Elisa Camahort Page: Building a Life, Career, and Company with Optionality

Welcome to the Wisdom of Women Show.

We are dedicated to amplifying the voice and wisdom of women in business.

A new model of leadership is emerging and we are here to amplify the voices of women leading the way.

I am your host, Coco Selman, five time founder, impact investor and creator of the Force for Good system.

Thank you for joining us today as we illuminate the path to unlocking opportunities and prosperity for women led enterprises by amplifying the voice and wisdom of women.

So today we have an extraordinary future of work pathfinder in our midst.

So Lisa Camahort Page is a serial entrepreneur, exited founder and culture architect who has built and scaled businesses rooted in community inclusion and operational excellence.

As co founder and former COO of BlogHer, she helped grow one of the most influential digital media companies for women, raising capital, achieving scale and modeling how to operationalize values inside a profitable enterprise.

Today, as co founder of Optionality, she is rewriting the rules of work itself, guiding experienced professionals to design meaningful, flexible careers in the now of work.

A seasoned startup executive board member, speaker and author of Roadmap for Revolutionaries, Elisa brings mastery in content, community communications, P and L leadership and the human side of growth.

Welcome Elisa.

Thank you Coco.

I'm so excited to join you today and thanks for that amazing intro.

I think you tweaked my perhaps more plain vanilla bio that I sent you a little bit.

I need it back so I can start using it.

Oh my goodness.

I just love to have people on the show and I love to find out as much as I can and try to create something that makes you feel really honored and welcomed because I am so appreciative to have you here and so we can share your wisdom on the show.

And as you know, I always like to ask, what is a book written by a woman that has significantly influenced your life?

Well, I'm going to share my still favorite number one nonfiction book I've ever read, which is the Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.

And I will say that as a first generation American who both parents were immigrants and that comes with a whole lot of lore and on one side they were, you know, my grandparents and my mom emigrated as part of one diaspora.

But when you're raised in that culture, you're sort of the lore, you know, is maybe more international.

It may not be so focused on the lore of this country here.

And so reading the Warmth of Other Suns really opened my eyes to the history here from before my family, you know, ever arrived on these shores.

So for those people who don't know.

It's about the African American diaspora and it really happened in waves.

It was not all immediately post Civil War.

It happened through Reconstruction, through Jim Crow and on.

And she takes three different individuals to represent a different wave of that diaspora and tells their story.

So it is masterful storytelling in that you feel these are characters that you are getting to know like you would in a novel, but full of this historical depth and detail and richness.

And it completely both opened my eyes and transformed my thinking.

Not just about race and race relations in America, but about this diaspora internally and how things across the country were influenced by it.

And it's just an amazing read and still my favorite nonfiction.

I have not read this book.

Oh, you must a lot of people.

Her most recent book is Cast, which is also.

That's an important book.

Yes.

But as far as the pure, really getting into your heart and soul, like the story of these three different folks who represent different waves of the diaspora.

Different.

It's just the structure and architecture of it really makes it stick.

I will read it.

You are so articulate.

I just love your content and the way that you.

I mean this is your mastery.

And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the show is because you have really, you're such an example of taking your own personal strengths and beliefs and purpose and putting it into the world and as a business.

And I just, I think it's such a wonderful example.

So.

So before we get into all things blog her and then optionality, I would love for you to share a little bit about you.

I always like to hear about three moments, defining moments in your life.

Three moments that you can look back on that sort of shaped who you are and the moments that created the person you've become.

Could be hard things, could be great things, could be whatever.

In between things, whatever comes up for you.

What are those three moments for you today?

Well, I think that it's pretty instructive for what I'm doing now about portfolio lives and things like that, that the first defining moment probably happened when I was 25.

I had ever since I entered high school.

I had gotten into theater and music.

I had decided that's what I wanted to do.

I was very single minded about it.

Traditional school was not for me.

Like I did okay.

I. I never really was going to fail anything because there was a lot of pressure.

You know, my parents expected me to do well and my older brother and my younger sister were both valedictorian 4.0 type students.

But I didn't care about school.

I cared about the activities I was doing through school.

So of course I went to college because that was expected.

But I majored in theater, I minored in music.

And I wanted to get in and get out in four years and move to New York because that's where my dream was, that's what I was going to do.

And I had a whole plan.

I worked all through college so I could save money.

I attended a summer stock theater where I could get my union card before I ever moved to New York.

And then I was there for about four years and I had a realization, oh, maybe I don't want to stay here and do this and pursue this.

Because I had this very starry eyed, naive perspective about what it would be like, not the living in New York.

My mom grew up in New York.

I'd been to New York many times.

But the actual industry of even theater is an industry, is a business.

And I got what I like to say, both jaded and naive.

I got jaded thinking, oh, it's all about who you know, it's all about this, that and the other.

It's not.

And I'm like, I also, I just didn't want to be poor like most actors.

Yeah, even working actors, it's just the odds are against you.

And I missed California.

So at 25, I moved back.

