Big Life Changes

The Greek Stoic Epictetus wrote, “Do you know that old age, disease, and death must overcome us, no matter what we are doing? What do you wish to be doing when it overtakes you? If you have anything better to be doing when you are so overtaken, begin on that now.”

In Buddhism, the term “Samvega” means, a sense of urgency or passion for spiritual or life practice coming from knowing the preciousness of life and the constant nearness of death.

With a powerful sense of Samvega, I’ve decided to join the Obama campaign. I’ve always followed politics closely, but I’ve never been inspired to get involved with a political candidate before. While I write this, there are over 700 wildfires burning in Northern California because of Continue reading →

I’ve decided to take a cool new job with Glam Media, serving as the General Manager & VP of their publisher network. It’s an interesting take on a model I’ve got some experience with. Glam has a media network of female-centric beauty, fashion and lifestyle bloggers (that’s *not* the part I have a lot of experience with) that they sell the advertising around (that is) and also provide other services like SEO and content distribution. They have a viciously loyal following and have succeeded in getting relevant advertisers like Levi’s and Macy’s to match the content. I attended one of their publisher functions the other night and met the author of a cool fashion blog called Stiletto Jungle. She had quit her job as an attorney to blog full-time on fashion and Shopping…Glam pays her bills by selling advertising on her site. I’m decidedly impressed with the smarts and positioning of the folks at Glam so far. They’ve achieved a lot in a really short amount of time.

One thing that has me a bit concerned however is that about a day after I accepted the job offer from Glam, I went in to Lens Crafters for a new pair of specs and when I got sized, there was only one pair that really spoke to me…I had to have the Prada eyeglasses. Let’s hope this trend doesn’t escalate for the sake of my pocketbook…

August 23rd will mark my 5th Anniversary with Tribal Fusion– and I’ve decided to make August 25th my last day. When I joined the company 5 years ago we were 5 people trying to eek out an existence in a horrible online ad economy. September 11th was soon to follow and if there were any advertising budgets left, few of them were online.

Still, we kept costs low and took advantage of the down market to slowly claw our way to profitability. It provided me an amazing opportunity to work closely with our CEO and founder, Dilip DaSilva and play a key role in the generation of a company. It was a fantastic experience to make huge contributions and experience successes and failures that were all my own. Before long I found myself as a Vice President at one of the web’s top media companies. I was invited to speak on panels, and I built a fantastic 10 person team to whom I’ll be sad to say goodbye. I’ve been on top of the world in many regards and yet I was itching to begin something new.

On September 5th, I’ll begin work as VP of Network & Partner Development for ViTrue a small start-up based out of Atlanta focused around user-generated video advertising. I’ll work from home and I’ll be starting from scratch. I’m certainly out of my comfort zone on this– but I’m hoping to grow through a new set of unfamiliar challenges. So, here goes…