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SUMMARY: In this episode of Feminist Founders, Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder of BlogHer, shares her journey in feminist entrepreneurship. From building inclusive communities to navigating VC funding, Elisa’s insights are invaluable for aspiring business leaders. Explore topics like feminist entrepreneurship, inclusive leadership, and Venture Capital, and learn how personal values shape business decisions. Discover why Elisa advocates for rethinking traditional mentorship models and explore new avenues for content creators to monetize their work. Tune in now and embark on a journey of empowerment and growth!

Discussed in this episode:

• Elisa’s relationship with feminism and how it evolved to be more intersectional
• How BlogHer was created to address the early days of blogging
• How values were more than something “laminated on the wall”
• Bootstrapping the rollout, and the growth pains of adding payroll
• Pursuing Series A funding, and who shouldn’t go for VC funding
• Challenges for women pursuing VC funding
• Why Elisa will not go for VC funding again (despite a decent first experience)
• How public and private funding negatively impacts decision making
• Choosing to sell vs. securing another round of funding for growth
• Managing the transition period of a buyout
• Navigating personal values while running a company that has grown beyond you
• The benefit of having an odd number of owners
• Male-dominated leadership of women-dominated products
• Why Elisa’s book wasn’t the one she originally thought she’d write
• The 20 years that destroyed worker trust, and how the pandemic shifted things
• Rethinking employee mentorship models
• New models for making money as content creators (ie, Substack)

Resources mentioned:

• “Roadmap for Revolutionaries: Resistance, Activism and Advocacy for All,” by Elisa Camahort Page, Carolyn Gerin, and Jamia Wilson
• “The Man Who Broke Capitalism” by David Gelles
• Center for Reproductive Rights
• National Network of Abortion Funds
• Our Hen House

Becky Mollenkamp:

Hello, Elisa, thanks for joining me.

 

Elisa Camahort Page:

Thank you, Becky. I’m so happy to be here.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Good. And I’m excited to talk about your journey with BlogHer and what’s been going on since. But first, tell me about your relationship with feminism.

 

Elisa Camahort Page:

I think I grew up with a pretty strong feminist role model. My mom was one of those prototypical second wave feminists who, you know, when she was originally a stay-at-home mom, and then when I was about 11, she decided to go into the workforce for the first time. She got married right out of college. And then she just worked her way up the traditional corporate ladder and was the first woman to do a lot of things in her company, in her industry. And so I’ve just always assumed I was a feminist. I always related to the concept of feminism and saw it more about helping women advance in many different ways. And I never went through any of the, I know the term is fraught for some people, but I just never went through that since the time I was a kid. It just seemed like, yes, that’s what I am and should be.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I had a similar journey, although later in my journey, it became around like how to deepen that understanding to go beyond just my lived experience in the world, which may also be part of your journey as well.

 

Elisa Camahort Page:

Obviously as you grow and you learn and evolve and you interact with more people from more and more different backgrounds, then I think our understanding of most principles goes beyond, hopefully if we’re believe in lifelong learning, we go beyond just our lived experience of a term, which is valid and enriches what we bring to the table. And we begin to understand things in a more academic way, and then eventually you begin to meet the people who were only maybe previously stories and illustrations and then you understand it in a more holistic way. And I would say that was very, very true for me as well. The concept of intersectionality and intersectional feminism, actually with BlogHer, we from the moment we founded it and put together our first advisory board and our first group of editors, we knew that the site and ultimately the company was through a, we were building it through a feminist lens and from the beginning in 2005, we were extremely conscious of inclusivity before it was even the DEI buzz term, you know, really was a thing. And then we just started to put our focus on that from that beginning. By doing that, of course, we enriched our own experiences and our knowledge.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

You said 2005. That was when I started my business and I remember those years. It was the very early part of blogging, which for some people, they have no recollection of what it was like before that, but it was definitely this new sort of thing. And blogging looked, I think, very different than it does now. It was much more like personal journal, almost, for most people, less about content marketing, that has evolved much. Maybe there was some of that, but then it feels a little different than it does now. Tell me about the beginning.

 

Elisa Camahort Page:

I have an advantage on my perspective of the beginning because our role was really as trying to bring together all the different ways it looked. What is true about the beginning is there was no social media yet. So there was blogging and there was, I guess, MySpace was still around, and there were online communities through Google groups and Yahoo. I don’t even know if Google groups actually existed, Yahoo groups. And there was, Facebook existed, but for college students. YouTube started the same year we did. There was no Twitter, Instagram, all these things. And it’s true that a lot of bloggers were using LiveJournal and Zanga and other tools to do personal journaling, but there was already in that space, there was a lot of political blogging and it was actually political blogging that first brought the concept of blogging into the mainstream because political bloggers were maybe not always breaking news, but they were certainly breaking perspective, which is what we considered ourselves to be doing with BlogHer. And so there was political blogging, but there was also even as early as 2005, before founding BlogHer in 2005, I was consulting with companies about how to blog, how to look into online communities and participate. So even 20 years ago, blogging had a variety of people focusing on it and using it for different reasons. I think what BlogHer did was create a business model for people who weren’t million-viewer bloggers. There was a business model for those folks, just like any major celebrity of any channel, there were people who wanted to get in front of their audience. But for the average blogger who wasn’t that large, by aggregating and joining forces and selling advertising in an aggregated way across our network, we created a business model where everyone could participate, including those folks who were doing small personal journaling. So, yeah, so it was one way in the early years of BlogHer when blogging really was the channel, social media was definitely either not there yet or very, very small and focused. And then over time, it just changed so much. When we started BlogHer, there was no smartphone. There was no social media. There was no online video. All of those things brought radical change to bloggers and BlogHer also wasn’t just for the people who wanted to have a business model. A big chunk of what we did is for people who were happy never to have a business model, but for whom this was a craft or even an art form and certainly a channel for self-expression and and connection.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

The connection piece, when I think of BlogHer, I think of events first and foremost. Tell me more about the aggregating around advertising and the business model piece of how that was about, because I know the mission I think was to empower women financially through blogging. I believe that’s roughly the mission. So tell me how that works beyond just live events.