I had trained for nothing else.

I knew nothing else.

I just had sort of my brain and my willingness to work.

And I got a job working for a friend of a family and commodities and finance.

And what I found is that I was completely liberated.

I wasn't going to do the thing I thought I was going to do.

And that meant I could literally do anything.

Anything I chose, I was going to have to learn.

Anything I chose was going to be like starting from scratch.

Seven years later I realized I don't really want to be in finance.

I don't really want to move to Chicago or New York to keep growing in my career because this was pre, like you could work anywhere.

And I looked around in Silicon Valley, I said, oh, this tech thing seems like it's a pretty big deal.

I guess I should figure out if I could do that.

And I just went and started at the ground floor again in a tech company and rode the dot com boom wave.

But that was driven by knowing at 25 that I could do anything.

It was just a matter of could I learn and could I work hard.

Yeah, so that, that was number one.

Then again, at the end of the dot com it was the dot com bust.

There was layoff after layoff after layoff at the company I was working at.

I had gone really far, really fast.

But now everything was spiraling down and I thought I was going to get laid off.

I thought, they can't go any more lean.

It's, you know, everyone's reporting to me and I had hit a glass ceiling.

They wouldn't promote me.

So everyone reported to me.

And I reported to this.

They were bringing in yet another new boss for me and I didn't get laid off.

And I spent all weekend saying, I've got to go back and try to do the same with fewer and fewer people.

And then there was a voice in my head that said, do you have to go back?

Why do you have to go back?

What could you do instead?

And it that defining moment where I went in on Monday and said, okay, can I get on the list?

What do I have to do to get on the list?

How do I get myself?

And from there is when I met Lisa Stone and Jory Desjardins soon after that, within a year or two after that, and we started blog her.

I had never planned to be an entrepreneur.

I had never planned to start my own business.

But that when that happened, I was like reminded, oh, yeah, you are free.

In fact, I have a little myintent.org necklace that says you are free on it because I need that reminder every time I'm mad or upset or feel frustrated.

I'm like, you're a free person.

You're in this relationship because you want to be.

You live in this house because you want to.

You're doing this work because you want to.

If you didn't, you could drop everything, you could start over, you could do something new.

Because you are essentially free if you're willing to learn what you can learn and start from the beginning if you need to.

Yep.

So I love that.

Yeah.

And then of course, I guess, you know, the last defining moment is probably when I said no to President Obama's team because it taught me that sometimes you just have to stick to what's right for you, not what's right for them.

We wanted him to speak at Blogger12, but we were Blocker12 was happening in a blue state and he was on his re election tour and they weren't going to come to New York.

And so they said, let us just send a video.

And I'm like, you know what?

All these women who come, this may be the one trip they make all year.

That's for them.

They spend lots of money to be here in person.

So you can give us a video anytime.

And we will publish it on our site, which gets millions of views like, we're happy to publish a video, but we're not going to have a video Remarks at our conference.

We never have.

We never will.

And I had probably three, four, five conversations where they kept.

And it kept getting closer and closer and closer.

And every time I said no, I would hang up and go, oh, my God, what am I doing?

Oh, my God.

I just said.

But at the end of the day, six days before the conference, they agreed to do a live via satellite.

He still didn't come in person, but he came live via satellite from some swing state, I'm sure, and gave the opening remarks for our conference.

And we had to figure out all the lynch and everything, shout out to Lori Luna.

And his person who worked for him said, you know, when I put my vision board together for next year, I'm going to put a picture of you under persistence, because you just stuck with your guns.

We never would have done this.

We never would have gone to this trouble except for that.

You really just would not accept anything less for your community.

And so that taught me something as well.

What great stories.

Oh, I love how your stories.

Share how you allowed yourself to shift and pivot when you decide to.

I was just talking to my husband about the other day is how I think one of the things that makes our lives and your life extraordinary is that we.

We do stuff right.

We just, you know, it's like, we don't.

We don't stay forever in terrible situations.

We can't stand.

Right, right.

Like, you decide, you try something.

I want to go and be an actress.

So you did it, you went, you tried, and you were like, well, not quite what I wanted.

Pivot.

Oh, okay, here's a finance job.

That's cool.

I'll do commodities.

Well, not forever.

Now I'm going to write.

Like, I just think that, like, it's.

It's.

This life is so much more fun, and you really get to where you want to be faster if you let yourself.

Yeah, right.

People talk a lot about lifelong learning, but they don't always give themselves permission.

You know, if you've achieved expertise in a certain area, it's kind of daunting.

When I got into tech, I took a job as an admin in the marketing department of a tech company, because I'm like, I'm not going to be precious about this, you know, But I want to see what will happen.

Will I like it?

And that was my question, right?

Will I like it?

Will I feel like I can be good at this?

It was like, you know, people worry so much and you're so unlikely to get into a situation where you honestly cannot figure it out and you just utterly fail.

You know what you're more likely to figure out, and I've said this all the time, you're more likely to figure out, oh, I don't really like this.

