June 3, 2025 • 43 mins
Sarah and Laura share their current practices for preserving family memories, and then Vanessa Quigley joins Sarah to share her experiences in building Chatbooks, as well as her take on why printing family memories are so important. She also discusses her entrepreneurial journey and some of the ways in which Chatbooks has become a company known for its family-friendly culture.
In the Q&A, a listener writes in looking for advice on how to discuss her prior job-hopping (related to her husband's career journey) with new potential employers.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist,
and speaker.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
And I'm Sarah Hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician,
writer and course creator. We are two working parents who
love our careers and our families.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about
how real women manage work, family, and time for fun.
From figuring out childcare to mapping out long.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Term career goals.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
We want you to get the most out of life.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This
episode is.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Airing in early June of twenty twenty five. Sarah is
going to be interviewing Vanessa Quickly, who is the founder
of Chatbooks, which I know is something a lot of
our listeners have used as part of their memory keeping
in the modern era. Vanessa will talk about starting a
company all that goes into that. She also has seven kids,
so definitely living the best of both worlds lifestyle there.
(01:07):
So Sarah, let's talk about your photo lifestyle right now.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
What are you hunting photos? What are you doing with
your fool photos?
Speaker 3 (01:16):
And I also wanted to mention, like other memory keeping
maybe because.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
I want credit for something.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
So when it comes to like physical items that I
want to keep, and they're not many of them, but
like of the kids, so that rare piece of artwork
that you're like, oh, or like that Mother's Day thing
that was so creative that you just like want I
do have. This was inspired by Gretchen Rubin, but I
got like Banker's boxes for each kid. Actually correction, I
have two Bankers Boxes for three kids because Cameron and
(01:42):
Genevieve are sharing a box, because that's what happens.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
But that's okay.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
It's worked out so far, and I would say I
put like two to three things per year per kid
in there, so it's like really sparing. But I think
that's going to be really fun when they're done and
I can hand them these folders or I can keep
them and they can look at them, because like the
goal is not to have a giant pie, like it's
very space limited, but it's kind of fun to have
some actual artifacts. And I don't mean artifacts like hair.
(02:06):
These are all like pieces of paper.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
I was gonna say, does Annabelle have more of an
artistic output than the other two or it's just that
they were younger.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
No, it's just that they're younger, so they're going to
each need their own box eventually. But because Genevieve's really
only been like in school and making things for a
few years, I'm shoving them in the back of Cameron's
box right now, but ultimately she'll get her own box.
And then in terms of our photos, so in theory
we print out photo books, but my last one is
from twenty twenty one, so maybe we don't print out
(02:36):
photo books. However, I am still thinking there was hope
for catching up, and I used to do one per
year via Shutterfly. I did the super easy version where
I just like told it to AI auto do it
and then I would like make slight adjustments. But I
didn't put a lot of work into it. The hard
part for me has always been the curation of like
which photos will go in there, and I could put
(02:56):
a kid to work on that task. I am well aware,
so I think we may catch up someday. And then
the other thing has been that I just do the
auto upload thing. We use Google Photos. Both my husband's
pictures and mine auto upload to there, and it's great.
I mean the other day, Laura, I was like, oh,
I want to go to this restaurant with Josh.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
Did I go there with somebody? And I was like,
I think it was Laura, And.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
I looked up I found the transaction in You Need
a Budget, I saw which day it was, looked up
the day, and then found a picture of us holding
drinks at this restaurant.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
It was awesome. That's awesome.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yeah, that's really Yeah.
Speaker 4 (03:26):
Google Photos is great.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Yeah, It's a lot more searchable now than it used
to be.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I mean I've had the like, Okay, I store my
passports in a place in the house that is not
near my desk, and so then I've had to enter
information for a few things recently. But I'm like, well,
I have a picture of it on my phone and
so then you know, I'm like, well, who knows when
I took that picture. But all I do is like
Laura passport, search for that and it comes up right, like,
(03:51):
I mean, it knows what that is, which is great, so,
you know, useful. But anyway, yeah, I have I have
a lot of photos on my phone that are just
sitting there, and I pay for extra storage because I
don't really feel it going through and deleting stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
We do have photo books from just about every year.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
I think we're at I do think we got to
twenty twenty three. I'm not sure that twenty twenty four
has been created yet. But the key in recent years
has been having Ruth take over this project. She has
access to my photos through my Apple account that is
also running her iPad, so it has not even been
a problem for her to just go through them and
put them directly into a Shutterfly and make a book.
(04:29):
So I've strongly encouraged that. But you know, we do
and I got to say, obviously people take lots of
photos on their phones. I will still put a plug
for paying a professional photographer to take real portraits of
your family. We've done this pretty much almost every year
with a couple of different photographers whose work we like
(04:51):
around here, and I.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Am so happy to have them.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I mean, partly, it's just then look nice on our
Christmas card photos. It doesn't look like you know, I
just randomly took it in the kitchen while everyone was
sitting there. But then we have printed them up nicer
and framed them. We have a photo wall, like a
gallery of all the kids. They have a big formal
portrait of all this. It's just good to have. I
don't know, I like it. I like seeing the photo.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
We did that last Thanksgiving with my parents and sister.
And I will say actually, the bigger the group is,
the more affordable it can be, because if you're in
a big family but you want like smaller family portraits,
you're generally paying for the photographer's time and you can
get a lot of pictures taken if you assemble a
decent group, and then you can kind of share the costs.
So obviously, also photographer's rates very widely. If you want
(05:39):
some well known person, you're probably going to be paying
a premium. But I found that this there's like a
gig economy in photos, and you can get some really
great artistic photos taken for not a ton of money.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
And this can also be a great gift, like for
a grandparent, if you are getting together as a family,
for instance, at some point this summer, like you're gonna
all each other at a wedding or at a graduation
or some sort of outdoor party that you're having, if
you hire a photographer to come and take photos of everyone,
(06:10):
this can be a wonderful thing to give to, especially
older adults who don't really need anything like this is
something that they might want. I will say, you have
to prepare everyone ahead of time for this, and because
people often don't want to stop what they're doing in
the middle of a party to pose for formal photos,
to just make sure everyone knows that they will need
(06:32):
to be taking thirty minutes out of the fund to
do this. But the memories are great, you know, It's
a small price to pay for being able to look
back on it forever. All right, Well, let's see what
Vanessa has to say about photos and memory keeping in general.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Well, I'm so excited to welcome to the show Vanessa Quickly,
the creator of chatbooks, a product a company that many
of you guys know and love. But just in case
you are not familiar with our chat books, go ahead
and introduce yourself.
Speaker 5 (07:03):
I hope many people know and love it. Yeah, my
name is Vanessa. I am a mother. I have seven
kids and two grandkids. I'm the oldest of twelve, so
big families of kind of my thing. I love a
lot of chaos and creativity and all that comes with
having a big family. Started the company ten years ago
(07:25):
because in all that chaos of phrasing kids and having
babies at breakneck speed. I had gotten behind to my
scrap booking. I was the scrapbook mom with my oldest
and my youngest was going off to kindergarten without a
single printed photo besides the annual Christmas card. And so
chat Books is a solution to that problem that I have,
and I've been building it for the last ten Oh man,
(07:46):
we're going on eleven years now with my husband and
it's been a wild, wild ride.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
That is amazing. So where exactly, because you have seven
kids and you sort of mentioned how all the oldest
was like, where were you and your parent journey when
you decided to start a brand new company.
Speaker 5 (08:05):
Well, my oldest had started his freshman year of college
and my youngest was going to kindergarten. So quite the
range there, And if I'm being honest, there were years
before we started Chatbooks that my husband had been trying
to build a company to solve like helping families hold
on to organize and enjoy their family memories. He has
a career in building enterprise software and was kind of
(08:29):
tackling the problem from that lens. And we basically drained
our savings trying.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
To build a solution.
Speaker 5 (08:38):
From a guy's point of view when we all know
it's the mom's right, the chief household officer that is
doing most of the memory keeping, and so I don't
have the Harvard MBA. But I finally spoke up and
I'm like, I don't think this is going to work.
I'm not using it, my friends aren't using it, my
sisters aren't using it.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Will you just figure.
Speaker 5 (08:58):
Out how to print my photos? And so with that
idea came like a volunteer to join the founding company
and build this business, even though I had no background
in business at all, but I was very passionate about
the problem to be solved.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
That is awesome.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
And by the way, slight parallel here because your age
spread of your kids is almost exactly the same as Laura,
my co host. She's got a five year old and
then headed off to college as her oldest, so kind
of similar on the up of seven and she has five, so.
Speaker 5 (09:29):
No, hey, it's all the same after three, it's a blur.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
So I can only imagine since I only have three.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
I also read a little bit about your background before
all this and found it, well, maybe not equally fascinating
because I want to hear more about like the whole,
like what it was like to start a company from
the ground up with all those kids in various ages.
But you also had an unusual upbringing. In fact, there
was an article that I think was part of your
preskitt that said why growing up weird can be good
(09:58):
for your career. So, Vanessa, how did you grow up
weird and was it good for your career? Well?