 

Elisa Camahort Page:

There were four prongs to our mission. We existed to create opportunities for women who blog to pursue education, community, exposure for their work, and economic empowerment. So when we use that mission, not as a laminated statement to put on a wall and never think about again, we used it to make decisions about, like, are we gonna do this thing? Well, which of the prongs of our mission does this serve for the women in our community? And we were very specific about saying we wanted to create the opportunities. We didn’t wanna deliver, we didn’t wanna provide. We wanted to create the opportunities and let people choose. And not everybody wanted to do all the things we did, and that was fine. We actually started as an event. Before we were ever a company, my two co-founders, Lisa Stone and Jory Desjardins and I, we were not friends or colleagues. We met each other. I met Lisa through a mutual friend. I met Jory sitting next to her at a conference. We decided to throw this conference where we would talk about, not talk about being a woman blogger, but be blogging women talking about politics and business and personal blogging and every aspect. Because we just saw that the mainstream was starting to pay attention to blogging as an actual important influence. And all the blogs and bloggers that they were referencing, that they were linking to, that they were citing, were all predominantly white men and we thought it would be a fucking shame if this new democratized form of media, like everyone called it, just rebuilt the network and systems of power that were in the existing media. And so we decided to do this conference. We decided to do it and four months later it happened. And after the first conference, we decided to form a company. And so our first thing was to, you know, we launched BlogHer.com and we had, we sort of said it was a Yellow Pages and a TV guide. Like there was a directory of how you could find all the women writing about all the things. And then we also had these contributing editors who kind of scoured the women’s blogosphere to point out what people were talking about and spotlight different women writing on the web. And then six months later, we launched the publishing network and the idea was that each of us on our own with small to medium audiences, we’re not gonna have much luck. There wasn’t much out there for us, but a lot of these women were like, hey, I’m good at this. And I think, why can’t I, you know, they always say do what you love and the money will follow, which is kind of bullshit, but whatever. And we’re like, hey, I’m good at this and I love it, so why can’t there be a business model for me too? And we’re like, well, you know, if we join together, we can. And at the time we were all about like everybody gets paid the same CPM rate, no matter their size. Everybody, the advertisers at the time couldn’t really say, I want this blogger and that blogger to show my advertising. They had to buy by vertical. So you could say you wanted mommy bloggers, you couldn’t cherry pick which mommy bloggers. And so that’s how we sort of built this network to help all boats rise and took action that was designed to make that happen. It was, again, it wasn’t like a laminated statement on a wall, it was like, what are the decisions we can make about how we make and share revenue that actually manifest that? And that was within the first year we had launched that.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I think women are especially good at saying let’s just get together and make this thing happen. And four months later, you made that thing happen. And then lo and behold, it became a business. So often I see some of the issues that come up with people who want to have it all figured out before they start. And then that idea never is birthed. And so I love that you did that. And I think it’s great inspiration. And talking about money, what did the early part of that look like for, because what you’re talking about is simple, but also I assume required a lot of tech, a lot of effort. There probably was a financial need for the business. So how did you guys approach funding in the beginning?

 

Elisa Camahort Page:

In the beginning to do the event, you know, we charged money to come to the event. And we did have some early sponsors. To do the website we bartered on the web design with our first website. They got sponsorship credit at our next event that we had already scheduled. Our first contributing editors, we were like, hey, we’re not making any money. So we can’t pay you. But as soon as we make money, we’ll pay you. And that’s what we did. And we raised the per-article fee as we started making more money. So in the beginning, there was little financial input that we had to do. I remember that Lisa and I split, I think we put $3,000 down to get the first venue on our personal credit cards, and then we paid ourselves back out of that. Now, what there was after the first event, and when we decided to make it a company, all three of us were consulting in the space, and by the beginning of 2006, we decided to phase that out. So now, none of the three of us had a real source of income. And I will say, I’m always really honest about it. I went through my whole life savings. I took out a $50,000 line of credit on my condo. At the point, so we bootstrapped for two years. We occasionally paid ourselves back for travel expenses. We were not drawing a salary. We were paying other people at this point, not just our editors, but we had contractors who were doing community management, who were doing tech. And at the point we got our first round of funding, which was into middle of 2007, like I was down to very little. Now, I will say I was living with my now spouse and they were splitting the expenses of running our household. I think it’s hilarious when I look back, I never mentioned to them that I was like spending all my money and taking out this debt. We were not married and I just didn’t consider it to be their concern. Now I think about it, I’m like, oh my God, that was just wacky of me. But I totally did that. I spent all my money and took out all this debt while giving this person an invoice for their 50% of the expenses of living in my condo. I have a little baggage around money. So anyway, at the point that we got our first round, it was the question whether if we didn’t get that round when we did, could we continue because we like to say we were totally break even, except for paying ourselves, you know. So then we did go out to get our Series A. The reason we wanted to get a Series A was because at this point we had built our publishing network to about 150 bloggers, I think, with about a million unique users a month. And that was a nice amount to get experimental money, community development money, let’s try this new influencer thing money, but it wasn’t enough to get included on RFPs with big brands looking to do traditional advertising campaigns on the internet. And we had a lot of pent-up demand from brands and advertisers saying, ‘hey, if you were about 10 million uniques, we would include you on these RFPs.’ We also had pent up demand from bloggers because we couldn’t pay enough staff. We had a very close moderation and oversight approach. And I think that’s what we did that helped BlogHer remain a civil place for discourse and disagreement when a lot of these companies with so much money didn’t want to invest in that kind of oversight and moderation and turned into cesspools. So we couldn’t hire enough people to get bigger because we couldn’t monitor and moderate and make sure we were creating an overall network across the internet that matched our community guidelines. So we wanted to get funding to grow 10X, which is what you need to have to want to do. If you do not want to be on the hook for scaling minimum 10X from what you’re doing, don’t go get VC funding. Like it’s not for you. There are other ways to bring in capital. There are other approaches. We wanted to grow 10X and more. And we used to joke, but it wasn’t really a joke. We were like, we wanted world domination of women’s media because we saw that at the time, traditional women’s media was still really prescriptive, telling you what was in, telling you what was hot, telling you what you should care about. And it was driven from a top-down view of what women want and need and not from a bottom-up view of what women are talking about that they want and need. And so we were ambitious in that way, and we wanted that kind of growth. I will say when it comes to getting funding, all three of us live in the Bay Area and all three of us had worked in companies or with clients who were close to venture capitalists, even if we had not. None of the three of us had raised funding before. So we had a very focused effort where we focused on warm ties. We went to people we knew and first we went to people we knew and got advice. And a lot of times it’s that old cliche, when you want money, ask for advice; when you want advice, ask for money. You know, so we kind of got both ends of that. And we got some great advice early on from some real, real Silicon Valley iconic people. And we were very focused. And you know what? Even the people who said no to investing, it was an investor who said no, who introduced us to the investor who said yes. She met him at a party and she’s like, he was telling her about what he was looking for in his next investment. She’s like, I think I’ve met the women for you. And three weeks later, the money, the first round of money was in the bank.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

That world, VC funding, has historically been pretty male dominated and I think remains so today, but definitely then. In having to seek out investing. It sounds like you ended up with a male funder. So I’m just curious about what your experiences were like, because I’ve heard some horror stories and some things that aren’t so bad around, you know, looking for and getting VC funding. 

