
(12:58):
They definitely mean something different,
they're related but they're different.
The lovely story I told of this great nurturing environment where I was going to spin a company out?
The the way that story ended was the dot.com crash happened right at the same time.
So instead of going and being the poster child of how this public dot.com company was going to incubate other companies.
(13:24):
Instead,
the asset that I created while under that umbrella became one of the crown jewels used to sell the parent company.
So my plan of launching this --
I had a term sheet in hand from a VC! I was going!
Nope! The dot.com crash came and interrupted all of those plans.
(13:46):
You can find me about that time with a haircut about a quarter inch long as I was giving a guest lecture about entrepreneurship saying how I would never ever work for anyone again in my life.
I was going to be this,
you know,
consultant for hire,
doing project based work.
I did that for about seven or eight years.
(14:08):
I was an interim chief technology officer for hire,
worked at many,
many start ups as their CTO.
At one point,
I had a,
a whole fan of business cards. Whoever I was talking to.
I could pull out, I'm this CTO of this company!
Yeah.
So that was definitely an interruption in my life that set me on a very different trajectory.
(14:34):
You and I met in person.
I can't remember the first time,
but definitely I remember doing a presentation with you when you were working at Plum Analytics,
you developed this really beautiful interface that enabled researchers to more easily capture what it was they were doing and,
and present that externally.
(14:55):
And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you ended up,
going from the search interface that you're talking about in the mid two thousands and how you ended up working in the research community and supporting research metrics?
Absolutely.
So when I was a consultant,
ProQuest needed some help to design a brand new search product.
(15:18):
And like I said,
that was my my background.
So I helped them from the business plan to a,
large business unit internally.
I came in and helped them design the Summon web scale discovery service.
So, the first of its kind, back then, of delivering a Google-like search experience for searching the different types of research that a library might subscribe to.
(15:45):
So we were selling it to academic research libraries primarily during the course of that work.
And I was there for several years and eventually became an employee of ProQuest and Serial Solutions.
But during that time,
we were trying to solve relevancy ranking:
how do we bring the best research back in response to a user's query?
(16:09):
And we hit a very large problem with academic research in particular,
where at the time,
the only way to really measure how credible a particular article was was based on how many other articles cite that work.
How many references it that had would give you a really good indication of whether a article had a lot of prestige in their field.
(16:40):
So you're looking for information about lung cancer and an article comes back that's been highly cited and that's great.
The problem is,
is academic research citations,
take years and years and years to accrue.
So if you were looking for something published in the last year that has a lot of academic research citations,
you're not going to find it.
(17:01):
So if you wanted something current,
you don't get these highly cited articles.
If you want something highly cited in general,
you don't get things that are current.
And so really saying there must be some way of doing this online.
There is a way of doing it in like normal web articles.
Google has its page rank algorithm.
(17:22):
And how do we do that?
And that's really where the idea for finding a way to measure the full impact of a particular piece of work came from.
So unlike what I described earlier,
instead, this time, I said,
I want to go and build a company with the mission of solving this very large problem.
(17:46):
You and I were working in similar spaces.
The company I was at,
at the time was trying to figure out how do we understand the longer term impact of,
for example,
a funder investing in a specific research area.
How do you bring that advanced computing power to doing extract transform load,
(18:06):
all the reg-ex stuff to try to find information inside of articles and cross reference bits and pieces, bringing in the machine learning,
but also the human component that validates and verifies what we're finding through these expressions.
So all of that was going on, a huge amount of work,
lots and lots of different organizations working on similar questions.
(18:29):
And one of the really neat things I remember about Plumb Analytics was you weren't just interested in journal articles. You brought in other ways of understanding impact, community relevance, into the way that you processed the articles.
(18:50):
I think this is another form of interruption which is saying,
look,
we are so used to in the academic space to treating citations as the measure of relevance and importance.
And what you said was actually no,
we need to work harder to understand what impact and relevance looks like.
(19:10):
And we -- your company -- is going to spend the time to figure out some other ways of doing that.
My background is in research and I always really wanted us as a research community to have more effective and inclusive ways of recognizing somebody's contribution.
You're coming at this from a very,
very different perspective and I'm interested in what your motivation was for starting this company.
(19:34):
My co-founder of the company was a librarian.
So his background at the time that we started the company,
he was looking at things where they were at the tipping point where how people produce and consume information is very different.
Open access and,
and making things publicly freely available out there is happening.
(19:59):
And we don't have metrics.
We don't even have the language to talk about what we measure and how we measure it.
So that very first day,
the two of us were kind of heads down together,
figuring this out.
We went and started looking at different random researchers at prestigious research libraries and research universities and notice what just an abysmal job they had at trying to represent their body of work,
(20:37):
their life's work and the impact it was having.
Often, they were just big old long lists of publications.
And so really all you could do is scan and look at the names of the journals to kind of figure out, was that a good thing or not?
And just that's just a can of worms of looking at only the journal of where something was published.
(21:00):
And as we talked about it,
we said,
well,
look at all of the other work that they're doing outside of journal articles.
So you couldn't measure the jour journal article that well and you couldn't capture everything else that well.
And it was,
imagine it,
imagine if there really was a way to represent across all different types of categories of research outputs across all different ways of organizing and understanding the sort of reach it has,
(21:34):
who's using it,
who's interacting with it,
who's sharing it,
who's citing it,
who's doing all of these different activities?
What would the,
what would we be able to do with information like that?
What would the researchers be able to do?
The funders who fund that research?
(21:54):
The universities that support them?
The corporations looking to get involved?
You know,
all of that entire ecosystem.
We decided, OK, we wanna work together and start this.
What are we going to do?
The two of us got together in the morning, and went from
oh my gosh, I don't know what we're going to do, this isn't going to work
to, before lunch,
we had the plan of what we were doing, and we went and had a lovely lunch.
(22:19):
We ate pizza,
drank wine,
celebrated starting this great thing.
And it was one of those moments where just all of the pieces just felt like they came together,
they came together from the work that he had done in his past,
from all of the work on search and data manipulation and machine learning that I had done in my past, and we learned right then that there was this brand new thing called alternative metrics that people were talking about.
(22:50):
And we're like,
hey,
we could be an alternative metrics too.
And so there was a movement afoot that we did not create,
we did not decide to form a company because of it.
But yet it just happened to be there.
That was hugely instrumental.
The entire space was being changed right in front of us.
(23:16):
And we just happened to have all of those forces come together at the perfect time.
That's a fabulous story.
Thank you.
It's interesting too because you were able to bring your capabilities and experience on the technology side,
(23:39):
plus the leadership component, that enabled you to say this is an interesting idea,
but we can make it happen too both technologically and from a business perspective.
And I think that combination of things is so, so important.
We also had a great network.
(24:00):
I think that's the other,
the other component, because we had built this disruptive product in search for academic libraries with Summon.
We were well known in that,
that narrow vertical as being the the folks who could take this up and could execute on something very large and complex and could make it happen.
(24:27):
And that's what we did.
We went,
you know,
gas pedal to the floorboard kind of way forward as a bootstrapping start up to make that to make that happen.
So you were able to go from a spin out,
and I think within two years,
you had already gone through an acquisition process.
(24:50):
We did.
We both quit our day jobs, and I consulted for about three months to just get my head in it,
you know,
is this going to be a thing?
Is this not?
And we hit the ground running and our goal was within two years to be acquired.
So we only bootstrapped.
(25:11):
We raised a small seed round and we did many things ourselves.
I'm not sure I recommend the high high velocity bootstrapping.
It was a very stressful and intense two years,
but we did that.
We were acquired by EBSCO and we built the team up from there,
(25:34):
a lot of people who had been helping us for a little bit of equity,
paying them with cases of beer.
And thank yous.
And you know,
all of those things.
Once we were acquired,
I was able to give them all nice jobs.
We built the team for real, and then not that long after that,
the company was acquired a second time and we moved from EBSCO to Elsevier.
(26:00):
So, I've gone through a transition from a smallish start up,
50 people or so to being acquired by a very large company,
50 people to 50,000 people.
And my experience at that time was,
the ability to lead the charge,
(26:22):
get people excited,
move the team,
engage with potential clients,
engage with existing clients --
there was such a freedom and,
and just the spirit of entrepreneurship,
we can do anything almost, right?
And then you move to this larger company where in some ways that acquisition was supposed to open up more opportunity for entrepreneurship and growth.