I don't really want this.

Oh, this is no thank you than that they are going to say that to you.

Most people I know, particularly most high achieving women, you are so much more likely not to like them than they are not to like you.

That's such a good reframe.

I love that.

Right?

Just give yourself freedom to try stuff.

And you know, the other thing too is I think people just don't think enough about other people.

Everybody's thinking about themselves.

So like, whether somebody else thinks you're good at something, it's kind of silly because, right.

Like, we're all just so captivated by our own dramas who really.

I'm trained to a certain mode of thinking.

I always think this about negotiation.

We've been trained to think there's going to be a winner and a loser in negotiation.

But if you're negotiating for a job or a partnership, why do you want to start a project or a job or a partnership with someone feeling like they're the loser?

People are not always walking to the table with empathy.

And I often found it was extremely disarming to just start by a give start by an I see.

And this thing that you want.

There's no.

What is my point in trying to pretend like I can't do that?

I could do that.

Like, let's just start with that.

People don't, especially if I'm going to generalize.

Men, especially do not know what to do.

That's why I say it's disarming, literally, because they've been thinking of negotiation and they've been trained to think of negotiation as a war.

I'm like, it's not a war.

You're starting something where you're supposed to come together, you know, so why would you do that?

I want to hear about your story of blogher because you created an extraordinary company, community, voice for women.

Talk to us about, tell us your story.

Why'd you do it?

Tell me all about it.

So there's a lot of counterintuitive things that went into bringing Blogger together.

The first being that Lisa and Jorie, who I mentioned before, we did not know each other when we started this company together.

I was mutual friends with someone with Lisa, and I met Jori sitting next to her at a conference.

And the first blog we Blogger started with a conference.

We did the first blog, her event, and that was all it was going to be.

And it was a.

It was a labor of love.

And I will say, I do love this about the Silicon Valley area.

And we get a lot of bad press right now because of what some of our most successful people here are doing.

But if you go below that layer, there is a spirit of, like, let's just try something.

Let's just talk about what we're doing and see who can help.

And see there's a lot of give and take and reciprocity.

And so we just decided to do this thing together, and we had four months to put it on.

And you learn a lot about people when you're working on something in 120 days.

Yeah.

And so we had no baggage together.

A lot of people form companies with people they know really well, but when you do that, you're starting with a relationship in place which has both good and bad baggage.

We didn't really have baggage.

We grew together.

Our friendship grew together, our company grew together.

We didn't decide till after the first event that we're like, oh, there's something here.

And we were not the intuitive people to lead that something, because while most people were paying attention to male bloggers, but there were some women who were more prominent and we were not them.

But maybe that made us the perfect person because we were like people, because we were the bridge between all those thousands of women who felt very alone sitting with their laptops at their kitchen table and where they could get to.

And we started to be able to bridge who are the people who want to get over here?

And then there were plenty of people who just wanted the camaraderie and community and to be good at it, but didn't necessarily want to turn it into something professional.

And so, you know, we were sort of the right bridge between all the different places you could go then.

The other thing I will say is that we did not have overlapping skills.

We came from different backgrounds.

We had different things that we were great at.

And that allowed us, as a triumvirate, to, like, when it came to this aspect of the business, let Jory lead and Lisa and I would support Let Lisa lead and Jory and I would support Let me lead and they would support me.

And it.

I find when you look at a lot of founding teams, there are some things that traditionally really go wrong.

The first is when there's not an equal level of work ethic that happens all the time, where someone isn't really.

They have equal ownership, but they're not pulling their weight, they're not putting in equal effort.

And that can really be bad for founding teams.

But the other is when they're too overlapping, and therefore every decision and discussion becomes chest beating about who's going to be right about the thing they're all equally schooled in or expert in.

But it becomes a different kind of competitive founding team instead of collaborative and complementary skill set that's across them.

And I think the third thing that goes wrong with founders that Lisa, Jory and I were able to nail from the beginning because we didn't have any preconceived notions or baggages.

It's really fun to ideate and create and have vision.

It's less fun when something goes wrong and you have to be like, okay, what are we going to do about this problem?

Got to be able to have the hard conversations, not just the easy ones.

You've got to be able to be honest.

And a lot of founding teams don't know how to deal with conflict, don't know how to deal with the hard things.

Something goes wrong and someone tries to fix it before anyone else finds out, but it never works that way.

It just spirals.

So I feel like we had those things going for us and.

And we bootstrapped for two years before raising our first round of funding.

And I think that's really important too, because we had a business model.

It's not that it never adapted or evolved, but we wanted to make money from the beginning.

We wanted to know how we were going to do that.

I also think perhaps we didn't know if we could count on raising funding because it's such a difficult environment for all women founding teams.

So.

But it gave us more traction, it gave us more leverage going into any future discussion that we had already built a business without needing anybody except our community.

So we always knew where our bread was buttered and it was buttered by our community.

So you guys came together, you did.

An event, we did an event, and.

Then it just took off.