 

Elisa Camahort Page:

We did not have a particularly bad experience. I will say that. I will also point out that I was over 40 already when we started BlogHer. Lisa and Jorie were younger than me. Jorie’s about 10 years younger than me. She maybe had the most questionable experiences from that perspective, from a kind of sexual undertone perspective of the way people treated her. But really, we were not treated badly. Here’s what I will say is that we were extremely focused. We were not spraying and praying, and trying to talk to everybody. We were trying to go through routes that were warmer and more friendly from the beginning. And then our second round was we were going for a strategic investor. So it was a different kind of commercial conversation. And then our third round, we were back. We added on another VC. And so I would not say that the fundraising was the hard part for us. I will say we got the woman discount on our valuation. I truly believe that. That because we were women doing a woman-y thing, it was, you know, people assumed we were a nonprofit at first, you know, oh, that’s so cute, you know? And we’ve got some patronizing perspective, not just from investors, by the way, just from people, you know, and then we’re like, no, we’re not a nonprofit. We’re a for-profit, we’re gonna make some money. And when you say that the numbers are still bad, they’re just the same. In 2007, when we raised our first round, 2% of venture capital went to companies that were solely funded by women. I think this stat is important to understand accurately, because a lot of people say only 2% of women get funding, or only 2%. It’s 2% of venture capital goes to companies that are only founded by women, whether a solo founder, three of us, two, all women. That number is the same today, the same. It has not budged. And of course, the number is lower when you’re talking about solely funded by a Black woman or Latina women, you know, it’s just the number goes down. And so, you know, and at the time I never would have said, I’m going to say something that sounds very not feminist, but I have known people who added a male co-founder specifically to try and game that stat. And I wouldn’t, you know, if you can find someone that you wanna work with in a partnership like that, like I wouldn’t say don’t do it. I’d be like, you are gonna make your life easier probably. You are gonna get different. It’s gonna drive you crazy probably, but it’s truth. I mean, so that 2% number is still true today. And it’s directly related to the fact that there aren’t women at the senior levels of the partnerships at VCs. Like the percentage has gone up, but only slightly. Lisa, my BlogHer co-founder, wrote this great white paper about synthesizing all the data about how it makes a difference to have women in your boardroom. It makes a difference to have women in your C-suite. It makes a difference to have women on the investment team. And you will have more diverse investments, and you will have better financial outcomes. But I think that’s probably, in part, due to the fact that if you’re going to stick it out in these environments where the deck is so stacked against you, you’re probably really driven, ambitious and talented. And so yeah, once you actually get a chance to exercise your power and your ambition and your skill, you’re probably going to do pretty great because what you’ve gone through to get there has honed you, you know? So anyway, I do think we got a discount on our valuation because we were women doing woman-y things. I had seen men doing things targeting the exact same audience who got higher valuations for having less. I also think if we had been doing something more overtly non-womany, probably our valuation would have been higher. So that’s where I think we really encountered some obstacles.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Despite the discount, which is a huge issue, your experience with VC funding wasn’t so bad because you were more selective and thoughtful through that process. And when we talked before this call, you said, whatever your next ventures would be, you wouldn’t, you would self fund and not do VC funding again. So what is it, even though the experience wasn’t so bad, what makes you feel like I don’t want to go down that road again?

 

Elisa Camahort Page:

That’s a really good question, Becky. I did say that and I did mean it. So I think that the financial incentives in this country for both public companies and VC-invested or private-equity-invested private companies are set up to encourage short-term thinking and from leadership of the company because public companies have a quarterly call with Wall Street. Private companies have their maybe every-other-month meeting with their board. And I have personally seen, and let me say, I’ve seen this in the public companies I used to work in, and I’ve seen it in private companies. You manage, what did you say in your last board meeting or quarterly call, and how do you make it come true in this next one? And you make decisions. Because everyone is graded on, did you make us feel bad by surprising us? It’s like an emotional thing. It’s such an emotional thing. We came in expecting X and you delivered Y and this makes us unhappy and we are going to punish you for it. And so people manage to expectations they set, even when fundamental things change. We have been through a lot of fundamental changes to business. I actually will say that the one time this didn’t happen was when the 2008 recession hit. And we came to our board in the end of 2008 with our 2009 projections. And they said, we’re going to give you a shot to go back to the drawing board and do these over because we don’t, we don’t believe you’re fully appreciating this recession. And we just want to have a better year next year and have the right expectations, so try again. And I’ve never experienced that before. That was a really extreme, they were like, yeah, we appreciate your effort and your confidence, but no, promise us less. And I’ve never experienced that before or since. Promise us less. But it was smart because then we could come in 2009, could be successful, could meet expectations. Nobody was shocked and surprised because we took a minute and said, you know, there’s stuff outside our control and that’s going to affect the entire chain of our business, the ripple through from consumers to big-brand advertisers. It’s going to ripple across us all. And many of those things have happened in the last 20 years. And yet, more often than not, companies get dinged if they adjust expectations and dinged if the expectations they set are right, but not good enough. You can make money every quarter on quarter on quarter, but if your rate of growth isn’t enough, then too bad for you. And so I think that all of those things, you know, I started out as a product person in tech and I really just want to make something that people want to pay for. And if they want to pay for it, I’ll make money. And if they don’t, I don’t have the right idea. So that’s what I’m kind of looking for, looking to do next, which is just to offer stuff that people can buy or subscribe to. And if they don’t want to, that’s on me and my product. And I think that having venture capital is really necessary for some companies. I just don’t think I’m going to create something that it’s going to be necessary for in the future.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

This process you’re describing of sort of managing expectations and in a way tending to toddler tantrums. It feels a bit like this, like taking care, like you’re having to babysit folks around their feelings of things that affect how you’re running the business. I mean, it has to ultimately affect how you’re running the business. And eventually, fast forward quite a bit, you all sold the company. What brought you to that point? Was some of it just were growing tired of all of this stuff and it was just becoming too much? Or were you, did you just reach a sort of natural phase where your services, like the company had grown beyond you? What was the exit process like?

