Personal Update - Sean Blanda

Personal Update

A collection of 8 posts

It's about the people, stupid: Lessons from 1 year of Pilcrow House

Personal Update

It's about the people, stupid: Lessons from 1 year of Pilcrow House

Pilcrow House [https://pilcrow.house/] is an event series that aims to foster candid conversation over some delicious food. At least, that’s what it is today. A year in, Allison [https://twitter.com/allisonblanda] and I are still figuring it out. Since the first Pilcrow House event with Adobe

What I wish I knew five years ago about building a career in "content"

Careers Featured

What I wish I knew five years ago about building a career in "content"

As of this writing, there are more than 1,000 content marketing positions on AngelList. It’s not only startups. A recent Axios story [https://www.axios.com/job-of-the-future-editor-in-chief-1dde0e58-4dc3-4dfc-8a07-41494f5c635f.html] highlights how Netflix, Airbnb, Blackrock, Robinhood, Stripe and other large orgs are launching new content ventures. In 2019, it’s

How to take a sabbatical

Careers Featured

How to take a sabbatical

This won’t be like every other blog post about travel. Your narrator won’t be casually doing something awesome when suddenly there is a life-changing revelation. That’s not how life actually works. This, instead, is an essay about something harder than sitting on a beach and Instagramming about

My dead dad’s journal: How I finally met a man I knew for my entire life

Personal Update Featured

My dead dad’s journal: How I finally met a man I knew for my entire life

For some reason, when my brother told me our dad was dead, I immediately went and listened to my voicemails. He left me silly voicemails often and I wanted to hear his voice. I came across the last voicemail he ever left me, a month before. This one wasn’t

I work for the site with the funny name (A year in review)

Personal Update

I work for the site with the funny name (A year in review)

A year ago I flew to Austin, Texas and started my tenure as the Editor in Chief of the personal finance website I Will Teach You To Be Rich [http://iwillteachyoutoberich.com/] and the entrepreneur community GrowthLab [https://growthlab.com/]. It’s a fully remote company, one of the properties

Traveling Under Trump

Personal Update

Traveling Under Trump

On November 8th, 2016 many Americans wished they were a world away. I actually was. And it sucked. As the east coast of the U.S. settled down for a long night of listening to Wolf Blitzer painstakingly cite voting totals, I was driving a “Deucey” camper van with my

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the 99U Refresh

Entrepreneurship

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the 99U Refresh

2016 marked the seventh anniversary of 99U: a website, magazine, conference and book series dedicated to helping people make their ideas happen—and the publication I’ve worked on in various roles since September 2012. In that time, the website has amounted an impressive resume: About 650k uniques a month,

I Had Help.

Earlier this month at the 99U Conference, ThinkUp co-founder Anil Dash spoke on the trajectory of careers: “Someone opened the door for you, they replied to your email, had coffee with you, interviewed you…that’s something that changed the direction of your career,” he said. He challenged the audience