• by Kendall Allen , October 13, 2009

Recently I've become quite  nostalgic. There are some personal reasons for this, but, primarily, my current professional mode has triggered  career remembrances both hilarious and gratifying.

It occurred to me over the weekend that I could not possibly be doing more things simultaneously that require a thicker  skin. My colorful love life aside, in addition to numerous other high-exposure initiatives, I am leading the debut of a content and community digital venture on the mamma of all start-up budgets. So, full disclosure: With this confluence of stuff at its hilt, this posting is a mix of stress relief, entertainment, and personal industry chronicle. Walk with me. Some of the references may ring a few bells for you, too.

Very soon my associate Carolyn Kepcher and I will roll out "Work Her Way." The digital instance of this new brand will come to life at www.workherway.com, a focused site for women on career. You may recall Carolyn from her time with Donald Trump on the first few seasons of "The Apprentice." As she immerses herself in shooting three related TV shows and getting out her next book, I'm focused on the digital piece.  With my crackerjack team, I am deep into programming, as I have not been since 1996.

Those early-morning sessions uploading contributor content through Wordpress have triggered my personal "way-back" machine. Those of you who know me, know that I am equally comfortable at lofty heights and down in the weeds. So, in addition to developing the business and charting our cross-channel course, I'm enjoying the pre-dawn time in my PJs cranking up the editorial so that we can get live on time. These days, with all the tools we have, it's now easy to publish.  Wow, how things have changed!

Flashback #1: 1996 in San Francisco, using Rainman, AOL's coding language, to program the AOL platform of Thrive, an AOL/Time Inc. joint venture. Rainman! Thrive  lived on both the AOL proprietary service and on the Worldwide Web. "Dual-platform" was our lingo then. Two platforms, given the state of the art and science, was a big undertaking to get live.

This Thrive experience was really my first serious digital adventure, as it was for most of us. It was weedy. I moderated chat rooms and issued terms of service warnings to hooligans in the middle of the night, taking my shift, until we hired our remote staff. I think we paid them with T-shirts. I emceed "Auditoriums." I hired and fired my first LA-based PR agency: They were giving the voice of Babe the pig more attention than our up-and coming company. One of my most favorite experiences was collaborating with our sales staff when they sold our first ads and custom publishing was required. Microsoft, Borders, and others. Progressive stuff at the time.

Flashing further back,I thought of other experiences in "new media," including:
-    Writing occasional short articles on CAD, "computer aided design," for a Western living magazine.
-    Reviewing CD-ROMs, on everything from German language to learning to play the piano. Yes, the CD-ROM was paired with a full keyboard that I carried around in the trunk of my car during this period.
-    Co-authoring case studies for a popular Windows-focused magazine on enterprise server conversions. My questionable co-author himself is another story for another time. Let's just say I had to look up "yellow journalism" a few times  just to be sure of what was happening.

Other experiences followed, including:

-    Joining a little company called Cybernautics in Sausalito that was just finishing its earn-out into USWeb, as USWeb and CKS were combining. This was my first step into the agency side of the business.
-    My first collaborative client engagement within the above merger, as we took my audience development client Ask Jeeves to a bigger place, partnering with teams from the CKS side of the family. This yielded my first big lesson in agency politics and sharing engagements across offices. That is putting it lightly. There may or may not have been tears.
-    The height and the crash; leading the closure of an office.
-    Riding back into digital on the wave that was search marketing, following the release of Piper Jaffray's "The Golden Search."
-    Moving to New York, my personal heart of it all. Commencing a chapter still in progress featuring an array of  business ventures, experiences and collaborations that continue to flourish.

Having spent time inside media companies and many years within the agency sphere, I am constantly reminded how much we're constantly exposed to:  options, platform considerations, limitations, personalities, business circumstances. And, just when we think things couldn't be more lively and complex, all we have to do is look in the rear-view mirror and smile at the familiar. I for one, savor the toils and spoils of a storied journey.

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