"I just buried it for years." Vulnerability lessons with Facebook's Carolyn Everson

This is a transcript of Hello Monday’s episode with Carolyn Everson. The podcast is designed to be listened to, rather than read.

Facebook's Carolyn Everson helped launch one of the most iconic startups of the Web 1.0 era: Pets.com. But before it really even took off, and long before its catastrophic failure, she was fired. It was a shameful secret she kept for years....and then, finally, shared. This episode, hear Carolyn's lessons on why leading with vulnerability takes courage.

We also feature reporting from LinkedIn’s Caroline Fairchild, author of the weekly newsletter Working Together.

TRANSCRIPT:

JESSI HEMPEL: From the editorial team at LinkedIn, I’m Jessi Hempel, and this is Hello Monday, a show where I investigate the changing nature of work, and how that work is changing us.

Everything changed for Carolyn Everson a few years ago, in a moment she didn’t see coming.

Carolyn’s got a big job. She’s in charge of the Global Business Group at Facebook which means she runs a big part of Facebook’s revenue. And, she was getting ready to speak at a leadership event for the woman in her company. It should have been a slam dunk--a friendly audience. Yet, standing there in the stage wings, she seemed...not so confident.

Sheryl Sandberg was there with her and asked her about it.

CAROLINE EVERSON: And I just turned around and said, because I was fired and she was like, she looked at me with these big wide eyes and she's like, what are you talking about? And I literally blurt out, I was fired from Pets.com in 1999 and it was my own company.

We all have things we don’t put on our resume, things we are afraid other people may eventually find out. For Carolyn, it was Pets.com. She’d helped launch the company, and it was supposed to be her first big job after business school. Instead, she’d graduated without a job--and with so much shame that she didn’t talk about it for years. It’s still not on her LinkedIn profile. In the Wikipedia entry for Pets.com, you won’t find her name anywhere.

Carolyn discovered that nearly two decades later, that fear – left unspoken – had still been driving her.

Confidence and vulnerability travel together. This is something we’re all beginning to realize and embrace. As shame researcher Brene Brown has told us...

BRENE BROWN: I think the daring transformative leaders that we’ve worked with acknowledge the fear and acknowledge the drive, this really limbic drive, to put on some armor and self-protect.

JESSI: So this week, I wanted to talk to Carolyn about what it means to embrace this vulnerability and incorporate it into how you work and how you lead.

Here’s Carolyn.

JESSI: Okay, so what was your first post-college job?

CAROLYN: Well, when I was at Villanova, my brother who's 10 years older than me, had already had his MBA and JD and he was really encouraging me to go into business, like look at business opportunities. And so the two types of jobs that were coming to campus were investment banking jobs and consulting, but more on the computer consulting, like the tech consulting jobs. I wound up getting hired. I was the only person, not from an Ivy and the only woman to get hired in 1993 and I started my career at Andersen, which is now Accenture and it was a great foundation to do that at age 21.

JESSI: Did you have a sense that you wanted to be a career woman?

CAROLYN: I always knew I wanted to work. My mom instilled a couple of lessons in me. I mean, she instilled many, but one was the importance of education. She said, no one can ever take away your degree, but you could get fired, ironically enough. And she also told me I need to be independent and be able to earn my own income and not be dependent on another person. And so those were instilled at a very young age. So the moment I could start earning income, I did. I babysat, I taught tennis, I worked at the local club. I mean, I did everything I could to earn my own income and my own spending money to give me that independence. That was really important to me growing up. Also, I grew up in a very middle class family where we did not take vacations. Like I took a couple of vacations growing up, like, you know, money was tight. And so I always wanted to be able to contribute.

JESSI: So you went from consulting to Harvard Business School?

CAROLYN: Well, actually I had one other step. I went from consulting to the Walt Disney Company, which was a wonderful step. And I spent about two years at Disney and in their Imagineering group.

JESSI: So then you went to Harvard Business School?

CAROLYN: I did.

JESSI: While you were at Harvard, you got involved in one of the most iconic companies of the web 1.0 era. Everybody knows the sock puppet, Pets.com. I'd love for you to tell that story.

CAROLYN: When I was at Disney, I had gotten my own dog named, and I named him Pluto, which was appropriate. And one of my projects at Disney was to look at whether or not Disney could build a pet resort. Every year. At that time, 18,000 dogs and cats would go into the kennel, which looked like every other kennel around the country. And I was like, this could be so interesting to think of the characters, the Dalmatians and Pluto – 

JESSI: That would be amazing.

