Podcasts about Camp Kesem

There's a but. The but is that it's for kids who are enduring a cancer battle or loss involving a parent. We had my frenemy (let's resurrect that late 00s word) Jenna Ellis on last to talk about her loss and her kids attending Camp Kesem, but she's back with more info and a guest of her own.. First, how to watch Guardians games!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kelly's daughter Claire takes the mic to share her experience with Camp Kesem, an amazing organization that runs free summer camps for kids whose parents have faced cancer. As both a cancer survivor's daughter and the current director of UVA's Kesem chapter, Claire opens up about her personal story and shows how this incredible community creates pure magic for children going through tough times. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A recent Dartmouth graduate shares her experiences at Camp Kesem.

Jenna lost her husband last summer to a brain cancer. I met her at a recent Victory Center event where she was a featured speaker sharing her and her kid's journey. She's also started her own endeavor to ensure those enduring a cancer battle can be pointed to the most effective resources. AND she shares what Camp Kesem is, and how helpful it was for her kids, and that slots are still open! First, $20k for healthy food, a high speed chase and the worst HOTD character. 

In today's episode of Elevate Your Career, Nicole is joined by Dr. Ron Glickman, Chief Information Officer at Trader Joe's and the author of 'Lead for a Change.' Ron shares his extensive experience in leadership and the importance of adopting a relational approach over a transactional one in professional environments. He emphasizes the value of giving back, drawing from his personal journey and the mutual coaching experiences he's had, including with the host. Ron's belief in the power of relational dynamics underpins the conversation, illustrating how building genuine connections can lead to more meaningful and impactful leadership.Ron explores the backstory of his decision to write a book, inspired by the lessons he's learned through his career and the encouragement of peers. His teaching role at Cal State LA and the subsequent push towards earning a doctorate to validate his non-scholarly approach to leadership education played a pivotal role in this. The book, intended as a practical toolkit for leaders at any stage, encapsulates his research and personal insights on leadership being a learnable skill, not limited by innate traits.Reflecting on personal influences, Ron credits his grandfather's journey to America and his own efforts to fulfill the American Dream as a significant motivation behind his achievements. He discusses the current political landscape's challenges and stresses the importance of effectiveness over being right. Ron's commitment to helping others, as evidenced by his involvement with Camp Kesem and women's leadership programs, highlights his belief in the transformative power of leadership to not just advance individual careers but also make a broader societal impact.Join Nicole and Ron for this fascinating and inspiring conversation!Enjoy!What You Will Learn In This Show:The distinction between relational and transactional leadership styles.Ron's path to authoring a leadership book, influenced by his experiences teaching at Cal State LA and pursuing his doctorate.Actionable advice on how to apply leadership lessons to your career and personal development.The critical role of compromise in leadership and politics, emphasizing the need for effectiveness over being right.The personal influences on Ron's leadership philosophy, including the impact of his grandfather's immigrant experience and the legacy of striving for the American Dream.Ron's unique method of reflection and relaxation through smoking cigars, illustrating the importance of finding personal ways to reflect and strategize about one's life and career.The fulfillment derived from engaging in projects that help others, such as leading a charity for children whose parents have been affected by cancer and contributing to women's leadership programs.And so much more...Resources:Ron's LinkedInLead for a Change book

Laura Kate Holden's kindness and thoughtfulness are a gift! I feel very lucky to get to share that with the world in this episode. As the Director of Camp Kesem at UGA and NMDP, she understands more than anyone the importance of living your life with purpose. Join us as we discuss a wide range of topics like meet-cutes, facing adversity, and spreading love! I LOVE YOU LAURA KATE! :)   FOLLOW THESE ACCOUNTS ON INSTAGRAM:  @lk.hold @kesem_uga @nmdp_org   FOLLOW US TOO!  @rewind.pod on Instagram and Spotify!! 

Join Ned Buskirk in conversation with Dr. Lucy Kalanithi, Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at Stanford University & the widow of Dr. Paul Kalanithi, author of the #1 New York Times-bestselling memoir When Breath Becomes Air, while they talk about her ongoing relationship to Paul, his impact/presence in her life still, & parenting their daughter in the wake of his death.dr. lucy kalanithi'swebsite: https://lucykalanithi.com/twitter: https://twitter.com/rocketgirlmdpodcast GRAVITY: https://lucykalanithi.com/podcastdr. lucy kalanithi wants you to supportBe A Hero: https://beaherofund.com/Camp Kesem: https://www.kesem.org/Caring Across Generations: https://caringacross.org/Produced by Nick JainaSoundscaping by Nick Jaina”YG2D Podcast Theme Song” by Nick JainaTHIS PODCAST IS MADE POSSIBLE WITH SUPPORT FROM LISTENERS LIKE YOU.Become a podcast patron now at https://www.patreon.com/YG2D.

Join us for an intimate conversation featuring four remarkable women—Aliza, Ashleigh, Jamie, and Nari (BIPOC)—as they candidly share their journeys through diagnoses, offering an up-close exploration of how they navigated the paths of motherhood and cancer. This special 'Part B' bonus series invites you to witness their unfiltered experiences, providing a heartfelt glimpse into the highs, lows, and unwavering strength that define their unique stories.A huge thank you to Jamie for graciously sharing her experience in the POSITIVE Study— a study that looks at women who are looking to pursue pregnancy by temporarily pausing their hormone therapy medication in hopes of conceiving. Jamie's journey led to the miraculous birth of her son, Cash. For more information about the study, we've included some helpful links below.Episode Timestamps:[00:01:29] Aliza Bochner[00:10:07] Ashleigh Van Son[00:23:09] Jamie Pelishek[00:34:28] Nari Baughman[00:45:34] OutroResources:https://www.dana-farber.org/newsroom/news-releases/2022/new-study-provides-encouraging-data-for-younger-breast-cancer-patients-looking-to-pursue-pregnancyhttps://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2023/pausing-breast-cancer-treatment-to-conceiveNari also spoke to us about Camp Kesem, which provides support for children whose parents have cancer. You can find out more here: https://www.kesem.org/Instagram:-Aliza @alizapollak-Ashleigh @healthyhappyash-Jamie @babyafterbreastcancer-Nari does not have Instagram, but you can find her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nlhbm125?mibextid=LQQJ4dYou can follow us on Instagram @TYFTSpodcast and email us at tyftspodcast@gmail.comPlease consider donating to our “Buy Me A Coffee” page. Your generous support will greatly assist us in continuing to produce quality content for our listeners.Every donation will get a shoutout on our podcast, as well as a free TYFTS sticker.www.buymeacoffee.com/tyftspodcast

Join us for an intimate conversation featuring four remarkable women—Aliza, Ashleigh, Jamie, and Nari (BIPOC)—as they candidly share their journeys through diagnoses, offering an up-close exploration of how they navigated the paths of motherhood and cancer. This special 'Part B' bonus series invites you to witness their unfiltered experiences, providing a heartfelt glimpse into the highs, lows, and unwavering strength that define their unique stories.A huge thank you to Jamie for graciously sharing her experience in the POSITIVE Study— a study that looks at women who are looking to pursue pregnancy by temporarily pausing their hormone therapy medication in hopes of conceiving. Jamie's journey led to the miraculous birth of her son, Cash. For more information about the study, we've included some helpful links below.Episode Timestamps:[00:01:29] Aliza Bochner[00:10:07] Ashley Van Zon[00:23:09] Jamie Pelishek[00:34:28] Nari Baughman[00:45:34] OutroResources:https://www.dana-farber.org/newsroom/news-releases/2022/new-study-provides-encouraging-data-for-younger-breast-cancer-patients-looking-to-pursue-pregnancyhttps://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2023/pausing-breast-cancer-treatment-to-conceiveNari also spoke to us about Camp Kesem, which provides support for children whose parents have cancer. You can find out more here: https://www.kesem.org/Instagram:-Aliza @alizapollak-Ashleigh @healthyhappyash-Jamie @babyafterbreastcancer-Nari does not have Instagram, but you can find her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nlhbm125?mibextid=LQQJ4dYou can follow us on Instagram @TYFTSpodcast and email us at tyftspodcast@gmail.comPlease consider donating to our “Buy Me A Coffee” page. Your generous support will greatly assist us in continuing to produce quality content for our listeners.Every donation will get a shoutout on our podcast, as well as a free TYFTS sticker.www.buymeacoffee.com/tyftspodcast

The delightful Sandy Rustin drops by the podcast to discuss her adaptation of Clue, which is the most-produced play in high schools for many years running. On the way to discovering Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Wrench, Melissa discovers Sandy's place in soap opera history and their mutual love of cooking.In this episode, we discuss:How she became the adaptor for ClueAcquiring dramatic rights and music rights to Clue and Mystic PizzaHer approach and tips for writing adaptationsHow her play Houston has suddenly become more relevantAnd more!Resources MentionedClue by Sandy RustinClue on tourThe CottageThe Nourish Me Kitchen by Erika SiegelAbout Our GuestSandy Rustin is a Broadway playwright and actress. One of the most produced playwrights in America, Sandy's adaptation of the film CLUE has enjoyed over 3,500 productions worldwide. Her musical adaptation of MGM's MYSTIC PIZZA will premiere at La Mirada Playhouse in 2024. Sandy wrote concert adaptations of I MARRIED AN ANGEL and DEAR WORLD for NYCity Center Encores! Her comedy, THE SUFFRAGETTE'S MURDER, will premiere in 2025 at the Denver Center for Performing Arts. Her play, HOUSTON (recipient of the New American Musical Award), is in development with Grammy winner Edie Brickell. Other theatrical works include RATED P … FOR PARENTHOOD, ELIJAH, STRUCK, AMERICAN GIRL LIVE, and others.  A Northwestern University graduate, Sandy is a member of ASCAP, SAG, AEA, and The Dramatists Guild and is represented by A3 Artists Agency. She serves on the Advisory Board of NYU's Camp Kesem chapter. She lives in Maplewood, NJ with her husband and two sons. Connect with Our Guestsandyrustin.comNew Play ExchangeInstagramConnect with host Melissa Schmitz***Sign up for the 101 Stage Adaptations Newsletter***101 Stage AdaptationsFollow the Podcast on Facebook & InstagramRead Melissa's plays on New Play ExchangeConnect with Melissa on LinkedInWays to support the show:- Buy Me a Coffee- Tell us your thoughts in our Listener Survey!- Give a 5-Star rating- Write a glowing review on Apple Podcasts - Send this episode to a friend- Share on social media (Tag us so we can thank you!)Creators: Host your podcast through Buzzsprout using my affiliate link & get a $20 credit on your paid account. Let your fans directly support you via Buy Me a Coffee (affiliate link).