Speaker 5 (10:03):
I mentioned I'm the oldest of twelve kids, and we
grew up in Orlando, Florida, and we right now live
in Utah, and Utah historically has been known for big families,
and in Utah, I mean in Florida. Though like twelve kids,
we were freak shows. We were in the newspaper at
least once a year doing an article on some aspect
of like me my mom being supermom, or we had
(10:24):
like a gentleman's farm in our backyard and a pine
tree nursery. My dad had got my got going so
that my brothers could help have actually have a healthy
outlet for all of that big boy energy, but also
to help raise money for college. I came from a
wildly entrepreneurial family, and my mother, who was the primary
(10:46):
caregiver for the twelve kids. She was so creative. She
was an artist, she was a script she would write plays.
She constantly built dream up business plans like that's what
she would do. So I was like a coping mechanism.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
For the twelve kids.
Speaker 5 (11:01):
It was like just wild creativity and imagining like other worlds.
But I think all of the experiences with growing up
with a big family, where like we didn't fit the mold,
anything was possible, dreaming big, like even when we already
had a lot of big things going on. All of
that fed into this idea when I left home at
eighteen that I can literally do anything that I set
(11:23):
my mind to. And when I left home, I wanted
to be an opera singer. I love to sing, and
my parents always told me that I had a really
nice voice, and so of course I'm going to go
off and be a famous singer. I actually thought I
would be on Broadway, like that's really what I wanted
to do. I had never seen an opera. I had
been to a few Broadway shows, and I was like,
(11:44):
that is a life for me up on the stage.
And again my parents were just like feeding me into this,
like you can do anything, and you're so wildly talented.
And so I went off to college, but I was
didn't really understand how my university broke up the programs.
There's like a strict music theater tracked and a strict
classical music tract. And I just auditioned for the first
(12:05):
flyer that I saw for singers, and I ended up
in this opera tract. And after I'd realized what had
happened and it was too late to drop the class,
I stuck with it that semester, and my like world changed.
I fell in love with opera music at all of
the new challenges that come with that repertoire and technique.
And so yeah, how did growing up weird in Florida
(12:27):
with twelve kids and a cow that we would milk,
and horses and the pine tree nursery and collecting snakes
and all of that that was part of my child?
How did that lead me to where I am today?
I think just I like taking risks. I'm not intimidated
by fear. Actually fear excites me. And I've learned as
(12:48):
I've my career has evolved, and as I've been raising
all of these kids through every wild phase of motherhood
that when things are scary, it usually means there's something
exciting or some growth that's on the other side.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
So super interesting, that's all right, I feel like I'm
hearing it's like you never fit the mold. Your family
didn't fit the mold, and it was okay, So like
why I aim to fit the mold to begin with?
Speaker 4 (13:14):
So kind of like your possibilities are limitless, right.
Speaker 5 (13:18):
And being different was something that I felt like was
a badge of honor. So the first house that we
bought after my husband finished his graduate school, we lived
in a neighborhood with a lot of families that looked
a lot like ours, and moms that were staying at
home with their kids. And I just was like, if
I have to sit in the basement and play Little
Pet Shop for the rest of my life, I will die.
(13:40):
I cannot do this. And so I was the first
to kind of start going back to work. Like I said,
I was a singer and I had kind of hung
up the dream of being an international opera singer when
I found out I was pregnant with my first baby
as a junior in college. Really hard to have an
international opera career and a young family. But I kept
up this and after my fifth child was born, I,
(14:04):
with the encouragement of my husband, went out for an
audition for a Vida and I was cast in that
show as the mistress and on the dance core, and
so I got to leave the house every afternoon to
go to rehearsal for months, and then the show ran
for three months, and it was like insane trying to
coordinate the five kids and my husband's startup schedule and
(14:25):
all the babysitters and all the help and we had
a lot of Hamburger helper during the run of that show.
But I came alive again being able to do this
thing that I felt born to do, that I had
a passion for and unique talents for. And I actually
felt like I was a better mother, a better friend,
a better wife because I was nurturing this part of
me that had been neglected for so long.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
That is so cool, And you were absolutely speaking our
listener's language. We're going to take a quick break, and
then I want to talk about Chad Folks being an
amazing workplace for women, and just a little bit more
about the company and your life ideas. All right, we
(15:13):
are back and that story is amazing. I mean, especially
just I can hear the passion in your voice when
it was maybe a little bit going against it sounds
like the cultural zeitgeist that you were in to just
be like, no, this is what I want. I have
awesome ideas, and you know what, I'm going to try
the singing thing. Even so, how did we go from singing?
Speaker 4 (15:32):
Two chatbooks?
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Like?
Speaker 4 (15:34):
How did the journey break off? Here?
Speaker 5 (15:37):
How did the breakoff? Well? Best laid plans right, you
have a plan of how you want your life to go.
And it's anything that I've learned throughout my fifty almost
fifty three years is that making plans is great, and
I think that keeps you going right. But then you've
got to be ready to take the pivot wherever it comes.
And so our family was actually living in Florida at
(15:57):
the time, where I grew up just minutes from the beach,
in a beautiful home where I had already imagined where
I was going to host all the wedding perceptions of
my kids, like this is where we're going to live forever.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
Right.
Speaker 5 (16:07):
I had my running friends, I had my theater friends.
I was working a lot in local theaters and with
a local orchestra. And like I had mentioned, my husband
had been building out this you know, solution for family
memories that was not going anywhere, and in a moment
of like panic, he was like, we have to move
to Utah. Like this little beachside town, as much as
(16:29):
we love it, like we're never going to be able
to build this company here. We've got to go to Utah.
And I went to college in Utah, and I loved
my time in college, but I did not love Utah.
And I know my husband when we graduated, I am
never going back there. And at the time he was
like me neither. He was from the East Coast as well.
I grew up in Florida, but there was really exciting
(16:50):
things happening in Utah, especially around consumer tech. And my
husband had flown out to Utah a couple times to
pitch some investors, and he was like, that is where
we have to go. There's like so much energy and
the culture of family is so big there. And this
was what clinched it for me. My oldest son decided
to go to BYU and he got accepted and so
(17:12):
he was going west. I had the hardest time imagining
sending my baby across the country, just goodbye, go off
to college. And so that was what kind of like
finally like tipped it for me, like, Okay, we'll move
to Utah for the business, also to follow my son
to college, which he hated. Actually, at one point I
had to tell him pretend we don't live here, and
(17:33):
he did. I hardly heard from him. In fact, I
called him to say, you know, when are you coming
home for Christmas? Like when's your last exam? He was
in Florida. He just booked his own flight, went to
Florida to do his own thing. Anyway, we moved our
whole family to Utah to try to give this business
that my husband had been building a chance. And that's
(17:55):
when I had my idea of like put all of
that expensive code even building on the shelf, and just
focus on the real problem that I am having, which
is the only way my son can see the photos
from the last five years of his life is in
the iPad, and I'm constantly taking the iPad and the
phones away from him. Right, he was just an addict.
With the exception of one printed photo album that his
(18:17):
preschool teacher had made that last year of preschool. She
took photos of their parties and field trips and whatever,
and she printed them off at Walgreens dropped him in
this old dollar store album and he loved that album.
He took it everywhere with him. In fact, the night
before he went to preschool, I found him up in
his room bawling his eyes out. He told me he
never wanted to grow up. He'd been looking at these
(18:37):
few photos and was feeling all these big feelings and
it was adorable. But it was also this massive gut
punch to me that I was failing in one of
my most important mom jobs, which is to help my
kids hold on to their story. There's so much power
in our stories, and it comes across differently scrolling on
an iPad than it does with a printed photo. And
(18:58):
so that was the light bulb moment that pivoted all
of the work that had been done previously. And like
I said, it was my idea. I knew who our
customer was, I knew how to talk to them, where
to find them. And so instead of going off to
play tennis or get yoga certified, when Deklan went off
(19:18):
to kindergarten, I went to work. And it was the
first like nine to five job I had ever had,
and there was a big learning curve there.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
But it sounds like obviously things went in an amazing direction.
I'm sure it probably sounds much more easy in retrospect
and they're playing million humps and little learning points along
the way. But your idea ended up getting into the
hands of so many people. I was literally taking a
walk before I recorded this episode and said I was
going to talk to the counder of chapbooks, and she goes, oh,
I have like a hundred of those all over my house.
Speaker 4 (19:46):
So I, oh, man, you.
Speaker 5 (19:48):
Know, I think so often we're just working head down,
grinding it out, trying to grow, trying to like do
all the things, and you sometimes forget that this is
actually making a difference. Those kinds of stories make me
so happy to hear it is.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
So let's talk about saving memories a little bit. And
you definitely have me on board with the idea that
printed is a little bit different than digital. Do you
have like rituals you recommend around memory keeping, whether that
involves using chatbooks or another platform. But like, sometimes I
believe that we focus a lot on like the product
and not a lot on like the process. Like a
lot are the processes here that will help people preserve
(20:24):
their family memories.
Speaker 5 (20:25):
We all take a million photos, right, a gazillion photos.
I probably take ten times more than my husband. He
always makes fun of me, But if there's one moment
I want to capture, I'll just go ahead and take
five to ten of them, just because you never know,
you want to get like the right everyone looking whatever.
And we just have such access to our phones that
and our kids are so cute, they're always doing something.