CAROLYN: Right? I mean, I still think, I still think it would be amazing. So if anyone's listening from Disney, I still think they should do it. But, so I had done a ton of work on pet resorts and so when I went into business school, it was the dot-com craze. Everyone was thinking about what kind of companies should I start? And so I was like, well, what do, what do I naturally love? I love pets. And I had done so much research and I knew how passionate people were about them. So I wrote a business plan. But I didn't have the domain name. And so I searched for the domain name. At the time, Greg Macklemore had owned a ton of domain names, pets being one of them. And I reached out. He wouldn't sell it to me, but he said, I'll partner with you. And so we partnered together, raised $5 million from the VC community back and forth trips between Boston and Silicon Valley.

JESSI: And that's how early the Internet was that pets.com was actually just something you could get.

CAROLYN: Correct. Yes. Early days, people acquired a lot of it, like Toys.com was another one – like basic names. And so when we raised the money, it was my second year of business school. I had turned down every other traditional job, so I worked for the summer prior at Goldman Sachs and Bain. I split my summer between those two companies. I turned down every job because I was on this path and when we raised the money it was like this unbelievable success story. Everyone was celebrating us at school. The teachers, the dean, everyone's like, this is going to be amazing. I was ready to make huge personal sacrifices. I was married at the time. My husband Doug was going to live in New York and continue to work there. I was going to live in San Francisco. I had been searching for apartments, like I was ready to live this dream. I was all set until about a couple of weeks before graduation. I was asked to go back out to California because the VC firm had found a CEO, which we had agreed I was not ready. I was fully on board with them getting a CEO. I met with her and it was obvious in the first few minutes that she saw the business so differently than I did. And so it was a rough meeting. But I did not know how rough until I got back to Boston and walked into my dorm room and there was a fax.

JESSI: A fax.

CAROLYN: A fax, yes because I am that old. Yes, I have to remind people at Facebook what a fax is. But yes, and it was that I was no longer needed at the company and I was essentially terminated. I think of that, you know, the agony of defeat when you think about the Olympic skier that flies off. It went from like the highest of highs from a career standpoint and the lowest of lows. And I could not pull myself together. Quite honestly, that following week were my final exams, I had done very well at school. I was going to graduate in the top portion of my class. I put a baseball cap on and I cried and I cried every single day and I kept my head down and I would just get into the classroom and I will say the community there was incredibly supportive. You know, I was embarrassed, like royally embarrassed, but they were so supportive and they got me through. But I walked down that graduation path and got my degree with my family. They're all proud that I had done this, but I graduated without a job and with a dream that was crushed. So this was by far and away the biggest failure that I experienced and I really was very ill-equipped to process it and handle it.

JESSI: I imagine that that's not something that you worked out just during that chapter of your life. I'm curious how that event has impacted the things that have come after it.

CAROLYN: Well, it really has impacted me substantially and it took many years after that to realize how much it had impacted me. So right after that, I wound up doing a lot of freelance consulting work for the summer to really get my feet back on the ground and say, okay, what do I want to do? And there were about eight other pet companies that were getting funded and so they were very interested but I wasn't sure I wanted to go do that. Cause it was just so hard for me to think about, okay, I'm going to go do this with another company. So I was trying to find my own way career-wise, but I think the biggest impact that it had is it rocked my confidence more than I ever really understood for many years to come. I never talked about Pets.com until I got to Facebook and it took me a few years at Facebook. So think about it. This happened in 1999, I got to Facebook in 2011, and I did not talk about it for several years after that. So it's about 14, 15 years where it was not on my resume, it was not discussed. Only the closest people to me back then knew about it and they weren't discussing it. And what it really, I think if I reflect on, well, what did this do to me? Everyday I was afraid of getting fired. Every day. So if my boss called a meeting on Friday, that was unexpected. I was definitely getting fired. If somebody left a message for me, my boss and I missed the call, he – it was mostly a he – he was calling to fire me. And that really can wear you down, but it also can motivate you. I felt like I always had to prove that I was worthy of whatever job I was in. And that really was a rocky period of time. I did well from a career standpoint, I don't think anybody if you look back, would be like, oh, I noticed that about her. But I do now. But I also think that I lost the confidence of having my voice to speak really what I thought. And one of the most important things is you have to have and own your voice, and I’ve regained my voice in the last seven years at Facebook and that's been a big change for me.

JESSI: Coming up after the break, we hear from LinkedIn’s managing news editor Caroline Fairchild on why vulnerability is having a moment.