 

Elisa Camahort Page:

So when we hit 2014, I guess, video was starting to become absolutely critical. And there was a lot of, I think, mistaken research or analysis that said what video content was gonna, how much of content on the internet was gonna be video. I mean, it’s true that there’s TikTok and YouTube, but there’s still a healthy amount of other kinds of content. But at the time, a lot of it was like, well, 90% of web traffic is gonna be to video. We would do video content when we had a sponsor for it. So we could create sponsored video content, but we didn’t have endemic video capabilities built into our structure. We didn’t have video studios that we just had. We didn’t have video talent. We hired in, we contracted. I mean, that’s what a lot of scrappy startups do. They contract as they need. And so it left us, we felt a little behind. And when we looked at what it would cost to invest in video studios, video talent, video content, to become video content people, we thought we need to raise another round to do that. Like that actually requires a tremendous amount of capital investment and people investment. And we thought about that and we were like, and we’d at this time, you know, we’d been around for nine years and we thought, you know, maybe now is the time to partner up, to join forces with another company who has been more focused on video, who has the built-in video capabilities. And maybe it’s time to, instead of raising the round, see if we can find a partner that would add this capability to what we did in a different way. So it’s a different way. You know, every time you raise around, you’re diluting your ownership. You’re, you really have less and less of an outlook into a big payoff from your company. You know, so that’s if you raise around, we get diluted down to even smaller than we were, or we could just go do the M&A right now. You know, at that point it was becoming kind of a six of one, half a dozen of the other, when it came to our personal future outlooks. So we were thinking about what will most quickly get us to a better business outlook for our customers, for our employees, for our investors. And that’s why we went that route.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Did you know going into that would mean your exit or was there still this hope that you guys will be able to stay around and be a part of this because you talk about partnering. I know the company was partnering but did it feel like partnering or more like this is a saying goodbye.

 

Elisa Camahort Page

I did stay another two and a half years. I will say Lisa and Jory left a little quicker. Our big leverage point, we really wanted to not be tied too long. Like we, a lot of companies, they acquire you and they try to get the founders to stay five years, three years. I think we negotiated to one year that we needed to stay. Not because we knew we didn’t want to, but because we just wanted, you know, we’d been tied to this for nine, almost a decade. And I think all three of us felt like, you know, I need to start figuring out what’s my next move. So I will say this about a mergers and acquisitions. When you join forces with another company, I think everyone kind of thinks about that there’s some overlap, like our GNA department, that’s finance, HR, all of that. They knew this bigger company had a whole team like that, and so they sort of went into it knowing we are basically writing the rules for our own eventual departure because they’re not gonna need two full departments, right? So a lot of people know about that kind of overlap at the worker level, at the line level managers, but it’s also true at the executive level. Lisa was our CEO, they had a CEO. So what do they carve out for her? Jory ran our highest-profile, big brand relationships. They had a Chief Revenue Officer and a Senior VP of Sales. So what are they going to carve out for her that’s meaningful, but also, you know, doesn’t step on toes. So I did a, you know, we were a startup till the end, really. We never got that big from an employee point of view. And I was managing a lot of different functions and some of them, they already had, and I was actually happy. You already have PR people have at it. You already have a whole editorial team. I don’t need to manage our editorial and creative services team, that’s great. I mean, but what I did that was really core to what I did for BlogHer and that they did not do at all was I managed our conference business, I managed our market research, and I managed our social community on the web. And they didn’t really do those things. So I feel like I had a longer honeymoon phase and a longer life of staying there because I was stepping on fewer toes when I walked in. I was horning in on fewer territories. I was bringing something new that they could leverage. And a lot of times, of course, companies find places for the executives coming in. And if the company comes in and is still treated like a subsidiary, sort of its own entity, that may be fine. But we were not. We were being integrated at every level. And so Lisa sort of oversaw this big integration effort. But you know, that takes about a year, right, and then what? And so I feel like that’s what happens to a lot of executives from startups being acquired is that at the end of the day, it’s, it’s uncomfortable. There’s a little bit of sand, sand in your shoe or a pebble in your shoe or whatever. What do I do about this fact that I kind of am coming in and somebody’s kind of doing the job I was doing. And if you are able to carve out the things that you do that they don’t really have and that you can really bring a teaching mindset to and helping to infuse that. I mean, one of the biggest things I did, I think, and I credit myself with, because I think we should credit ourselves, is that I kind of brought, I infused them with our ethos around diversity and our ethos around representation that they really confessed to me, they didn’t really think much about that point, and this was 2014. So I look at what they do now and they still use the BlogHer brand for their events. And I look at what they do now and I’m like, that really stuck. Like I look at their speaking rosters, or I look at their advisory committees for their new projects, and I’m like, that’s stuck that I feel that’s probably the thing I’m most proud of about that transition was that I can see it in action today, almost 10 years later.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I know it can be hard when you’re somebody who starts something because it’s born out of passion and born out of a commitment to doing things differently and considering folks who haven’t been considered and all of what this venture was for you all, and what is the challenge then and how do you navigate that challenge of when it’s time to say, it has to be bigger than us, we have to bring on first venture funding and then now, you know, maybe potentially selling the company? How do you manage the passion and the values and that, and all that you care about, and then working inside of a capitalist system that doesn’t care about those things? And you know, what does that look, what does that look like for you all?