It was like you were there and you discovered the market need and you just continued.

Yeah.

We said, what do folks want?

Yeah.

And they wanted a place to find each other, not just in real life at an event, but Every day online.

So that's why we launched blogger.com next.

And then they wanted a spot.

They were writing all their hearts out, and they wanted people to find it.

So we started.

We were sort of part TV Guide, for those of you who remember TV Guide, like, part TV Guide, part Yellow Pages, another outdated reference.

But, like, we were a directory, and we were also a curation.

And so we were like, look at everything that's going on.

And to raise our profiles, we raised their profiles.

And then there was a segment, and it was just a segment who wanted to make money.

And then we were like, how do we do that?

Because there were some bloggers making money, but they were almost 201.

Very, very, very large already.

And a lot of these.

We had some large bloggers in our midst, but we also had some folks who had a really passionate audience, but they weren't that big yet.

So that's when we basically decided we're going to aggregate these together into verticals.

We're going to say, you buy the parenting vertical, not this parenting blogger.

You buy the food vertical, not this individual food blogger.

And we basically, by doing that, we allowed all boats to rise together and helped people find a business model.

Not just when you reached a million views or whatever it was, but when you were still small, you were at least participating and part of the endeavor.

And I think that was really important.

People felt like they were part of something together.

Yeah.

So then how long were you in this business?

You had your event, you started to really grow.

You then raised capital.

We bootstrapped for two years.

We had gotten to about a million unique visitors a month across our network.

We raised capital, and we raised two more rounds of capital.

And we did that for about seven years.

And over that time, we grew to reaching, you know, we started.

Oh, and social media didn't even exist when we started.

Right.

So then we had to start doing programs for Twitter and Facebook and Instagram when it came out, and video and all of that.

And so eventually, across, the entirety of our network was reaching 100 million unique visitors a month.

But that was across.

We allowed.

Everyone kept their own real estate.

Everyone kept their own freedom, basically.

We were not trying to bring them into a walled garden.

And that actually made people more loyal and wanting to stick with us because we weren't trying to take over what they had built, started building themselves.

So after nine years total, from the time we did the first event to, you know, when we got acquired, we then got acquired.

And the reason we pursued some sort of M and a Partnership was that we had gone through many, many changes.

The social media didn't exist when we started.

The mobile smartphone didn't exist when we started.

Wow.

Yeah.

So we had multiple times had to reinvent how we did things.

We started to productize our background backend system so that we could make guarantees about.

People still thought of social media as the wild west, but we found we could make guarantees to clients based on what we knew about years of doing programs.

And then video was like this last frontier that, you know, you.

We did video but it was always when it was sponsored and by some client.

Right.

We didn't build our own video studios, we didn't build our own video ongoing.

And we were like.

And we looked at it and we're like, we've been doing this nine years, we could do this.

We'd probably have to raise another round to do that.

Or we could try to find somebody who can fill in who has the video capabilities, who has the video assets.

And I think after nine years of doing it, we were like, it's time to join forces.

It's time to find a bigger media company that can weather this transition in content with us.

And so that's why we ended up doing the acquisition.

That's amazing.

And did you stay on afterwards or was it an end?

I stayed on for about two and a half years.

I stayed the longest and I think part.

It's really instructive if you're going to be acquired and you're thinking about this.

I think the reason I was able to stay longer than Lisa or Dory is because I was doing something the acquiring company wasn't really doing.

I ran our events business.

They did not do events or big events.

You know, I ran our market research.

They weren't doing market research.

I ran our social community and they were using social media purely as a traffic driving exercise.

They weren't really trying to have community.

Right.

So in multiple areas, I wasn't stepping on anyone's toes.

I wasn't infringing on anyone's territory.

I mean, it's hard if you're the CEO of a company being acquired.

They have a CEO, yes.

They have the head of sales.

They have those things.

But there was a bunch of stuff I didn't have to do anymore.

And I was really happy.

Like I was overseeing our editorial team.

I didn't have to do that anymore.

I didn't have to oversee our design team.

I didn't have to oversee G A.

Like they had all those people and I was like, yay.

And So I really could come in and focus on areas where they didn't have a lot of toes to step on.

And so I actually had a pretty good time for a couple of years helping transition the concepts of community and inclusivity and doing research and events, you know, had a really good time transferring that knowledge.

So how do you feel about it today, looking back, the journey and the exit?

It's hard because in a way, it's your baby.

We did it for a long time.

I always tell people to think about exit way quicker.

It'll make your life easier.

Like when you've been doing something nine years and you get acquired, like, that is such a big adjustment.

So I can't imagine a path what we would have done differently.

That was the path before us.

That was the best smart thing to do.

And I had a good couple of years helping transfer all of that and everything.

And yet things change.

And then you're like, what did they do to my baby?

You can't help it.

You cannot help it.

So it's never not.

I don't know anyone who's been acquired that doesn't have those feelings, those mixed feelings about, thank God we got that done.

Yes.

And what are they doing to my baby?