(26:49):
But in practice,
it was like putting the lid on,
this kettle of entrepreneurship and that just stifled so much.
And so I'm wondering what your experience was,
you not only went through one acquisition,
went through two in a fairly short order, and clearly you had designed to be acquired within two years.
(27:12):
So you wanted to go that route.
But I'm wondering if you can talk a bit about what that experience is like.
I mean,
this isn't the first time you've gone through this,
you've done a couple of spin outs.
What is your experience and how have you managed,
psychologically,
this transition from that small super agile ideas all over the place,
(27:34):
frenetic activity, to
OK,
I'm now part of a larger organization with its own culture and way of doing things.
How does that work?
They're great questions.
When I started Plum, less than two weeks after I started,
my dad was diagnosed with cancer.
(27:59):
And my co founder and I,
we're like,
ok, we're still doing this.
And so I was raising money while my dad was going through,
you know,
it was the very early days of the start up.
And he actually was diagnosed with cancer when his femur,
you know,
the largest bone in his leg, shattered when he was putting on socks.
(28:21):
And so he was in the hospital having surgery on that.
And I was there and had an investor meeting that I was like,
ok,
well,
I have nowhere to do this from other than,
on my laptop in the hospital cafeteria.
(28:41):
So I have my laptop open.
I'm sitting presenting to the potential investor.
My mom and dad are watching at the table behind me and I go through the entire presentation and turn around like,
ok,
mom,
dad,
what did you think?
And my dad's like,
I understand everything finally, what you're doing.
(29:03):
But why in the world do you want to sell your company?
Why would you wanna do this?
Like, you're never going to be happy.
You own the company now.
Why are you doing this?
And I remember telling him,
oh dad, this is my plan.
Of course, this is what I wanna do.
This is what I'm going to do and why.
(29:25):
And I've often thought back to that conversation many,
many chapters later and go,
man.
Why did I want to sell the company?
Why didn't I listen to my dad?
He got this.
But I wouldn't trade the journey.
Definitely, when I talk with entrepreneurs,
(29:48):
now, one of the big things I ask and I try to get them to think through is what's on the other side of success.
Say your plan works,
say everything goes exactly as you hoped.
What's on the other side of that?
Is that what you're truly solving for?
(30:08):
Are you solving for
pulling the brass ring that you're supposed to be,
like, ok, yay.
But then what do you do?
And having gone through some of those things where I got exactly what I designed,
I designed the plan I executed,
it was successful.
And then you think,
huh?
Was that really what I should have been solving for at the end of the day?
(30:34):
It's interesting because a lot of the work that I've been doing has been in the nonprofit and social benefit space,
where the,
the brass ring is
benefit to the community, and not
VC investment or a purchase by another entity.
And that question still comes up, which is, you're putting all of this time and effort in, (a) why is it a nonprofit?
(31:01):
And, (b) what is success,
what does that look like?
Not just for the organization you're building,
but also for you as a founder.
It's a tough question,
but one that needs to be asked. I think for the founders of these organizations,
whether they're for profit,
nonprofit, co-op,
(31:22):
whatever,
having somebody like you who's been through this journey multiple times to kind of bounce some ideas off of,
it is so important.
It's just really important just to know --
I'm not going crazy,
I do have these questions and I don't understand,
how I can balance my need for "x" with
(31:42):
community need for this organization, whatever that happens to be.
It's a really tough position.
And even though Plum Analytics was a for profit company,
it was very much a mission driven company.
It was about getting these fuller metrics that we truly believed,
and I still believe, change the pace at which research discoveries could happen.
(32:05):
If you could actually give the data that enables people to better understand what's happening with research and build that into the platforms where people are searching for data and manipulating data,
you could change things.
And that was the evolution that the two acquisitions went through.
(32:26):
One was to build out the actual features and functionality of what we were doing.
And we did that while at EBSCO with the support of all the people there.
And then that was kind of a vertical that we were selling a particular product called Plum X into the market.
(32:46):
And then when Plum Analytics became a part of Elsevier instead of building a vertical solution,
I switched my focus and my team's focus kind of building a horizontal solution across research metrics across what a
very large publisher,
scholarly publisher is doing.
(33:07):
And we got our brand new metrics integrated in a very short amount of time and every major platform that Elsevier had so that those metrics then got built right next to where the researchers could engage with them or the people searching,
research could engage with them.
So it was all very much stepwise, like this all makes sense.
(33:33):
It's all building something bigger than just what was best for my career or my team's individual careers.
But building this for this larger why, where the product or the technologies were helping solve for that.
(33:54):
Definitely the pace of change from being a,
a start up to being a senior leader at a large company that's working across many teams to get road maps lined up to move big initiatives forward,
it's a very different pace and a very different job.
But yet,
(34:14):
one I was still happy doing,
because again,
it was trying to look at
what's the mission behind the work, and why does this work matter?
So, you have this long career in product development,
very product-centered career.
You have a tech background and the leadership experience that allows you to conceive of, develop, and launch products.
(34:38):
Super awesome.
And I love that the products are also in the space that I know of, so I get to know you!
One of the challenges we run into and again, in the nonprofit space particularly, is we have this really fabulous idea that we think is gonna change the world and we go off and try to build this thing,
whatever it happens to be, and then somebody forgets to talk to the end user.
(34:59):
And then you're like,
well,
how am I supposed to measure change if I don't even know who is using my platform?
And I haven't actually talked to them in the design of the platform.
How do you do that in the product spaces you've been in,
how have you been able to engage with users and, particularly, let's focus on Plum,
where you're developing a suite of metrics,
(35:20):
that can be used by the community,
including the researchers themselves who are producing the content,
the metrics are being applied,
and at the same time, researchers just really don't want to do this.
They just want to do their research, and they are often drug kicking and screaming into this idea of,
(35:41):
would you just stop measuring me, and just let me do my work?
So how did you engage with the researchers in the development of these metrics and/or in the launch of them in these different platforms.
So I talked about that meeting and then the lovely lunch where we toast and we celebrated that afternoon.
(36:02):
The very next thing we did was booked plane tickets and we went to where we knew we could talk to a large number of people at the same time.
So a lot of our contacts and our networks were around libraries.
So we went to the ALA conference, which happened to be in January,
(36:23):
just a couple weeks after we got together. And we went and we booked as absolutely many meetings as we could handle.
And our schedule was insane. We wanted to talk to everybody,
We wanted their feedback.
We wanted to know,
would you do this,
(36:43):
does this make sense?
Would you help us connect with some researchers to vet this idea?
And so we leveraged the the network.
We had built some great partnerships,
got directly in contact with some pilot projects to work with the university and their university library and some researchers to go and build the system around their research
(37:13):
and then get those researchers to give us feedback on, was this helpful?
Was this right?
Was this wrong?
And we definitely learned.
Some of the stuff we were most proud of, then we'd hear the researchers say, What? This is terrible!
And I was like,
oh my gosh,
ok,
I get it.
And so we definitely learned a lot and changed a lot during that time.
(37:34):
One of the things that we did that then haunted us later was we did not want to give a single score. We pushed back hard on that.
We came up with the visualization.
We did all sorts of things to give data and analytics tools.
But we never wanted to say this article is a 17 or this,
(37:57):
this podcast is a 3.
No, we didn't want that. We thought that would do more harm than good. It would have helped us sell more,
but yet we felt it would do a disservice to the mission behind what we were doing.
(38:17):
And that was a decision that really followed us through many ups and downs with the company of why we wouldn't give a single score even when the buyers might love that single score.
We felt the researchers truly deserved better.
(38:37):
We had so many conversations about,
that single score, that we could build a composite.
And as you describe,
there is no one way of doing research or there is no one kind of researcher and trying to develop a single score is just in my opinion,
it's a fool's errand.
And as you said,
does a disservice to the research community.
(38:59):
You really have to take a little more time and try to look at things.
I think everyone is in such a rush,
you know,
they're in such a rush and they want a single number and somebody else to digest all this information and it's just not the way this should work.
(39:23):
So, maybe let's go on to this next piece of your career. After Plum you were doing some consulting,
and then one day you kind of fell off the face of the earth.
And I was actually still at Plum at that point.
(39:43):
I was at Elsevier.
I was an employee at Elsevier.
I had a team,
I was overseeing research metrics.
I had a really exciting next big thing I was going to be doing,
it was December.