Aaron and Julian spend $5,000 on the PWCC Weekly Auction, with all cards being purchased as a donation by PWCC. The cards will be re-sold in Auction #80 (July 30), and all of the sales will be donated to Camp Kesem! For PWCC Vault transfers for Camp Kesem: eyJpdiI6InpDeFBETTEvM1VYNTRJUDBabHAxSlE9PSIsInZhbHVlIjoieGJ6c2syWDR3eUFhRExtOE5FVlhlQT09IiwibWFjIjoiZjkwOGZiMTkyYmExZTRmMDY4YzFjYmNlMGMyYWZmOWFhYjcxYzZlMTg2MTA1NzAxNzBhMDVjYTBjN2U1YjkzNyIsInRhZyI6IiJ9 Bid in the PWCC Weekly Auction now: https://pwccmarketplace.pxf.io/oqn45b Sign-up for The Daily Slab newsletter: https://www.slabstox.com Grade your cards with SlabStox x SGC Grading: https://www.slabstox.com/grading Create your Card Ladder account here: https://app.cardladder.com/signup?via=slabstox - All-time sales history | Sales data from 14 sources | Track your collection.

We begin this show with Camp Kesem, a summer camp for children dealing with a parent who has Cancer. With over 125 locations in more than 40 states, Camp Kesem is a place where College Student leaders help the campers coping with a parent's Cancer. Positive outcomes for the campers include improved self esteem, enhanced […]

Today's For the Good of the Order is a speech that Kelly gave at Camp Kesem, a very special place that welcomes loss, friendship, sorrow and new beginnings equally. A place that shows us that we can be damaged and heavy-hearted, but still buoyant and insightful and very useful to one another.

We are excited to announce the SlabStox Camp Kesem Charity Event is BACK for the third straight summer! The sports card community has the chance to help us eclipse $300,000 in fundraising since 2021, sending kids to camp for free whose parents are impacted by cancer. The 2023 Charity Event will take place in July, and for the second straight year, the grand finale will be at The National Trade Night hosted by Kentucky Roadshow and CardCollector2.   Last year, we had over 60 different sponsors donate over $100,000 in sports cards. Once again, we'll be adding as many sponsors as possible to this event, with the first announcement coming this Friday. We already have a handful of sponsors committed, but we are looking for more! If you want to be a Platinum or Gold sponsor this year, please reply to this email immediately with your interest. We'll provide the information about how to join to change these kids' lives.   If you can't sponsor the event but you want to help, donating as little as a $10 to $20 card can make a difference, and you can send any donations to:   SX Kesem PO Box 320384 Franklin, WI 53132   In the month of June, we will be announcing where the donations will be sold, as we'll be hosting various fundraiser events. We can't wait for another summer of giving back, as the sports card community continues to amaze us each and every year through the SlabStox Camp Kesem Charity Event.

Aaron and Nate talk about tons of different cards + 6 very important items ending, as 5% of the proceeds will be donated to Camp Kesem (up to $1,000). Sign-up for The Daily Slab newsletter: https://www.slabstox.com

Today's episode is very special for Shawn because his daughter attended Camp Kesem, a camp founded to help children through and beyond a parent's cancer, put on by the incredible organization led by today's guest. Kesem is a nonprofit that works with kids of parents who've had cancer and Shawn has been amazed and in awe of their work, their vision, and the impact they have had on so many people.  In this episode, Shawn sits down with Alicia Kabir, Chief Executive Officer of Kesem, to talk about the challenges of running a nonprofit organization, how it feels to make such a big impact on the community, especially kids, how designing a better experience can improve someone's life, and Kesem's mission to help kids rediscover the joys of childhood. In This Episode: (02:23) – The best day she's ever had doing what she does. (04:35) – How designing a better experience can improve someone's life. (06:43) – What employers can learn from how Kesem recruits and trains college student volunteers. (09:40) – How Alicia found her calling at Kesem. (11:40) – Learning how to become a successful CEO. (13:35) – On being maverick-minded and human-obsessed with kids at camp. (16:35) – Talking about how a non-profit can grow its impact. (17:41) – The best advice Alicia received about leadership. (19:42) – The Combustion Questions. What We Learned from Alicia Kabir Alicia measures Kesem's success by the number of tears, laughs, and hugs that they experience. College students are the heart of Kesem's organization. Kesem does two things really well: Leaning into their why and giving their volunteers a lot of responsibilities. Use the voices of the people in your community to make sure you're making decisions that make sense to them. Notable Quotes [3:23] - “You can see the happiness that the kids have, the joy, thankfulness, and gratitude that the parents have. It's such a special moment for us at Kesem.” [8:00] - “They are our next generation of leaders and they need real responsibility and they step up and do this work time and time again.” [17:18] - “It's super important to listen, to get feedback and input in order to scale and to make good decisions that truly drive impact and meaning with the families that we serve.” [18:08] - “I really am not hiding anything. You have the full story. And for me, that is leadership.” Our Guest Alicia Kabir is the Chief Executive Officer of Kesem, the leading national nonprofit organization that supports children affected by a parent's cancer. She has been involved at Kesem since 2017 and began serving as CEO in 2021. Alicia had an established career in Environmental Engineering before she found her calling at Kesem, leading a successful nonprofit. Kesem offers free, creative, fun-filled programs that foster a lasting community and allows kids to rediscover the joys of childhood.  Resources & Links Alicia Kabir LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alicia-kabir-4b31a4/ Shawn Nason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nasonshawn/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/manonfiresocial/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/manonfiresocial Website: https://shawnnason.com/ MOFI: https://www.mofi.co/ The Combustion Chronicles Podcast Website: https://shawnnason.com/combustion-chronicles-episodes/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is dedicated in loving memory to our team member and friend, Carol Milliron, who passed away on January 25, 2023 after a heroic fight against breast cancer.In honor of Carol, we have been raising money for Camp Kesem, a national nonprofit that supports children who are affected by a parent's cancer. It provides year-round programs and services to support these children, ages 6–18, at no cost to families.You can make a donation here. Thank you for supporting Camp Kesem in Carol's memory.Want more from SheSpeaks?* Sign up for our podcast newsletter HERE! * Connect with us on Instagram, FB & Twitter @shespeaksup Contact us at podcast@shespeaks.com

Stephanie is a retired hair stylist, writer, and advocate for AdvancedBreastCancer.net. Stephanie was diagnosed stage IIIa at 25, and then stage IV at 31. In this episode Stephanie reads their essay “My Life and Being Wrong” from Wildfire Magazine's 2022 “Legacy Stories” issue. Stephanie's unusual cancer story is about a very unexpected pregnancy. Stephanie and April will discuss the importance of using your story for advocacy, reasons for being private with your cancer story, and being an example to our children when it comes to cancer. They will also talk about Stephanie's future plans to write a book with helpful tips on how to get started. More about Stephanie: https://www.instagram.com/_the_radiatedlizard/Purchase a print or digital copy of the “Legacy Stories” issue of Wildfire Magazine: https://www.wildfirecommunity.org/shop/mbc22More breast cancer stories from LBGTQIA2S+ community members: “Slowing Down to Write One Moment with Dawn Amodeo” https://player.captivate.fm/episode/a082c76d-bd6e-4345-adc5-2b3ac29af98fGet the free Wildfire email newsletter: https://www.wildfirecommunity.orgLearn about Wildfire writing workshops: https://www.wildfirecommunity.org/workshopsShop Wildfire merch & more: https://www.wildfirecommunity.org/shopSend your voice recording testimonial to editor@wildfirecommunity.org*Free* The Burn Writing Companion: Guided Prompt Journal (Vol. 1): https://www.wildfirecommunity.org/the-burnBuy the Wildfire book “Igniting the Fire Within: Stories of Healing, Hope & Humor, Inside Today's Young Breast Cancer Community”: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BJVJ629F?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860Other resources mentioned in this episode:Bright Spot Network https://www.brightspotnetwork.org/Mighty and Bright https://mightyandbright.com/Camp Kesem https://www.kesem.org/AdvancedBreastCancer.net https://advancedbreastcancer.net/

The cat's out of the bag and the co-host is in another state (we miss you, Amy!!), but we're making it work with some pals old and new. If you can believe it, we nabbed Thriver Writer, survivor and recent divorcée (keep reading; it's relevant) Meghan McCallum! Joining us too: producer, co-survivor and husband extraordinaire Nathan McGehee. The convo? Relationships of all flavors, with some live letters that brought the house down. How do you get your mojo back when the hormones aren't flowing like they used to? When do you disclose cancer status to a date? And oh yeah: "At leasters"? come here, we just wanna talk. A huge thank you to the brave readers that joined us on stage and the anons that let us share their words, too. RATS come scurrying out of the weed(s) to confront the cannabis problem. Sure, there are some studies, but without legalization and with all these taboos, how's a breastie supposed to get straight answers? We try to help clear the air. A HUGE HUGE mound of gratitude to Young Survival Coalition for having us, and to everyone who stayed to listen, talked to us after, and whom we met over the incredible summit weekend. We love you, YSC!!As promised, here is the link-o-rama! Meghan McCallum's writing can be found at https://www.thriverwriter.com and she's on the ‘gram too: https://instagram.com/thriverwriter?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=For kids of cancer grownups, Camp Kesem offers free summer camps nationwide: https://www.kesem.orgHealing Pines Respite offers free wellness retreats in & around North Carolina: https://www.healingpinesrespite.orgLittle Pink Houses of Hope provides no cost retreats to survivors, thrives, and their families. https://www.littlepink.orgFight Through Flights offers free wellness retreats and travel opportunities for Black survivors and thrivers https://www.fightthroughflights.orgFor The Breast of Us empowers women of color with breast cancer diagnoses! https://breastofus.comYSC's virtual meetups for LGBTQIA folks are so good! https://youngsurvival.org/ysc-private-facebook-group-for-lgbtq-survivors-and-thriversCANNABIS STUFF! The study on anti-tumor effects for ER+ breast cancer: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4018723/ & the possible mechanism combined with endocrine disruption: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25177025Antitumor activity of plant cannabinoids with emphasis on the effect of cannabidiol on human breast carcinoma. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16728591/http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/68/9_Supplement/Cannabidiol as a novel inhibitor of Id-1 gene expression in aggressive breast cancer cells. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18025276 & Full Text: http://mct.aacrjournals.org/content/6/11/2921.longModulation of the tumor microenvironment and inhibition of EGF/EGFR pathway; novel anti-tumor mechanisms of Cannabidiol in breast cancer https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4387115/Modulation of breast cancer cell viability by a cannabinoid receptor 2 agonist, JWH-015(Synthetic THC), is calcium dependent https://www.dovepress.com/modulation-of-breast-cancer-cell-viability-by-a-cannabinoid-receptor-2-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-BCTTCannabis expert RN doing amazing work: http://www.nursekristin.com