Those things coexist.

Yeah, they totally do.

They totally coexist.

And it's like in the other moments of your life where there was a shift.

Right.

Sometimes it's because you planned it, and other times it's just, you know, things happen.

Right.

And so I love that you took some time and then you.

Now you're creating a new.

It's already launched.

Talk to us about optionality.

And you're doing this with Jori.

Yeah.

So Jori and Lisa.

I've stayed in touch, close touch with both of them for all these years since, you know, by now it's been 10 years.

They're both really super close colleagues and I see each of them multiple times a year.

Usually right after I left, I had my last week at the company that acquired Blog her, the same week that I signed a book deal to partner with two other women to write the roadmap for Evolutionaries.

And then I went and I did some work in house at a couple of different startups.

I came in and did some executive work and I did some coaching and consulting.

And I was just doing a lot of different things.

It's really hard after doing.

Doing one thing for 12 years, which, as you can tell from my early career, that was not my norm to stick around for that long.

So I was like, what do I want to do?

And so Jory and I would go have lunch and she went a different route.

Lisa always knew she wanted to go on the investment side.

She wanted to help invest in more women and marginalized founders.

And now she is a GP of a fund.

Right.

So that she had a vision.

But Jori and I were like trying different things.

And Jori in particular was like, she did a big company stint because she felt like being an entrepreneur makes it hard to hire you at big companies.

They think you can't operate within a corporate structure.

She went into leading edge tech like blockchain and augmented reality.

She had a goal to keep on the leading edge of things.

But what we found was that life was kind of getting in our way.

For me, it was.

My stepfather died and we discovered my mom had cognitive issues.

And for her it was a child that had some chronic issues.

And we were like, you know, I.

And part of it is just after working for so long, you're like, I don't know if I want to work that way ever again.

Yeah.

Because I really did it to the exclusion of everything.

But we also found that it was really, we felt like we're only getting wiser, we're only getting more experience, we're only having more to offer.

And yet it seems harder and harder to find people who want to work to get the best from you without also wanting to get you kind of mired in stuff that isn't your, as some people would say, zone of genius.

You're like, why?

Like why does it get harder as you get wiser?

That seems counterintuitive.

So we started talking probably five years ago about this.

People keep saying the future of work, but work is really different now.

It's changed.

And also we had been through a lot of cycles of, we're seeing a cycle right now of tech layoffs, but this is not the first time.

We had the dot com bust, we had the financial crash.

We had these cycles of boom times and then crashes, especially in Silicon Valley.

I think it's a little more volatile than maybe other industries.

And we were like, you know, you used to think that getting a job and staying there, getting a full time job with full time benefits, that was the pinnacle of stability and security.

And that doesn't really seem true anymore.

And it actually hasn't been for a while.

Right.

And yet there's a really binary perspective from the employer side that you're either a full time employee and you get all this or we hire you as a contractor and you're on your own.

Yeah.

Both to make it up in fee, but we are going to argue every dollar of that fee, you get no accrued time off, you get no equity.

Sometimes you can negotiate it for advising with early startups, but contractors don't negotiate equity with public companies very often, right?

No, you don't get equity, you don't get paid time off, you don't get benefits.

And we're going to argue every dollar of your fee and see how low we can get you to go.

Even though you're supposed to make up all those things by having a higher effective rate.

And we're like, why, especially in white collar, like, knowledge work, is it so binary right now?

That's not the future.

Yeah.

So we decided to build community around it, which is how we started Blogger Building Community.

So Jory and I decided to build community around people who want to work a different way and want to find a way to survive, sort of stay on an even keel even as things are crashing and, and booming around them.

And I wanted to do it different this time.

I'm like, okay, Jory, I'm all in.

But I don't want to raise venture capital.

I don't want to sell advertising.

We did that for Blog.

Her not interested in doing it again.

She's like, okay, then we gotta figure out another model which also keeps it kind of interesting to do.

Just figure out a different business model.

After you've done particular models for a long time, we all have to keep learning and figuring out new ways to do things.

It keeps things a little.

You don't want to become complacent or always doing the same thing.

So that was the idea behind optionality, to first build community of people who want to work this way and then hopefully start evangelizing to companies about why it can actually be mutually beneficial to work this way.

And then hopefully, maybe someday, you know, Blogger participated as the government came up with policies for influencers.

We were part of the early FTC work on that.

And I'm like, eventually some of this needs to turn into policy, you know, and especially with AI, like, we need policy.

Oh yeah, we need policy.

And so we're in the community building phase of that.

But here's something that I didn't expect, which is we thought it was going to be all kind of seasoned professionals like us.

Gen Z is walking into the workforce with this perspective that they want optionality, that they want their life to matter, that they want fulfillment now.

And every generation looks at the next generation and gets mad at them.

For wanting the stuff we all wanted.

You know, it used to be Slacker Gen X, then it was entitled Millennials and now it's like these whiny Gen Z and I'm like, you realize that we're just old like that people did it to us and we're doing it to them.