(20:46):
We're just taking so many photos, and I think it's
amazing in contrast to the few photos that I have
of my childhood, right, Like, it's such a blessing. But
that overwhelm just causes paralysis, and a lot of us
just sort of like, oh, I know I should be
doing something with my photos. But a process that I
have I call it my Sunday select where at the
end of the week, usually Sunday afternoons or Sunday evenings,
(21:08):
I go through my camera roll just from that week
and just tackle those photos. Delete all the duplicates, delete
all the screenshots, either save them or just get rid
of them. I'm really actually not going to ever cook
that recipe that I screenshot in, send photos that I
have of neighborhood kids or of my nieces and nephews
to them, just kind of declutter and pare down to
(21:30):
what I actually want to keep that habit alone, and
that's something you can start today. You don't have to
feel guilty about not going back throughout the years. Start
that today a weekly habit. Some people do it every day.
That's overwhelming for me because I take a lot of
photos for work things, and usually by the end of
the week I know what I need to keep them
what I don't need to keep. But just having a
regular habit of curation is number one. And then it
(21:54):
honestly is so important to back them up. And I
think most of us have them backed up on Google
or Amazon or the cloud, right. I hope, at the
very least have them backed up in one place. I
recommend having to. You can get really detailed in your
curation and backup and use folders and by years. But
(22:14):
AI has done so many amazing things in photo management
that something's better than nothing done, is better than perfect,
like let the automation work for you, especially when you're
going through the backlog, but going forward, like get those
photos out of your phone and into the hands of
your family. We actually have done research with HP and
with the Bump to measure the impact that printed photos
(22:38):
have on families, and it's amazing the outcomes. I mean,
number one, you're going to feel like a better parent
because you're doing something that you know you should probably
be doing right. And there's something about looking at printed
photos that like brings more permanence into our mind, into
our memories. It helps create this narrative of our family
story that can be such a source of strength and resilience.
(23:00):
There's something called elaborative reminiscing that the professor that worked
with us on the HP study helped us understand the
power of it's when we tell stories with great detail,
and kids love to do this. Sit down with the
photo book or with a printed photo, and you ask
them what was happening here, and who is with you?
And how are you feeling? And what happened before and
(23:22):
what did you do after and what did you learn
from this? So often our kids experience of that moment
that we've caught on camera is so different from our
own experience, and so allowing them to share it does
a lot of things. It helps them build a greater
sense of identity, it helps create better problem solving language skills.
There's more connection happening between parent and child, and they
(23:45):
are crafting this narrative of their story that is going
to serve them throughout their whole life. So my suggestions are,
do a regular curation of your camera starting today going forward.
I've seen people share on Instauce. One hack is whatever
day you're doing it, go back throughout your camera, roll
back the years on that same day and curate those two.
(24:07):
That's an amazing way to work on that backlog. But
I just really feel like if we start to think
about all of the years where we've done nothing, we
will just feel so overwhelmed that we'll do nothing. So
I like to just say that's for a later day.
Maybe when I'm retired, I will get to that, but
now is the time to start doing something, something's better
(24:28):
than nothing, and then print your photos, whether it's with chatbooks,
there's so many companies that do photo books. I will
say the thing that is different about Chatbooks is when
we built the app and built the website, I had
busy moms in mind, like me and I had tried
making photo books on the other platforms, and there are
a million different ways to build a book, lots of
(24:50):
templates and cute fonts and colors and designs and shapes
and sizes of collages, all of those fun things. And
if you have tons of time.
Speaker 4 (24:59):
You can make a great book.
Speaker 5 (25:00):
But every book that I had ever started that way,
i'd never finished. And so we created a super easy
way to make a chat book where you really we've
taken all of that decision fatigue away, the very simple layouts,
not a whole lot of choices to make. And it's
the ongoing photobook subscription that really is magical because think
about all the things that come into our homes, right,
(25:21):
all the catalogs and ads and media. What if you
had an ongoing, regular delivery of a photo book with
the memories and not just the ones that would traditionally
get made into a photo book, like the graduation and
the big trip and the family reunion, all those things. Yes,
you should be printing those photos and hanging on with
those two. But it's the everyday magic of our everyday
(25:44):
lives that really that is what really tells the story.
And you know, when I look through the few photos
that I have of my childhood. One of my favorites
is a photo my mom took my room when I
was in seventh grade when I decided my favorite color
is purple, and I wanted the whole room purple, all
the things purple. And it was a disaster. And that
is just such a snapshot into my life as a
(26:04):
seven year old. I mean it is a seventh grader.
I make it a habit of taking picture. Anytime I
see one of my kids rooms just horrendously out of
control messy, I'll snap a picture, and that goes in
our chat books because that's part of our story. And
one day they will be grown adults and they will
have immaculate homes. Maybe I don't know who cares, but
they'll have this little snapshot to look back on, and
(26:26):
I will too. When my house is clean and quiet,
I'll remember this is where the magic was happening in
the middle of this chaos and mess.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
And they can show it to their kids and then
make them feel better about having a messy room. No,
I love that exactly. I think one thing, like having
these printed things around it's good for kids, it's also
good for us, Like you get to savor that vacation again,
you get to like remember the cute little thing that
your kid did on that random class assembly or whatever.
(26:54):
And I know, yes, like these things are living in
our phone somewhere, but we're just not going to bring
them out in the same way than if they're actually
like part of our environment. So I really do feel
like it makes sense that there's value there. I saw
there's research on the kids, and I would like to
know what the research is also as favorable for the adults.
Speaker 5 (27:13):
Oh yeah, Like eighty nine percent of moms say that
looking at photos helps them feel like a better mom,
and I think it is number one. They've actually probably
punted them and that's like, you know, gold star, I
did that thing that I probably should be doing. But
also it gives you a chance to look back and
see all the things that you're doing, Like we are
doing a better job than we give ourselves credit for, right.
(27:33):
And I know I'm in the thick of teenagers and
young adult kids and that can be very trying at times,
and sometimes I have an older child that I'm just
absolutely losing my mind with. But looking back at photos,
especially older photos, and being like, oh, yeah, we had
some really special moments and at the core that really
difficult teenager is a sweetheart, Like I remember those days
(27:57):
and so it helps me like reground and reconnect. Yeah,
there's powerful, powerful outcomes for parents and especially around mental health.
Like that was what we were really focusing on in
the survey with the bump that all the things that
we can do and we have access to for our
mental health, Like a photo book is like one of
(28:17):
the most powerful mental health tools that we have at our.
Speaker 4 (28:21):
Fingertips and so simple. I love it.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
We're going to take a quick break and we'll be
back with more of Vanessa. Okay, we are back. I
want to ask you like a slight pivot. I read
(28:44):
that Chatbooks was actually named one of the best places
to work for women, and I want to know what
is your company doing structure wise to make it so awesome, Like,
because we have a lot of leaders that listen to
this podcast and if they want ideas on how to
make their workplace amazing or maybe to present it to
their leaders if they're not the ones in charge, give
us some ideas.
Speaker 5 (29:04):
Yeah, I mean, like I had mentioned before, this is
my first like go to work nine to five job.
I had observed my husband and some of his jobs,
and you know, building software that's a whole nother kind
of company culture. But here we had an opportunity to
build a company from the ground up that really reflected
our values. The mission of Chapbooks is to connect and
strengthen families, and I wanted everything from the product to
(29:27):
the company culture to reflect that. And we were in
a season of our life where I didn't want to
be absent from all the amazing things that were happening,
and so we just created a company culture that was
family first, recognizing that everyone that works for us has
a life outside of Chatbooks, and we want to and
(29:49):
expect every team member to come and bring their best
self to work for eight amazing hours, but we can't
be blind to the fact that they have full three
sixty lives with people that depend on them and school
assemblies that they need to go to and kids that
get sick overnight, and then you can't come into work,
And so what is it going to look like and
feel like to work here at Chatbooks while being a mom,
(30:11):
being a dad, all of those other responsibilities, And so
we just center everything around five values. After working, you know,
those early startup days are a grind and you're just
trying to like just keep the wheels on the bus, right.
But when we had a moment to think about, all right,
how we want to be really deliberate about the kind
(30:31):
of company we were building. We're building a product that
serves parents and is primarily moms. We need every level
of this organization to represent our customer, like we need
women everywhere. So how are we going to create this
working environment that will be welcoming to all kinds of
(30:51):
women at different levels of their career. And so these
values that we just have heralded, We have them painted
on the walls in our offices, We use them for
every interview, for every evaluation, we talk about them constantly
are five star values. The pinnacle is to be a
(31:12):
grown up. And this came out of an experience where
the first little office that we had, and it was
honestly just a bunch of guys developers, and my husband
and I would have to put the toilet paper on
the toilet roll because these guys are used to their
mommy doing it and I'm like, this is not happening.
You know, if number one, a chat booker is a
(31:34):
grown up, so that entails putting the toilet paper on
the toilet roll, cleaning up after yourself, and obviously, like
all of the other things that we expect from grown ups,
be considerate, be kind, be thoughtful, like all of those things.
And the other other values are being kind and optimistic,
being willing to ship and do amazing work. Those things
(31:57):
come intention But we have this all stark culture with
family first benefits that are at like the top of
what is being offered here in Utah and including like
full mental health services for each employee and their family.