HAPPY NEW YEAR! I hope this new year is treating you well! And if it's not... it's okay because we have a first-year psychology PhD student on this week's episode. He's one of my good'ol undergrad friends, and we were in the same nonprofit org together! We talk about that organization (Camp Kesem), the road to becoming a licensed psychologist, our personalities in elementary school, buying gifts for our partners, prioritizing our mental health, and how we react when our identities are challenged! This was such a fun episode, and I hope y'all enjoy it!!Lab Shenanigans Merch:https://labshenanigansmerch.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

 Listen, sometimes the summer just gets away from you and people start to be concerned that you've either quit your cancer podcast or died. If that's you, no judgment. Amy and Stef, however, would NEVER abandon their loyal listeners for two months to live their best parasol-twirling, innertubing, redwood hugging, concert-in-the-parking, WNBA gaming (go Storm!!) lives. Salad days, amirite? (Seriously, am I?) So…anyway…the gals are back with new scan results and some dirt to dish. Stef's kids are bunking at Camp Kesem (kesem.org), communing with nature and other children of cancer people. It's free! It's fantastic! We stan! Amy's prepping for fat grafting surgery, but rest assured, her boobs will always turn heads at Trader Joe's. Then, fertility feelings: we've (almost) all got ‘em. We'd love to hear from you, pals, but until then, consider: do our triggers need to take center stage? (….don't say “stage”!) Finally, we take on the ‘warrior' problem, for the honor of ONJ. Maybe some script-flipping is in order! In any case, it's all up…or down…hill from here! Birthday babe Jessica Boudreaux (Summer Cannibals) new album here. Empowered Mastectomy is here.RATS: The WCRF article is hereComparison of Cancer-Related Spending and Mortality Rates in the US the best vs 21 High-Income Countries” by Ryan D. Chow, Ph.D., Elizabeth H. Bradley, Ph.D. and Cary P. Gross, MD, 27 May 2022, JAMA Health Forum. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2792761https://scitechdaily.com/the-us-spends-200-billion-each-year-on-cancer-care-we-might-not-be-getting-our-moneys-worth/

BID IN THE AUCTION NOW: https://www.pwccmarketplace.com/weekly-auction?listing_filter=1&sort_by=price_high TONIGHT IS ALL FOR THE KIDS! Whatever proceeds come from this nearly 200 card auction will be donated to Camp Kesem to send kids whose parents are impacted by cancer to camp for free.

CAMP KESEM PREVIEW AUCTION! 100% of the proceeds are getting donated to Camp Kesem to send kids who are impacted by cancer to camp for free. Sign-up for The Daily Slab newsletter: https://www.slabstox.com Create your Card Ladder account here: https://app.cardladder.com/signup?via=slabstox - All-time sales history | Sales data from 14 sources | Track your collection. Bid in the PWCC Weekly Auction now: https://pwccmarketplace.pxf.io/DVqG9q Receive $10 in Whatnot credit for FREE when signing up through this link: https://www.whatnot.com/invite/slabstox

New year, new PWCC auctions! We're going to be targeting rare cards in attempts to flip our way to a grail by the end of the year. Track our journey every Sunday starting at 9:45pm ET. We can't wait to see where this goes! Bid in the PWCC Weekly Auction here: https://pwccmarketplace.pxf.io/DVqG9q *We are a paid partner and affiliate of PWCC* - We maintain full autonomy in our content creation, bidding and what we purchase. All opinions are our own.

Kathy, Mads and Kelsey welcome their first ever guest of the Mourning Crew, Claire! Claire and Kathy met as counselors for Camp Kesem and she lost her dad when she was 12 too. Claire is recently engaged, so we cover how losing a parent impacts wedding planning--both what she wants to do to honor him and what she wants to avoid. Additionally, we talk about experiences attending weddings and how this massive life milestone with so much tradition and pressure is often a big reminder of the person who's not there. We share ideas of how to include that person on your special day and tips on how to manage grief while attending one.Instagram @themourningcrew / Email: themourningcrew@gmail.com / The Mourning Crew Facebook Page / Mental Health Resources

We just received a massive 90-card grading submission from SGC and we're sharing every one of them in this huge reveal. Join SlabStox on our journey of buying, grading and flipping sports cards. We're documenting the process, opening up our tracker and showing the results. You can learn along the way--from the ups, downs, hits and misses. We'll share our strategies, wins and missteps. In this episode of Slab Reveals: · Which investment received a COU (Counterfeit) instead of a grade? · Biggest winners and losers · Which two cards received SGC gold labels? Many of the cards from Slab Reveals will be sold at The National or land on the PWCC Weekly Auction, and we'll track them on our Flip Quest 2022 live show, 9:45 p.m. ET on Sundays. If you liked this show tracking sports cards from buy, grade to sell, please LIKE, SUBSCRIBE and COMMENT below. Grade with SGC here: https://www.gosgc.com Sign-up for The Daily Slab newsletter: https://www.slabstox.com Follow @SlabStox on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slabstox/ 0:00 - Intro 0:34 - Camp Kesem 2022 1:48 - SGC Submission Tracking 3:56 - SGC Slab Reveals 19:02 - Profit Breakdown

Can you outsmart other collectors? We ask 15 TOUGH trivia questions today to really get your brain pumping for sports cards! Sign-up for The Daily Slab newsletter: https://www.slabstox.com Create your Card Ladder account here: https://app.cardladder.com/signup?via=slabstox - All-time sales history | Sales data from 14 sources | Track your collection. Bid in the PWCC Weekly Auction now: https://pwccmarketplace.pxf.io/DVqG9q Receive $10 in Whatnot credit for FREE when signing up through this link: https://www.whatnot.com/invite/slabstox

Medical school is hard and can even wear you down! This week my special two guests, Pickles (Tri Pham) and Guac (Raj Dalal), and I talk about the origins of our unique friendship and what we've all been doing for the past five years (wow, it's been that long!). Our conversation also dabbles into Camp Kesem (hey, I really love this non-profit org, okay?) and a little bit of our research projects. ENJOY THIS FREAKING EPISODE!!!Lab Shenanigans Merch:https://labshenanigansmerch.com/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We debate the biggest sports cards in the industry, everything from the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle to the 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan to the 2018 Panini Kaboom Sam Darnold. Lou Geneux from Card Talk Pod joins us to assess the values and determine if they're underrated or overrated. Jump in on our SX Breaks at https://www.slabstox.com/shop/ Sports Card Market Analytics Track Your Investments FOR FREE SlabStoxPro Available Now! pro.slabstox.com To donate to Camp Kesem through SlabStox: https://donate.kesem.org/fundraiser/3146325

Chris and I recall our days in middle school and high school together and people who have impacted us. He talks about his college experience, involvement with Camp Kesem, chess, and more!

Jump in on our SX Breaks at https://www.slabstox.com/shop/ Sports Card Market Analytics Track Your Investments FOR FREE SlabStoxPro Available Now! pro.slabstox.com To donate to Camp Kesem through SlabStox: https://donate.kesem.org/fundraiser/3146325