I do know the year, it was December of 2018 and life was good until I took a prescription drug and I had a severe allergic reaction to it.
(40:13):
And so in the course of 48 hours I was having,
I was having seizures daily.
I couldn't walk,
I didn't have balance.
I couldn't think.
I lost pretty much, you know,
brain injury,
I lost my executive functioning,
(40:33):
not from a senior executive kind of way,
but just a brain executive functioning,
unable to do simple things like cook dinner or do laundry.
That,
that level.
My life was completely interrupted, and it was not a quick recovery.
(40:54):
Originally, they thought,
well,
once I was 72 hours and the drugs were,
you know,
the prescription drugs were out of my system,
I would be fine.
But we're not exactly sure why it happened,
but my brain did not recuperate quickly and it was almost three years that it took from that December 2018 until I was able to work again and be the person that's having this lovely conversation with you today, Laure
(41:28):
and get back to being able to,
to figure out what I wanted to do next.
Because during some of the,
the darkest times,
it wasn't clear that I would fully recover and it wasn't clear that I would be able to do any sort of thinking work at all.
(41:54):
And it was only through perseverance,
and I think a little bit of luck, that I found some medical ways to get my functioning back and to figure out what actually had happened to kind of rewire my brain.
So I cannot imagine what you went through and I just,
(42:21):
I'm happy you recovered.
I know you can't be more happy than you were to recover.
During that time,
I mean,
not during the time,
but let's say once you realize that you are going to recover,
what was your,
how did this unfold your,
(42:42):
your decision
or I guess the decision making process, or the thinking process for "what I wanna do next in my life"?
Can you talk a bit about how that emerged?
I am sure you went through cyclical bouts of depression and elation and then depression and like,
(43:04):
oh my God,
what have I lost?
And oh, there's this opportunity..
Can you talk a bit about what that experience was like?
I know I went through all sorts of speech therapy,
physical therapy,
vision therapy,
cognitive therapy,
all sorts of things.
And one of the therapists I was talking to when I was expressing my frustration that I just wanted my life back.
(43:31):
I just want it back.
And I'll never forget it, because she smiled,
she sat back in her chair and looked at me and said,
do you want to go back to high school and be exactly the person you were when you were a high school student?
And I was like, of course not.
She's like, well, why not?
I'm like, well, because I'm not that person anymore.
(43:52):
She's like, exactly, you're not going to go back.
There is no going back, any more than you can go back and be,
you know,
a 16 year old getting their driver's license
and figuring that out for the first time.
You don't get to go back, ever.
You only get to go forward.
(44:14):
And I reflected on that so many times, about every time I would think to myself,
I just want to be ...
well,
I can't be that anymore.
And so that was the first phase, I would say, is just trying to come to terms with not being able to go back.
(44:34):
And then I had huge uncertainty for a long time of what could I do going forward?
Because I couldn't trust the one thing that I had built my whole self identity around,
which was my brain.
I wasn't someone who physically did much.
(44:58):
I wrote code.
I led people. I talked.
I sat in front of a computer.
I talked on the phone, every now and then I talked face to face,
but it was talking and thinking were what I could do.
Luckily through most of this,
I could still keep typing.
So I was able to write.
(45:19):
So I wrote a lot,
a lot of it early on completely unintelligible,
even to me at the time I was writing it,
but I forced myself to keep just trying to put my thoughts together enough to express them.
Even when I couldn't speak, because a lot of my deficits were auditory,
(45:41):
both being able to comprehend information coming at me verbally as well as being able to speak.
I was still able to write, and that was
a big piece of my recovery was being able to just try to come up with a plan.
(46:03):
I don't think I totally answered your question.
The pivotal moment for me was I was on an airplane for the first time by myself going to meet a friend to go hiking because
I learned through my whole recovery, being in nature, walking,
(46:24):
hiking,
I could talk for a long time about how transformative and healing that was.
But I was on this cross country flight going out to go hiking and I was trapped in the window seat next to --
It sounds like a joke, bnut it wasn't --
a Buddhist and a Southern Baptist Christian debating the meaning of life.
(46:49):
Right?
So these two gentlemen on a cross country flight from the US.
Trapped. My noise canceling headphones weren't canceling out their conversation.
And I eventually said,
you know what,
I'm not joining in their conversation.
But let me figure out what is my meaning of life?
(47:09):
Maybe this is what I'm supposed to do trapped on this flight.
Let me figure this out. And I came up with just this template of how do I figure out what my,
what my why is?
What's important to me as a person?
What am I passionate about?
What kind of pay do I need?
(47:30):
What kind of structure do I want?
And what came out of that analysis for me was, it wasn't about building products anymore.
I didn't feel like I needed or I should even go and try to launch a new product company that goes and does this, even with a great mission,
(47:51):
purpose driven.
But it was really about the people. Because the legacy I think we all leave are the lives of the people around us and how we can help and influence them.
And I thought maybe that's what I'll do.
I don't know how
I'm gonna do this,
but I'm gonna go be a coach and I'm gonna help people.
(48:11):
I'm going to help them do what I know how to do,
which is launch products and run companies.
But it's not about me building the next company or the next product.
It's about how do I help the people around, and just kind of an ever growing set of people who I've been able to help is how I'm measuring my own success right now.
(48:34):
So it's like the Andrea start up.
It is!
How are you going to monetize,
what is your product,
which is yourself, right?
And bring yourself into these essential conversations with people about what their meaning of life is.
So you're really kind of sharing that conversation over and over again.
(49:00):
And this is the hardest start up to date, I'll tell you.
I think the standpoint of, for me,
it's way clearer talking about a product's purpose and the business model around the product.
When you're actually talking about your own purpose,
it's way more nuanced than that.
It is.
(49:20):
And I think, having gone through a similar kind of evolution in my own career from product based nonprofit community,
to,
hey Laure is out there offering myself in a way,
a similar way,
as conversation partner for organizations that are starting up,
we're going through some transition,
we need some help.
It is really difficult to explain it.
(49:43):
And for me,
I don't know if it's the same for you.
But for me,
part of it also is changing the focus from this thing that's over here,
and now the focus is on me.
And I think, coming up through the ranks as a research scientist and,
working at a variety of different places where the focus was always external to me and I could contribute to the advancement of this other thing,
(50:09):
having the gaze now settle on me is unsettling.
I don't always care for it.
I don't know if you've had that same experience.
I have. Right after the dot.com crash in 2001, I did have that seven or eight year period where I did do consulting.
(50:32):
But it was much more,
you need a technical person to come and do these sets of things for you.
I can do that.
It was much more tangible.
And what I did back then was I thought,
oh,
I'll just market this interim CTO person who happens to be me and I'll do that.
(50:56):
And so this is very similar,
but it's also a little different because,
although I do go into companies in a,
sometimes a hands on role,
I'm always transitioning to more of a coaching model towards the end of that or helping them hire,
(51:17):
hire a full time person if they're a very young company.
So I have to say, your LinkedIn posts have been wonderful.
They are so,
they're direct, and friendly at the same time,
and they seem very you.
I love that about them.
The tools that you put together are elegantly simple.
(51:40):
I love them.
And I looked at them like,
oh,
I should do that.
And then I look at you!
I like the elegance.
But then, I'm just not an elegant person.
I just admire it in other people.
So, I want to come back to this theme of the podcast.
(52:02):
We've come and talked about disruption and interruption in many different ways.
And I wanted to come to the end of this podcast and have you reflect a bit on your experience with interruption and what it means to you.
Whether it's Andrea in Andrea's career, or you personally,
(52:24):
how has your understanding of interruption involved over the course of your career in your life, and how do you sit with the notion of interruption right now?
That's a really profound question, actually.
I think of interruption as an opportunity for reinvention.
(52:49):
And I've been playing around with this visual in my head of a Phoenix.
Like, during the darkest times when I truly felt like I was in the ashes.
I mean,
I really truly felt like,
man,
I've got nothing left.
I have nothing of my past life that can serve me today to get through today, and the tasks that I need to do.
(53:15):
I've got nothing, and rebuilding and
rebirthing what you want to do and how you want to do it, is,
it's an opportunity to do that.
Not an easy opportunity,
right?
When you're interrupted,
you never,
I should say you,
(53:36):
you rarely want to be interrupted.
That's the other thing. I haven't ever looked at an interruption and said,
oh,
thank goodness.
Even what I talked about earlier as a developer.