We have access to a platform that allows them to
(32:17):
have therapy like all those things. As moms, we all
of my kids are therapy right now. Like how I
don't know how you live in this life without having help,
but just access to tools and resources and support from
the highest level of childbooks leadership to do what they
need to do to bring their best self to work.
(32:39):
And it's just we have an incredible team, a very
diverse team. And yeah, getting an award like that was
just super validating and super grateful for it.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
Well you should be proud.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
It's amazing, and it's these kinds of companies sometimes don't last.
And here you are eleven years later and my friends
got your books all over the house, So I think
you're doing an amazing job.
Speaker 4 (33:00):
Makes me so pemple. On that note, two more things.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
Number one, what advice would you offer to somebody who
has their own chat books in their head? I mean
not specifically photo books, but has some idea they're they're
excited about and they're like, where do I get started
with this?
Speaker 4 (33:16):
What advice would you offer that young entrepreneur? Yeah?
Speaker 5 (33:20):
I think the first thing is that there's seasons for things, right,
Like I think that if I had had this idea
when my oldest was going to kindergarten, I don't know
if I would have been able to do it. My
husband was in a different place in his career, I
was literally just babies everywhere. It wouldn't have been the
(33:41):
right time for me to do it. And so there
was something there in the timing of our family and
for me too, like I felt more ready then to
take that on that I would have earlier. And so
I hear a lot of people saying, I just really
want to build a business. I really want to build
a business, and it's doable to do with a bunch
(34:02):
of young kids. It is, but it might not be
right for you just because someone else is doing it.
So just really look at your situation and with your
partner talk about what your real goals, long term goals
are and your values and if now is the time,
then you just got to find the right support. And
whether it's a co founder, I am like hot on
(34:23):
a hot co founder. My co founder is very hot. No,
my husband is like amazing. I love building a business
while building a family with the same partner because that
give and take that always comes, like we're there for
each other, like with the same goal, with the same values,
able to help as you go through those ups and
downs of it all. But the other thing I would
(34:46):
just say, yeah, talk to a lot of people. I
think as entrepreneurs sometimes we think that our idea is
we've got to guard it and keep it secret and safe.
But the more people you talk to, the better the outcome.
Like if it's something that someone can rip off really easily,
let them like find a different idea, Like you don't
(35:07):
want to have entering a market and being like so
vulnerable to competitors. But I really feel like when the
more people you talk to, you're going to learn more
about the market. That you're entering the way that you
want to find and sell to your customers. That's how
you find the best people to come work for you. Yeah,
just like network network, talk to as many people, listen
(35:29):
to your customer, really identify who your customer is, and
then really listen to what they're saying. Because I will
say one of the things that was the downfall of
what my husband had built for those years before chatbooks
was I would actually gather these focus groups of moms,
you know, to have them do demos, and they would
politely listen and say, yes, I should do that. That
(35:51):
is a really great idea. I should totally do that.
By the way, should is the kiss of death. If
you hear that, that means I will never Sorry, I
don't have time for that. But the all question was
always couldn't I print all of this in a book?
And my husband at the time thought print is dead.
All this is going to be safe and sound and
shareable in the cloud. But I'm sorry, we should have
(36:11):
listened to our customers say they want this printed is
It turns out that was the key that is why
chatbooks finally took off, because we were finally printing the
photos that they cared about and we're curating. So yeah,
that's so funny. Make sure this is the right season
for you, and then talk to as many people as
you can and learn as much as you can, especially
(36:33):
from your perspective customer.
Speaker 4 (36:34):
I love that.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
I love the story of like, well, no, we can't
do that, or we don't need to do that, like
over and over again. Then finally you realize, wait a second,
they know exactly that is great.
Speaker 5 (36:45):
I know, well, it's it's tough sometimes as such an entrepreneur,
you're like, no, I need to be really dogged about
my vision. That's what's setting us apart. Yes, and you
got to listen to the market and listen to your customers.
So there's tension there too, and it's it's.
Speaker 4 (37:00):
Tricky, super helpful.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
So our final thing we do this on every episode
is that we have a love of the week, which
can be anything. It can be a show you watched,
it can be like a scenery you saw outside your window.
It can be literally everything. And I always have me
go first. You have an example and you haven't a
big about it, But my love of the week is
doing what I call a walk and talk, which is
(37:24):
just like I'll just text a friend and be like,
want to go on a walk together at like noonsh
you know, like they could be in another city. But
then I'll go out for a walk and steamy South
Florida and they'll go for a walk in like somewhere
much more pleasant, and we'll chat and the time goes
by in like no time, and it's not quite as
good as walking next to the person, but it's like
eighty five percent is good, which is awesome. So I'm
(37:45):
super into walking talks.
Speaker 5 (37:48):
I love that I actually schedule some of my meetings
as a walk and talk and I'll just go out
and walk around our officers and a great place to walk.
But I work from home three days a week, so
go walk around the trail. I love that. It's so good. Okay,
I know what my love of the week is. All
my kids are in town this week, including my two
grand babies, So waking up to the sound of happy
little grand babies is the best. And I've been digging
(38:11):
in the basement pulling out the few little toys and
books that I've saved from my kids, and watching them
play with these now vintage toys is just like forget
about it. It's the best. But they do leave in
a week, and I'm not going to be sad about
that either. So they brought three dogs with them, so
we had a lot of dogs in our house right now.
Speaker 4 (38:30):
It's perfect.
Speaker 3 (38:31):
You can love the week when they're here, and then
you can love your piece and quiet on the other end. Well,
thank you so much for coming on in us. This
has been a pleasure. Yeah, thanks for having me all.
Speaker 4 (38:40):
Right, we are back.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
So much fun to talk with Vanessa, And I have
to say that does kind of makes me think about
trying chatbooks since I have not been as consistent with
my other photo methods as I had been previously, So
we will see if I become a convert. But here's
our question that came to us this week. This comes
from a listener who writes, I have a question in
(39:02):
regards to my resume and work experience as it relates
to moves we've made for my husband's career. Because he
works in a specific niche industry, We've moved a lot
based on the location of companies that he would work for.
But now that the kids are in school, we are
not going to work anymore.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
I don't move anymore.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
Sorry, Yeah, we're done working, kids are in Still, we're done.
We want to stay put, We're happy with the school district,
et cetera. So I'm in a remote role for a
large corporate company in which my role has gone completely stagnant.
So I'm looking for something else. What advice do you
have for someone like me who's bounced around in my
career but not because of personal reasons, but because of
my husband's specific job prospects. I want to be prepared
(39:41):
for how to justify the many jobs I've had. I
have nothing to hide, but I'm not sure how that's
going to be perceived as I go for more senior roles.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
I thought this is a great question, and I think
this is something probably a lot of people have experienced.
So you could certainly ask friends and colleagues people online
about this for advice. But as I think you noted,
there's nothing to hide. If you need to explain it,
you can simply mention what you said that earlier in
your career you moved because of opportunities based on your
(40:12):
husband's job, but now you are settled and not planning
on moving because the kids are in school. I mean,
if your interviewer has children, they will totally understand that.
And so you're looking for longer term opportunities, and you
can even talk about that, like, I am so excited
to now be able to take on a longer term opportunity.
I'm so excited to see myself at this company long
(40:33):
term and keep working that language into it. And it's
hard to know how any of this will play out,
but I have found interviewing is also about getting a
lot of practice, especially if you're.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Going to do a lot of this over the next
few months.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
You will quickly find out what people react positively to
or what they sort of raise their eyebrows, and then
you will quickly learn to adjust how you spell it.
And I think the upside though, of clearly the reasons
you moved really didn't have anything to do with either
you or the companies that you worked for in the past.
(41:13):
It was just a circumstance sort of thing. So this
means that you've got a pretty warm network I would
imagine of all those places, because a lot of those
companies probably regretted seeing you go out the door, and
you may have been happy to have continued working for them.
It just didn't work because you needed to live in
California and they were in Pennsylvania or something. So I
would start by reaching back out.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
To all of those people.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
And I don't know if anyone's still hiring, but they
may know people who are.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
They may have moved to other places and have ideas.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
So I would really tap the fact that you have
a big network from having moved around to a lot
of jobs and left those jobs, not because there was
anything wrong with the jobs or with you, but because
of sheer circumstantial kind of things.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
Totally makes sense, I think one thing, and I haven't
done a ton of hiring, but have definitely assisted with some.
You want to hear a story that makes sense, and
you have one, so like, why hide it? It's like, oh,
this is like a very natural trajectory. It'll also mean
if you're being honest, that you're not going to have
to like talk around something things will people can kind
of sense when you're.
Speaker 4 (42:14):
Trying to hide something, and you won't have to worry
about that.
Speaker 3 (42:16):
And I actually think there's a way you could spin
this as a plus, like, oh, I've gotten to see
how so many different companies do things, and I've really
been able to glean the best methods from everywhere and
have assembled all these contacts. As Laura mentioned, like, you know,
it's not like you've even left on bad terms. So wow,
what a great network you have to draw from and
that this could actually be a selling point. So great
question and great thing to think through as you embark
(42:39):
on this journey. We wish you the best of luck.
Speaker 4 (42:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
Exciting to think about a new stage in your career
and having a little more options and hopefully finding something
that feels a little less stagnant than what you're doing now. Well,
this has been best of both worlds. Sarah has been
interviewing Vanessa.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Quigley of Chatbooks.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
We will be back next week with more on making
work and life fit together.