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Naomi Shah is the founder and CEO of Meet Cute. We discuss Naomi's early passion for STEM, being a Goldman Sachs equity trader, leaving VC to be a founder, why a rom-com podcast network solves a problem in the wellbeing market, raising $6M of capital during COVID, and how a non-Hollywood background makes her a better media entrepreneur.Subscribe to our newsletter. We explore the intersection of media, technology, and commerce: sign-up linkLearn more about our market research and executive advisory: RockWater websiteFollow The Come Up on Twitter: @TCUpodEmail us: tcupod@wearerockwater.com---EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: Chris Erwin:Hi, I'm Chris Erwin. Welcome to The Come Up, a podcast that interviews entrepreneurs and leaders. Naomi Shah:At the early stages, it was exploratory, "Let's make one of these stories, let's figure out how this process works." I was actually on the investment team at USV when I started working on this idea. I had a really close relationship with the partners at USV, two or three months into building this, they said, "Why don't you come in and pitch us more formally." And that was a crazy experience of being in the same room that I'd sat in for the last two years listening to pitches and being on the other side of the table pitching my old colleague. Chris Erwin:This week's episode features Naomi Shah, the founder and CEO of Meet Cute. Naomi grew up in Portland, and one of her earliest memories is not just learning to walk, but specifically walking to the local science museum. So from an early age, Naomi had a love for STEM and actually ended up going to Stanford to study mechanical engineering and human biology. But, her early career took her to Wall Street, first as an equities trader at Goldman Sachs, and then as an investor at Union Square, focusing on the intersection of entertainment and wellbeing. But after hearing hundreds of pitches and learning the power of story to convince her partners to invest, Naomi only decided to flip the script. Chris Erwin:She felt a large portion of the wellbeing market was under invested, and so wanted to create a product that mirrored the benefit of tech-powered health solutions, but done differently. And so Meet Cute, the rom-com podcast and modern media company was born. Naomi is one of the youngest founders I've interviewed on the show, and it was a lot of fun getting to know her over the past couple of months. Some highlights of our chat include growing up a tomboy, her love for the "Flubber room", how her family inspired her workplace culture, raising $6 million of startup capital during COVID, and how a non Hollywood background makes her a better media entrepreneur. All right. Let's get into it. Chris Erwin:Naomi. Thanks for being on the podcast. Naomi Shah:Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Chris Erwin:As we always do, let's dive back a little bit. I'm curious to know a little bit more about where you grew up and what your household and parents were like, so tell me about that. Naomi Shah:I grew up in Portland, Oregon, loved growing up there. I always say it's like a small little big town. It has all the elements of a big city, but just geographically smaller, fewer people. And I grew up with my mom, my dad and my older brother, Preem. My older brother is two and a half years older than me, I always felt like I was chasing him, following in his footsteps in various ways, and we're still very close. Chris Erwin:When you say you always felt like you were following in his footsteps, was it because of like different hobbies he had or sports or friend groups or things he was doing in school? What do you mean by that? Naomi Shah:I would say when I was younger, I was pretty tomboyish just like in terms of what he did. So if he wore Pokemon shirts, I wore Pokemon shirts, if he was playing Pokemon, I was doing that. If he was like roughhousing with his friends at the playground, I was doing that, I was always kind of chasing him. I would also say that as I grew up, because we both went to the same high school, I was always Preem's little sister in high school, and so all the teachers knew me as Preem's little sister. So it was just always part of my identity growing up. Chris Erwin:And was he excited to have you following him around or was it like, "Ugh, my little sister's here. This is annoying." Naomi Shah:No, my brother is somehow is super mature and always took care of me and was totally fine bringing me around. Even to this day, if he's hanging out with his friends, he's always like, "Oh yeah, my sister's in town, she'll come hang out with us." Chris Erwin:Jumping forward. But describing yourself as a tomboy growing up, and now you run a rom-com podcast network, a little bit of a funny juxtaposition there. Naomi Shah:Absolutely. I think it's hilarious. And even as a tomboy growing up, I loved rom-coms and I identified with a lot of the protagonists in rom-coms because one of my favorite ones growing up, Bend It Like Beckham was about a woman who really loved soccer and her parents wanted her to be the like classic good, perfect girl. And she was like, "Why can't I be that and play soccer?" Same thing with She's The Man. And so I always identified with that type of tension where I knew that I could play soccer, be really good at soccer, and still be a woman. I could really care about science and math and still wear makeup if I wanted to. Naomi Shah:And kind of taking away the tension between those two things was something that was really important to me growing up and something that I really appreciate that my mom spent a lot of time on with me. She's like, "Just because you do science fairs and you like swimming and soccer, it doesn't mean you can't care about what you wear and want to look nice and all of these other things that people associate with being feminine." And so I really liked being able to do both of those, and I think that that's a big part of my identity today. Chris Erwin:Speaking of your parents, you're just talking about your mom, what were your parents like? So we know that you have an early history and interest in STEM, today you're media and entertainment executive. Is that inspired by your parents at all? What did they do? Naomi Shah:My parents ran a company together, it was a software consulting company. And so pretty early on in life, my brother and I were exposed to my parents being leaders. And they would bring work home with them, they would talk about it at dinner, they'd talk about it when we were on family vacations. And so I always saw myself in a role where I was impacting a lot of change in an organization, not really knowing what that meant. More tactically, both my parents went to business school and studied business, so I always imagined that past for myself. It turns out I didn't end up going to business school and I just threw myself into founding. And I feel like I've picked up a lot of the things just by practicing it day to day that I would have learned in business school. Naomi Shah:So I kind of felt like I'd stepped off of their path there, but it was inspired by seeing how they ran a company together when they were in their early 20s and early 30s. Chris Erwin:Co-owners and co-running this company? Naomi Shah:Yeah. Yes. My mom was the president, my dad was the vice president. Chris Erwin:You think of things of like, okay, the family income is not diversified. It's not like if one person loses their job or the company goes under, the other one's okay. But it's also like, they work together, spend so much time together. I'm sure a lot of it went swimmingly, but there's probably times and it was difficult and challenging. Did that come into the home front as well? Naomi Shah:I can't remember that happening. And I think they did a good job of making sure that they protected us from that. To be completely honest, when I was growing up, all I knew is that my parents ran a company together, I didn't really look into what they were doing, what the company did, all of that. So I felt like I was sheltered from that a bit. I'm sure it did. I'm sure that there was a lot of complexities to running a company and they probably had to work through that, and they spent a lot of time together. But I think that they split up the roles and responsibilities both at home and at work in a way that worked really well for them. Naomi Shah:And there was also a lot of flexibility that you get from that, like my mom was there to pick us up from school and if we got sick, she would take care of us. When my mom would travel for work trips, my dad would turn into, we joked he was Mr. Mom and he would make all over meals for us and drop us off to play dates. And so they really shared the load. And I think that that has played into not only like how I see running a company and making sure that people feel ownership over different parts of it, but also how we think about relationships and how work and relationships can be a symbiotic relationship and not in tension with each other. Chris Erwin:That's well put. I was going to ask you, does entrepreneurship run in the family? Clearly. And, what are the values of your parents as entrepreneurs that inspired how you run your company, how you find balance, how you empower different relationships on your team? I think the note that you just gave on that is really thoughtful. Now, it's like middle school going into high school, how early does this theme around STEM interest and passion start? Naomi Shah:I think it starts probably early, early on in our lives. I could imagine learning to walk and going to a science museum around the same time. In Portland, Oregon, there's a science museum called The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. And I just remember being maybe three or four years old and being in this Flubber room where you could just touch and play around with Flubber, and you're experimenting with how it's made and you're pressing it into different shapes and things like that. Naomi Shah:And my brother and my dad would be over in the chemistry and physics labs, and my mom would be in the Flubber room with me and I'd be walking around touching things and being like, "Why does this work this way? And what is this?" And they really encouraged us from a young age to not be scared of asking questions, not feel you're dumb because you don't understand how something works. And I think that they took it upon themselves to make sure that if we showed interest in something, that whatever that thing was, whether it was science or dance or writing, that they would help promote that curiosity in that space. Naomi Shah:And so I think that the curiosity piece has probably started way earlier than middle school, but my first foray into STEM and being interested in that happened in sixth grade, I would say when we were all, I remember this very vividly, we were all in the library at my middle school and our science teacher was like, "Everyone needs to do a science project this year. Go on Wikipedia, go on Google, go look for topics that you're curious about." And I was like, "That's an insane thing to ask a group of sixth graders. The world is huge, we're curious about so many things." Naomi Shah:And I remember like coming up with a list of topics that I was interested in and I ended up scratching all of them off, because I was like, "I want to do something that relates to my life and people in my life." And so what I ended up working on in sixth grade was a project around air quality and lung health because both my brother and my dad had allergies. And that was really the first time that I was setting up a research question, coming up with hypotheses, figuring out how to go about experimenting around it. And that process was what made me very interested in STEM and the whole discovery process. Chris Erwin:I have to admit, there's not many sixth graders who when tasked with a project and they could be like, "Go research any topic that you find interesting," that you take a pause, you caveat the project and say, "How is this going to help other people? How has this maybe going to help my family?" And then air quality comes to mind. So I think that's probably a pretty rare trait. Naomi Shah:I think so too. And I can't like take credit for that, I honestly think that like my science teacher in sixth grade probably sat down and helped me a lot with narrowing on topics. I actually think my dad was pretty influential and being like, "If you want to spend hours and hours researching something, you have to make sure you care about it." I'm pretty sure I came home and was like, "I want to build a hovercraft." I think that felt like the most interesting thing to me where I was like, "This is the future of travel. Let me research how to do that." My dad was like, "Awesome, I think that could be a really good project. Is that something that you as a person, as a human are really interested in?" Naomi Shah:And so I think I took some time there to think about, "What are things that I would actually want to know the answer to?" And seeing my brother and dad have allergies six months out of the year, I was like, "Why does that happen?" And I started looking up just very basic Google searches around it and found that indoor air quality was one of the top five silent killers. There's so many things that we know about pollution, we know about outdoor pollution, but no one really thinks about the air pollutants in their home. And so I was like, "Wow, no one talks about this. I don't know the first thing about it. I'm pretty curious in terms of, how does this affect my family?" Naomi Shah:I make it sound like in the hour that I was given, I figured it out, but I think it was like many conversations later, lots of lists, lots of hypotheses around these questions, and then I probably came to it. Chris Erwin:Got it. Okay. So it starts at an early age. You're describing an interest in STEM and science dating back to when you can start walking and you can actually visit some of these museums. Sixth grade, this big question for a report. Then you end up going to Stanford, and you actually focus on mechanical engineering and human biology. So at this point, you're going to undergrad, what did you think that your career was going to be? Naomi Shah:To be completely honest, because I was so interested in human health and things that impacted human health, I went in thinking that I would be a surgeon. I thought I was going to be pre-med the last couple quarters of high school before I went to Stanford. At Stanford, I started by taking a core classes like math and science that I would need for either an engineering major or if I were to do human biology, those were the classes I would need. So I went through a period of being a little bit confused about what my career was going to be. I can't say that I was like, "This is definitely what I want to dedicate my life to." Naomi Shah:And I think that that's pretty common for people in that age to go through a period of, "I'm not really sure what I wanted to do, but I know that whatever I end up doing, I want it to have an impact in some way." So I started out with human biology as my main focus. And then sophomore year, I took my first mechanical engineering class, kind of on a whim. I was excited about Stanford as a great design school, and I was excited about just sitting in on one of the classes there, figuring out what about design and engineering is pulling me into trying a class here. So I took my first class and was fascinated by the whole process of. you start with an idea, you sketch it out, you design it, you build it, you do user testing around it, you interview people, and then you put the final touches on it and you figure out how this could become a product in the world. Naomi Shah:And I think that that process to me felt very similar to the science research process that I loved in high school. I also feel like the pace of engineering felt very perfect for my personality where it's like, in academia, I think you'd spend a lot longer answering the same question and you have to be a lot more... you have to like apply for a grant, be patient about how long it takes you to get to the final answer. Whereas in engineering, you learn the process, you understand it, and you constantly apply that process to building. And I really liked that hands-on experience that Stanford offered in the mechanical engineering department. Chris Erwin:What I'm hearing though is also, you had a builder mentality early on where you liked the scientific method and process of, have a hypothesis, research, get some data, but also, you don't want to be stuck in the system where you're researching forever, that you wanted to put things out into the world. Naomi Shah:Exactly. And I think that that is a really important point, which is that, even in my science research when I was looking at air quality and lung health, when I got to my results and conclusions phase of the project, I think someone who wanted to stay in academia would have said, "Okay, this is great. I'm going to go back into the lab now." For me, what was interesting is, how does this connect into policy? How does this connect into building a product that people can use? So I think that my natural tendency at that point was to say, "What is the connection between research and humans? Naomi Shah:And that's where I loved mechanical engineering and in building because you had something physical that people could interact with. And so that's where I realized that, "Okay, I'm interested in the interface between engineering and humans. And so when people ask me, do I regret minoring in human biology? I always say, "No, I loved those lectures. I loved sitting down and learning about human development, psychology, behavioral studies, all of that, because I think that informs a lot of how you build." And tying that to today, building a company, constantly, I feel like I'm going through that process of like, "Here's a question, let's come up with what we think is going to happen. Let's go test it. Let's sit down and look at our results. Now let's see how can we implement those results into the product to make it better for our users." Naomi Shah:So I actually think that a lot of the things that I worked on starting in middle school, in college, and after college are all tied in to each other, and the common thread is just that curiosity and in that scientific process of question, hypothesis, results, and then implications, like, how does that tie into something tangible that people can touch? Chris Erwin:This is helpful because I went into this interview, Naomi, as I started doing research for it, I was like, "Okay, what's the through line here?" I was like, "Naomi is running a modern day audio media company focused on micro casts rom-com scripted content. Got it." So as I'm doing the research, I'm like, "All right, early STEM focus, mechanical engineering, human biology." I was like, "How does this come together?" But I think you've woven a tale for our listeners that makes a lot of sense. And I will say I've interviewed a lot of people on the show, I don't think anyone has a background like yours. Chris Erwin:But now, I think you might be inspiring maybe a whole new breed of people to enter into media entertainment saying, "Well, if Naomi can do it and look at her success now, then we can do it." My guest pedigree might be changing over the next couple of years. Naomi Shah:I love that you pointed that out. What I really about Meet Cute and how we've built Meet Cute is that I think we approach the space of media and entertainment through beginner's mindset. And I think that scientists and researchers always have to have a beginner's mindset because you never know what your results are going to be or what the data is going to show. And so, I often feel like media entertainment is one of those spaces that people are like, "Do you have a production background? Do you have an agency background? Do you know people in the industry?" Naomi Shah:And I actually think it's a strength to say no to those because you've come up with new solutions, new ways of doing things, you bring a fresh perspective to it. And honestly, I love talking about the different paths that it could take to get into media and entertainment because, to your point, we can inspire new people to join this way of like flipping existing and traditional models in an industry. But two, I think that people who are already in the industry love having conversations with new people because they bring a different perspective to the table, they bring something that hasn't been done before to the table. Naomi Shah:And so I love having those types of conversations and being like, "Yeah, I actually have no idea how these deals are done before, but here's an idea. What do you think of this?" Chris Erwin:I'd like to point out that you said also about a beginner's mind. It reminds me, I interviewed Matthias Metternich on this podcast, he's the founder and CEO of Art of Sport. And before he did that, he's launched a consumer product and media brand around it., he was at I think a FinTech company, like a B2B FinTech business. He actually also ran a women's bathing suit retailer and manufacturer. And I was like, again, "What's the through line?" He's like, "I like to get into industries with a fresh mind and solve consumer problems." And he's like, "I think it gives me an advantage versus I've been in this vertical for 20 years." Chris Erwin:But anyway, Naomi, we could go down a whole tangent on this. Before we get into your early career, going into being an equities trader at Goldman and being an investor