I was happy writing code and building these systems,
you're doing amazing stuff.
I didn't want to be interrupted to go and lead a project.
(53:57):
I didn't want that.
I was resistant to that.
I clearly didn't want to be interrupted when I was working at Elsevier as a,
a VP of Metrics and doing all of those
big important things.
At the time, I didn't want that either.
So, the only way I've found to come to terms with all of that is to really say,
(54:22):
all right,
what does that mean for who I want to become?
Who do I want, given that I'm here where I'm at right now,
who do I want to become?
And how do I,
how do I take steps --
sometimes little small wobbly steps --
but steps towards getting to that,
that next place.
(54:44):
I really tried to visualize what that next place looks like.
It's down to the details of what --
what does my office look like?
How am I spending my day?
What kinds of conversations am I having with whom?
(55:06):
What sorts of problems are we solving?
And just focusing on, how can I get to that next state of how I wanna live my life.
And what does that mean for my family time?
And where am I going to go on great hikes next?
(55:26):
And what am I going to travel and see?
And I'm actually going to travel for me, not to go to a conference or to a customer meeting.
So much of my professional life was traveling to go somewhere and hurrying to get home because I had kids at home.
(55:49):
I wasn't extending the my time over the weekend to go and sightsee because I couldn't.
I could have but I couldn't,
I needed to come home and take my kids to ballet class.
It's defining the type of life you want in the future.
(56:14):
Yeah.
And I think so many of us don't do that work to imagine what life could be like.
I think a lot of people get sucked into what life is like now, and in a way it is an absolute luxury to be able to go through that ideation process and imagine a life different than what we are living in today,
(56:39):
For ourselves personally,
but also more generally like,
what could things work like?
And how do I think they could be better for,
this group of people or this group of people,
including myself or my family?
And I think taking that breath,
that pause, and almost interrupting your own narrative to say,
(57:01):
you know what, this is where I am today,
but like you said,
what are those opportunities,
that opportunity for reinvention -- is just such an awesome way to look at what interruption means. Neat.
I'm so glad you're coaching because you can bring some of these life lessons into those coaching experiences with people and get them to kind of shake loose from the chains that bind.
(57:30):
Absolutely.
And they bind us all, right?
I think that
it is just taking that,
taking that breath,
the power of pausing.
I once I once learned in negotiating,
in negotiating a big important contract or a big deal,
(57:52):
there's huge power in pausing, and stop talking.
So, that's like negotiation for me.
Negotiation 101:
Stop talking.
Stop.
Say what you want.
Say what you need, and let it get uncomfortable.
(58:14):
And then often, that's when things start to turn.
So, if you look at that of interrupting your life the same way,
sometimes interruptions -- like my brain injury -- are way uncomfortable.
It was not the type of pause I wanted,
but then things kind of break loose on the other side of that pause.
(58:35):
So that's another ... just as I've been reflecting,
thinking about talking about interruptions,
that that power of pausing that an interruption gives you,
is something that is really an interesting concept because it doesn't happen other times.
(58:56):
Without being interrupted,
we all just keep on going down the same path we've been going down more often than not.
And it takes those pausing those big moments to step back and reconsider and re-evaluate.
Andrea. Thank you so much for sharing your story.
(59:18):
There's some really personal aspects of your story as well that I know are difficult to share, and I appreciate that you have done.
So, thank you.
It's healing and therapeutic to share those things.
Thank you for the opportunity to do that.
(59:38):
Thank you for joining us for more about We Interrupt.
Please see our website at www.weinterruptthis.com
There, you can find show notes,
links and other episodes.
You can also contact me on Twitter @HaakYak to recommend topics or speakers for the series.
I really look forward to hearing from you.
(59:59):
This podcast was produced on the traditional lands and waters of the Menominee, Potawatomi and Ojibwe peoples.
I pay my respects to Elders past and present and to emerging and future Indigenous leaders.
It is a gift to be grounding and growing this work within these beautiful and waterways.
Thank you to Emma Levinson for her artwork featured on our website.
(01:00:21):
Thank you to Alan Huckleberry for allowing us to use Bartok’s "Melody with Interruptions", from The University of Iowa Piano Pedagogy Video Recording Project.
Additional music is "Deconstructed" by Magnus Moon, licensed by Tribe of Noise BV.
Without being interrupted,
we all just keep on going down the same path we've been going down more often than not.
And it takes those pausings, those big moments, to step back and reconsider and re-evaluate.
Hi! Welcome to We Interrupt.
(00:26):
I'm Laure Haak, your host.
In this podcast, we explore the ins and outs of interruptions to understand more fully what interruption is and how it may be useful or even necessary for enhancing creativity,
connection,
reducing power imbalances and even building inclusive communities.
(00:46):
In this episode, we explore interruption with Andrea Michalek.
A serial entrepreneur, Andrea started her career as a software engineer working on innovative search algorithms.
Early on, she was tapped to lead a spin-out, and she was hooked.
Andrea has led spin-outs, start-ups, and a major acquisition,
not once but twice, all in the space of search technology,
(01:08):
and more recently in scholarly reputational management.
Her career has had many overlaps and touch points with my own,
which made this conversation even more fun.
However, all of that stopped abruptly in 2020 when Andrea suffered a traumatic brain injury from which she has emerged over the course of the last three years.
(01:29):
Join us as we talk about her career of diversions and interruptions and her experience restarting her own life.
(01:56):
Andrea, thanks so much for joining us today for We Interrupt.
I wanted to start off with having you tell us about yourself, and then we're gonna get into your roles over the years that have had just a lot of interruptions and phoenix-like rebirths.
I'm so looking forward to this conversation.
Great.
Thank you so much, Laure.
(02:17):
It's really a pleasure to be here.
So I am, as you mentioned, a serial entrepreneur.
I've joked that I'm a recovering entrepreneur, and in a phase of life at the moment,
helping other people, through coaching --
leadership coaching, product coaching -- be more successful in what they're doing and why.
I started my career as a software engineer,
(02:46):
as a woman in technology,
which has had some interruptions of itself just being in that space,
but progressed from there to a technology manager,
to a product leader,
to a founder and a series of different companies that I've founded.
Some have had exits and had a really interesting career progression through all of those different changes in my own life.
(03:14):
One of the things I really love about what you're doing in addition to the coaching work that you're doing now,
which is so important for others of us who are also entrepreneurs,
is to have somebody like you,
we can talk to who helps us understand that we're not crazy and and can also encourage us on this pathway and provide some specific examples and support
(03:37):
saying I've been through this,
here's some things you might want to think about.
There's that, but there's also the fact that you offer part time in person support services to organizations that are moving through these initial start ups, which is also so important.
I think so many start ups don't take the time to work on actual product development,
(04:01):
which you do.
But in my experience,
it's also a lot of the operational guts of organizations, people tend to ignore.
They've got a really great idea and an MVP and then they don't have a plan for how are we gonna increase staff support and scale and support our user base, that ends up in disaster.
So I love that you do both of those things,
(04:23):
the coaching and also,
hey, I can help you on the ground.
A lot of why I focus my practice that way is because as an entrepreneur,
that's what I needed.
I didn't need more frameworks or books or guidelines.
A lot of times I needed someone in the trenches with me helping navigate the really complex decisions that you're faced with and decisions that often have a lot of opportunity cost,
(04:54):
right?
It's not just should I do this or not,
but if I'm going down this path,
I'm explicitly not going down this other path and how do I make those decisions?
There's an aspect of both this cyclical rebirth,
this phoenix-like component, as well as disruption throughout your entire career.
(05:14):
And you mentioned one piece that for many of us feels disruptive, is just being a woman in tech.
I think another one is being a woman in a leadership position,
particularly a woman in a leadership position in a tech start up is
such a purple swan kind of event.
(05:34):
I have been a leader in tech start ups, several times as well.
And there is this feeling of loneliness,
being taken seriously, how you are perceived as a,
a leader versus a harridan.
And I'm wondering if you can talk a bit about this idea of disruption or interruption,
(05:56):
both in terms of how you are interacting with people around you,
but also in how you perceive yourself and have learned and grown in your career.
So I grew up as the youngest child with two older brothers,
I was as likely to be out playing football or climbing a tree or,
(06:19):
having a sword fight with the other neighborhood boys because that's just the environment I grew up in.
And so I was somewhat taken by surprise that I was not taken as seriously as a man in a role, because it wasn't the way I was raised.