[AD BREAK 1 OF 2]

JESSI: And we’re back with our managing news editor, Caroline Fairchild. Hey Caroline.

CAROLINE FAIRCHILD: Hi Jessi, it’s great to be back. So we’ve heard from senior leaders for some time about this topic of being vulnerable in the office. But I think you and I can both say that this really hit a breaking point with Brene Brown's Netflix documentary that came out last month. Everybody was talking about it, it was like vulnerability at work was this new topic of discussion.

JESSI: I think it's important here to define what we mean by vulnerability.

CAROLINE: Right, it's a really misused term. And I think when people hear vulnerability, they think it just means oversharing, talking way too much about yourself at work. But in reality, it means putting yourself out there, taking emotional risks as a leader to show the people that you work with that you're human. And the work of Brene and others clearly demonstrate that to be an effective leader, you have to do this, and leaders like Carolyn have figured out as well. It's this idea that you shouldn't be afraid to take emotional risks in the office.

JESSI: Why is it so important to take those risks?

CAROLINE: It’s hard to come up with new ideas if being vulnerable or failing isn’t acceptable. I mean think about it, if you're not allowed to be vulnerable then you really are in kind of a stifling work environment where new ideas wont' come to bear.

JESSI: But it’s obviously not just Brenee who is driving this idea forward.

CAROLINE: Right. This is something that executive coaches and other thought leaders have been talking about for quite some time. There are executive coaches like Jerry Colonna who have started whole businesses around this idea that to discover your true leadership style, he works with his clients to talk openly about their upbringing and their failures. And the results kind of speak for themselves. Jessi, this is something you know a lot about, because you profiled Jerry in Wired in 2017.

JESSI: I did, I wrote about Jerry and what I found so interesting about his approach and why I think it resonates for so many of the startup and tech company founders that he works with is that he asks his clients to get in touch with their own feelings because he believes it's going to make them better leaders. You don't see a lot of business coaches do that today. I have to wonder how gender plays into this discussion as well. I mean, do men and women deal with vulnerability differently?

CAROLINE: Of course, but I do think there's a lot of misconceptions around vulnerability and women that we need to address. For better or worse, people hear vulnerability at work and they just conjure images in their head of weepy women in their offices. Jerry bucks that trend and there are definitions of both male and female leaders being vulnerable at work, that show us that you can be vulnerable and powerful.

One of my favorite examples of this is a story about Howard Schultz – he's the former chairman and CEO of Starbucks. I read it in this book that came out earlier this year called No Hard Feelings by Mollie West Duffy and Liz Fosselin. So when Howard Schultz returned to Starbucks in 2008 to lead, he cried in a meeting in front of the entire company.Thousands of employees. It was right at the beginning of the recession and the company just wasn't doing well. And he stayed up for nights wondering what to do, and what he realized he needed to be open with his employees about how he was feeling vulnerable as well. And it really worked: He got over 5,000 emails after the meeting with employees thanking him for just being real.

Of course, Howard didn’t just get up on stage and cry and let that be that. He also presented the team with his plan for getting Stabucks back on track. I like this example because I think it clearly demonstrates how being open in the office paired with having a vision for how to move the business forward is a winning combination for the next generation of leaders.

JESSI: And this is something I want to hear from our listeners about too, Caroline. Do you have a story about what it means to be vulnerable at work? Send us a voice memo to [email protected], or post on LinkedIn, using the hashtag #HelloMonday. Thanks a lot, Caroline.

CAROLYN: Thanks, Jessi.

JESSI: Now back to my conversation with Carolyn Everson. At Facebook, Carolyn works closely with Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s COO.

JESSI: I'm curious how you got to the a-ha moment where you, you realize that actually for many, many years you had been carrying around the fear of being fired.