Speaker 4 (43:01):
Thanks for listening.
Speaker 3 (43:02):
You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com
or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
And you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
This has been the.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
Best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time
for more on making work and life work together.
Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist,
and speaker.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
And I'm Sarah Hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician,
writer and course creator. We are two working parents who
love our careers and our families.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about
how real women manage work, family, and time for fun.
From figuring out childcare to mapping out long.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Term career goals.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
We want you to get the most out of life.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This
episode is.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Airing in early June of twenty twenty five. Sarah is
going to be interviewing Vanessa Quickly, who is the founder
of Chatbooks, which I know is something a lot of
our listeners have used as part of their memory keeping
in the modern era. Vanessa will talk about starting a
company all that goes into that. She also has seven kids,
so definitely living the best of both worlds lifestyle there.
(01:07):
So Sarah, let's talk about your photo lifestyle right now.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
What are you hunting photos? What are you doing with
your fool photos?
Speaker 3 (01:16):
And I also wanted to mention, like other memory keeping
maybe because.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
I want credit for something.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
So when it comes to like physical items that I
want to keep, and they're not many of them, but
like of the kids, so that rare piece of artwork
that you're like, oh, or like that Mother's Day thing
that was so creative that you just like want I
do have. This was inspired by Gretchen Rubin, but I
got like Banker's boxes for each kid. Actually correction, I
have two Bankers Boxes for three kids because Cameron and
(01:42):
Genevieve are sharing a box, because that's what happens.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
But that's okay.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
It's worked out so far, and I would say I
put like two to three things per year per kid
in there, so it's like really sparing. But I think
that's going to be really fun when they're done and
I can hand them these folders or I can keep
them and they can look at them, because like the
goal is not to have a giant pie, like it's
very space limited, but it's kind of fun to have
some actual artifacts. And I don't mean artifacts like hair.
(02:06):
These are all like pieces of paper.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
I was gonna say, does Annabelle have more of an
artistic output than the other two or it's just that
they were younger.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
No, it's just that they're younger, so they're going to
each need their own box eventually. But because Genevieve's really
only been like in school and making things for a
few years, I'm shoving them in the back of Cameron's
box right now, but ultimately she'll get her own box.
And then in terms of our photos, so in theory
we print out photo books, but my last one is
from twenty twenty one, so maybe we don't print out
(02:36):
photo books. However, I am still thinking there was hope
for catching up, and I used to do one per
year via Shutterfly. I did the super easy version where
I just like told it to AI auto do it
and then I would like make slight adjustments. But I
didn't put a lot of work into it. The hard
part for me has always been the curation of like
which photos will go in there, and I could put
(02:56):
a kid to work on that task. I am well aware,
so I think we may catch up someday. And then
the other thing has been that I just do the
auto upload thing. We use Google Photos. Both my husband's
pictures and mine auto upload to there, and it's great.
I mean the other day, Laura, I was like, oh,
I want to go to this restaurant with Josh.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
Did I go there with somebody? And I was like,
I think it was Laura, And.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
I looked up I found the transaction in You Need
a Budget, I saw which day it was, looked up
the day, and then found a picture of us holding
drinks at this restaurant.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
It was awesome. That's awesome.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yeah, that's really Yeah.
Speaker 4 (03:26):
Google Photos is great.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Yeah, It's a lot more searchable now than it used
to be.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I mean I've had the like, Okay, I store my
passports in a place in the house that is not
near my desk, and so then I've had to enter
information for a few things recently. But I'm like, well,
I have a picture of it on my phone and
so then you know, I'm like, well, who knows when
I took that picture. But all I do is like
Laura passport, search for that and it comes up right, like,
(03:51):
I mean, it knows what that is, which is great, so,
you know, useful. But anyway, yeah, I have I have
a lot of photos on my phone that are just
sitting there, and I pay for extra storage because I
don't really feel it going through and deleting stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
We do have photo books from just about every year.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
I think we're at I do think we got to
twenty twenty three. I'm not sure that twenty twenty four
has been created yet. But the key in recent years
has been having Ruth take over this project. She has
access to my photos through my Apple account that is
also running her iPad, so it has not even been
a problem for her to just go through them and
put them directly into a Shutterfly and make a book.
(04:29):
So I've strongly encouraged that. But you know, we do
and I got to say, obviously people take lots of
photos on their phones. I will still put a plug
for paying a professional photographer to take real portraits of
your family. We've done this pretty much almost every year
with a couple of different photographers whose work we like
(04:51):
around here, and I.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Am so happy to have them.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I mean, partly, it's just then look nice on our
Christmas card photos. It doesn't look like you know, I
just randomly took it in the kitchen while everyone was
sitting there. But then we have printed them up nicer
and framed them. We have a photo wall, like a
gallery of all the kids. They have a big formal
portrait of all this. It's just good to have. I
don't know, I like it. I like seeing the photo.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
We did that last Thanksgiving with my parents and sister.
And I will say actually, the bigger the group is,
the more affordable it can be, because if you're in
a big family but you want like smaller family portraits,
you're generally paying for the photographer's time and you can
get a lot of pictures taken if you assemble a
decent group, and then you can kind of share the costs.
So obviously, also photographer's rates very widely. If you want
(05:39):
some well known person, you're probably going to be paying
a premium. But I found that this there's like a
gig economy in photos, and you can get some really
great artistic photos taken for not a ton of money.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
And this can also be a great gift, like for
a grandparent, if you are getting together as a family,
for instance, at some point this summer, like you're gonna
all each other at a wedding or at a graduation
or some sort of outdoor party that you're having, if
you hire a photographer to come and take photos of everyone,
(06:10):
this can be a wonderful thing to give to, especially
older adults who don't really need anything like this is
something that they might want. I will say, you have
to prepare everyone ahead of time for this, and because
people often don't want to stop what they're doing in
the middle of a party to pose for formal photos,
to just make sure everyone knows that they will need
(06:32):
to be taking thirty minutes out of the fund to
do this. But the memories are great, you know, It's
a small price to pay for being able to look
back on it forever. All right, Well, let's see what
Vanessa has to say about photos and memory keeping in general.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Well, I'm so excited to welcome to the show Vanessa Quickly,
the creator of chatbooks, a product a company that many
of you guys know and love. But just in case
you are not familiar with our chat books, go ahead
and introduce yourself.
Speaker 5 (07:03):
I hope many people know and love it. Yeah, my
name is Vanessa. I am a mother. I have seven
kids and two grandkids. I'm the oldest of twelve, so
big families of kind of my thing. I love a
lot of chaos and creativity and all that comes with
having a big family. Started the company ten years ago
(07:25):
because in all that chaos of phrasing kids and having
babies at breakneck speed. I had gotten behind to my
scrap booking. I was the scrapbook mom with my oldest
and my youngest was going off to kindergarten without a
single printed photo besides the annual Christmas card. And so
chat Books is a solution to that problem that I have,
and I've been building it for the last ten Oh man,
(07:46):
we're going on eleven years now with my husband and
it's been a wild, wild ride.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
That is amazing. So where exactly, because you have seven
kids and you sort of mentioned how all the oldest
was like, where were you and your parent journey when
you decided to start a brand new company.
Speaker 5 (08:05):
Well, my oldest had started his freshman year of college
and my youngest was going to kindergarten. So quite the
range there, And if I'm being honest, there were years
before we started Chatbooks that my husband had been trying
to build a company to solve like helping families hold
on to organize and enjoy their family memories. He has
a career in building enterprise software and was kind of
(08:29):
tackling the problem from that lens. And we basically drained
our savings trying.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
To build a solution.
Speaker 5 (08:38):
From a guy's point of view when we all know
it's the mom's right, the chief household officer that is
doing most of the memory keeping, and so I don't
have the Harvard MBA. But I finally spoke up and
I'm like, I don't think this is going to work.
I'm not using it, my friends aren't using it, my
sisters aren't using it.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Will you just figure.
Speaker 5 (08:58):
Out how to print my photos? And so with that
idea came like a volunteer to join the founding company
and build this business, even though I had no background
in business at all, but I was very passionate about
the problem to be solved.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
That is awesome.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
And by the way, slight parallel here because your age
spread of your kids is almost exactly the same as Laura,
my co host. She's got a five year old and
then headed off to college as her oldest, so kind
of similar on the up of seven and she has five, so.
Speaker 5 (09:29):
No, hey, it's all the same after three, it's a blur.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
So I can only imagine since I only have three.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
I also read a little bit about your background before
all this and found it, well, maybe not equally fascinating
because I want to hear more about like the whole,
like what it was like to start a company from
the ground up with all those kids in various ages.
But you also had an unusual upbringing. In fact, there
was an article that I think was part of your
preskitt that said why growing up weird can be good
(09:58):
for your career. So, Vanessa, how did you grow up
weird and was it good for your career? Well?
Speaker 5 (10:03):
I mentioned I'm the oldest of twelve kids, and we
grew up in Orlando, Florida, and we right now live
in Utah, and Utah historically has been known for big families,
and in Utah, I mean in Florida. Though like twelve kids,
we were freak shows. We were in the newspaper at
least once a year doing an article on some aspect
of like me my mom being supermom, or we had
(10:24):
like a gentleman's farm in our backyard and a pine
tree nursery. My dad had got my got going so
that my brothers could help have actually have a healthy
outlet for all of that big boy energy, but also
to help raise money for college. I came from a
wildly entrepreneurial family, and my mother, who was the primary
(10:46):
caregiver for the twelve kids. She was so creative. She
was an artist, she was a script she would write plays.