at Union Square, I also do want to ask, I saw that, there's a pretty strong through line of volunteerism throughout your history. I saw Camp Kesem, I saw a StreetSquash, and then I saw OMSI, if I'm pronouncing that right. And so I'm just curious, when did this start? And I know Camp Kesem is for kids with parents undergoing cancer treatment. Honestly, I don't know what StreetSquash is. So what are some of the inspiration for these groups that you're involved in? Naomi Shah:This is a testament to my parents who have always encouraged us to try and be involved in our community in some way. OMSI is actually the science museum that I used to run around as a kid, and I volunteered there in middle and high school, basically talking about science experiments with the next generation of kids. And so I loved the education aspect of it. I thought that it was a way to give back to the community in a way to be involved in bringing STEM into more people's lives. Because I think that especially there is a stigma around middle and high school, I think a lot of women who could be really interested in STEM stop taking classes around it. Naomi Shah:And they either think that it's not for them or they don't see their friends in it, so they stop taking them, and that trickles into the breakdown of how many females are in certain college majors when you get to college. While I didn't think about this all as an eighth grader, now looking back, I can see that that was one of the things I loved most about volunteering at OMSI, is being able to bring an excitement around STEM to people who might not otherwise care about it. Showing people that there were really cool applications in the world by pursuing this stuff was part of OMSI. Naomi Shah:Camp Kesem in college was a summer camp that I worked at for a week at the end of the school year, and it was all Stanford counselors. I actually do have a personal relationship to cancer in my family, and so that was an important liaison for me. And it was at the first time that I shared that experience publicly, it was the first time I opened up about it to people that weren't in my closest circles. And I think that that was a really great way to be a leader and like learn how to lead with vulnerability and learn how to lead with transparency and honesty. Naomi Shah:And I think I take a lot of the things that I learned from being a counselor at Kesem into the way that I want our team to function at Meet Cute today, or the way that I interacted with my coworkers at USV and Goldman. Something that I always say is like, "Don't check your personality at the door, bring a lot of those experiences into your work." And I think it makes you a stronger colleague, I think it makes you a better teammate, I think it's easier to have discussions and brainstorms when you know a little bit more about your coworkers without oversharing. I think that that's also an important boundary to strike. Naomi Shah:So that was Camp Kesem, I loved being a counselor, I loved being outdoors. It was a week of no phones, a week of- Chris Erwin:So rare nowadays. Naomi Shah:Exactly. I think that those four weeks one every year was the longest I've ever spent off of my phone probably since I got a cell phone in middle school. It's one of the most liberating things when you come back to the real world at the end of the week and your phone is just like for the next 20 minutes, just like blowing up. And you're like, "It's actually so important to get away from your phones, but we just don't do it." And then the last one, you mentioned StreetSquash. Before I moved to San Francisco last year, I lived in New York for three years. And I don't play squash, but StreetSquash is a program that merges squash practice with academic involvement. Naomi Shah:It takes place in Harlem, in New York. And it's a primarily a program for kids who are usually first-generation, want to develop skills in a sport and get better in their homework and in academics. And we bring those two things together. And I actually love that because sports have been a part of my life growing up. I loved playing soccer when I was little, I ended up swimming in middle and high school, I skied throughout a lot of my childhood. And I found that having extracurricular activities that took up time meant that I was just more dedicated and learned things like discipline and showing up in teamwork, and those were all things that I think I took into school projects, my internships, my jobs after college. Naomi Shah:So I loved the combination of those two. And I started out as an academic tutor at StreetSquash, and then the second two years ended up co-chairing the young leaders committee. So was involved in fundraising, was involved in managing the board, all of that. Chris Erwin:Very cool. So now leaping forward a bit. You come out of Stanford, Naomi, and head to Wall Street, you become an equities trader at Goldman. Curious, what got you excited about going into finance? That was a path that I took right out of undergrad as well. What was the thinking? Naomi Shah:Yeah. I actually did an internship at Goldman my junior year. They came to campus and talked about how engineers that wanted to work on fast-paced problems could find a spot on the trading floor. Really interesting. And I was thinking about it and I was like, "I love patterns." When I think about science research, when I think about even mechanical engineering, I love looking for patterns in data and learning about why those exist and what we can learn from those patterns. And what was exciting to me about the trading floor is looking for those patterns in the public market, like how does this conflict internationally affect oil prices? Or how does a change in leadership in this government affect jobs? And things like that. Naomi Shah:So I think that I was just genuinely curious and I'd never applied it to thinking about the public markets until I started working at Goldman, and I loved the idea of working on projects that involve that data to the point that you were making earlier, applying that to something very directly, applying that to trades and making trades. So I can connect that in my mind to just curiosity and not really caring what the physical product was that I was working on, but instead caring about the process to get to that product. And so I actually loved my internship there. I really was excited about working in New York, about like that fast-paced lifestyle. Chris Erwin:You grew up in Portland you lived there your whole life, and then you were West Coast at Stanford, but you had never lived on the East Coast? Naomi Shah:Exactly. And I think part of me wanted to have one of those classic New York jobs. I think I was enamored by it. I loved the idea of waking up at... This is going to sound crazy, but I love the idea of waking up at like 5:30, grabbing a coffee and just being on all day. And I thinks that my personality has that intensity to it where I like the grind. And I think that that is part of what Goldman provided. They were like, "Yeah, everyone here is really smart and grinds, and you will be surrounded by people who will push you, will ask you questions. Will say, 'Why did you do that?'" And I really liked that. I thought that was a very important and pivotal part of my first job out of college. Chris Erwin:And what that sounds like to me, that's an early 20s love story with New York. Naomi Shah:Totally. Chris Erwin:I grew up in the tri-state area, Jersey Shore. And so I was super pumped about going into finance, being on Wall Street, being in New York, right out of undergrad, like you, Naomi, being like, "I'm going to work 24/7." To the point where I was walking around like delirious, because it was banking 7:00 AM to 4:00 AM, seven days a week. But it's funny, I'm seeing your eyes light up, which is probably reminiscent of when you were in your early 20s doing it. Now, you write about love stories, maybe you just got a theme for an upcoming Meet Cute show. Naomi Shah:We like to say that there's a rom-com every situation, so if there are there billion people in the world, there are nine billion rom-coms, and you can definitely see one happening around finance and the culture there. But yeah, I completely agree with you, I think that there is absolutely a... I wanted to live in New York, I wanted to have a job that pushed me really hard. I loved the culture around grinding. And I think that that was really a part of what made me sign a return offer at Goldman and come back as an equities trader. I really liked how fast paced the markets were. And I felt it played to a lot of my strengths. Naomi Shah:I always told people, "I don't think you need to be a finance major to go get a really good job in banking, I think you can be an art history major and apply that to banking. I think you can be an engineer and think of ways to automate and create process around trading." And I think that was what stood out on my resume to Goldman, where it was the scientific process, applying that to trading, how do you ask questions and create processes around answering those questions? And that's really the direction that banks want to go now. But what I've found there is that it didn't hit on the creativity part of what I was excited about. Naomi Shah:So I almost felt like a repetition to what I was doing that I liked at first, and then I started thinking, I don't know if this is what I want to do five or 10 years later. And I miss the creativity from building and college, from my mechanical engineering classes that said, "Okay, you have this idea. Now, go create it in the world, create something new that no one has seen before, and do it from scratch." And I missed that. So that's really what caused me to make the jump to venture capital, where I could work with early-stage founders and learn from them and learn that process of building something from scratch. Naomi Shah:And so that was what excited me about early-stage venture and about Union Square Ventures when I applied for that job, Chris Erwin:I also have to ask you just an inside question about Goldman and macro market trading. I know everyone likes to predict the markets of like, "Oh, there's a big governmental shift over here, some regulatory shift over there. Macro economic prices are soaring, they're falling." I think there's so much noise in the market that is actually very difficult to say, "Oh, because X happened, Y is then going to be the results," because you don't know the big institutional traders making their big market investments at incredible volume. Were you guys actually able to pinpoint specific market activity? I find that to be like so challenging for the retail traders that I talk to. Naomi Shah:Well, I definitely think you're right. I think that there is so much volatility and a lot of things can change an outcome of a trade. One of the interesting things is like, you have to be very good at taking risks in that role because you have no idea what the outcome could be. The market could move against you because something happens and you have to be really fast at trading out of that position. But I will say that there are a lot of research projects that you can do to say, "If this trade was executed... " Say for instance like oil prices crashed, "Well, what happened to these three prices when oil prices crashed five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago?" Naomi Shah:So you can map out what you think is going to happen, what you predict is going to happen based on historical trade data and figure out patterns in that that create more educated hypotheses about what will happen today. And who knows, there could be so many confounding variables, so that's why you have to put a 95% confidence interval around it and then be okay with that 5% of risk where it's like, if something else happens that isn't part of your model, that'll move the needle on what the outcome of your trade is. Naomi Shah:Surprisingly, markets are so cyclical and you can come up with a lot of predictions based on historical trade data. And that's where the pattern recognition comes in. Chris Erwin:Very helpful. When you leave Goldman, I think you were there for about a year, did Union Square reach out to you or were you proactively looking for your next one? Naomi Shah:I was surprisingly not really aware that venture capital was a career path. And at that point, I think no one I knew was in VC, and so I didn't really understand what a job or a career in VC looked like, but I was looking around at different startups and different companies. And I stumbled upon the USV Blog, which is a dynamic blog that they post about their investments. And so I read back two or three years in their blog, like why did they make an investment in Twitter? Why did they make an investment in Duolingo? Why did they make an investment in SoundCloud and Etsy? Naomi Shah:And I was fascinated by, it's a very different risk profile than public markets because you're taking these like eight to 10 year bets on companies at the earliest stage of an idea, you're taking a bet on the idea and the founder. And I love reading why they took that bet, what convinced them to do it. And I felt like it was a really good example of taking some pattern recognition, which I think I had affinity towards and then taking some like creativity and intuition and saying like, "What do we want the world to look like in five years?" So I was reading their blog and then around that time, they actually put out a call for analysts and there was this two year analyst program. Naomi Shah:So in that evening that I was starting to read and stuff, I just submitted an application. I literally spent like a few hours on it, and the application was closing soon, so I probably just like made it into the application pool right as it was closing, and talked about what I found interesting about VC. And I think that one of the questions was, here are three companies, talk about whether you think they're overvalued or undervalued. And I obviously used a lot of my training from Goldman to answer that question, but then I applied a separate lens to it, which is like, what as a user do I think this company is doing well? I think I picked Snapchat, Chris Erwin:Were you bullish or bearish on Snapchat back then? Because now Snapchat is crushing it, but there were a lot of skepticism over the past. Naomi Shah:I was bullish. And I think that was rare. I think everyone else that just Snapchat was bearish at that time. And I pointed to a bunch of things that I thought they were doing really well and setting themselves apart. And maybe we're going through a tough few years, but I thought that they had a long-term view on a lot of things. And so I think that that was a pretty unique perspective. And then I backed it up with a few quantitative and qualitative points. Chris Erwin:What I like that I'm hearing from you is I think just going through your background, if you look at like STEM, engineering, biology, it was very defined data sets, very defined research methods and hypothesis creation. But I think then as you were saying, at Goldman, something you were missing was like, what's the creativity? What's the art and the science? And I think going into venture investing, and you're starting to read these theses on their blog, you're like, "Look, there's some market data and information, but the data sets are a lot less defined." And you have to trust your gut and have a different set of judgments. Chris Erwin:So it feels like the creativity vein you saw a lane for you that was building off of yet a financial background still got you excited, but this is clearly setting you up for even going deeper once you started Meet Cute, is that right? Naomi Shah:Also I'm very impressed with how you articulate things, because these are things that I've just started articulating to myself after years of doing this. And these are the types of things that I love thinking about. So absolutely. I think that venture investing is an art and a science. I think that founding a company is an art and a science. I love using both sides of my brain. I think that I didn't realize early on in my life that you could find a perfect fit that uses both sides of your brain. I love going deep and brainstorming and thinking creatively about things that don't exist. And I call it like my big picture brain. Naomi Shah:And then I love going into the details in the operations and saying, how does this actually work tactically? What are the steps we need to follow to get there? And I think both of those exist in venture investing and in founding a company. And at USV, I would do five to 10 coffee meetings with founders every week, and sifting through all of those conversations where every person is so passionate about what they're building was one of the coolest things. And a lot of it is intuition, you go into a founder meeting, which conversations make you lean forward and say, "This is the next big thing. This is what I want to invest in"? Naomi Shah:You get that when you feel that and when you find those companies, it's the best feeling in the world. And then it was my job as an analyst at USV to convince the team or one of the partners at USV, why they should spend more time with this company and meeting them. And so part of it was I had to tell a story to my team. And so there was like a storytelling component to venture capital that I think really trickled in. And I've pulled into things that I do at Meet Cute today, which is, we're a storytelling company, we're also a business that reports to investors. Chris Erwin:Hey listeners, this is Chris Erwin, your host of The Come Up. I have a quick ask for you. If you dig what we're putting down, if you like the show, if you like our guest, it would really mean a lot if you can give us a rating wherever you listen to our show. It helps other people discover our work, and it also really supports what we do here. All right, that's it, everybody, let's get back to the interview. Chris Erwin:I'm curious about the exposure to audio, because I was looking at the Union Square portfolio, I know Headgum is an audio network. That investment was made by, I think it was after your time there or in the latter half. So what was the exposure to podcasting and audio and how did the actual like idea of Meet Cute start coming to be? When you were there, I may have read that maybe some partners approached you about it, but elaborate. Naomi Shah:Like I said, I was spending a lot of time in the wellbeing category of our portfolio. And what I was excited about was there was an under-invested category within wellbeing in venture capital. And I wanted us to be looking at that category more seriously. And that was, what do people do for fun? So Chris, what do you do for fun when you're like trying to blow off steam? Chris Erwin:I like to surf and be in the ocean and in the water. Naomi Shah:Okay. That's a great example of it's not prescriptive, no one is telling you, you have to do this. It's not a meditation, it's not healthcare, it's not mental health, but that supports your mental health, that makes you feel good. Similarly, people like reading books, watching movies, scrolling on Netflix, listening to podcasts, listening to music, going to concerts. So I was like, "If we could find a company in the media and entertainment space that felt like a product or technology investment that mirrors in the investments that we've made in product and technology, that'd be pretty cool. That'd be a great coming together of two different categories." Naomi Shah:And so I started looking for a company in that space and spent a lot of time on it. And eventually was very excited about short form content, very excited about audio, very excited about a verticalized media company that created a niche for itself in a massive market that could attract many consumers through network effects. And so to be honest, you can do what we're doing in many different mediums, many different genres, but we just had conviction in audio and in romantic comedies. And that's why we started there. Naomi Shah:And so I was actually on the investment team at USV when I started working on this idea, I was working really closely with one of the partners, Andy Weissman, who also led the Headgum Investment. And at first it was like an incubation, I was literally working out of the USV office. It was only when I started building a team around it did we spin it out and make it a portfolio company rather than a project within USV. Chris Erwin:Seems like you're starting to operate as like an EIR, where you're an investor there, and then you're probably increasingly spending more time here, your passion is here. And so your role is changing at the company. Naomi Shah:Yes. And there was like a six-month period where I was just doing two jobs at once. I was looking for investments, and then also spending a ton of time building out the earliest stages of an idea and business model around what ended up being Meet Cute. At that time we were calling it something else. It was a very unique path to founding where I had a really close relationship with the partners at USV. They trusted me, they knew me. And so two or three months into building this, they said, "Why don't you come in and pitch us more formally?" Naomi Shah:And that was a crazy experience of being in the same room that I had sat in for the last two years listening to pitches and being on the other side of the table pitching my old colleagues at USV. Chris Erwin:Naomi, I have to ask, when you started working on Meet Cute, did you have conviction like, "This is it. I know this is a great idea. I'm going to build this"? Or was it more exploratory, which