CAROLYN: I was working with a coach for my tie my entire time at Facebook. So Lisa McCarthy, who has been coaching me and she and I have known each other for years. She, in my development plan, she would always talk about my confidence issues, but we never really drilled in, I don't think enough on like where did it come from. She was just acutely aware that I had them, that I was intimidated sometimes to say what I really thought in meetings and I really wasn't owning my own voice. So that was very helpful because she had been working on this with me for a number of years. But there was a moment right backstage before I was supposed to go onstage in front of about a thousand women at Facebook's women's leadership day and Sheryl and I were backstage and she just turned to me in the middle of a conversation. She goes, I just sometimes you have like these confidence issues. I probably said to her, I'm very nervous about getting out there. And she was, I think is how it happened. And I just turned around and said, because I was fired and she was like, she looked at me with these big wide eyes and she's like, what are you talking about? And I literally blurt out, I was fired from Pets.com in 1999 and it was my own company. People get fired from other companies, but I got fired from my own company and she said – she had this really quizzical look and she said, well, what if I fired you right now? And I was like, I literally, my heart sank. I was like, oh my god. That was not the reaction I was expecting. And she said, no, my point is you would be okay. And so, that conversation, the work with my coach, all of it sort of pulled together for me to get back on my feet and say, okay, first of all, I got this confidence thing I need to really get my arms around. But even almost as importantly, I need to tell this story because if you look on paper, the career just looks like it's up into the right. Great education, great career opportunities. It all looks good, but I was doing myself and more importantly, anyone else that I could potentially help mentor and give advice to. I was doing everyone a disservice. Now, little did I know that it would have been a huge badge of honor in Silicon Valley. It would have been a great thing. 

JESSI: You know, can we talk about that for a second? Because as somebody who has chronicled Silicon Valley for 17 years, I have written the narrative that failure is a badge of honor many, many times. But my experience is that when you ask people who have failed to talk about that event, they don't feel that it is a badge of honor. They only feel shame about it and they mostly won't talk about it. And so I don't know. I don't know if I believe that Silicon Valley really feels that way or likes to talk a big talk.

CAROLYN: Here's what I do know. I do know that we really value people that, that are willing to be bold, take risks. And certainly at Facebook we reward failure as long as you've learned from it and you get back on your feet and you, and you move forward. And I think now that I've been telling my story more, both internally and I'm starting to do it much more externally, the reaction I'm getting is like that was really impactful, Carolyn. Like, thank you for sharing that vulnerability and for opening up because more people need to hear that things just always up into the right. And so whether it's a badge of honor or not, I don't know. But think about it. I just buried for years that I wrote a business plan. I got $5 million of funding while I was in school. Had a whole foresight, and by the way, you know, hindsight is 2020, the company wound up being like the catastrophic failure of dot-com bust. And you know, I wasn't part of that. So I had the early part of it and it was, it's a story that I think people want to hear more about. Vulnerability is one of the most important qualities. I have a whole set of qualities that I'm much more clear on now than I was many years ago that define an enlightened leader versus not. And vulnerability is one of the top most important qualities. People want to know that you are a human, that you get up every day like they do in your brush your teeth and you get dressed. But that there are things that don't go perfectly.

JESSI: And that is actually, that's quite honestly why I wanted to have you on the show. You to me have always been a leader who embraced vulnerability. And I mean going way back. I remember the first time that we met, it was at a dinner at a tech conference in Aspen, Colorado. And you blew into that dinner and you were a little bit late and you sat down next to me and you were kind of distracted and I'll admit, I was like, oh, she really doesn't want to be sitting here having dinner with me. It's probably about me and this isn't going to go well and we're going to be here for two hours. And then you turned and you said, you know, I'm sorry, I've just lost a good friend. And we had a beautiful conversation for a couple of hours that cemented a relationship that has lasted now for years. And I always thought that that was brave of you to simply give the whole story.

CAROLYN: I will never forget that night. I will never forget that day and that evening because I found out that Jen Goodman Linn, who I went to business school with who started Cycle for Survival had passed away and I was in the Denver airport and you know they have the big people movers. It’s a very big airport and all I did was go up and down. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know if I should get back on a plane and go home to New York. I didn't know if I should go to Aspen for the conference and and where you were. I had no idea what to do. And I literally was going up and down the people mover. I decided to get on that plane and I walked into that dinner and I was really nervous because I was like, I don't, I don't even know how to have a conversation. So I didn't know anything other than I have to be myself. And you were such, like the perfect gracious colleague to have sitting next to me because I remember, I vividly remember that conversation and you allowed me to be real and to be human and not sit there and do the pleasantries and, you know, talk business. I needed, I needed a friend. I needed to tell somebody that this tragic thing had just happened and you were there for me and that, but I think those are the connections that are important to people. Those are the things that I remember. I don't remember – I barely remember what I had for dinner at like the last, you know, two weeks. But I remember that dinner vividly. And that's what defines us when we're human. 

JESSI: And so I'm curious what it means to be a vulnerable leader.