And we could instead say, you know, they just want to be treated like humans and how our perception of how we should treat humans evolves.

And that's a good thing.

That's a good thing.

And you're creating a business around, starting to shape the future of what it could be and talk to us about that, tell us dumb it down in a business model and what do you offer and who's your audience and all that.

Right?

So right now we have a membership model with a la carte options as well.

So we have a community.

We originally built it on Substack and Slack because we just wanted to mess around in tools that did not require a ton of investment and where people were congregating.

And we've shifted over to mighty networks and there's a no cost community membership to have discussion and conversation.

But then there's a premium membership.

And what we're doing for premium members is kind of providing ongoing support, support for rethinking how they're doing work.

And we're just now sort of productizing what we're calling the optionality operating system.

It's all very well and good to say, you're going to keep your options open.

You're going to have lots of different irons in the fire.

You're going to look at them and assess them in a different way than you used to.

But now we're actually saying, okay, let us provide for you the tools with which to do this.

Like how are you going to make those decisions and calculations?

Can we provide tools for you to track and assess and keep on top of your opportunities and make decisions, A decision matrix about how to do that, how to manage your networking.

Your networking looks a lot different when you're trying to get a job versus when you're trying to build an optionality driven life.

Because people can help you with different things and you can help them with different things.

And it's a kind of, we call it intentional CRM.

It's not spraying and praying.

I feel it's sad to say this as one of the early digital utopians who was a huge proponent for social media, but I really think posting on social media is spraying and praying.

Yeah.

Including LinkedIn.

Yeah, totally.

Sending mass emails Spraying and praying.

And now I look at social media, I'm like, what do I enjoy doing?

Who do I want to talk to?

Because it fulfills me and is fun.

Because me having fun and being fulfilled makes my mind work better, makes my brain work better.

And so it really serves a different function for me now than it did 15, 10 years ago.

So, yes.

So we have our community.

We're productizing our operating system for optionality driven workers.

And we're doing these sprints and working groups and courses to help people bring that into their lives and how they work.

Amazing.

And so we were talking a little right before we officially started recording, and you were saying that what's unique or different, or maybe you did this with Blog her too, but you're following your joy and your curiosity and your interest more in this endeavor and that you're working on something now that you've been working on, something that's been a passion for you.

Yes.

So part our Q1 sprint.

The first of these kind of products we released for optionality was this sprint we called Roadmap to Restoration.

We had live sessions during Q1, but you can take it.

It's still on our site.

You can buy and do the materials asynchronously.

And part of it was about identifying what brings you energy, what brings you fulfills you, what energizes you.

You.

A political environment, right?

Yes.

I have tough life things going on.

So I'm like, you know what I'm missing?

What am I doing?

Just because I love it and I'm having fun.

And so in doing the sprint myself, because Jory and I eat our own dog food and follow the same.

We were doing it with the folks in the community.

I realized I need something I'm doing that I'm just excited about.

And so for many years, I have been a little bit obsessed with my favorite television show of all time, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

And I had it in my head to write a book about all the leadership and life lessons in Buffy.

And then the election happened, I got approached to collaborate on this book, Roadmap to Revolutionaries.

And so for years since then, I've been like, I really need to get back to that.

Well, here's the thing.

A year ago, I finished my book proposal finally.

And no sooner did I do that than I was like, I don't know if I really.

Is that gonna fulfill me to write a book?

Do I wanna promote another book?

Like the whole process of a book is a lot.

Do it.

Do I wanna do it?

And then I'm like, maybe I just wanna talk about it and like, have fun with it.

So I decided to just launch.

I'm going to do started on March 10th.

I'm doing a lot a watch through, a re.

Watch through of Buffy.

And I'm in a live post on Threads, which is the platform I'm having fun on right now.

I'm going to watch a few episodes every week live, post my reactions, and then each week I'm going to write a little post about what lessons I learned from those.

Here's the other fun thing.

I have a Buffy tarot deck.

Oh.

And I'm like, I'm like the least woo woo person ever.

But I love tarot the tool.

I actually compare tarot to AI in this way.

When I have used Claude.

Claude is my tool of choice.

When I use it as a thought partner.

I realize that I'm debating myself, I'm discussing with myself.

It can only, you know, it's a tool for self reflection.

And that's what tarot is.

Tarot is not a fortune telling thing for me.

It's a like, what does this card tell you about your situation?

So I think I'm going to start offering little Buffy tarot readings.

And I just like, I am going to find a bunch of other people who love talking about it too.

And that is going to be my little joy.

I just decided to launch it at the beginning of March.

And who knows, maybe I'll get two years in because there are seven seasons.

So it might take me a while to get through the whole thing.

Who knows?

Eventually I may decide at some point, okay, this is no longer bringing me joy.

And then you know what?

Bye, bye, bye.

Right.

I need something that is just for me because I love it.

And that's what I love.

Well, and it's such a great example for us all to set right around, especially living.