is like, "I think there's something here, let's see where it goes"? Naomi Shah:At the early stages, it was exploratory. It was, "Let's make one of these stories. Let's actually figure out how this process works. Do people like this? Is there a certain time constraint that we can apply to it?" And I think that keeping things flexible in the early stages of a company means that you get to learn from user feedback, you get to learn from listening data and engagement data. And so I like to say that we definitely have conviction in certain things, like we said, we want these stories to be uplifting and positive because there is a gap in that market, but keeping certain things open to feedback and listening data was really important to us too. Naomi Shah:So I would say it's definitely, it started out more exploratory, it started out trying to figure out how this works and how we can build it. And a big reason for that is the founding team at Meet Cute, didn't have experience in doing this. And so it was really an experiment to say, "Is this a good idea first? And then now let's fundraise around it and let's build a team around it to execute. Chris Erwin:Now, the tables are turned. You're now pitching the partners at Union Square for a company that you want to found, and you're asking them for money. So how does that go down? Naomi Shah:The biggest part of that pitch was taking a bet on a new idea where we're essentially bringing Hollywood and a product company together, and taking a bet on me as a former colleague of theirs. I think that there was a lot of comfort in the idea that I was pitching people I knew. So there was that kind of ease in it, but there was a completely new paradigm that I was now on the other side of the table, I was a founder and I was looking for the right fit in terms of like, are they asking me questions? Are they pushing me? And they absolutely did. Naomi Shah:They asked me, why are you thinking about it this way? What is the vision of the company? And I loved that. And I think it showed me early on that as a solo founder, you want investors who are going to challenge you and who are going to almost like build alongside you. They're not just going to put the capital in and then step back. And so part of the fundraising process for me was learning to be able to find investors that were really involved in hands-on. And I'd seen at Union Square Ventures, the way that the team did that with other portfolio companies. Naomi Shah:And so I was really excited about them being involved in Meet Cute, even though they're not traditional media entertainment investors, we were approaching it from a different way and they were very excited about that. So that was a big part of the pitch. A big part of it is leaving room for experimentation to the point we were just talking about and saying, "I'm okay, not knowing all the answers today, but here's what I think, and here's the things that I want to test. And here's the team that we have around Meet Cute to go execute on that." Naomi Shah:And I think that setting it up like that is a really strong way for a seed company to say, "We don't have all the answers, but we're about to go figure it out and work really hard to do that." Chris Erwin:I think that's well put. Look, I'm a strategic advisor for companies and I always have to tell the team, "Yes, we're known to be the experts, but we don't have to have all the answers in the moment. It's more about, let's have a point of view, a vision. Let's also stand in our power where we don't know the answers, but let's have a plan for how we can figure that out thoughtfully." And I think that when you take that approach with confidence, it actually instills a lot of confidence in an investor, in a client. So I think that shows great self-awareness, Naomi. Naomi Shah:Absolutely. And honestly, these were things that I picked up from getting pitched to a lot, where sometimes I would be in a conversation with a founder where I'd suggest, "Have you thought of this? Or what do you think of this?" And if they hadn't thought of it, but they were willing to engage in conversation around it or say, "I'm not sure, I need to look into that," and have that humility that maybe they don't have all the answers, I was like, "That might be a founder that is really fun to have brainstorms with and discussions with because they're open to learning." Naomi Shah:And I actually think that if you have all the answers, then you'd already be a massive success, whereas at the earliest stages of founding, a lot of things are still unproven. Chris Erwin:After this pitch, do you get the funding? I think it's a $3 million seed. Does that happen pretty quickly? Naomi Shah:Happens pretty quickly. And a big reason is that I raised from people that I knew. Plus, we brought in Advancit Capital, which is Shari Redstone's investment team. I already had a team around Meet Cute of founding team. We already had our head of content and head of development. And so we go right into making a story. We now have capital to start testing this out. And we start bringing in creators around us like writers, producers, voice actors, and just start developing relationships in the field. A lot of this is trial and error. Naomi Shah:And so we start saying like, "It doesn't make sense to have a writing team in-house. It does it make sense to go get a studio space or rent studio space. How do we open up a bank account?" And so I had this like ongoing checklist of things. Some of them is super trivial, how do we get an EIN number? All these things that I had never had to do before. And so I just asked a ton of questions of people around me and asked for help when we needed it. And that was what the first few months of starting was like, it was just, this fire comes up, let's put it out, let's try it again. Naomi Shah:We don't know the answer to this question, let's go ask an expert in the field and send out a few cold emails. And that was the process of figuring it out. Chris Erwin:I think you finalized the funding in January of 2020. So this is just right before COVID is hitting. But at this point, have you released any content? Naomi Shah:Our first series came out in December of 2019. So we did put some content out there, and no one knew about us at that point, so we just sent it around to people we knew, friends and family, asked for feedback, posted it on social media. We were just trying to get our earliest beta testers, for lack of better word, to give us feedback. Chris Erwin:How was it received? Naomi Shah:It was received really well. People really liked the short form. Some people hated it and were like, "This is never going to work." And then it was up to us to take certain feedback with a grain of salt and say, "No, we want to make another one. We think this is going to work." Overall, feedback was very positive, it was really fun to see even not being discoverable in the podcast platforms, yet we were getting some organic lessons from people, sharing us with their friends. Our creators that worked on that story shared as far and wide, like the voice actors, the producers, the developers of that story. Naomi Shah:And that was really encouraging to us to see how proud the people who worked on it were and how they wanted to make sure everyone in their networks knew about it too. So pretty quickly we had like a few hundred people listening to the story and qualitatively getting some feedback around what engagement. And listening was like, it encouraged us enough to make the next few in January. Chris Erwin:I know that at RockWater for our content, some of the most powerful ambassadors are just our internal team. So after we podcast or publish a writing piece, they help spread the word and then hopefully it catches fire elsewhere. That's how you build initially. I have to ask, one of your themes has building a really diverse set of creatives, and also which then enable very diverse rom comedies, micro cast stories from a values perspective, from geography, from ethnicity, from gender, sexual orientation. Was that part of the mandate from very early on, or is that something that evolved in the beginning of it? Naomi Shah:That was something that we made a conscious decision about. So rather than building out an internal team of writers and producers, we thought if we can open a network of people that can participate in Meet Cute and can participate in our creative process, that's going to be a part of our business model to have multiple voices, that diversity and inclusivity piece that we valued as a company, but now it's baked into the way that we create. So I think that at first, it was just we want those voices to be a part of Meet Cute because we think that will create better storytelling, and that was important to us. Naomi Shah:And over time we were like, "This is our MO. This is something that we're doing that no one else has. We have the largest network of creatives because we're enabling people from multiple geographies, people from any sexual orientation, people from around the world to participate in our storytelling. And so I would say, it's both a business value and it's a creative value at Meet Cute that we think that the stories that were told from people who might not have a voice in media and entertainment today otherwise, we get to benefit from their storytelling because they care about the stories that they tell. Naomi Shah:They share it with their communities, they write stories for communities that might not be represented in pop culture. And that means that those stories are making our platform more diverse and inclusive in a really organic way. And what's important to Meet Cute is that we don't tokenize those communities. We're not saying, "This is a story from the LGBTQ community." No, we want that to be normalized in our feed, and just to be another rom-com, all of these stories are rom-coms. There are multiple ways to love in the world, and we want to be the brand that captures all of those stories. Chris Erwin:I really like that. Speaking to another very strategic decision that you made early on was micro casts. This is something that's near and dear to my heart and that of the RockWater team. We launched a micro cast podcast ourselves called the RockWater Roundup over the past few months, where you get your industry news in like 10 to 15 minutes. The reason behind that, we've been evangelizing this to our clients is because the growth of smart speakers expected to be like a 650 million install base over the next few years. Chris Erwin:We think it's going to bring audio into the home, more routine-based listening, listening in between your day-to-day moment. So that's probably like shorter time. And then Spotify has their playlist and they're curating for you and they want to have shorter snippets to pull in, we think that there's a lot of tailwinds of like micro cast is an exciting format, but it still hasn't caught on in the broad industry. But you guys made this decision dating back nearly two years. So is that you're going to stick to, or are you also exploring long form? Tell me about that. Naomi Shah:Yeah. We really like, exactly to your point that these stories can fit in in your day, anywhere. Within our 15-minute stories, we have three-minute chapters. So on the way to a meeting or when you're waiting for your Uber or whatever it is, you can throw in a story and throw in a chapter and get a little escape from your day. And that to us was really exciting, because there are a lot of books out there that could be eight or nine hours, but it's just a bigger time commitment. And so we wanted to create a slightly new product and a new use case. Naomi Shah:And we're finding that people are consuming these throughout the day in the mornings when they're getting ready for work. Even though rom-coms traditionally are like your evening, Friday and Saturday entertainment, now we're pulling them into new parts of people's day because they're so accessible and they're so short that you can fit them in anywhere. And so to us, it was exciting that we could create new listening behavior around this genre. Chris Erwin:I like that. I like to read Modern Love from The New York Times. Like you said, Naomi, I typically read that maybe at night, on the weekends, it helps me relax, go to sleep with just like a good feel. But I was listening to one of your episodes, like a cruise episode because it reminded me I had lost love on a cruise line dating back 15 years. And I was like, "Oh, I got to check this out." And I just liked the feeling that it left me with. So I liked that you could start inserting this feeling like earlier in the day or midday, a little bit different. Naomi Shah:Exactly. Like you have a stressful meeting, you want 15 minutes of optimism, or hope, or human connection, we want Meet Cute to be the go-to place for that. And to your point, there is a lack of optimistic stories. If you think about Ted Lasso, I don't know if you've seen that? Chris Erwin:Oh, I love Ted Lasso. I just started watching the new season, it just came out. Naomi Shah:Yes. The second episode I think dropped yesterday, but I'm obsessed with it, and everyone that I've talked to is obsessed with it. And it's because there isn't that much content out there that isn't darker or anxiety ridden or doom-scrolling related. And I think people are craving that, especially after the last year, it was such a hard year. There were so many negative news cycles. You were scared about a lot of things in the world, and people want an escape. People want a consistent feeling of hope in their lives. Naomi Shah:And so you can get that through a Disney movie, you can get that through Ted Lasso. How do you get that around human connection and love? We think that there is a place in the world for that, and that's what we were hoping to build at Meet Cute. Chris Erwin:Naomi, before we wrap up with the Rapid Fire round at the end, I just want to hear, look, you launched a business right before COVID. COVID hits, you're a new young founder, incredible challenges, but clearly you guys are doing something right, because fast forward into the end of 2020, and you raise another six million. That I think is from Lerer Hippeau, Newark Venture Partners. And then it's off to the races. So tell me quickly, where is Meet Cute headed from here? What's the grand vision? Naomi Shah:Meet Cute vision for the company is to become the official source of romantic comedies. We want to be one of the largest entertainment brands on the order of magnitude of Disney and Pixar, and create universes that people fall in love with, characters that you want to wear on your sweatshirt and your tote bag. And honestly, be a best friend to people in the entertainment world because of the stories that we're telling. And so the core of that is being an incredible storytelling company, enabling creatives to do their work best, and building a verticalized media business that focuses on optimism, and hope, and human connection. Naomi Shah:So five years from now, we're still working on our audio stories, we can adapt some of those into other formats, into TV, film, books, live shows. We're selling merch for some of our biggest theories. We have a community of people that cares about the show and wants to listen to every series that comes out. I could go on and on. There's so many possibilities for what you can do, but at the core bit, it's become one of the greatest entertainment brands that's long lasting, that stays relevant and fresh, no matter how society evolves and pop culture evolves, we want to be at the apex of that. Chris Erwin:And right now, you're focused on building audience and you're not yet monetizing, is that right? Naomi Shah:We're focused on audience and community. That's correct. Chris Erwin:I get that you are preparing for the long term, the vision for five years, but we're in something that we talk about, we're in the middle of the audio wars, and you see incredible capital flows. Amazon buying Wondery, Amazon buying Art19. You see the exclusive rights deals for Call Her Daddy with Spotify, and also with SmartLess. You see SiriusXM buying Stitcher, and so much more. Is there a world where you must be thinking about, you may have already gotten inbounds for Meet Cute as an acquisition target? What do you think about that? Naomi Shah:Yeah, there is a ton of movement. There's new headlines every day in the podcast world, in the world of acquisitions. A lot of people are looking for exclusive content. I see Meet Cute as a large entertainment brand. And so working really hard to not get distracted in the meantime as we're building that and just focus on telling amazing stories and building our community, I think it does take putting blinders on. And our work is set out for us, and that's something that we're excited about in the next few years. Chris Erwin:Before the Rapid Fire, I just want to give you some kudos, Naomi. Going into this interview, I think I was telling you before, you're one of the youngest people that we've brought on in terms of your experience, your experience before actually starting a company, but I think it's been so rewarding for me to hear about coming from such a different background from so many other media and entertainment professionals that have interviewed that it's been very refreshing. And I think that you make a really great case for why a background like yours is so powerful and it's so relevant and could be a really strategic asset for you. Chris Erwin:That's great to hear for additional investment that might come your way, additional team members that you want to recruit, but I really think that your story could also start to recruit new founders into the media and entertainment ecosystem, which would be such a beautiful thing. I think overall, Hollywood, traditional and digital new Hollywood needs some rethinking, some new brains and muscles to add to the mix. And I think that you're really paving the way for it. And I think that how thoughtful you are for how you are building and how that's inspired by some of like your home grown roots and your parents is a really beautiful thing. So I think you're set up for some really great success. And I want to acknowledge that Naomi Shah:Thank you so much. That means so much coming from you. I think that like new founders in any space, rethinking things, flipping the status quo, building from scratch, I love seeing that kind of movement in an industry, especially one that has been around for so long and things are done a certain way. And so I'm very excited to be building in a space that we can rethink a lot of the existing assumptions. And I know the whole Meet Cute team is excited about that. So I appreciate you acknowledging that. And I think that more people should jump into feels that they might not have experiencing, but have good ideas around. Chris Erwin:All right. Now we're in the Rapid Fire round, six questions. The rules are that you can answer as short as possible. So it could be just one sentence, it could maybe even just be one or two words. Do you understand the rules, Naomi? Naomi Shah:I understand the rules. Chris Erwin:Proudest life moment? Naomi Shah:Meeting President Obama. Chris Erwin:Oh, wow. Okay. What do you want to do less of in 2021? Naomi Shah:Being a slave to Google Calendar? Chris Erwin:What do you want to do more of? Naomi Shah:Spending time on big picture vision for Meet Cute. Chris Erwin:Not setting up EIN numbers anymore? That mini-stuff. Naomi Shah:Not setting up the EIN numbers. That's right. Chris Erwin:What one to two things drive your success? Naomi Shah:Caring about community and the people around me. Chris Erwin:Advice for media execs going into the second part of 2021, and then into 2022? Naomi Shah:Have conviction even when things are really rocky, like a global pandemic, and don't overthink things. Chris Erwin:Yeah. Keep it simple, is a core value for us too. Any future startup ambitions? Naomi Shah:I like blinders, so I'm focused on Meet Cute right now. I think Meet Cute has a lot of potential in terms of new products and offshoots from Meet Cute. And so I'm excited to explore that more. Chris Erwin:Before I ask you the last one, I have to go back. What were the circumstances for meeting Obama? Naomi Shah:Honestly, that was the first thing that popped into my head. I think that the things that I'm proudest about are the science research that led me to meeting President Obama. It was just something I spent seven years working on it, and that was an example of hard work pays off. We got to visit the Oval Office and I have a really funny photo with him where I have like a Lego trophy and it fell on the floor, and all that. So that was the circumstance. Chris Erwin:I love that. Very cool. All right. Last one, this is easy. How can people get in contact with you? Naomi Shah:Any social media. I'm on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, DM me, follow Meet Cute. Love Responding to DMs and happy to chat. Chris Erwin:Awesome. Naomi, this has been a delight. Thank you so much for being on the show. Naomi Shah:Thank you so much for having me. This was awesome for me as well. Chris Erwin:Wow. It's amazing how much Naomi has accomplished so early on in her career, yet she's so down to earth. That was such a fun chat. Really enjoyed it. All right. In closing, reminder that one, we love to hear from all of our listeners. So shoot us a note. If you have any guest's ideas, any feedback for the show, you can reach us at tcupod@wearerockwater.com. And also that we have a new podcast that's out, it's called the RockWater Roundup, where me and my colleague, Andrew Cohen, we break down must-know medi