(06:39):
It wasn't the way I was raised by my parents.
I was the annoying little sister,
of course,
but that was not because I was a girl, but because I was the annoying little sister.
And so you fast forward into a professional setting where often I was the only woman on the team.
(07:00):
One of my first jobs, I was in a department of 300 engineers,
one of two women. That is a ratio that was not atypical. And not only was I one of two women,
I was young,
I had big froofy hair,
a dark tan.
(07:21):
And you know,
when I would show up,
people would be like,
wait,
you're Andrea Michalek?
You're Andrea?
Wait,
this can't,
this doesn't equate to the person they heard over the phone -- because it was a somewhat of a distributed team.
So when I would go to the main office, they'd be very surprised.
Those sorts of interactions weren't negative,
(07:44):
but yet you were always a little bit of an outsider.
As you would come in or,
even speaking up,
sometimes the sound of a female voice when they're expecting a male voice would make people react in a very different way than you would expect.
So you started off as a member of a development team,
(08:07):
software development team,
and gradually moved into more positions of leadership, as well as starting your own company.
So, how did that happen?
How did you move from being a member of a team to
Oh, I have this great idea for a start up.
(08:28):
It was very evolutionary, and at times I was drug kicking and screaming to the next phase.
Early in my career, I was a developer building search technologies.
My background is search and machine learning and deep algorithms to solve very specific problems. I loved my job.
(08:52):
I really did.
I was building a search product at an early dot.com and it was one of those moments where the parent,
the company had a major project that wasn't just the online dot.com,
but we were trying to do an enterprise-grade search service.
And they had hired for their start up that I was at,
(09:15):
they had hired a very well seasoned project manager to come and manage this project,
whose skills and techniques were not at all a match for the fast paced start up that we were in, and the project was in dire straits.
And if coincidentally that project failed,
the revenue wouldn't come in,
(09:36):
they wouldn't make payroll,
the company would go out of business, all of that.
So the GM of the company and a senior leader pulled me aside one day and said,
hey,
Andrea,
guess what?
We'd like you to lead this project.
And I said,
oh, thanks.
But no,
And the punch line really was, well,
(09:57):
if you don't,
I hope you enjoy the next month at the company because after that,
it won't be around.
And I decided to leave my first project.
And when I did and we,
you know,
of course,
it wouldn't be a good story without a great ending.
And of course,
it launched on time the customer loved it.
(10:17):
We made payroll, all of that.
The learning I took from it was, I loved it.
I love the fact that the impact I could make was bigger than the impact I alone made with my hands on the keyboard.
It was all of my colleagues, and wow, that was great.
How do I do more of it?
(10:38):
And that was the seed that happened.
And the very first company I started was again for that company.
At that same company,
a couple of years later,
we had way too many consumer facing products that we were marketing.
And I came to the decision that what we really needed was to market the engine that would power all of these products.
(11:06):
And I went to the CEO of the company, and he said that's a great idea.
I have this other guy in another part of the company who heads up our affiliate marketing, who wants to start a company.
Why don't the two of you get together and maybe spin this out.
That was built for purpose.
Not like, hey, I wanna be an entrepreneur, let me go and do this.
(11:26):
It was much more, here's an opportunity, let me go and seize that and go from there.
That's really neat, that you were able to do essentially two spin outs where as an entrepreneur,
you got to refine your skills at project management without the craziness of trying to find the funding to get the idea started.
(11:47):
It's a nice way to go.
And the second one as well.
Also getting paired with somebody else that you can partner with on the on the launch of that. That's awesome.
For people inside of companies thinking like, oh, I need to go out and become an entrepreneur,
there's definitely pathways,
career pathways for intrapreneurship, that is a type of way to disrupt your own career,
(12:12):
but not
OK, let me go quit my day job and go all in and do it.
I have done that path as well later in my life.
But learning the ropes,
I was able to have a little bit of the best of both worlds,
the corporate support,
the mentorship right in place and then the opportunity to go and,
(12:37):
and really try these things out.
We've been talking and using the word disruption.
And I'm wondering if any of the experiences thus far that we've talked about,
you would have considered either at the time or in hindsight to be more of an interruption than a disruption or do you feel like those two words kind of mean the same thing?
(12:58):
They definitely mean something different,
they're related but they're different.
The lovely story I told of this great nurturing environment where I was going to spin a company out?
The the way that story ended was the dot.com crash happened right at the same time.
So instead of going and being the poster child of how this public dot.com company was going to incubate other companies.
(13:24):
Instead,
the asset that I created while under that umbrella became one of the crown jewels used to sell the parent company.
So my plan of launching this --
I had a term sheet in hand from a VC! I was going!
Nope! The dot.com crash came and interrupted all of those plans.
(13:46):
You can find me about that time with a haircut about a quarter inch long as I was giving a guest lecture about entrepreneurship saying how I would never ever work for anyone again in my life.
I was going to be this,
you know,
consultant for hire,
doing project based work.
I did that for about seven or eight years.
(14:08):
I was an interim chief technology officer for hire,
worked at many,
many start ups as their CTO.
At one point,
I had a,
a whole fan of business cards. Whoever I was talking to.
I could pull out, I'm this CTO of this company!
Yeah.
So that was definitely an interruption in my life that set me on a very different trajectory.
(14:34):
You and I met in person.
I can't remember the first time,
but definitely I remember doing a presentation with you when you were working at Plum Analytics,
you developed this really beautiful interface that enabled researchers to more easily capture what it was they were doing and,
and present that externally.
(14:55):
And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you ended up,
going from the search interface that you're talking about in the mid two thousands and how you ended up working in the research community and supporting research metrics?
Absolutely.
So when I was a consultant,
ProQuest needed some help to design a brand new search product.
(15:18):
And like I said,
that was my my background.
So I helped them from the business plan to a,
large business unit internally.
I came in and helped them design the Summon web scale discovery service.
So, the first of its kind, back then, of delivering a Google-like search experience for searching the different types of research that a library might subscribe to.
(15:45):
So we were selling it to academic research libraries primarily during the course of that work.
And I was there for several years and eventually became an employee of ProQuest and Serial Solutions.
But during that time,
we were trying to solve relevancy ranking:
how do we bring the best research back in response to a user's query?
(16:09):
And we hit a very large problem with academic research in particular,
where at the time,
the only way to really measure how credible a particular article was was based on how many other articles cite that work.
How many references it that had would give you a really good indication of whether a article had a lot of prestige in their field.
(16:40):
So you're looking for information about lung cancer and an article comes back that's been highly cited and that's great.
The problem is,
is academic research citations,
take years and years and years to accrue.
So if you were looking for something published in the last year that has a lot of academic research citations,
you're not going to find it.
(17:01):
So if you wanted something current,
you don't get these highly cited articles.
If you want something highly cited in general,
you don't get things that are current.
And so really saying there must be some way of doing this online.
There is a way of doing it in like normal web articles.
Google has its page rank algorithm.
(17:22):
And how do we do that?
And that's really where the idea for finding a way to measure the full impact of a particular piece of work came from.
So unlike what I described earlier,
instead, this time, I said,
I want to go and build a company with the mission of solving this very large problem.
(17:46):
You and I were working in similar spaces.
The company I was at,
at the time was trying to figure out how do we understand the longer term impact of,
for example,
a funder investing in a specific research area.
How do you bring that advanced computing power to doing extract transform load,
(18:06):
all the reg-ex stuff to try to find information inside of articles and cross reference bits and pieces, bringing in the machine learning,
but also the human component that validates and verifies what we're finding through these expressions.
So all of that was going on, a huge amount of work,
lots and lots of different organizations working on similar questions.
(18:29):
And one of the really neat things I remember about Plumb Analytics was you weren't just interested in journal articles. You brought in other ways of understanding impact, community relevance, into the way that you processed the articles.
(18:50):
I think this is another form of interruption which is saying,
look,
we are so used to in the academic space to treating citations as the measure of relevance and importance.
And what you said was actually no,
we need to work harder to understand what impact and relevance looks like.
(19:10):
And we -- your company -- is going to spend the time to figure out some other ways of doing that.
My background is in research and I always really wanted us as a research community to have more effective and inclusive ways of recognizing somebody's contribution.
You're coming at this from a very,
very different perspective and I'm interested in what your motivation was for starting this company.
(19:34):
My co-founder of the company was a librarian.
