M+E Connections

Changes Caused by the Pandemic Created New Opportunities for Many in Tech Field

Over the past 18 months, many people in the technology, media and entertainment sectors experienced massive changes. Although many of those changes were not viewed as positives at the time, some of those massive changes actually turned out to be positives as they became road signs for new opportunities, learning experiences or life-changing realizations.

Women in Technology Hollywood (WiTH) found a few individuals willing to share their stories of hope, inspiration and perseverance during the latest WiTH Connection Corner webinar, “Our Stories of Resilience,” on Aug. 6.

The webinar was moderated by Lynn Rose, CEO and founder of WOWMaker Enterprises, who kicked off the webinar by noting: “In this industry and the time we’re in, boy do we ever need to have resilience.”

COVID has forced us to confront the challenge of figuring out what we really want and then adapt to achieve that, she later said.

Rose is currently launching a “global platform that is positive social media designed to drive global change,” she told viewers, adding there was “quite a path” to get to this launch.

Story 1

The first person to tell her personal story was Liz Tang, founder of EpiReminder, a new company that developed a mobile app that notifies users when they are too far away from their EpiPens and when it gets too hot or cold.

Tang’s story started five years ago, when she and her husband took their baby son to a restaurant and their son ate sushi and loved it. But he had an allergic reaction while leaving the restaurant. One month later, their child was diagnosed as having allergies to peanuts and eggs. The doctor said most kids with such allergies tend to be fine eating baked products that are made with eggs, so he suggested they try and let him eat a muffin at home, Tang recalled. But “we did and it wasn’t OK,” she said, noting: “That night, he went into anaphylactic shock. I had to use [an] EpiPen on him and rush him to the ER.”

Their son got through that scary incident fine and Tang was thankful she had an EpiPen and “used it and it worked it, and never wanted to experience it again,” she said.

Five years later, there were just four restaurants they safely ate at but had “close calls at all of them,” she said. Meanwhile, “the risks are everywhere,” so their EpiPen needs to be everywhere also, she said, noting they found egg shells at the playground one day.

Tang quit her job after the pandemic started and her child’s daycare center closed, she recalled. After more than a year, however, she felt the desire to work again.

“It is really easy to forget – even if you’re [an] overbearing, helicopter, crazy mom like me” – about the EpiPen, she said, pointing out that was when she thought up EpiReminder. She is ready to sell the product now – hardware and software – this month, after the project started as only an hour-a-day project just a few months earlier, she said.

Story 2

For Stefanie Kleinsmith, a human-focused technologist, mentorship chair of WiTH’s Mentorship & Networking Committee, and the recently-appointed director of sales operations at Method Media Intelligence, the “biggest takeaway” from her experience over the past 18 months or so was that it’s a great idea to “turn to your support network – whether it be professional or personal” – when facing a major career upheaval.

“I found my current role that way and it’s just been really helpful and has been such a professional lifeline during this time,” she said, quoting a line from the film The Shawshank Redemption: “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

Her story started in mid-March 2020, when she went to a Southern California theme park with her husband and mother-in-law. On the last day of her time off, she had a scheduled call with her manager and was informed she was being let go as part of the company layoffs that had been happening since 2019, she recalled.

It was “semi-unexpected but I always knew that it was a possibility in the back of my mind so I was a bit surprised but not as upset as one might expect,” she said. In addition, “this was not my first layoff rodeo,” she said, noting she was also laid off in 2009 and “that layoff left me crestfallen and full of self-doubt but it also led me to a new industry that I didn’t even know existed, which was ad operations, and that eventually led to my current career in ad technology.”

Based on that earlier experience, “ I knew that being laid off was “not a reflection of me or my skills, experience or abilities,” she said, adding: “I viewed it as an opportunity to find my next great career adventure, similar to what happened a decade before.” She also received a severance package when laid off last year.

“The one wrench in the story” is that the Safer at Home mandate was “enacted a few days later” in California to stop the continued spread of COVID-19, which “increased  my concern about finding a job – but I was still feeling pretty positive,” she noted.