If we're going to live a life of optionality where we really believe wholeheartedly that we don't have to do anything, we really have.

We have so many choices.

And so what is it that's feeding your soul?

And you know, so one of the questions I have and The Buffy the Vampire Slayer thing, I think that's amazing.

And I'm thinking about my older daughter, who's 24 and she happens to be disabled, but I think.

And she watches shows with her caregivers and I have this feeling that she would love this and actually would love to participate in whatever you're doing.

Like, I could see her being a part of it anyway.

So how do you bring all of this together?

How do you bring your passions, your interests, your intuition and structure and P and L?

Because you are a P and L. Yeah.

You care about that too.

I know that.

Yeah.

So one of the things that we introduced to our optionality community this quarter as part of our sprint that we're going to productize and make more generally available is this idea of opportunity tracking and assessment.

And Jori did a lot of work last year because she does a lot of fractional work.

I used to think I wanted to be a fractional exec, and now I'm like, no.

You know, my observation is that fractionals, they're either trying to get full time work out of you for fractional pay or they're happy for you to be fractional, but they expect that as soon as they get funding that you'll want.

To go full time.

Yeah, most people don't want to give executive responsibility to fractional without there being some pressure.

So she actually was really revisiting how she managed all her opportunities.

And so she came up with this matrix for how to define different opportunities.

And I thought it was so interesting.

So basically, you put your opportunities into, I would say, five different categories.

The first is, okay, we all need some floor opportunities.

The thing that pays the bills, the thing you got to do.

And the problem for most of us is that we're so concerned with filling up our floor opportunities that we let the other kinds of things go until all we're doing is working on floor opportunities that are perhaps easy to do, perhaps you're totally capable of doing, but they're not exactly either.

An anchor opportunity that really speaks to the identity you want to have, that's where you want to go.

That's what you want to build.

That if you could do it full time, you would.

If you want to do something full time, if could, you got to allocate time and space to it and capacity and energy.

The third is horizon opportunities.

And these are things like, what do you need to do so that five years from now you're ready?

Like what?

How do you keep learning?

How do you keep growing?

So what are you Doing.

And that's not necessarily a revenue generator that might come on the expense side of the, of the income statement.

The fourth is platform.

I find there's so much bad advice out there, especially women, about yes, you should know your value, yes, you should know your worth.

Yes, if someone's paying all the men and not you, that sucks.

But I do not like this advice about never do anything for free.

You know, there are a million things I will do for free if they contribute to my platform, if it's fair, if I care, if it's, you know, for a purpose.

To immediately reject every opportunity.

I have traveled all over the world.

Yeah, yeah.

To speak.

And I didn't get paid to speak sometimes, but my travel got paid and I got to see places I would never otherwise see.

That was worth it to me.

Maybe it won't be worth it to you, but at least put that category there of what builds my platform and what am I willing to invest in that.

And then the fifth that I think we're going to add is about those personal non negotiables, whether that's child care, whether that's parental care.

But the point is that you can have different kind of opportunities.

And if you're not careful, you will focus entirely on your floor opportunities, maybe in your anchor.

But you aren't really taking care of your platform or you're not taking care of the far horizon, or you're not taking care of your non negotiable personal stuff.

And you constantly feel stretched.

So by understanding what percentage you want to allocate to each and trying to stay within that and tracking within that and sometimes you're going to turn things down because you know what?

You don't have any more capacity.

That's the thing.

Like if 100% of your work is floor, you have to be honest with yourself.

Do I actually need all of this at the expense of what I really care about or what is really fulfilling or what will serve my future?

Because we could use it.

I can use more money all the time.

I can find a way to use all the money, but if it's at the expense of five years from now feeling like I'm doing stuff I care about and I'm fulfilled and I'm ready for whatever the future holds, then it's not worth it.

You know, I'm thinking about this for individuals with their careers, but I'm also thinking about it for building a company, right?

Building as a founder, right?

You have things that you're building that you have right now that you can sell other things that you don't have, you can sell yet.

But if you spend all of your time only doing the thing that you have today, then you'll never have the anchor or the horizon.

Opportunity company goes through this, the legacy product where how are you managing the shift from the legacy product to the next generation product?

I worked in hardware when I was in tech, I worked for hardware companies and even in hardware companies we had this shift from legacy, which is still the bread and butter.

But you got to build the next gen because eventually you're going to get someone's going to leapfrog over you if you don't have your next gen ready.

So this is true in hardware, this is true in software, this is true in everything you do that you've got to be ready with the next generation of who you are and what you bring to the table.

If you spend all your time on your floor, you never rise.

So this is giving.

This is a wonderful framework for helping build a long term structure, a short term and long term structure for that financial stability that you might want or I would say most of us want financial stability in some way and then being able to grow into the future as well.

I think a lot of us, when we get to a certain level and including a certain level of financial stability, it's hard to turn off the.

Yeah, but I just got to keep working for having more and more.

You end up being in your late 50s or whatever and you're going, I'm doing all this stuff that I don't even like and do I really need to do it?