So his background at the time that we started the company,
he was looking at things where they were at the tipping point where how people produce and consume information is very different.
Open access and,
and making things publicly freely available out there is happening.
(19:59):
And we don't have metrics.
We don't even have the language to talk about what we measure and how we measure it.
So that very first day,
the two of us were kind of heads down together,
figuring this out.
We went and started looking at different random researchers at prestigious research libraries and research universities and notice what just an abysmal job they had at trying to represent their body of work,
(20:37):
their life's work and the impact it was having.
Often, they were just big old long lists of publications.
And so really all you could do is scan and look at the names of the journals to kind of figure out, was that a good thing or not?
And just that's just a can of worms of looking at only the journal of where something was published.
(21:00):
And as we talked about it,
we said,
well,
look at all of the other work that they're doing outside of journal articles.
So you couldn't measure the jour journal article that well and you couldn't capture everything else that well.
And it was,
imagine it,
imagine if there really was a way to represent across all different types of categories of research outputs across all different ways of organizing and understanding the sort of reach it has,
(21:34):
who's using it,
who's interacting with it,
who's sharing it,
who's citing it,
who's doing all of these different activities?
What would the,
what would we be able to do with information like that?
What would the researchers be able to do?
The funders who fund that research?
(21:54):
The universities that support them?
The corporations looking to get involved?
You know,
all of that entire ecosystem.
We decided, OK, we wanna work together and start this.
What are we going to do?
The two of us got together in the morning, and went from
oh my gosh, I don't know what we're going to do, this isn't going to work
to, before lunch,
we had the plan of what we were doing, and we went and had a lovely lunch.
(22:19):
We ate pizza,
drank wine,
celebrated starting this great thing.
And it was one of those moments where just all of the pieces just felt like they came together,
they came together from the work that he had done in his past,
from all of the work on search and data manipulation and machine learning that I had done in my past, and we learned right then that there was this brand new thing called alternative metrics that people were talking about.
(22:50):
And we're like,
hey,
we could be an alternative metrics too.
And so there was a movement afoot that we did not create,
we did not decide to form a company because of it.
But yet it just happened to be there.
That was hugely instrumental.
The entire space was being changed right in front of us.
(23:16):
And we just happened to have all of those forces come together at the perfect time.
That's a fabulous story.
Thank you.
It's interesting too because you were able to bring your capabilities and experience on the technology side,
(23:39):
plus the leadership component, that enabled you to say this is an interesting idea,
but we can make it happen too both technologically and from a business perspective.
And I think that combination of things is so, so important.
We also had a great network.
(24:00):
I think that's the other,
the other component, because we had built this disruptive product in search for academic libraries with Summon.
We were well known in that,
that narrow vertical as being the the folks who could take this up and could execute on something very large and complex and could make it happen.
(24:27):
And that's what we did.
We went,
you know,
gas pedal to the floorboard kind of way forward as a bootstrapping start up to make that to make that happen.
So you were able to go from a spin out,
and I think within two years,
you had already gone through an acquisition process.
(24:50):
We did.
We both quit our day jobs, and I consulted for about three months to just get my head in it,
you know,
is this going to be a thing?
Is this not?
And we hit the ground running and our goal was within two years to be acquired.
So we only bootstrapped.
(25:11):
We raised a small seed round and we did many things ourselves.
I'm not sure I recommend the high high velocity bootstrapping.
It was a very stressful and intense two years,
but we did that.
We were acquired by EBSCO and we built the team up from there,
(25:34):
a lot of people who had been helping us for a little bit of equity,
paying them with cases of beer.
And thank yous.
And you know,
all of those things.
Once we were acquired,
I was able to give them all nice jobs.
We built the team for real, and then not that long after that,
the company was acquired a second time and we moved from EBSCO to Elsevier.
(26:00):
So, I've gone through a transition from a smallish start up,
50 people or so to being acquired by a very large company,
50 people to 50,000 people.
And my experience at that time was,
the ability to lead the charge,
(26:22):
get people excited,
move the team,
engage with potential clients,
engage with existing clients --
there was such a freedom and,
and just the spirit of entrepreneurship,
we can do anything almost, right?
And then you move to this larger company where in some ways that acquisition was supposed to open up more opportunity for entrepreneurship and growth.
(26:49):
But in practice,
it was like putting the lid on,
this kettle of entrepreneurship and that just stifled so much.
And so I'm wondering what your experience was,
you not only went through one acquisition,
went through two in a fairly short order, and clearly you had designed to be acquired within two years.
(27:12):
So you wanted to go that route.
But I'm wondering if you can talk a bit about what that experience is like.
I mean,
this isn't the first time you've gone through this,
you've done a couple of spin outs.
What is your experience and how have you managed,
psychologically,
this transition from that small super agile ideas all over the place,
(27:34):
frenetic activity, to
OK,
I'm now part of a larger organization with its own culture and way of doing things.
How does that work?
They're great questions.
When I started Plum, less than two weeks after I started,
my dad was diagnosed with cancer.
(27:59):
And my co founder and I,
we're like,
ok, we're still doing this.
And so I was raising money while my dad was going through,
you know,
it was the very early days of the start up.
And he actually was diagnosed with cancer when his femur,
you know,
the largest bone in his leg, shattered when he was putting on socks.
(28:21):
And so he was in the hospital having surgery on that.
And I was there and had an investor meeting that I was like,
ok,
well,
I have nowhere to do this from other than,
on my laptop in the hospital cafeteria.
(28:41):
So I have my laptop open.
I'm sitting presenting to the potential investor.
My mom and dad are watching at the table behind me and I go through the entire presentation and turn around like,
ok,
mom,
dad,
what did you think?
And my dad's like,
I understand everything finally, what you're doing.
(29:03):
But why in the world do you want to sell your company?
Why would you wanna do this?
Like, you're never going to be happy.
You own the company now.
Why are you doing this?
And I remember telling him,
oh dad, this is my plan.
Of course, this is what I wanna do.
This is what I'm going to do and why.
(29:25):
And I've often thought back to that conversation many,
many chapters later and go,
man.
Why did I want to sell the company?
Why didn't I listen to my dad?
He got this.
But I wouldn't trade the journey.
Definitely, when I talk with entrepreneurs,
(29:48):
now, one of the big things I ask and I try to get them to think through is what's on the other side of success.
Say your plan works,
say everything goes exactly as you hoped.
What's on the other side of that?
Is that what you're truly solving for?
(30:08):
Are you solving for
pulling the brass ring that you're supposed to be,
like, ok, yay.
But then what do you do?
And having gone through some of those things where I got exactly what I designed,
I designed the plan I executed,
it was successful.
And then you think,
huh?
Was that really what I should have been solving for at the end of the day?
(30:34):
It's interesting because a lot of the work that I've been doing has been in the nonprofit and social benefit space,
where the,
the brass ring is
benefit to the community, and not
VC investment or a purchase by another entity.
And that question still comes up, which is, you're putting all of this time and effort in, (a) why is it a nonprofit?
(31:01):
And, (b) what is success,
what does that look like?
Not just for the organization you're building,
but also for you as a founder.
It's a tough question,
but one that needs to be asked. I think for the founders of these organizations,
whether they're for profit,
nonprofit, co-op,
(31:22):
whatever,
having somebody like you who's been through this journey multiple times to kind of bounce some ideas off of,
it is so important.
It's just really important just to know --
I'm not going crazy,
I do have these questions and I don't understand,
how I can balance my need for "x" with
(31:42):
community need for this organization, whatever that happens to be.
It's a really tough position.
And even though Plum Analytics was a for profit company,
it was very much a mission driven company.
It was about getting these fuller metrics that we truly believed,
and I still believe, change the pace at which research discoveries could happen.
(32:05):
If you could actually give the data that enables people to better understand what's happening with research and build that into the platforms where people are searching for data and manipulating data,
you could change things.
And that was the evolution that the two acquisitions went through.
(32:26):
One was to build out the actual features and functionality of what we were doing.
And we did that while at EBSCO with the support of all the people there.
And then that was kind of a vertical that we were selling a particular product called Plum X into the market.
(32:46):
And then when Plum Analytics became a part of Elsevier instead of building a vertical solution,
I switched my focus and my team's focus kind of building a horizontal solution across research metrics across what a
very large publisher,
scholarly publisher is doing.
