What Wu-Tang Clan taught us about Career Survival
What Wu-Tang Clan taught us about Career Survival
In your future work life your resume won’t save you. Collectives will.
It was January, 2005, and I was sitting in a meeting room of a charming Napa Valley resort hotel, at my first of what would become many conferences for bloggers. I had been invited by one of the organizers, who’d noticed my independent work and suspected I’d be interested.
Smart phones and Twitter were not yet things; tapping away on one’s laptop to take notes or live-blog sessions were. And as such most of the attendees were heads-down tapping away while listening to a talk. All but two attendees were hand-writing notes: myself, and the woman at the other end of the table, whom I was to meet after the session, Elisa Camahort Page.
I was to learn that, In addition to our penchant for taking hand-written notes, we had both left our corporate roles to pursue this activity that we’d become addicted to and that we suspected held more opportunity and fulfillment than our previous gigs — professional blogging. At the time this term was more a paradox than a profession.
And I learned that Elisa had recently met another blogger, Lisa Stone, and they wanted to establish an event for women bloggers, seeing as most of the events available for this emerging practice of social media were geared toward its more technical, business-facing aspects and run like developer events prevalent among, well, men.
I had no job, no savings, and a smattering of freelance projects I’d taken on to pay my rent. I didn’t know what the future held. I only knew I wanted to help.
Six months later we held our first BlogHer conference. A year later we launched a blogging network and advertising platform. Two years later we secured Series A funding and scaled to what would become 200,000 members, over 20,000 creators monetizing on the platform, and over 100 million monthly readers across our network of creators. We had scaled to become one of the largest—at times THE largest—women’s digital media property in the U.S.
Earlier this week I was interviewed for a program featuring women in tech and I was asked about this story of great scale—how’d we do it, create such scale from nothing? Of course, venture capital helped to formalize the business behind our growth, but the network itself was quite organic. I responded to the question with the first word that came to mind: Trust.
Trust is a very loaded word. In this case it meant we were not seeking to simply “capture" a target market of female influencers; we were seeking to solve issues we ourselves were experiencing around something we were passionate about, in service of a community we belonged to. We were our market. And our market, our fellow members, wanted the business to work because they had skin in the game of professionalizing content creation.
OPTIONALITY IRL! October 2, 2024 | San Jose, CA
In the early days best practices around blogging and a sustainable business model had yet to be determined. But because our community trusted us and knew we had their backs first and foremost, they were willing to join us on the journey and knew we would figure it out.
Likeminded creators, some of whom were already successfully building their media empires, jumped in and got their hands dirty. One of the largest food bloggers in the world subbed in at our first conference as an amateur sound engineer. Dozens live-blogged the event. Dozens more supplied us with content for free to populate our subsequent MVP platform. They got into the weeds with us, contributing feedback and content, referring members, test-driving new processes and —always— providing feedback.
And most critically: All boats rose. All members who gave got something in return.
Note: I didn’t say all boats rose equally. Some boats made life-changing money; some covered their internet bill. Some made nothing from ads but built new careers, speaker platforms, and a network from which to generate gigs. All boats rose uniquely, but they rose.
I bring up this slice of my work history because I’m reminded again of how, in a time of extreme transition, the collective model seems uniquely positioned to support this shift toward self-employment.
At a time when there’s low signal-to-noise ratio, and so many fractional executives, consultants, and smart people out on the market, how can you compete and apply your unique skill set when and where it is most effective?
As an “independent” you may not have the resources or contacts yet to build your solo empire or small business quickly. But that’s the beauty of the collective — it’s a bedrock of opportunity that you didn’t have before that you can build from, as you help build it.
But not all collectives succeed. Many years after building BlogHer I’ve had experience building other communities and collective models and have noted shared aspects among the ones that work.
Collective members must give to get, regardless of their “stature” in the collective. Members who provide funding, resources, or expertise to the collective are rewarded with opportunities. With BlogHer we were lucky to have engaged some of the biggest creators in our network, judging by their audiences and the multi-media pathways they forged, including New York Times bestselling books, TV shows, legislative wins, and branded product lines.
And, just as they benefited from opportunities associated with our collective, so, too, did these creators pass along that opportunity, by speaking to peer creators about how they grew their businesses, by hosting community events for their peers, and by attracting additional opportunities that could be shared and supported by the community.