She constantly built dream up business plans like that's what
she would do. So I was like a coping mechanism.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
For the twelve kids.
Speaker 5 (11:01):
It was like just wild creativity and imagining like other worlds.
But I think all of the experiences with growing up
with a big family, where like we didn't fit the mold,
anything was possible, dreaming big, like even when we already
had a lot of big things going on. All of
that fed into this idea when I left home at
eighteen that I can literally do anything that I set
(11:23):
my mind to. And when I left home, I wanted
to be an opera singer. I love to sing, and
my parents always told me that I had a really
nice voice, and so of course I'm going to go
off and be a famous singer. I actually thought I
would be on Broadway, like that's really what I wanted
to do. I had never seen an opera. I had
been to a few Broadway shows, and I was like,
(11:44):
that is a life for me up on the stage.
And again my parents were just like feeding me into this,
like you can do anything, and you're so wildly talented.
And so I went off to college, but I was
didn't really understand how my university broke up the programs.
There's like a strict music theater tracked and a strict
classical music tract. And I just auditioned for the first
(12:05):
flyer that I saw for singers, and I ended up
in this opera tract. And after I'd realized what had
happened and it was too late to drop the class,
I stuck with it that semester, and my like world changed.
I fell in love with opera music at all of
the new challenges that come with that repertoire and technique.
And so yeah, how did growing up weird in Florida
(12:27):
with twelve kids and a cow that we would milk,
and horses and the pine tree nursery and collecting snakes
and all of that that was part of my child?
How did that lead me to where I am today?
I think just I like taking risks. I'm not intimidated
by fear. Actually fear excites me. And I've learned as
(12:48):
I've my career has evolved, and as I've been raising
all of these kids through every wild phase of motherhood
that when things are scary, it usually means there's something
exciting or some growth that's on the other side.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
So super interesting, that's all right, I feel like I'm
hearing it's like you never fit the mold. Your family
didn't fit the mold, and it was okay, So like
why I aim to fit the mold to begin with?
Speaker 4 (13:14):
So kind of like your possibilities are limitless, right.
Speaker 5 (13:18):
And being different was something that I felt like was
a badge of honor. So the first house that we
bought after my husband finished his graduate school, we lived
in a neighborhood with a lot of families that looked
a lot like ours, and moms that were staying at
home with their kids. And I just was like, if
I have to sit in the basement and play Little
Pet Shop for the rest of my life, I will die.
(13:40):
I cannot do this. And so I was the first
to kind of start going back to work. Like I said,
I was a singer and I had kind of hung
up the dream of being an international opera singer when
I found out I was pregnant with my first baby
as a junior in college. Really hard to have an
international opera career and a young family. But I kept
up this and after my fifth child was born, I,
(14:04):
with the encouragement of my husband, went out for an
audition for a Vida and I was cast in that
show as the mistress and on the dance core, and
so I got to leave the house every afternoon to
go to rehearsal for months, and then the show ran
for three months, and it was like insane trying to
coordinate the five kids and my husband's startup schedule and
(14:25):
all the babysitters and all the help and we had
a lot of Hamburger helper during the run of that show.
But I came alive again being able to do this
thing that I felt born to do, that I had
a passion for and unique talents for. And I actually
felt like I was a better mother, a better friend,
a better wife because I was nurturing this part of
me that had been neglected for so long.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
That is so cool, And you were absolutely speaking our
listener's language. We're going to take a quick break, and
then I want to talk about Chad Folks being an
amazing workplace for women, and just a little bit more
about the company and your life ideas. All right, we
(15:13):
are back and that story is amazing. I mean, especially
just I can hear the passion in your voice when
it was maybe a little bit going against it sounds
like the cultural zeitgeist that you were in to just
be like, no, this is what I want. I have
awesome ideas, and you know what, I'm going to try
the singing thing. Even so, how did we go from singing?
Speaker 4 (15:32):
Two chatbooks?
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Like?
Speaker 4 (15:34):
How did the journey break off? Here?
Speaker 5 (15:37):
How did the breakoff? Well? Best laid plans right, you
have a plan of how you want your life to go.
And it's anything that I've learned throughout my fifty almost
fifty three years is that making plans is great, and
I think that keeps you going right. But then you've
got to be ready to take the pivot wherever it comes.
And so our family was actually living in Florida at
(15:57):
the time, where I grew up just minutes from the beach,
in a beautiful home where I had already imagined where
I was going to host all the wedding perceptions of
my kids, like this is where we're going to live forever.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
Right.
Speaker 5 (16:07):
I had my running friends, I had my theater friends.
I was working a lot in local theaters and with
a local orchestra. And like I had mentioned, my husband
had been building out this you know, solution for family
memories that was not going anywhere, and in a moment
of like panic, he was like, we have to move
to Utah. Like this little beachside town, as much as
(16:29):
we love it, like we're never going to be able
to build this company here. We've got to go to Utah.
And I went to college in Utah, and I loved
my time in college, but I did not love Utah.
And I know my husband when we graduated, I am
never going back there. And at the time he was
like me neither. He was from the East Coast as well.
I grew up in Florida, but there was really exciting
(16:50):
things happening in Utah, especially around consumer tech. And my
husband had flown out to Utah a couple times to
pitch some investors, and he was like, that is where
we have to go. There's like so much energy and
the culture of family is so big there. And this
was what clinched it for me. My oldest son decided
to go to BYU and he got accepted and so
(17:12):
he was going west. I had the hardest time imagining
sending my baby across the country, just goodbye, go off
to college. And so that was what kind of like
finally like tipped it for me, like, Okay, we'll move
to Utah for the business, also to follow my son
to college, which he hated. Actually, at one point I
had to tell him pretend we don't live here, and
(17:33):
he did. I hardly heard from him. In fact, I
called him to say, you know, when are you coming
home for Christmas? Like when's your last exam? He was
in Florida. He just booked his own flight, went to
Florida to do his own thing. Anyway, we moved our
whole family to Utah to try to give this business
that my husband had been building a chance. And that's
(17:55):
when I had my idea of like put all of
that expensive code even building on the shelf, and just
focus on the real problem that I am having, which
is the only way my son can see the photos
from the last five years of his life is in
the iPad, and I'm constantly taking the iPad and the
phones away from him. Right, he was just an addict.
With the exception of one printed photo album that his
(18:17):
preschool teacher had made that last year of preschool. She
took photos of their parties and field trips and whatever,
and she printed them off at Walgreens dropped him in
this old dollar store album and he loved that album.
He took it everywhere with him. In fact, the night
before he went to preschool, I found him up in
his room bawling his eyes out. He told me he
never wanted to grow up. He'd been looking at these
(18:37):
few photos and was feeling all these big feelings and
it was adorable. But it was also this massive gut
punch to me that I was failing in one of
my most important mom jobs, which is to help my
kids hold on to their story. There's so much power
in our stories, and it comes across differently scrolling on
an iPad than it does with a printed photo. And
(18:58):
so that was the light bulb moment that pivoted all
of the work that had been done previously. And like
I said, it was my idea. I knew who our
customer was, I knew how to talk to them, where
to find them. And so instead of going off to
play tennis or get yoga certified, when Deklan went off
(19:18):
to kindergarten, I went to work. And it was the
first like nine to five job I had ever had,
and there was a big learning curve there.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
But it sounds like obviously things went in an amazing direction.
I'm sure it probably sounds much more easy in retrospect
and they're playing million humps and little learning points along
the way. But your idea ended up getting into the
hands of so many people. I was literally taking a
walk before I recorded this episode and said I was
going to talk to the counder of chapbooks, and she goes, oh,
I have like a hundred of those all over my house.
Speaker 4 (19:46):
So I, oh, man, you.
Speaker 5 (19:48):
Know, I think so often we're just working head down,
grinding it out, trying to grow, trying to like do
all the things, and you sometimes forget that this is
actually making a difference. Those kinds of stories make me
so happy to hear it is.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
So let's talk about saving memories a little bit. And
you definitely have me on board with the idea that
printed is a little bit different than digital. Do you
have like rituals you recommend around memory keeping, whether that
involves using chatbooks or another platform. But like, sometimes I
believe that we focus a lot on like the product
and not a lot on like the process. Like a
lot are the processes here that will help people preserve
(20:24):
their family memories.
Speaker 5 (20:25):
We all take a million photos, right, a gazillion photos.
I probably take ten times more than my husband. He
always makes fun of me, But if there's one moment
I want to capture, I'll just go ahead and take
five to ten of them, just because you never know,
you want to get like the right everyone looking whatever.
And we just have such access to our phones that
and our kids are so cute, they're always doing something.