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THE NATIONAL IS HERE! Jump in on our SX Breaks at https://www.slabstox.com/shop/ To donate to Camp Kesem through SlabStox: https://donate.kesem.org/fundraiser/3146325 To support SlabStox, sign-up for our Investment Newsletter at https://www.slabstox.com (Sunday Slab Trends email box). PRE-REGISTER FOR SLABSTOXPRO at https://www.slabstox.com/slabstox/ - Trends | Analytics | Buy & Sell. We're bringing you the first all-inclusive sports card trading platform to track your investments while also transacting on new investments! Learn more at the link above. To receive all of our Instagram content, follow at https://www.instagram.com/slabstox/

Episode Notes We will be talking with the author of "Ordinarily Extraordinary". A story told from personal experiences of loss and overcoming by Patrick P. Long. Patricks lost wife Melanie to breast cancer 2 years ago and had to learn how to raise their 4 children alone. He talks very openly about his marriage, his wife, her death and how he worked at picking up the pieces afterwards. Patrick ended writing a book called "Ordinarily Extraordinary" about his experiences. You can find his 5 star, award winning book at Amazon.com and every major book retailer. For more information on Patrick P. Long - please visit www.patrickplong.com For more information on Camp Kesem - please visit www.campkesem.org For more information on the American Cancer Society - please visit www.cancer.org Support Focused on Forward by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/focused-on-forward Find out more at https://focused-on-forward.pinecast.co