She pointed to a quote by Lao Tzu she said she always liked: “Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”

That was the mantra she tried to follow after the latest layoff and she “had no ill feelings towards the company or any of my former colleagues; it was simply the reality of the corporate world,” she said, noting “if something did flow naturally forward my way, I wanted to take full advantage of it.”

She started a job search, reached out to her LinkedIn network while expanding it, and completed a course in product management via Cornell University’s online program in late 2020.

“What buoyed my during this whole time was the kindness and generosity of people offering to help me,” even people she did not know, and “I still carried with me the confidence that I would be great asset to any number of companies because of what I brought to the table,” she explained.

But, as time went on and her severance money started to run out, her job search stopped getting much traction and “I slipped into a funk” that nothing could shake her out of a few months back, she recalled.

However, a little over a year after being laid off, somebody contacted her, a call with the CEO was set up and a job was offered to her that she accepted, she said.

The attitude that Kleinsmith had was an “important” one, Rose said, noting that by turning her challenge to an adventure, she was let go but turned her being let go into LET’S GO!” Focusing on opportunities in her existing support network was also a good move, according to Rose.

Story 3

The career of Courtney Wu, CEO and co-founder of Amnesia Media, whose ad tech platform serves ads to new cannabis consumers, has “taken many twists and turns, from being raised to think that being a doctor was pretty much the only career choice available to me to then working in public health and then moving on to PokerStars,” a poker website, she told viewers.

Wu “leveraged the interests and the skills that I developed” through those twists and turns and was able to overcome a major hurdle for Amnesia by raising capital. But then she was hit with a new challenge: the first lawsuit threat. And then another challenge: a “very negative health” diagnosis, she said.

Everything seemed “insurmountable” but she has been able to overcome the challenges, she told viewers.

Story 4

Hollie Choi, executive director of the Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR) is an IT executive who had reached the top of where she could go in her position and felt stuck in it, she recalled. That company was acquired and was no longer a good fit for her and she asked to be included in the next round of layoffs she knew was coming.

She called the day she was laid off “The Great Reset,” she said, noting it was also the day the global pandemic created stay-at-home orders. Her kindergartener switched to home schooling and her husband started working from home, and her mother was diagnosed with cancer.

On top of that, “I had no job prospects and, worse than that, I had no idea what I wanted to do at that point, so everything sort of felt like it blew up all at once,” she explained.

She started thinking in the middle of the pandemic that she had made a mistake to push for leaving her last job without having another position lined up, she noted.

She requested a meeting with somebody she didn’t think would take her call and would probably barely remember her after meeting only a couple of times in the past, she pointed out.

But he wound up becoming the “biggest advocate I’ve ever had in my career,” she said, noting he introduced her to a lot of people who were looking for people like her at their companies.

At the same time, she realized that she liked working from home, where she was able to supervise her child learning from home and help with her mom’s illness. She started taking short-term contract gigs and thought that was how she would make her new living.

Choi was introduced to somebody at EIDR to discuss working in a part-time role remotely, which she got, and was also able do contract work on the side, she said, adding: “I love the work” and likes the freedom she has now.

She also couldn’t help but wonder how many opportunities she had missed in the past by not making calls to people she thought at the time wouldn’t meet or speak with her. She suggested others make such phone calls also.

Story 5

Iseabail Lane, director of application development, platform services and enterprise data at Pharmavite, and a WiTH board member worked for a studio nine years and was laid off twice, she said. She realized the latter was not personal, just business.

She applied for and got an executive role but soon wanted to go back to a technology-related position. Lane got a second master’s degree, in cybersecurity.

Although she initially saw the studio she was laid off from as the villain of the story because it didn’t want her anymore and laid her off, she now realizes the studio was really “kind of the hero” of her story.

She was “burnt out” before being laid off and likes the new team she manages now and has a “wonderful rapport” with her new boss, she said.

Wrapping up the session, Rose explained: “It’s not about what happens to you. It’s about what you do with what happens to you – how you respond to what happens to you. And you can actually use it to your favor.”

Lane was so inspired by everybody’s stories during the webinar that she planned to research for a PhD, she said.