(20:46):
We're just taking so many photos, and I think it's
amazing in contrast to the few photos that I have
of my childhood, right, Like, it's such a blessing. But
that overwhelm just causes paralysis, and a lot of us
just sort of like, oh, I know I should be
doing something with my photos. But a process that I
have I call it my Sunday select where at the
end of the week, usually Sunday afternoons or Sunday evenings,
(21:08):
I go through my camera roll just from that week
and just tackle those photos. Delete all the duplicates, delete
all the screenshots, either save them or just get rid
of them. I'm really actually not going to ever cook
that recipe that I screenshot in, send photos that I
have of neighborhood kids or of my nieces and nephews
to them, just kind of declutter and pare down to
(21:30):
what I actually want to keep that habit alone, and
that's something you can start today. You don't have to
feel guilty about not going back throughout the years. Start
that today a weekly habit. Some people do it every day.
That's overwhelming for me because I take a lot of
photos for work things, and usually by the end of
the week I know what I need to keep them
what I don't need to keep. But just having a
regular habit of curation is number one. And then it
(21:54):
honestly is so important to back them up. And I
think most of us have them backed up on Google
or Amazon or the cloud, right. I hope, at the
very least have them backed up in one place. I
recommend having to. You can get really detailed in your
curation and backup and use folders and by years. But
(22:14):
AI has done so many amazing things in photo management
that something's better than nothing done, is better than perfect,
like let the automation work for you, especially when you're
going through the backlog, but going forward, like get those
photos out of your phone and into the hands of
your family. We actually have done research with HP and
with the Bump to measure the impact that printed photos
(22:38):
have on families, and it's amazing the outcomes. I mean,
number one, you're going to feel like a better parent
because you're doing something that you know you should probably
be doing right. And there's something about looking at printed
photos that like brings more permanence into our mind, into
our memories. It helps create this narrative of our family
story that can be such a source of strength and resilience.
(23:00):
There's something called elaborative reminiscing that the professor that worked
with us on the HP study helped us understand the
power of it's when we tell stories with great detail,
and kids love to do this. Sit down with the
photo book or with a printed photo, and you ask
them what was happening here, and who is with you?
And how are you feeling? And what happened before and
(23:22):
what did you do after and what did you learn
from this? So often our kids experience of that moment
that we've caught on camera is so different from our
own experience, and so allowing them to share it does
a lot of things. It helps them build a greater
sense of identity, it helps create better problem solving language skills.
There's more connection happening between parent and child, and they
(23:45):
are crafting this narrative of their story that is going
to serve them throughout their whole life. So my suggestions are,
do a regular curation of your camera starting today going forward.
I've seen people share on Instauce. One hack is whatever
day you're doing it, go back throughout your camera, roll
back the years on that same day and curate those two.
(24:07):
That's an amazing way to work on that backlog. But
I just really feel like if we start to think
about all of the years where we've done nothing, we
will just feel so overwhelmed that we'll do nothing. So
I like to just say that's for a later day.
Maybe when I'm retired, I will get to that, but
now is the time to start doing something, something's better
(24:28):
than nothing, and then print your photos, whether it's with chatbooks,
there's so many companies that do photo books. I will
say the thing that is different about Chatbooks is when
we built the app and built the website, I had
busy moms in mind, like me and I had tried
making photo books on the other platforms, and there are
a million different ways to build a book, lots of
(24:50):
templates and cute fonts and colors and designs and shapes
and sizes of collages, all of those fun things. And
if you have tons of time.
Speaker 4 (24:59):
You can make a great book.
Speaker 5 (25:00):
But every book that I had ever started that way,
i'd never finished. And so we created a super easy
way to make a chat book where you really we've
taken all of that decision fatigue away, the very simple layouts,
not a whole lot of choices to make. And it's
the ongoing photobook subscription that really is magical because think
about all the things that come into our homes, right,
(25:21):
all the catalogs and ads and media. What if you
had an ongoing, regular delivery of a photo book with
the memories and not just the ones that would traditionally
get made into a photo book, like the graduation and
the big trip and the family reunion, all those things. Yes,
you should be printing those photos and hanging on with
those two. But it's the everyday magic of our everyday
(25:44):
lives that really that is what really tells the story.
And you know, when I look through the few photos
that I have of my childhood. One of my favorites
is a photo my mom took my room when I
was in seventh grade when I decided my favorite color
is purple, and I wanted the whole room purple, all
the things purple. And it was a disaster. And that
is just such a snapshot into my life as a
(26:04):
seven year old. I mean it is a seventh grader.
I make it a habit of taking picture. Anytime I
see one of my kids rooms just horrendously out of
control messy, I'll snap a picture, and that goes in
our chat books because that's part of our story. And
one day they will be grown adults and they will
have immaculate homes. Maybe I don't know who cares, but
they'll have this little snapshot to look back on, and
(26:26):
I will too. When my house is clean and quiet,
I'll remember this is where the magic was happening in
the middle of this chaos and mess.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
And they can show it to their kids and then
make them feel better about having a messy room. No,
I love that exactly. I think one thing, like having
these printed things around it's good for kids, it's also
good for us, Like you get to savor that vacation again,
you get to like remember the cute little thing that
your kid did on that random class assembly or whatever.
(26:54):
And I know, yes, like these things are living in
our phone somewhere, but we're just not going to bring
them out in the same way than if they're actually
like part of our environment. So I really do feel
like it makes sense that there's value there. I saw
there's research on the kids, and I would like to
know what the research is also as favorable for the adults.
Speaker 5 (27:13):
Oh yeah, Like eighty nine percent of moms say that
looking at photos helps them feel like a better mom,
and I think it is number one. They've actually probably
punted them and that's like, you know, gold star, I
did that thing that I probably should be doing. But
also it gives you a chance to look back and
see all the things that you're doing, Like we are
doing a better job than we give ourselves credit for, right.
(27:33):
And I know I'm in the thick of teenagers and
young adult kids and that can be very trying at times,
and sometimes I have an older child that I'm just
absolutely losing my mind with. But looking back at photos,
especially older photos, and being like, oh, yeah, we had
some really special moments and at the core that really
difficult teenager is a sweetheart, Like I remember those days
(27:57):
and so it helps me like reground and reconnect. Yeah,
there's powerful, powerful outcomes for parents and especially around mental health.
Like that was what we were really focusing on in
the survey with the bump that all the things that
we can do and we have access to for our
mental health, Like a photo book is like one of
(28:17):
the most powerful mental health tools that we have at our.
Speaker 4 (28:21):
Fingertips and so simple. I love it.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
We're going to take a quick break and we'll be
back with more of Vanessa. Okay, we are back. I
want to ask you like a slight pivot. I read
(28:44):
that Chatbooks was actually named one of the best places
to work for women, and I want to know what
is your company doing structure wise to make it so awesome, Like,
because we have a lot of leaders that listen to
this podcast and if they want ideas on how to
make their workplace amazing or maybe to present it to
their leaders if they're not the ones in charge, give
us some ideas.
Speaker 5 (29:04):
Yeah, I mean, like I had mentioned before, this is
my first like go to work nine to five job.
I had observed my husband and some of his jobs,
and you know, building software that's a whole nother kind
of company culture. But here we had an opportunity to
build a company from the ground up that really reflected
our values. The mission of Chapbooks is to connect and
strengthen families, and I wanted everything from the product to
(29:27):
the company culture to reflect that. And we were in
a season of our life where I didn't want to
be absent from all the amazing things that were happening,
and so we just created a company culture that was
family first, recognizing that everyone that works for us has
a life outside of Chatbooks, and we want to and
(29:49):
expect every team member to come and bring their best
self to work for eight amazing hours, but we can't
be blind to the fact that they have full three
sixty lives with people that depend on them and school
assemblies that they need to go to and kids that
get sick overnight, and then you can't come into work,
And so what is it going to look like and
feel like to work here at Chatbooks while being a mom,
(30:11):
being a dad, all of those other responsibilities, And so
we just center everything around five values. After working, you know,
those early startup days are a grind and you're just
trying to like just keep the wheels on the bus, right.
But when we had a moment to think about, all right,
how we want to be really deliberate about the kind
(30:31):
of company we were building. We're building a product that
serves parents and is primarily moms. We need every level
of this organization to represent our customer, like we need
women everywhere. So how are we going to create this
working environment that will be welcoming to all kinds of
(30:51):
women at different levels of their career. And so these
values that we just have heralded, We have them painted
on the walls in our offices, We use them for
every interview, for every evaluation, we talk about them constantly
are five star values. The pinnacle is to be a
(31:12):
grown up. And this came out of an experience where
the first little office that we had, and it was
honestly just a bunch of guys developers, and my husband
and I would have to put the toilet paper on
the toilet roll because these guys are used to their
mommy doing it and I'm like, this is not happening.
You know, if number one, a chat booker is a
(31:34):
grown up, so that entails putting the toilet paper on
the toilet roll, cleaning up after yourself, and obviously, like
all of the other things that we expect from grown ups,
be considerate, be kind, be thoughtful, like all of those things.
And the other other values are being kind and optimistic,
being willing to ship and do amazing work. Those things
(31:57):
come intention But we have this all stark culture with
family first benefits that are at like the top of
what is being offered here in Utah and including like
full mental health services for each employee and their family.
We have access to a platform that allows them to
(32:17):
have therapy like all those things. As moms, we all
of my kids are therapy right now. Like how I
don't know how you live in this life without having help,
but just access to tools and resources and support from
the highest level of childbooks leadership to do what they
need to do to bring their best self to work.