The Collective must always encourage pursuits outside of the collective and not hold anyone back from other pursuits.
A perfect example of this: the hip hop musical collective Wu-Tang Clan. Having been dropped from a label that insisted on repositioning his image, group co-founder and leader RZA modeled Wu-Tang to provide exposure to all members while enabling them to remain true to their artistic personas and pursue independent projects. Anyone could pursue a solo album, but the Wu-Tang contract stipulated that all members, from Ol’ Dirty Bastard to Method Man, pitch in on recording collective record albums featuring all members and performing together. RZA shared in an interview:
“We reinvented the way hip hop was structured, and what I mean is, you have a group signed to a label, yet the infrastructure of our deal was like anyone else's. We still could negotiate with any label we wanted, like Meth went with Def Jam, Rae stayed with Loud, Ghost went with Sony, GZA went with Geffen Records, feel me? ... And all these labels still put "Razor Sharp Records" (One of Wu-Tang’s own record labels) on the credits … Wu-Tang was a financial movement. So what do you wanna diversify…Your assets? (Wikipedia)
The scripted Hulu series Wu-Tang: An American Saga, dramatized the challenge of getting all members, some of whom were street rivals and who competed for limited commercial music opportunities, to agree to the collective arrangement. Fortunately the model spawned and expanded their opportunities, including seven studio albums, one EP, 22 compilation albums, 21 singles, 25 additional recordings, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individual projects and a rabid fan base that still exists, more than 30 years later.
The collective catapulted the careers of its ten members,
Collectives thrive on rules of engagement and governance. BlogHer was represented by bloggers of diverse political, ethnic and occupational persuasions, but we had respectful, even inspirational, discourse across our membership. We held our members to a code of civil disagreement and commercial integrity that attracted both members and sponsors. Failure to comply with these standards would be grounds for expulsion from the advertising collective, online participation, or both.
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAOs, are collectives whose governance is executed and enforced on a blockchain, with voting power granted in proportion to ownership of governance tokens. Governance is conducted through a series of proposals that members vote on through the blockchain to enact any number of initiatives, from collective investing in startups to accelerating lunar settlement. (Not surprisingly, and perhaps a hat tip to pioneers of the collective model, PleasrDAO is a group of art collectors who own the sole copy of the Wu Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.)
DAOs, while still esoteric, provide a glimpse into the future of collective models, with rules of engagement baked right into the operating structure.
Collectives must evolve with the times. For BlogHer this meant integrating new advertising models, such as programmatic and data-management technology, into our network, while still being a relevant source of opportunity for our members. For Optionality, evolution means staying on top of the skills and best practices that will be critical for our members to navigate to thrive in the future of work: AI prompting skills, fractional practice management, personal brand and platform development, etc.
Collectives must achieve sustained scale. Many heavily capitalized business networks and marketplaces learned this the hard way: They “bought” their members with initial perks and empty promises of opportunity and then lost members when the talent on the supply side realized opportunity was sparse.
There will always exist a tension between growth and impact. Collectives must pace their growth alongside the opportunities they can offer its members. Founders must be choosy about initial members, biasing toward those willing to invest time and resources into the collective, not those only interested in receiving opportunities.
Collectives run on trust; not transactions. I belong to an executive women’s group called Hipower. The founder, Mona Sabet, has seen members over the past 10-plus years write books, earn the roles of their dreams, build and exit companies, present TED talks, and so much more as a result of the connections made and support provided by the membership.
Are all of the aforementioned outcomes guaranteed to its members? Hell no!
All Hipower membership guarantees is a highly competent, supportive network of women who all agree to the ethos of giving to get, and who have enough trust in the network to assume that if a member puts out a request for investors, coaching, ideas, advice, or even a good lawyer she is ‘good people’ and will be helped.
With a similar ethos in mind, Elisa and I deliberately chose not to make Optionality a glorified fractional job board. For one thing, those platforms already exist and do a fine job serving that purpose. And we do post roles in our Premium Slack channel, as do other members, but not as a primary function of the organization. That’s because we believe the value of the roles surfaced by members–for members–are more targeted and valuable to our community than a running list of opportunities you can find elsewhere. Providing custom responses to the needs of members by other members is the currency we’re propagating.
The currency of trust.