(33:07):
And we got our brand new metrics integrated in a very short amount of time and every major platform that Elsevier had so that those metrics then got built right next to where the researchers could engage with them or the people searching,
research could engage with them.
So it was all very much stepwise, like this all makes sense.
(33:33):
It's all building something bigger than just what was best for my career or my team's individual careers.
But building this for this larger why, where the product or the technologies were helping solve for that.
(33:54):
Definitely the pace of change from being a,
a start up to being a senior leader at a large company that's working across many teams to get road maps lined up to move big initiatives forward,
it's a very different pace and a very different job.
But yet,
(34:14):
one I was still happy doing,
because again,
it was trying to look at
what's the mission behind the work, and why does this work matter?
So, you have this long career in product development,
very product-centered career.
You have a tech background and the leadership experience that allows you to conceive of, develop, and launch products.
(34:38):
Super awesome.
And I love that the products are also in the space that I know of, so I get to know you!
One of the challenges we run into and again, in the nonprofit space particularly, is we have this really fabulous idea that we think is gonna change the world and we go off and try to build this thing,
whatever it happens to be, and then somebody forgets to talk to the end user.
(34:59):
And then you're like,
well,
how am I supposed to measure change if I don't even know who is using my platform?
And I haven't actually talked to them in the design of the platform.
How do you do that in the product spaces you've been in,
how have you been able to engage with users and, particularly, let's focus on Plum,
where you're developing a suite of metrics,
(35:20):
that can be used by the community,
including the researchers themselves who are producing the content,
the metrics are being applied,
and at the same time, researchers just really don't want to do this.
They just want to do their research, and they are often drug kicking and screaming into this idea of,
(35:41):
would you just stop measuring me, and just let me do my work?
So how did you engage with the researchers in the development of these metrics and/or in the launch of them in these different platforms.
So I talked about that meeting and then the lovely lunch where we toast and we celebrated that afternoon.
(36:02):
The very next thing we did was booked plane tickets and we went to where we knew we could talk to a large number of people at the same time.
So a lot of our contacts and our networks were around libraries.
So we went to the ALA conference, which happened to be in January,
(36:23):
just a couple weeks after we got together. And we went and we booked as absolutely many meetings as we could handle.
And our schedule was insane. We wanted to talk to everybody,
We wanted their feedback.
We wanted to know,
would you do this,
(36:43):
does this make sense?
Would you help us connect with some researchers to vet this idea?
And so we leveraged the the network.
We had built some great partnerships,
got directly in contact with some pilot projects to work with the university and their university library and some researchers to go and build the system around their research
(37:13):
and then get those researchers to give us feedback on, was this helpful?
Was this right?
Was this wrong?
And we definitely learned.
Some of the stuff we were most proud of, then we'd hear the researchers say, What? This is terrible!
And I was like,
oh my gosh,
ok,
I get it.
And so we definitely learned a lot and changed a lot during that time.
(37:34):
One of the things that we did that then haunted us later was we did not want to give a single score. We pushed back hard on that.
We came up with the visualization.
We did all sorts of things to give data and analytics tools.
But we never wanted to say this article is a 17 or this,
(37:57):
this podcast is a 3.
No, we didn't want that. We thought that would do more harm than good. It would have helped us sell more,
but yet we felt it would do a disservice to the mission behind what we were doing.
(38:17):
And that was a decision that really followed us through many ups and downs with the company of why we wouldn't give a single score even when the buyers might love that single score.
We felt the researchers truly deserved better.
(38:37):
We had so many conversations about,
that single score, that we could build a composite.
And as you describe,
there is no one way of doing research or there is no one kind of researcher and trying to develop a single score is just in my opinion,
it's a fool's errand.
And as you said,
does a disservice to the research community.
(38:59):
You really have to take a little more time and try to look at things.
I think everyone is in such a rush,
you know,
they're in such a rush and they want a single number and somebody else to digest all this information and it's just not the way this should work.
(39:23):
So, maybe let's go on to this next piece of your career. After Plum you were doing some consulting,
and then one day you kind of fell off the face of the earth.
And I was actually still at Plum at that point.
(39:43):
I was at Elsevier.
I was an employee at Elsevier.
I had a team,
I was overseeing research metrics.
I had a really exciting next big thing I was going to be doing,
it was December.
I do know the year, it was December of 2018 and life was good until I took a prescription drug and I had a severe allergic reaction to it.
(40:13):
And so in the course of 48 hours I was having,
I was having seizures daily.
I couldn't walk,
I didn't have balance.
I couldn't think.
I lost pretty much, you know,
brain injury,
I lost my executive functioning,
(40:33):
not from a senior executive kind of way,
but just a brain executive functioning,
unable to do simple things like cook dinner or do laundry.
That,
that level.
My life was completely interrupted, and it was not a quick recovery.
(40:54):
Originally, they thought,
well,
once I was 72 hours and the drugs were,
you know,
the prescription drugs were out of my system,
I would be fine.
But we're not exactly sure why it happened,
but my brain did not recuperate quickly and it was almost three years that it took from that December 2018 until I was able to work again and be the person that's having this lovely conversation with you today, Laure
(41:28):
and get back to being able to,
to figure out what I wanted to do next.
Because during some of the,
the darkest times,
it wasn't clear that I would fully recover and it wasn't clear that I would be able to do any sort of thinking work at all.
(41:54):
And it was only through perseverance,
and I think a little bit of luck, that I found some medical ways to get my functioning back and to figure out what actually had happened to kind of rewire my brain.
So I cannot imagine what you went through and I just,
(42:21):
I'm happy you recovered.
I know you can't be more happy than you were to recover.
During that time,
I mean,
not during the time,
but let's say once you realize that you are going to recover,
what was your,
how did this unfold your,
(42:42):
your decision
or I guess the decision making process, or the thinking process for "what I wanna do next in my life"?
Can you talk a bit about how that emerged?
I am sure you went through cyclical bouts of depression and elation and then depression and like,
(43:04):
oh my God,
what have I lost?
And oh, there's this opportunity..
Can you talk a bit about what that experience was like?
I know I went through all sorts of speech therapy,
physical therapy,
vision therapy,
cognitive therapy,
all sorts of things.
And one of the therapists I was talking to when I was expressing my frustration that I just wanted my life back.
(43:31):
I just want it back.
And I'll never forget it, because she smiled,
she sat back in her chair and looked at me and said,
do you want to go back to high school and be exactly the person you were when you were a high school student?
And I was like, of course not.
She's like, well, why not?
I'm like, well, because I'm not that person anymore.
(43:52):
She's like, exactly, you're not going to go back.
There is no going back, any more than you can go back and be,
you know,
a 16 year old getting their driver's license
and figuring that out for the first time.
You don't get to go back, ever.
You only get to go forward.
(44:14):
And I reflected on that so many times, about every time I would think to myself,
I just want to be ...
well,
I can't be that anymore.
And so that was the first phase, I would say, is just trying to come to terms with not being able to go back.
(44:34):
And then I had huge uncertainty for a long time of what could I do going forward?
Because I couldn't trust the one thing that I had built my whole self identity around,
which was my brain.
I wasn't someone who physically did much.
(44:58):
I wrote code.
I led people. I talked.
I sat in front of a computer.
I talked on the phone, every now and then I talked face to face,
but it was talking and thinking were what I could do.
Luckily through most of this,
I could still keep typing.
So I was able to write.
(45:19):
So I wrote a lot,
a lot of it early on completely unintelligible,
even to me at the time I was writing it,
but I forced myself to keep just trying to put my thoughts together enough to express them.
Even when I couldn't speak, because a lot of my deficits were auditory,
(45:41):
both being able to comprehend information coming at me verbally as well as being able to speak.
I was still able to write, and that was
a big piece of my recovery was being able to just try to come up with a plan.
(46:03):
I don't think I totally answered your question.
The pivotal moment for me was I was on an airplane for the first time by myself going to meet a friend to go hiking because
I learned through my whole recovery, being in nature, walking,
(46:24):
hiking,
I could talk for a long time about how transformative and healing that was.
But I was on this cross country flight going out to go hiking and I was trapped in the window seat next to --
It sounds like a joke, bnut it wasn't --
a Buddhist and a Southern Baptist Christian debating the meaning of life.
(46:49):
Right?
So these two gentlemen on a cross country flight from the US.
Trapped. My noise canceling headphones weren't canceling out their conversation.
And I eventually said,
you know what,
I'm not joining in their conversation.