 

Elisa Camahort Page:

That’s another reason I don’t think venture capital or private equity is for everybody because you do have to operate. Once you take that check, you are promising to try to get them return. You are on the hook. It is an obligation. It is your fiduciary duty, although I don’t know if it exactly is that legal term for startup founders, but you are signing on for that. So I think sometimes people act a little naive about that. No, you took the check. You’re supposed to get them return. It’s not free money. It is money to be used to build the company to try and make it worth something, worth enough that you can either sell it or go public. That’s what it means to take venture capital. If you don’t wanna be on the hook for that, don’t take it. Don’t do it because you’ll just disappoint. You’ll find yourself constantly conflicted and you’ll disappoint the people who took a chance on you. So I don’t besmirch venture, I mean, there are a lot of amazing innovations in this world that would not exist without venture capital having funded it. But this is the deal. So yes, so you come in and you have a mission, but you’ve taken this money and you are promising to try and make money. I’ll give you a personal example. So I’m a vegan. I’ve been a vegan for 15 years, no, 17 years. I was vegetarian before that. Lisa and Jory, they’re not. Most of the people in the network, the company, the world, are not, right? So when it came to advertisers and conference sponsors, I had some of my own blogs in the publishing network and we allowed people to say what kind of ads couldn’t show on their blogs. So I did not let ads from animal-oriented companies show on my personal blogs. But I did not stop the company from having many an advertiser or sponsor that, our biggest sponsors for a couple of years in a row, Hormel and Jimmy Dean, because I think they’re part of Sarah Lee or they were. Anyway, that whole conglomerate was like one of our leading sponsors for a couple of years in a row at the conference. And so I decided for my personal places on the internet, I could make that call to be like, that’s not gonna make me personal money. For the company, it really wouldn’t have been fair for me to say to a bunch of other people who didn’t have the same problem with it, that I was going to block that. It’s a good thing about having three founders, there’s always going to be a majority. If you think your two other founders are the smartest people you know and you can’t convince them, then you might have to admit that you’re wrong. You don’t have the best idea. I always found that very, very useful. So yeah, sometimes that is a real-life, individual compromise that I made, you know, and I don’t feel bad about it. I feel like I made the right choice for, we were a partnership and I was not the sole decider, you know, and I had my own values that I stuck to for my own things I did, but I couldn’t enforce them on the company when other people didn’t share them, you know, so.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I don’t know that there are right answers to that, right? Because if we want to make an impact at a much larger level, money, that’s got to be a part of the equation, you’re going to almost always have to have outside help to do that. And how do you navigate, you know, your value system inside of that? It’s just there’s not a right answer. So it’s just interesting to hear how you all navigated it. Yeah.

 

Elisa Camahort Page:

Everything’s a trade-off. And I would say that when we started BlogHer, everything you saw in the media about blogging was male-dominated, white male-dominated even. I would say within a few years, people thought of blogging as a feminine pursuit. And by the way, the data supported, we did our own first-party research on usage of social media. And the data supported that women were the majority users of blogs, and then ultimately of things like Twitter and Instagram. The only two spaces back then that women weren’t the majority of users for were Reddit and YouTube. And I think that’s because those were extremely unfriendly environments for women in the comment sections. So I think women just sort of avoided them. But you know, those companies, this is what kind of chaps my hide about how those big social media companies abdicated their responsibility to create environments that were not abusive. They had their multi-billion dollar valuations because of women users. Women were the majority of users. Women were power users. So women spent more time on those platforms. Women shared more. Women were more engaged. They were more active. So all that glowing press about these companies and their valuations and their white male leadership were all propped up by a user base of women who ultimately were let down by the policies of those companies. Even when those leaders knew shit was going down. They didn’t see it. They didn’t experience it. And they didn’t prioritize fixing it. And I think that is a damn shame.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

It is a damn shame and it clearly continues to be an issue. And I wasn’t going to go to your book yet, but I do want to mention because you wrote a book called “Roadmap for Revolutionaries” or co-wrote a book called “Roadmap for Revolutionaries.” And I think that’s interesting just with what you’re talking about, because I know a piece of that is around social media as well and, and online safety and how to protect yourself online. Could you just talk a little bit about what motivated, cause that happened inside of I guess right on the other side is probably selling the company, right?

 

Elisa Camahort Page:

So what happened was we sold our company in 2014 and Lisa and Jory left a year, year and a half in. I was the only executive on the West coast. And, you know, I was working from home. I’ve been working from home for the last. I don’t know, decade. Um, and you know I was feeling a little lonely over here and there was a lot of hallway conversation management over there that I felt like I could have contributed more, but I didn’t want to move to New York. And about a week before the 2016 election, I thought, you know, I really want BlogHer ‘17 in the middle of ‘17 to be my last conference. I wanna figure out a transition out. So I went to the CEO, who happened to be a man, went to the CEO of the company that acquired us about a week before the election and said, I think it’s time for us to engineer my exit. And that was a more, I mean, I think because I was hands-on managing the conference team still, because I was sort of the face of the new joined company to the online community and trying to retain the community, it was sensitive and I was willing, I didn’t wanna leave them in the lurch. So we kind of negotiated this whole transition through to the middle of the next year. And one of the things in my mind was that I wanted to maybe write a book, but I had a totally different book in mind. I thought I knew what kind of world I would be living in and then the election happened and I was like, oh fuck, that is not what I expected. And you know what they say about unmet expectations. One of my co-authors, Carolyn Gerin came to me and she said, I have this idea. I feel like people, I see everyone around me is super activated. They’re super pumped up, but they’re a little bit running around like with their heads cut off. Like they don’t know what to do next. There’s so many different ways you can activate. I feel like, you know, we need, I would like to create a guidebook. She’s like, do you remember the Girl Scout handbook that told you? And I’m like, I was never a Girl Scout, sorry. She ended up going and buying off eBay, a vintage Girl Scout handbook, just so she could show me what she was talking about. But anyway, she’s like, we need a guidebook for helping people decide how they’re going to activate. And I said, that’s great, I’m in, cause I, I totally believe in say yes until the no becomes obvious, like do things, try things, work with people. Before you co-found a company, do a project. Lisa, Jory, and I did that first BlogHer as a project. And then we figured out what it was like to work together and said, yes, sign me up for more of this. So I said, okay, sure. And then I said, you know, Carolyn, you and I are demographically, geographically, pretty similar and we need to get another, like we were both in tech in Silicon Valley and, you know, same age-ish. I think I’m older. And I’m like, do you mind if I invite someone to join us who would kind of bring a different perspective, different experience? And so I invited Jamia Wilson, who I had met through the company that acquired BlogHer, I interviewed her for something we did, and I had just sort of fallen in love. And now’s she’s like a total publishing big wig, so she probably wouldn’t say yes if I asked her now. At the time she had had a couple of things published but anyway, I asked her if she wanted to join us on this project and she said yes. And so we got to work on it. And we got the book deal the same, the last week I was at BlogHer, the last BlogHer conference was the same week we signed the book deal. My life kind of goes like that. Like I signed the deal to sell BlogHer the same day I signed the closing papers on the house I live in now, which was my first like standalone house. So I like to pack things, big stressful things and exciting things in together. So same week we do the last BlogHer I’m going to be involved with. And we signed this book deal and we wrote the book in like three months and turned it in before, you know, in Q4. And it was just not what I had intended, but what the moment felt like it called for. Because I thought the people I saw who were super activated, either the midterms were gonna happen and they would get what they wanted and they’d be like, oh, sorted, that’s all done. Or it wouldn’t go the way they wanted, and they’ll say, see, it doesn’t make any difference, why did I try? So I just wanted to say activism, everyday activism is something I believe in work-life activism integration. I think you just got to pick what really matters to you and do something all the time, have a little something working. And so our book, “Roadmap for Revolutionaries: Resistance, Activism and Advocacy for All,” Carolyn Gerin, Jamia Wilson, and I wrote it. And there are five sections. One of the sections is about government, and even that—government and politics—and even that section is primarily focused on local, how important local and state governances, and how easy it is for you to find a way to get involved in your local and state government. There’s lots of interviews and resources around how to do that, what it’s like. There’s one section about really, this book is not about Washington DC. And this book may have been inspired by the election of Trump, but it’s not about Trump. It’s about how you can pick your path and always feel like you are making a difference. And one section is about politics and government, but four sections are about totally other things, including Carolyn’s brainchild was that chapter on online safety and that protecting your identity and protecting your privacy in this surveillance state is a radical act. And we wanted to have a chapter to help people be a little radical in that regard.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