Yeah.

And our definition of ambition for ourselves.

Why am I ambitious for this stuff?

Who told me to be.

Yes.

Am I telling me I'm ambitious for this stuff or is this just the expectation I've put on myself after 30 years in the workforce that I need to be ambitious for this?

Maybe I'm not.

Yeah, maybe I don't care about it anymore.

That's okay.

That's great actually.

Yeah.

Yeah, right, Totally.

So where do you see this going?

What is your vision for optionality?

We really want to help build these.

I'm vibe coding right now.

I'm teaching myself how to vibe code and we really want to build these tools to take the idea of having an optionality life from a concept that every person needs to figure out for themselves based on great concepts to actually having this productized framework that they can use.

It's not the only thing people will ever use, but it's a way to really build like a Foundation.

The foundation is how you decide what you want, right?

And then you're building the scaffolding and you're building the walls and you're building the utilities that go through the house and you are really building.

And we just want to provide tools to help you build all those parts of building what you want your optionality driven life to look like.

We can't tell you what it has to look like.

The foundation is you knowing what keeps you in, what serves you, what doesn't serve you, what's your ambition really look like today?

And so what it looks like right now is that we're trying, we're in that process of building those tools to help with each part of that building that house of your optionality driven life.

And then there's a way to help enterprises see why this is to their benefit as well, because clarity for the people who work for you about how they also don't get so mired in the floor that they never see the horizon.

And I think that happens to so many folks.

And maybe executives get sent to like do strategic off sites and stuff, but your people on the line, your managers, every day, like, what are you doing to help them also be thinking of the horizon?

Yes.

Yeah.

And I think sometimes companies don't do that because they're afraid of.

They start thinking about, yeah, we're not going to be part of their horizon.

And I'm like, you should be so lucky that they, you have employees that have vision and direction and tell you about it.

And maybe you don't want their vision and direction.

Okay, but like we're in a very industrial, like we have a very industrial perspective.

We're still stuck there, but it's not working.

It's not working, working.

Nobody loves it.

Nobody loves it.

And people relieving all this brilliance and I hate the word productivity, but productivity transformation, growth, not just dollar growth, but personal growth, relieving it, innovation on the side.

Because people are industrialized.

And it's so true.

Right.

All the arguments about return to office and all that, that's really just a name we've put on this conflict between thinking that employer versus employee is still an industrial, like, you know, cogs in the machine versus, you know, versus not.

I think that's the issue that everybody's kind of hanging their hat on to try and say, we have this, we must have that.

And I'm like, if you do you.

Really, it's like to your point, like you really do you really.

Is that the only way to make sure your people are doing their jobs.

Well, it is for this because if you can't figure out how to have accountability and culture when people are working remotely, I'm going to guess you didn't know how to have accountability and culture when they were all in the office either.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's absolutely right.

All right, so Elisa, let's move to a fast fire round.

I'm going to ask you five questions to answer in five words or less.

Oh, gosh.

Okay, okay, so here it is.

What's a red flag you look for immediately in a company's culture?

No answer for tough questions.

Brilliant.

What's one boundary every founder might be good to set Early.

Work is hard, but not the same.

Beautiful.

Work is hard but not the same.

What's one metric founders tend to obsess over that you care less about.

Hours in the office.

Yeah.

What's one mistake founders make when building community?

Thinking bi directionally, not a cycle.

Beautiful.

Last question.

What does power mean to you?

Freedom.

Freedom.

I love that.

Lisa, how can our listeners and viewers get in touch with you?

Learn about optionality, get involved, become part of the optionality life.

Life.

Yes.

Well, optionality life is actually our URL and you will that will take you to our community.

On mighty.

I'm@elisa CP on threads.

ElisACP.com is my personal website and I'm on LinkedIn and those are really the places I for someone who was there at the beginning of social media, I don't use most of it anymore.

Whatever that says.

Well, it says you're creating your own community and designing your own, your own world.

And just for everybody just to go, just check this out, go into optionality life.

You're going to come here and sign up.

There's a free option to get in here.

There's all kinds of great stuff here.

You're going to see different plans.

Roadmaps to restoration is right there.

These things are all very accessible and fun.

Community membership comes at no cost.

Come in and check it all out.

And look, these guys are visionary, right?

Like, you know, Elisa and Jorie are visionary women and they're doing this because they love it and because they like to build businesses.

And that's the cool thing.

You can come in and watch them firsthand and see their decision making and see where they're visionary focused.

And so part of why I'm interested in getting in there is because I'm not as clear about where the community based world is going to.

And so the brilliance of what you are offering is so cool.

And for me, I'm very curious to learn from you.

For anybody who has a digital community of any kind, digital products community building, this is the place to go.

These ladies built massive following in the past and they're going to do it again and you may as well watch them do it step by step.

Thank you.

I will look forward to seeing you and all your listeners there.

Wonderful.

Thank you for being on the Wisdom of Women Show.

Thank you for having me.

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