Warning: Explicit language used throughout the video. GaryVee joins the SlabStox Instagram Live-Stream to talk about the National, the Michael Jordan 1986 Fleer RC PSA 10, the SlabStox Charity Night, and his buying strategy at The National. Kesem Redemptions AVAILABLE NOW - https://www.slabstox.com/shop/. 100% of proceeds are going to Camp Kesem to send kids to camp for free whose parents have/had cancer! We are partnering with @campkesem & @campkesem_uwmadison to throw the biggest sports card charity event ever. This will be at the 2021 National in Chicago on Friday, July 30 from 6pm to 9pm after the show at the O'Hare Hyatt Regency. This event will also be live-streamed to YouTube, so you can attend virtually. There is already $100,000+ in product donations committed, and 100% of the proceeds from the event is going to Camp Kesem to send kids whose parents have/had cancer to camp for free.

Today, we're talking about what the sports card market will look like when the summer comes to a close. Jump in on our SX Breaks at https://www.slabstox.com/shop/ To donate to Camp Kesem through SlabStox: https://donate.kesem.org/fundraiser/3146325 To support SlabStox, sign-up for our Investment Newsletter at https://www.slabstox.com (Sunday Slab Trends email box). PRE-REGISTER FOR SLABSTOXPRO at https://www.slabstox.com/slabstox/ - Trends | Analytics | Buy & Sell. We're bringing you the first all-inclusive sports card trading platform to track your investments while also transacting on new investments! Learn more at the link above. To receive all of our Instagram content, follow at https://www.instagram.com/slabstox/

In this episode we offer a panel discussion and focus on anticipatory grief and how to have these honest and tough conversations with your loved ones and your children. Depending on the ages of your children, they will have different levels of understand. We explore these variables, share tactics and leave you with examples. You are not alone in these conversations! QUOTES WE LOVE"When we love, and we love deeply, we are going to grieve deeply…. Grief means we have loved….. " Abigail JohnstonRESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Ciitizen is free, helps you gain access and control to all your medical records and now, can also help you explore your custom Clinical Trial options!  ciitizen.com/SBCtrials  Amanda's Blog:https://www.survivingbreastcancer.org/post/de-novo-metastatic-breast-cancerInflammatory breast cancer Research Foundation: http://www.ibcresearch.org/Camp Kesem http://www.campkesemstanford.org/Inheritance of Hopehttps://inheritanceofhope.org/Little Pink Houses of hopehttps://www.littlepink.org/_________________________SAY HI ON SOCIALYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/SURVIVINGBREASTCANCERFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/SurvivingbreastcancerorgPinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/BreastCancerConversations/Twitter: https://twitter.com/SBC_org Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/survivingbreastcancerorg/Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=YWH7Z7QXDL6AY&source=url)

January 3, 2020 Nate and Leabo talk to a very special young lady about her experiences with being a counselor at Camp Kesem. Nate talks about his charity BIGGSTEPS and how they contribute to this wonderful cause.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

June 26, 2018 Nate Bukaty talks to a very special young lady about her experiences with being a counselor at Camp Kesem. Nate talks about his charity BIGGSTEPS and how they contribute to this wonderful cause.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

July 3, 2018 Nate Bukaty talks to a very special young lady about her expierences with being a counsler at Camp Kesem. Nate talks about his charity BIGGSTEPS and how they contribute to this wonderful cause.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In many households, parents are deciding which camp to send their kids to over the summer. But what if you're a household dealing with the upheaval of a parent's cancer diagnosis? In this latest installment of our series “Taking a Break from Cancer,” we're going to find out about Camp Kesem, a special camp designed especially for children who are dealing with a parent who has been diagnosed with cancer, is in remission or has died from the disease. With us today are Jane Saccaro, the CEO of Camp Kesem, and Theo Christopulos, a former camper and now Camp Kesem student volunteer and counselor.

Summer is our favorite time of the year and what better way to celebrate the final weeks than with some inspiration from our favorite dads. Jim Higley joins us as he prepares for life as an empty-nester and his new role at Camp Kesem, an innovative camp for kids affected by a parent's cancer that is organized and operated by college student leaders. Mike Adamick joins us to talk about his new book, Dad's Book of Awesome Science Experiments (a perfect book for summer) and gives us a great outdoor building/craft project that we can do with our kids. Whit Honea joins us to offer the perfect response to the "I'M BORED" whine we are all hearing as summer winds down and tells us about geocaching, the modern day scavenger hunt that is keeping he and his kids busy this summer.