And you’re going to share some tips that if you want to get them, you can subscribe to the newsletter, which link is in the show notes. But we will talk a little bit more about tips for how to choose the thing you’re going to focus on and what you’re going to become a revolutionary around. So we can talk about that in a little bit. And speaking of kind of the changing world in which we live, and this divided world in which we live, when we talked prior to this interview, you had talked a lot about how things have changed in the tech industry, but in business also, and just kind of in our lives, 9/11, the dot-com bust, the Great Recession, gig economy, COVID and the work from home movement, and all of that sort of resulting in this broken system this broken trust system, employees not trusting employers, the sort of social contract between employer, employee being broken, that was something that was important to you. And I want you to share more about that because I found it really interesting and also what you think that’s leading to. What are we in the midst of as far as the change in how we approach business?

 

Elisa Camahort Page:

People kind of have short memories. It’s our nature. And we think about the pandemic lockdown, the great resignation, and the great pushback now as being almost a standalone thing. But it’s actually the culmination. Just like I don’t think Trump… He is the culmination of years of policymaking. He’s the logical conclusion. Where we are now is the logical conclusion of 20 years of disruption to what we were all led to believe the workplace was going to be like. So yes, 9/11, the dot-com bust, the Great Recession, the rise of the gig economy, and the rise of Silicon Valley relying on the gig economy to rise. And the gig economy really just further concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Then after the gig economy, you have the Great Recession, you have. After that, you know, sorry, the gig economy was after the Great Recession. And then you have, now you come to where the pandemic happens, right? So you’ve already been going through all of this sea change in how people are employed. The decline of unions until this year, the decline of retirement that was provided by even private employers, you know? So now you have people who are less and less convinced they can ever retire, less and less prepared for it. The decline of stock being a way that people get windfalls for taking risks, right? Public companies no longer give stock options, they give restricted stock units, which is nice and everything, but it’s far less upside potential, right? So all these things have happened to continue concentrating. You know, you got the offshoring, you got the outsourcing, you got the automation. All of this, last 20 years or more. Now you have the pandemic. And all of a sudden we get a little bit, we were totally fucking socialist during the pandemic. If you had any health problem related to COVID, you didn’t have to pay for it. You didn’t pay for the medicine, you didn’t pay for the vaccine, you didn’t pay for the treatment. We were trying to eradicate a plague, right? So you had universal healthcare for COVID. They upped the amount of unemployment. And for the first time, they allowed people like me, who had a consulting firm at the time, was not employed by a W-2, I could go get unemployment. Consultants, contractors, freelancers could get unemployment, which is usually not the case. And they upped the amount. So you know what? We basically had Universal Basic Income. And we had all of these programs. I speak mostly for my state. I can’t speak for what was happening everywhere in the country. We had programs that got homeless people into rooms. We had programs that delivered food to housebound people and addressed food insecurity. We found all these creative ways to connect the restaurants that were struggling and the produce growers that were struggling with the people who were struggling, and the state subsidizing it. The state and the country, the nation, were subsidizing people being fed, people being housed, people being treated, people having disposable income. You couldn’t be evicted. You didn’t have to pay your student loans. And by the way, student loans have changed radically since when I went to college. So people who didn’t go, who haven’t been in college the last 10 years or had kids in college, you don’t know how much the costs and the loans have changed, and why it’s such a burden and so unfair. All of this basically gets taken care of. Boom. And by the way, I will point out, we still never had, knock on wood, that recession everyone thought was guaranteed to happen because that we did all this for the populace. And our economic recovery in this country has been better than any other industrialized nation. So people get this and they’re like, huh, why am I breaking my back for this employer who doesn’t give me benefits, who pays me less than a living wage? Maybe there’s another way. Maybe I could think of something else to do. Maybe I can get educated, maybe I can start a business, maybe I can do training, maybe I can do a million other things than go back to some of these jobs. And that’s what kind of drove the great resignation. Like, no, you know, fuck all y’all. And now, even though we’ve gone through the responsive, you know, tech is having a lot of layoffs, there’s all this, you know, we have tried our hardest to get a recession. You know, we have tried our hardest. The media has really made every effort to make sure there’s a recession and yet it just fucking refuses to show up. I don’t know what’s up with that. But anyway, you know, there’s all this fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And companies are trying to leverage that. And so yeah, employees don’t trust employers. Why would they? Why should they? While the gap between the median income and the highest paid people just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And the way they tighten belts is to get rid of the people who are making average money, not the people who are making millions and millions. It’s the same thing with the, you know, the actor strike and the writer’s strike. It’s like, it is really hard to take you seriously, Mr. CEO of a streaming company, complaining about this ask when you make $40 million a year. Right? So the trust is broken from the employee side because they see… Here’s the other thing. When the lockdown happened, people got sent home and most people thought it was for two weeks. So they left their personal stuff in their cubes, in their offices. They went home, and instead of two weeks, it was two years or more. And most companies kept on ticking along. People figured it out. Industries did not collapse. Companies of knowledge workers did not collapse. The companies focused on logistics and administrative and technical solutions to help people work remotely overnight, entire workforces. And you know what? They did it. They did it. What they didn’t wanna do is figure out culturally, how about some of those intangibles? How about some of those, you know, culture things? Well, you know what? If you didn’t wanna figure that out during this lockdown and remote work, I bet you weren’t that focused on culture before either. All these people saying, well, how are we gonna have culture, mentorship, leadership, camaraderie? And I’m like, I bet you weren’t that great at it before. Cause it really should have been the first thing you started thinking about when you got everybody sussed out with their technology and their ergonomic chairs and their, all the Zoom accounts and all the levels of whatever you needed to keep going. Culture should have been the next thing on your mind. But for a lot of companies, it wasn’t. And so now they feel suspicious, they feel angry that they can’t just tell people to show up and people will just show up because the experience on the other side of that was so different for people. I don’t want to minimize that for some, particularly women, the burden of homeschooling and working and taking care of the health of their families, which is women’s, we know that women own that job. Like that was tremendous. For some people going to the office is