(32:39):
And it's just we have an incredible team, a very
diverse team. And yeah, getting an award like that was
just super validating and super grateful for it.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
Well you should be proud.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
It's amazing, and it's these kinds of companies sometimes don't last.
And here you are eleven years later and my friends
got your books all over the house, So I think
you're doing an amazing job.
Speaker 4 (33:00):
Makes me so pemple. On that note, two more things.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
Number one, what advice would you offer to somebody who
has their own chat books in their head? I mean
not specifically photo books, but has some idea they're they're
excited about and they're like, where do I get started
with this?
Speaker 4 (33:16):
What advice would you offer that young entrepreneur? Yeah?
Speaker 5 (33:20):
I think the first thing is that there's seasons for things, right,
Like I think that if I had had this idea
when my oldest was going to kindergarten, I don't know
if I would have been able to do it. My
husband was in a different place in his career, I
was literally just babies everywhere. It wouldn't have been the
(33:41):
right time for me to do it. And so there
was something there in the timing of our family and
for me too, like I felt more ready then to
take that on that I would have earlier. And so
I hear a lot of people saying, I just really
want to build a business. I really want to build
a business, and it's doable to do with a bunch
(34:02):
of young kids. It is, but it might not be
right for you just because someone else is doing it.
So just really look at your situation and with your
partner talk about what your real goals, long term goals
are and your values and if now is the time,
then you just got to find the right support. And
whether it's a co founder, I am like hot on
(34:23):
a hot co founder. My co founder is very hot. No,
my husband is like amazing. I love building a business
while building a family with the same partner because that
give and take that always comes, like we're there for
each other, like with the same goal, with the same values,
able to help as you go through those ups and
downs of it all. But the other thing I would
(34:46):
just say, yeah, talk to a lot of people. I
think as entrepreneurs sometimes we think that our idea is
we've got to guard it and keep it secret and safe.
But the more people you talk to, the better the outcome.
Like if it's something that someone can rip off really easily,
let them like find a different idea, Like you don't
(35:07):
want to have entering a market and being like so
vulnerable to competitors. But I really feel like when the
more people you talk to, you're going to learn more
about the market. That you're entering the way that you
want to find and sell to your customers. That's how
you find the best people to come work for you. Yeah,
just like network network, talk to as many people, listen
(35:29):
to your customer, really identify who your customer is, and
then really listen to what they're saying. Because I will
say one of the things that was the downfall of
what my husband had built for those years before chatbooks
was I would actually gather these focus groups of moms,
you know, to have them do demos, and they would
politely listen and say, yes, I should do that. That
(35:51):
is a really great idea. I should totally do that.
By the way, should is the kiss of death. If
you hear that, that means I will never Sorry, I
don't have time for that. But the all question was
always couldn't I print all of this in a book?
And my husband at the time thought print is dead.
All this is going to be safe and sound and
shareable in the cloud. But I'm sorry, we should have
(36:11):
listened to our customers say they want this printed is
It turns out that was the key that is why
chatbooks finally took off, because we were finally printing the
photos that they cared about and we're curating. So yeah,
that's so funny. Make sure this is the right season
for you, and then talk to as many people as
you can and learn as much as you can, especially
(36:33):
from your perspective customer.
Speaker 4 (36:34):
I love that.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
I love the story of like, well, no, we can't
do that, or we don't need to do that, like
over and over again. Then finally you realize, wait a second,
they know exactly that is great.
Speaker 5 (36:45):
I know, well, it's it's tough sometimes as such an entrepreneur,
you're like, no, I need to be really dogged about
my vision. That's what's setting us apart. Yes, and you
got to listen to the market and listen to your customers.
So there's tension there too, and it's it's.
Speaker 4 (37:00):
Tricky, super helpful.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
So our final thing we do this on every episode
is that we have a love of the week, which
can be anything. It can be a show you watched,
it can be like a scenery you saw outside your window.
It can be literally everything. And I always have me
go first. You have an example and you haven't a
big about it, But my love of the week is
doing what I call a walk and talk, which is
(37:24):
just like I'll just text a friend and be like,
want to go on a walk together at like noonsh
you know, like they could be in another city. But
then I'll go out for a walk and steamy South
Florida and they'll go for a walk in like somewhere
much more pleasant, and we'll chat and the time goes
by in like no time, and it's not quite as
good as walking next to the person, but it's like
eighty five percent is good, which is awesome. So I'm
(37:45):
super into walking talks.
Speaker 5 (37:48):
I love that I actually schedule some of my meetings
as a walk and talk and I'll just go out
and walk around our officers and a great place to walk.
But I work from home three days a week, so
go walk around the trail. I love that. It's so good. Okay,
I know what my love of the week is. All
my kids are in town this week, including my two
grand babies, So waking up to the sound of happy
little grand babies is the best. And I've been digging
(38:11):
in the basement pulling out the few little toys and
books that I've saved from my kids, and watching them
play with these now vintage toys is just like forget
about it. It's the best. But they do leave in
a week, and I'm not going to be sad about
that either. So they brought three dogs with them, so
we had a lot of dogs in our house right now.
Speaker 4 (38:30):
It's perfect.
Speaker 3 (38:31):
You can love the week when they're here, and then
you can love your piece and quiet on the other end. Well,
thank you so much for coming on in us. This
has been a pleasure. Yeah, thanks for having me all.
Speaker 4 (38:40):
Right, we are back.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
So much fun to talk with Vanessa, And I have
to say that does kind of makes me think about
trying chatbooks since I have not been as consistent with
my other photo methods as I had been previously, So
we will see if I become a convert. But here's
our question that came to us this week. This comes
from a listener who writes, I have a question in
(39:02):
regards to my resume and work experience as it relates
to moves we've made for my husband's career. Because he
works in a specific niche industry, We've moved a lot
based on the location of companies that he would work for.
But now that the kids are in school, we are
not going to work anymore.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
I don't move anymore.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
Sorry, Yeah, we're done working, kids are in Still, we're done.
We want to stay put, We're happy with the school district,
et cetera. So I'm in a remote role for a
large corporate company in which my role has gone completely stagnant.
So I'm looking for something else. What advice do you
have for someone like me who's bounced around in my
career but not because of personal reasons, but because of
my husband's specific job prospects. I want to be prepared
(39:41):
for how to justify the many jobs I've had. I
have nothing to hide, but I'm not sure how that's
going to be perceived as I go for more senior roles.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
I thought this is a great question, and I think
this is something probably a lot of people have experienced.
So you could certainly ask friends and colleagues people online
about this for advice. But as I think you noted,
there's nothing to hide. If you need to explain it,
you can simply mention what you said that earlier in
your career you moved because of opportunities based on your
(40:12):
husband's job, but now you are settled and not planning
on moving because the kids are in school. I mean,
if your interviewer has children, they will totally understand that.
And so you're looking for longer term opportunities, and you
can even talk about that, like, I am so excited
to now be able to take on a longer term opportunity.
I'm so excited to see myself at this company long
(40:33):
term and keep working that language into it. And it's
hard to know how any of this will play out,
but I have found interviewing is also about getting a
lot of practice, especially if you're.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Going to do a lot of this over the next
few months.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
You will quickly find out what people react positively to
or what they sort of raise their eyebrows, and then
you will quickly learn to adjust how you spell it.
And I think the upside though, of clearly the reasons
you moved really didn't have anything to do with either
you or the companies that you worked for in the past.
(41:13):
It was just a circumstance sort of thing. So this
means that you've got a pretty warm network I would
imagine of all those places, because a lot of those
companies probably regretted seeing you go out the door, and
you may have been happy to have continued working for them.
It just didn't work because you needed to live in
California and they were in Pennsylvania or something. So I
would start by reaching back out.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
To all of those people.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
And I don't know if anyone's still hiring, but they
may know people who are.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
They may have moved to other places and have ideas.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
So I would really tap the fact that you have
a big network from having moved around to a lot
of jobs and left those jobs, not because there was
anything wrong with the jobs or with you, but because
of sheer circumstantial kind of things.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
Totally makes sense, I think one thing, and I haven't
done a ton of hiring, but have definitely assisted with some.
You want to hear a story that makes sense, and
you have one, so like, why hide it? It's like, oh,
this is like a very natural trajectory. It'll also mean
if you're being honest, that you're not going to have
to like talk around something things will people can kind
of sense when you're.
Speaker 4 (42:14):
Trying to hide something, and you won't have to worry
about that.
Speaker 3 (42:16):
And I actually think there's a way you could spin
this as a plus, like, oh, I've gotten to see
how so many different companies do things, and I've really
been able to glean the best methods from everywhere and
have assembled all these contacts. As Laura mentioned, like, you know,
it's not like you've even left on bad terms. So wow,
what a great network you have to draw from and
that this could actually be a selling point. So great
question and great thing to think through as you embark
(42:39):
on this journey. We wish you the best of luck.
Speaker 4 (42:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
Exciting to think about a new stage in your career
and having a little more options and hopefully finding something
that feels a little less stagnant than what you're doing now. Well,
this has been best of both worlds. Sarah has been
interviewing Vanessa.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Quigley of Chatbooks.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
We will be back next week with more on making
work and life fit together.
Speaker 4 (43:01):
Thanks for listening.
Speaker 3 (43:02):
You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com
or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
And you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
This has been the.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
Best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time
for more on making work and life work together.
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