Career change; Farewell Eventbrite, farewell Lanyrd
Those of you who know me personally will likely know that I have always been passionate about wildlife and the environment.
The News: I have decided to leave Eventbrite and Lanyrd. My plan is to use my technical and organisational skills to make a difference in environmental conservation.
Read on for some musings on the intersection of my career to date with my passion for environmental and wildlife conservation.
A lifelong interest
My new mission has been a fair while in the making. I have always been passionate about wildlife and the environment. I grew up in Devon, in a relatively rural village in the South West of England (think green rolling hills, cows and excellent cider).
My family nurtured my interest in nature from an early age, with lots of time outside and interacting with wildlife. We even used to volunteer together for the Devon Wildlife Trust on the Wild Weekends in Killerton Park. We helped supervise groups of 10 year olds on camping trips in the park, cooking over bonfires, organising activities and telling stories to introduce them to nature and the outdoors.
Volunteering with environmental action groups at university
At Bath University I studied Computer Information Systems, and while I was there I volunteered for a number of environmental action groups including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.
After I graduated in 2005, like many university students, I wasn’t really sure what to do with my degree. I didn’t really want to go into technology for technology’s sake. I wanted to make a difference.
Biodiversity, Beetles, lizards and dolphin rescue training
I moved back home to Devon and for about half a year I volunteered for the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers as a Volunteer Officer. I helped co-ordinate and supervise the weekend trips of local children with special needs to clear local paths and canal towpaths to restore the native habitats.
One of my favourite memories of that time was a week long conservation residential in Cornwall where I was one of the supervisors of a group of 12 teenagers.
We did various fun environmental action tasks such as clearing a graveyard of weeds, and counting and monitoring the populations of adorable dormice, butterflies and bats. I trained in Dolphin rescue(!!!) and did a fair amount of beach litter picking. The group also had lectures from a tree surgeon.
At this time I was also volunteering for the Devon Wildlife trust again as a researcher and assistant where I got to do all sorts of fun and important things like surveying the population of lizards, plants and grasses, beetles and butterflies as well as building and maintaining stiles and dry stone walls. Most of these conservation duties were for the Bovey Heathfield park in Devon.
This is a photo of me identifying flowers and grasses and analysing the age and biodiversity of the heath.
I wasn’t really using the skills I had learnt in my degree though and although I felt like I was doing valuable work I was having to start from scratch in a completely different field as I had no formal training in conservation.
Using technology to make a difference
In late 2005 I went to the first Rails and Django meetup in London where I met Tom Dyson. Tom ran Torchbox and convinced me that it was possible to use my technical skills and my university education to make a difference in the world.
Torchbox is a web development agency that does great work for charities and the public sector, and the office is based in a deer park in the Cotswolds. In their own words “We do great digital work with organisations that are making the world a better place”.
This was right up my alley. I got the job and moved to Oxford where I spent two years as a full stack developer, product manager and lead usability consultant working on all sorts of worthwhile projects including the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), the Waste and Resources Action plan (WRAP), RecycleNow, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) the National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS) and Rethink (this was all a while ago now so the sites have probably changed quite a bit since I worked on them).
Torchbox also built its own carbon calculator which I worked a bit on too. It was about this time that I started organising technical meetups and volunteering at conferences.
Persistence, letter writing and snail rescue
One day on a walk in the Cotswolds I nearly jumped out of my shoes when I saw this amazing snail! I named him Snaily.
Snaily was a member of the Roman snail family. On doing some extensive research I discovered that it was Britain’s largest snail, and a protected species in England facing destruction of habitat and the threat of poachers. Roman snails were possibly native to the UK but a lack of fossil evidence suggests they may have been introduced by the Romans for food.
There was due to be a car park extension built near where I found Snaily and his/her friends. As Roman snails only have a habitat of about 20-30m radius and as far as I could tell there were only 6 or so other known colonies in England I couldn’t let this happen.
I forget how many letters I wrote to politicians and local and national conservation groups to have them recognise this unrecorded colony and stop the carpark expansion. Thankfully it worked! The car park extension was not built and the signs advertising that it would take place were removed: Snaily was safe! for now.