great. It gets them their space away. For some people, work-from-home wasn’t a huge culture in New York, in my experience of working with people in our New York offices, because a lot of them live in small apartments where you know what? They don’t really wanna sit there all day and work. And I know for my friends in New York, the lockdown was really, really hard. They weren’t in a lot of square footage, and they were there really isolated. But for a lot of people, it was a revelation that they could work like this. And they just don’t wanna give it up for a company that has proven that they will lay them off without a second thought. You know, so the trust is broken. And I think for employers, there’s a little bit, I’ll be honest, it’s mostly white, male CEOs of very large companies that I see making the most outrageous anti-worker statements. You’re not really committed if you won’t come in. You’re not really productive. You’re not really this, you’re not really that. They’re instilling that fear. I think the biggest fear people have is that if you don’t have face time, you won’t be advanced. And that fear is being purposely instilled in people, to make them come in, that you will suffer if you don’t. And I just think there’s a better way. And lots of companies are figuring it out and there needs to be a way to bring their stories to the forefront. Let’s stop focusing on the assholes who think that people who worked from home at the drop of a hat and kept your company going for more than two years without missing a step are somehow not committed or not productive. Why don’t we focus on the companies who, you know, we hear a little bit about companies that try four-day work weeks, stick with it. Like, let’s hear more of that. Let’s hear more about the hybrid. Let’s hear more about, I think it was Erica Keswin, a friend of mine, who had a great thing about, we used to work on site and then do off sites to do focused work. Well now, we’re gonna work remote and let’s use on sites when we need to do focused, specific work. And I don’t think people are being honest about the commercial real estate aspect of why there are these demands. And I just think we could really focus more on the stories of the companies that are totally working it out, sustaining their culture, figuring out how to adapt that, not just their technology. And let’s start championing those stories instead of Jamie Dimon or whoever else we listen to. Elon Musk, like, why do we listen to these guys when they say stuff that’s just very self-serving?

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I have not figured out why anyone listens to Elon Musk at this point anymore, or it really ever did. But there’s two more things I wanted to ask you about before we wrap this up. And I know we’re running out of time. So I’m going to try it. Let’s see. You mentioned about culture and about face time and how that helps with advancing. I know also when we talked before, you had some real, you had some thoughts around modern mentoring models and how mentoring can change. I don’t want us to like stay on, I don’t want to keep you for a real long time. But if you can just hit on the highlights of that, that’d be great.

 

Elisa Camahort Page:

I think that our model of mentorship is often based on the idea that you and a mentor are going to be in a company or in an industry or in a space for an extended period of time and you’re going to work with someone who’s been where you want to go and you’re sort of their Yoda for you or Obi-Wan, whatever. But that’s not how people work anymore. And I think increasingly people are looking for ways that they can keep their options open, keep more irons in the fire, have more lines of, streams of revenue, it’s not just gonna apply now to people who are trying to be freelancers or content creators, I think more workers are gonna try and figure out how do I have multiple things that feed my soul and feed my belly? How am I going to sustain that? And so I actually think that having a traditional mentor is a big ask of someone. And it’s a big give to agree to. I don’t believe I’m a traditional mentor for anyone, but I believe I thin-slice mentor dozens and dozens of people. So what that means is that, you know, when I got into tech, I didn’t, I came from a totally different industry and I didn’t really know the market or the industry or the mores of that market. I didn’t know the technology. And there wasn’t one person who was gonna help me get up to speed. So I had one guy who really mentored me from a business point of view and a kind of business marketing relationships, that whole kind of how to be savvy around people. And I had another guy who totally mentored me around learning the technology. When I moved on to my next country, I found people again, like I need to learn about this technology that I have not, I wasn’t already mentored on. I need to go ask this guy if he’ll sit with me and whiteboard it for a day or two. And so I feel like everybody has something to offer others can offer you, but you don’t have to look for a be all, end all mentor. You just have to look for someone who can help you with that one thing. And what can you offer them in return? Also, that’s the thing I really believe is that, and it’s not something cliche like, Oh, I’m a, I’m a Gen Z so I can teach you about TikTok. Like, that’s not what I mean, but we’re all educated and knowledgeable and interested and fascinated by different things, and almost anywhere you go you got to stay on top of a lot of different aspects of a company or a business or a market. And so you have something to offer. You have developed skills or expertise or perspective or knowledge that someone you need something from doesn’t have. And so I believe everything is a two-way ask, an ask and offer basically. And maybe they won’t take you up on it. Maybe they don’t really want to understand this aspect that you’ve really looked at. But you can make the offer. And so I think that the old-style mentor where you’re gonna find that person who’s gonna be your be all, end all, I think that isn’t really relevant to today’s workforce. And I also kind of reject the whole, you don’t need mentors, you need sponsors. You need all, you need everything. And just, you need relationships. You need relationships that are not transactional but are emotional and supportive, and that you can turn to at different people at different moments for different things. And because you’ve maintained that thread and let’s face it, digital technology allows you to do this. And everyone says, oh, you can’t really be friends with 200 people or whatever. Okay, maybe not, but you can retain a thread of connection with so many more people than you ever could before. And so building that the people who are doing things you think are cool, the people who know more than you, the people who think differently than you and can help you think things, like how many times have you worked with a colleague and you just don’t think like they do. And if you could talk to someone you knew who, you know what, they remind me of that person, but I like them. Like I need to talk to them about how I can communicate with this person. I would just blow up our concept of what mentorship is, and just think of the threads of relationship you have and how they can help you do better, be better, speak better, communicate better, and get more of what you want and how you can help in return.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Okay, we’re going to go over on time. The last thing then because, and this is sort of selfishly, I want to talk about it, but your background with BlogHer and around the beginning of blogging and where you come in from sort of democratizing publishing and media. When we talked before you said that Substack isn’t the answer, it’s not the only answer anyway. It’s not enough, that model. But it’s certainly something that’s happening now where people are trying to take back some amount of control over ownership of their content, over making money around their creation and their creativity. Tell me a little bit about why you think it’s not necessarily enough or it’s not the right model or what you think should be happening.