But let me figure out what is my meaning of life?
(47:09):
Maybe this is what I'm supposed to do trapped on this flight.
Let me figure this out. And I came up with just this template of how do I figure out what my,
what my why is?
What's important to me as a person?
What am I passionate about?
What kind of pay do I need?
(47:30):
What kind of structure do I want?
And what came out of that analysis for me was, it wasn't about building products anymore.
I didn't feel like I needed or I should even go and try to launch a new product company that goes and does this, even with a great mission,
(47:51):
purpose driven.
But it was really about the people. Because the legacy I think we all leave are the lives of the people around us and how we can help and influence them.
And I thought maybe that's what I'll do.
I don't know how
I'm gonna do this,
but I'm gonna go be a coach and I'm gonna help people.
(48:11):
I'm going to help them do what I know how to do,
which is launch products and run companies.
But it's not about me building the next company or the next product.
It's about how do I help the people around, and just kind of an ever growing set of people who I've been able to help is how I'm measuring my own success right now.
(48:34):
So it's like the Andrea start up.
It is!
How are you going to monetize,
what is your product,
which is yourself, right?
And bring yourself into these essential conversations with people about what their meaning of life is.
So you're really kind of sharing that conversation over and over again.
(49:00):
And this is the hardest start up to date, I'll tell you.
I think the standpoint of, for me,
it's way clearer talking about a product's purpose and the business model around the product.
When you're actually talking about your own purpose,
it's way more nuanced than that.
It is.
(49:20):
And I think, having gone through a similar kind of evolution in my own career from product based nonprofit community,
to,
hey Laure is out there offering myself in a way,
a similar way,
as conversation partner for organizations that are starting up,
we're going through some transition,
we need some help.
It is really difficult to explain it.
(49:43):
And for me,
I don't know if it's the same for you.
But for me,
part of it also is changing the focus from this thing that's over here,
and now the focus is on me.
And I think, coming up through the ranks as a research scientist and,
working at a variety of different places where the focus was always external to me and I could contribute to the advancement of this other thing,
(50:09):
having the gaze now settle on me is unsettling.
I don't always care for it.
I don't know if you've had that same experience.
I have. Right after the dot.com crash in 2001, I did have that seven or eight year period where I did do consulting.
(50:32):
But it was much more,
you need a technical person to come and do these sets of things for you.
I can do that.
It was much more tangible.
And what I did back then was I thought,
oh,
I'll just market this interim CTO person who happens to be me and I'll do that.
(50:56):
And so this is very similar,
but it's also a little different because,
although I do go into companies in a,
sometimes a hands on role,
I'm always transitioning to more of a coaching model towards the end of that or helping them hire,
(51:17):
hire a full time person if they're a very young company.
So I have to say, your LinkedIn posts have been wonderful.
They are so,
they're direct, and friendly at the same time,
and they seem very you.
I love that about them.
The tools that you put together are elegantly simple.
(51:40):
I love them.
And I looked at them like,
oh,
I should do that.
And then I look at you!
I like the elegance.
But then, I'm just not an elegant person.
I just admire it in other people.
So, I want to come back to this theme of the podcast.
(52:02):
We've come and talked about disruption and interruption in many different ways.
And I wanted to come to the end of this podcast and have you reflect a bit on your experience with interruption and what it means to you.
Whether it's Andrea in Andrea's career, or you personally,
(52:24):
how has your understanding of interruption involved over the course of your career in your life, and how do you sit with the notion of interruption right now?
That's a really profound question, actually.
I think of interruption as an opportunity for reinvention.
(52:49):
And I've been playing around with this visual in my head of a Phoenix.
Like, during the darkest times when I truly felt like I was in the ashes.
I mean,
I really truly felt like,
man,
I've got nothing left.
I have nothing of my past life that can serve me today to get through today, and the tasks that I need to do.
(53:15):
I've got nothing, and rebuilding and
rebirthing what you want to do and how you want to do it, is,
it's an opportunity to do that.
Not an easy opportunity,
right?
When you're interrupted,
you never,
I should say you,
(53:36):
you rarely want to be interrupted.
That's the other thing. I haven't ever looked at an interruption and said,
oh,
thank goodness.
Even what I talked about earlier as a developer.
I was happy writing code and building these systems,
you're doing amazing stuff.
I didn't want to be interrupted to go and lead a project.
(53:57):
I didn't want that.
I was resistant to that.
I clearly didn't want to be interrupted when I was working at Elsevier as a,
a VP of Metrics and doing all of those
big important things.
At the time, I didn't want that either.
So, the only way I've found to come to terms with all of that is to really say,
(54:22):
all right,
what does that mean for who I want to become?
Who do I want, given that I'm here where I'm at right now,
who do I want to become?
And how do I,
how do I take steps --
sometimes little small wobbly steps --
but steps towards getting to that,
that next place.
(54:44):
I really tried to visualize what that next place looks like.
It's down to the details of what --
what does my office look like?
How am I spending my day?
What kinds of conversations am I having with whom?
(55:06):
What sorts of problems are we solving?
And just focusing on, how can I get to that next state of how I wanna live my life.
And what does that mean for my family time?
And where am I going to go on great hikes next?
(55:26):
And what am I going to travel and see?
And I'm actually going to travel for me, not to go to a conference or to a customer meeting.
So much of my professional life was traveling to go somewhere and hurrying to get home because I had kids at home.
(55:49):
I wasn't extending the my time over the weekend to go and sightsee because I couldn't.
I could have but I couldn't,
I needed to come home and take my kids to ballet class.
It's defining the type of life you want in the future.
(56:14):
Yeah.
And I think so many of us don't do that work to imagine what life could be like.
I think a lot of people get sucked into what life is like now, and in a way it is an absolute luxury to be able to go through that ideation process and imagine a life different than what we are living in today,
(56:39):
For ourselves personally,
but also more generally like,
what could things work like?
And how do I think they could be better for,
this group of people or this group of people,
including myself or my family?
And I think taking that breath,
that pause, and almost interrupting your own narrative to say,
(57:01):
you know what, this is where I am today,
but like you said,
what are those opportunities,
that opportunity for reinvention -- is just such an awesome way to look at what interruption means. Neat.
I'm so glad you're coaching because you can bring some of these life lessons into those coaching experiences with people and get them to kind of shake loose from the chains that bind.
(57:30):
Absolutely.
And they bind us all, right?
I think that
it is just taking that,
taking that breath,
the power of pausing.
I once I once learned in negotiating,
in negotiating a big important contract or a big deal,
(57:52):
there's huge power in pausing, and stop talking.
So, that's like negotiation for me.
Negotiation 101:
Stop talking.
Stop.
Say what you want.
Say what you need, and let it get uncomfortable.
(58:14):
And then often, that's when things start to turn.
So, if you look at that of interrupting your life the same way,
sometimes interruptions -- like my brain injury -- are way uncomfortable.
It was not the type of pause I wanted,
but then things kind of break loose on the other side of that pause.
(58:35):
So that's another ... just as I've been reflecting,
thinking about talking about interruptions,
that that power of pausing that an interruption gives you,
is something that is really an interesting concept because it doesn't happen other times.
(58:56):
Without being interrupted,
we all just keep on going down the same path we've been going down more often than not.
And it takes those pausing those big moments to step back and reconsider and re-evaluate.
Andrea. Thank you so much for sharing your story.
(59:18):
There's some really personal aspects of your story as well that I know are difficult to share, and I appreciate that you have done.
So, thank you.
It's healing and therapeutic to share those things.
Thank you for the opportunity to do that.
(59:38):
Thank you for joining us for more about We Interrupt.
Please see our website at www.weinterruptthis.com
There, you can find show notes,
links and other episodes.
You can also contact me on Twitter @HaakYak to recommend topics or speakers for the series.
I really look forward to hearing from you.
(59:59):
This podcast was produced on the traditional lands and waters of the Menominee, Potawatomi and Ojibwe peoples.
I pay my respects to Elders past and present and to emerging and future Indigenous leaders.
It is a gift to be grounding and growing this work within these beautiful and waterways.
Thank you to Emma Levinson for her artwork featured on our website.
(01:00:21):
Thank you to Alan Huckleberry for allowing us to use Bartok’s "Melody with Interruptions", from The University of Iowa Piano Pedagogy Video Recording Project.
Additional music is "Deconstructed" by Magnus Moon, licensed by Tribe of Noise BV.
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