My Journey
In 2016 I moved from Chicago to San Francisco to try and land a Real Job. I felt stuck in my career as a Production Manager at a printing facility, and also the weather was bumming me out.
I had just enough connections and experience to think I could land something decent if I applied myself.
Things worked out pretty well. Over 5 years I worked my way up at a meal kit company called Sunbasket, starting as a graphic design temp and graduating as an operations Project Manager optimizing core business workflows with the corporate services team. I liked my coworkers and my desk was in the same office as the test kitchen, so I was regularly fed and fairly happy.
In 2022 I got the slip after our 3rd round of layoffs, and happily jumped into getting my PMP and enrolling in a coding bootcamp, trying to follow the path into a cushy tech job like so many of my peers.
Like many of my major life decisions, my timing was pretty terrible.
I did very well in the program. Logic, structures, process flow, complex interactions, weird esoteric knowledge bits that you only learn after chasing down a bug for 3 hours… they all came pretty easily to me. Writing code and building cool things brought immense joy in my life. I thought I had really found something I could happily do for the rest of my life.
On December 2nd 2022, two of my peers asked me to jump in a discord call. They had chatGPT, freshly launched, up and running. We played around with it. Made it solve DSA problems we had struggled with. Made it write raps about our classmates. We joked about how fucked we were. We laughed because we knew it wasn't a joke.
I graduated from the program in January 2023, and spent an extremely draining year trying to break into the industry as a software engineer. Getting interviews was like pulling teeth (and I was one of the few people from my cohort that had any professional experience at all). I was the 2nd choice at the end of multiple interview series, and after landing an amazing gig to build an app at a biotech company, the Director who hired me quit, and they had to shutter the project well before it was complete.
I was disheartened and got very depressed. I lost my taste for coding. I stopped working on side projects. I stopped trying to find work. I faffed around for a little while until I was brought in by my previous boss to a biotech company that needed a Technical Project Manager. Ten months later, I signed paperwork that said I would not sue or publicly disparage that company in exchange for a very generous severance.
Suddenly it's 2025. The job market is terrible. I'm sitting pretty for a little while. So, what do I do? I embrace a sabbatical and have the absolute best year of my life. Travel, performance art, festivals, parties full of joy and creativity, falling in love, reconnecting with long lost dear friends. Meanwhile, I'm watching the country burn around us and the rising tide of AI come for us all. But hey, I'm on welbutrin now so I have certainly felt a lot worse.
In December of last year I was connected with the Director of a 2 million dollar eCommerce company who was struggling to meet the fulfillment needs of their busy holiday season. They needed an operations consultant who could optimize their systems and workflow to get through the season and pitch in where needed.
And that's how I started working with The Store.