 

Elisa Camahort Page:

Let me caveat by saying I have a personal Substack and in this new project I’m going to be launching, we’re using Substack as the content aspect of it. Well, there there’s two things. The first is philosophically, I’m not sure Substack and its leadership is all that different from the things I haven’t liked about leadership of Facebook or Twitter or any of these companies. Like they do some things I think are really. Like every time I get a newsletter from the founder of Substack, I question all my life choices. Like, why am I using this platform? I just, I’m allergic. I’m allergic to the way they express their philosophy. So that’s one reason. The second reason is because it’s like what we’re seeing right now. I’m sure some of you are like me, and I’ve just gotten all year rounds of this streaming service is raising its price. Disney is raising its price, Paramount+ is raising its price, Apple TV is raising its price, I don’t know, all of them are. Discovery+ is raising its price. They’re all raising their prices. And that dream of somehow you were going to be able to get what you wanted by cherry picking and stop paying for things you didn’t want to watch, you’re not paying less anymore, I don’t think, in a lot of cases, to get everything you want to watch. And that’s true with Substack. I pay for some newsletters, but I can’t pay, I subscribe to just a ton of people that I’m interested in what they’re writing and stuff, but I can’t pay them all. I mean, I guess I could, but I’m not, let me just put it that way. I’m not. And I think every creative pursuit has the same business model where maybe the top 1% get wealthy doing it, the top 5% maybe have a livelihood doing it, and most of us are doing it and have other jobs. This is true of acting. This is true of writing. This is true of musicians. This is true in every creative pursuit. So sure, there are some great success stories. This is true of blogging, by the way. This was true of the BlogHer network. People tend to really focus on the superstars who were making seven figures with blogging. We used to do a BlogHer economy report out where we would say, here’s how much we’ve paid out. Here’s what the average blogger makes. And then we would have some anecdotes about how people were using the money because the average blogger was making $200 a month. I don’t know. I don’t really remember the number anymore, but it was in the low hundreds, not even the thousands, right? That was the average. But the stories were like, oh, I could stop choosing between food and groceries this month. Oh, I could quit my third job and stay at home and see my kids more. Oh, I retired from teaching a few years early because I had this supplemental income. And we were trying to make the point that that’s powerful to give more freedom and to give more choice to people. So I don’t knock the fact that for most of us, these pursuits will not be a wealthy livelihood, but I think that that’s why it’s not the answer for how journalism can serve us. I just don’t think it’s the answer for that. And I don’t think it’s the sole answer. It’s a piece of the puzzle for people who want to make their living with their creativity and their voice.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Let’s wrap up, because we’ve gone a little long, and tell me a resource.

 

Elisa Camahort Page:

So David Gelles wrote “The Man Who Broke Capitalism” about Jack Welch. And what’s very interesting about it is, because people talk about capitalism and you know, it’s our flavor of capitalism. There’s no law that says capitalism has to run the way we run it. Even that thing about, oh, you have to prioritize shareholder value over any other value is actually an anti, it’s like trying to protect yourself from liability. It’s a CYA guideline. It is not some law. Companies do things all the time that are for other values besides shareholder value. What is important about reading that book is not just to see how Jack Welch implemented regular layoffs, outsourcing and offshoring, all these things. He trained a cadre of executives that then other companies, because they saw GE’s success at the time, they thought they wanted to get a little flavor of the Jack Welch magic. And so he tracks the family tree, basically, of people that came up through Jack Welch’s organization and then took his philosophies and actions out to other big companies and propagated this form of capitalism. We can change our form of capitalism. It is not written in stone.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I want to finish by asking you a nonprofit or an organization that’s doing good work in the world that you support and that we can support and learn about.

 

Elisa Camahort Page:

I don’t have kids. So last year, my spouse and I finally did our Will and Trust. And we’re like, oh, we might as well just give a big chunk of this to the charities when we die. Why not? Center for Reproductive Rights is an organization that takes it to the courts. And they do it internationally, not just nationally. So they’ve had some big wins. in international spaces and all these countries that are now beating the US at abortion access. I also give to the National Network of Abortion Funds because that’s where the rubber, the feet meet the street, the rubber meets the road. This is how helping women who live in places where it is very hard to get an abortion, it helps them travel, it helps them get an abortion. And I’m on the board of Our Hen House, which is an animal rights-focused media company.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Awesome. Well, I will donate to at least one of those as a thank you for your time. I will include and I will include the links to all of them in the show notes for people who would like to do the same. And then we’re going to right after this talk some more. And if you want to hear the rest of this conversation, subscribe to the Feminist Founders Newsletter. Thank you so much. 

 

Elisa Camahort Page:

Thank you, Becky.