Specialising in Frontend Development
I eventually left Torchbox and Oxfordshire to move to Clearleft in Brighton. Clearleft is a small user experience agency that punches well above it’s weight on an international level.
I worked at Clearleft as a Senior Frontend Engineer for several years where I improved my technical skills immeasurably and got to work on some cool projects, such as the redesign of WWF, redesign of the Mozilla addons site, and the redesign of organic veg box delivery service Riverford. (…again this was a while ago so the sites may have changed a bit since I worked on them)
WildlifeNearYou.com
During my time in Brighton we attended a number of Dev Forts, organised by friends of ours James and Norm. A bunch of us went to a napoleonic sea fort in the English Channel for a sort of hack-week with no planned agenda except to make a thing together.
Wildlife near you was an idea I had attempted to build in the past, but which became so much more as it was reborn and evolved over the week into a truly collaborative project between 12 people. The site encouraged you to create a trip report every time you visited a park, zoo or nature area, cataloguing the animals you saw and adding photos. We then used the data elsewhere on the site to power essential features like the ability to find your nearest owl!
Simon and I later built owlsnearyou.com which was even featured in Wired magazine and was one of the earliest apps on the web to use the HTML5 geolocation API.
After the fort Simon and I carried on developing the site for another year and a half. When we finally launched it we had learnt heaps about the importance not of waiting that long to launch! Launch early launch often was a lesson we internalised, as was remembering to take backups of your backups… sadly the site is no more.
Heading out into the sunset
Simon and I quit our jobs to get married and go travelling in 2010. The plan was to earn money from freelance work, travel overland as much as we could for three years and document conservation success stories and photograph endangered species around the world to help raise awareness.
(Photo credit below to Richard Rutter)
Our plan didn’t exactly play out as intended but I like to think that serendipity makes everything work out alright in the end.
Food poisoning and accidentally starting a startup
Simon and I honeymooned overland for three months before we became sick from food poisoning in Casablanca. It was Ramadan and none of the restaurants were open during the day (Casablanca isn’t really on the tourist trail). We rented an apartment for a couple weeks to cook ourselves better, and launched Lanyrd, our on-the-road side project.
Read the full story in my blog entry here.
Lanyrd is a social directory of professional events. As an event organiser and someone who has made many friends and built my professional contacts and career through events it was a product I wanted to exist.
We never set out to be entrepreneurs, but Lanyrd took off faster than we could keep up with just the two of us so we joined Y Combinator, raised $1.4M from investors and hired a team of 6 over the course of three years. I was head of product and did all of the frontend development and design (until we hired for those roles), while also learning how to build and run a company - everything from investor negotiations to accounting to HR, PR, marketing, sales…
Lanyrd acquired by Eventbrite, moved to San Francisco
In August 2013 we closed the deal to sell Lanyrd to Eventbrite. The entire team and their families have since moved from London to San Francisco, where we’ve spent the past two years working on a whole range of exciting Eventbrite projects.
For about 8 months running up to the acquisition Simon and I were working nearly 20 hours a day, and not looking after ourselves at all. It takes a long while to come back from that!
I have now been worked at Eventbrite for nearly 3 years, firstly as Director of Organizer Acquisition and Growth, then as Director of Frontend Engineering. Its a great place to work and of course, always hiring (as are Clearleft and Torchbox) but the time became right for me to move on and after nearly 6 years in event technology to say goodbye to both Eventbrite and to Lanyrd.
Time to move on
My time at Lanyrd and then at Eventbrite helped me develop my organisational / management / technical / all sorts of skills significantly, and gave me time to think about what I really wanted to do with my life as well as what I enjoy and what is important to me.
Saying goodbye is hard, but I am taking my own advice to make the difficult decisions needed in order embrace serendipity and make my own luck.
What’s next?
Well, that is a story I look forward to unfolding, I am going it alone for a bit to see what happens. I have some visa stuff to work out first so I’ll be taking some time off to learn new things, work on interesting environmental / technical / creative projects, recuperate and volunteer as a Freelance Environmentalist (and no, I don’t really know what that means yet either).
Watch this space :)
I’d like to thank my wonderful husband Simon and all my lovely friends and family for the support in making this life change!