CAROLYN: People care more about me sharing the more personal things than they do the updates on the business because they expect me to, of course, update them on the business and update them on the latest products and things. What they don't expect is for me to share when I'm hurting, when I've lost a friend or someone is sick in my family or I'm worried about my children because they've had a concussion. Like it's those moments because you become relatable to a person. And leaders I think have to be very careful that they are, if they get put on a pedestal sometimes in companies and people are afraid to tell them what's really going on or they're not sure if those people are even real anymore or they just like superwoman and superman because they do all of these things. And I'm the same as everybody else. Like I have good days, I have bad days, I have things that are, that are wonderful and things that really hurt me. And I think I've learned that the engagement that I get from my teams internally at Facebook is so much higher. And then the other thing that I do, which has been incredible, I think, gift and lesson is I write an annual vision. And I write that vision as if it's already happened. And then I share it and I share it with the entire company. Now my teams are doing these vision sessions. We take a half day in December and they write them for the following year. But I share and I share. And that's vulnerable because I'm not going to accomplish all of those things. Two years ago I said I was going to write a book. I still haven't written a book. But I put it out there and I just think if, if leaders and people can just be more human and more relatable, I think we would all be in such a better place. I think it's when you put the facade and that armor on that it's all figured out. You're not approachable and people are not going to tell you. And also being vulnerable in a weird way, boosts your confidence and allows you to use your voice even more.

JESSI: That's true. Right? It is ecause it helps you to connect with people. And when you, when you are feeling connected to people, it's been my experience, you then feel more grounded in yourself. (CAROLYN: Correct.) So I love this idea of the vision statement. So what would a vision look like? Is this is what I want for my life professionally, here's what I'm going to achieve at Facebook?

CAROLYN: No. So the vision, it would start something like this. So imagine we're in December of 2018 and my first paragraph would say something like it is December 31st, 2019 I am with my family and friends about to celebrate New Year's Eve. And I reflect on my year that I've just had and, and then I would go into my personal. What I did. I was a more present spouse and I appreciated my husband. I was a more patient daughter. I exercised, I ate healthier. Like I very detailed. I went and got my annual physical and took care of my health and prioritized that. I try to think about mental, physical, emotional and spiritual energy in that bucket of personal. Then business. But it's not, I hit this number and that's great. It is. I am proud of the way Facebook showed up to the business community. We showed up as a team that cared really about clients' business more than we cared about our own business. So I write language to try to bring it to reality and then I have a section on community service. I took a trip to Kenya and brought 57 people and we did, we did a community immersion for a week. I really was behind the gun safety movement and these are the accomplishments. And so you write it, it's very detailed and it's as if it's already happened. So the language of the writing of that, that it's already happened is a very important step. And then what the research shows is that if you share it now, you can share it with your spouse, your partner, your team, whomever – you are 42% more likely to achieve those goals because now someone else is starting to hold you accountable.

JESSI: Coming up after the break, Carolyn Everson tells us how things are going at Facebook.

[AD BREAK 2]

Alright, we’re back with my conversation with Carolyn Everson.

JESSI: So you've been at Facebook now for, I mean I guess it's only eight years, but given that that's more than half of Facebook's life, it kind of feels like a couple of generations of Facebook. What's it like to be a leader internally during that time?

CAROLYN: It's been a time of incredible transitions. I've seen the company as you said, go from when I got to Facebook it was only Facebook, mostly the desktop Facebook and now we are a mobile company. We have Instagram, we have Whatsapp, we have Messenger separated out, we have Oculus. We are thinking about drones and how to provide connectivity to people. And so just the core offering a Facebook between 2011 and 2019 is just entirely different, which makes the job really interesting. But the bigger, more interesting I think piece of it has been to widen the aperture around what is exactly the impact of having 2.7 billion people connected, which is larger than any country in the world. What does the impact of that? And there is no global playbook. There's no mechanism to say this is how you define hate speech. This is how you define the line of freedom of speech. And we are working to create that and try to create it in a very responsible and safe way. And that has been incredibly rewarding and challenging. I, there's not one day that I don't wake up and think about the enormity of our responsibility, not one day. And what I do believe and the reason why I'm still here and the reason why I still want to be at Facebook for many years to come is that I deeply believe in the mission of how you bring the world closer together. We have found that that has had to evolve because at first it was just about connecting people and putting the, you know, the nodes out. That's not enough, people need to have a sense of community. It's very akin to what we talked about in the beginning of this podcast is people want human connections and when they find them in positive ways, everything from the dog group that in the UK, which is like the sausage dogs, the, you know, the long –

JESSI: Dachshunds.

CAROLYN: Yes. Thank you. The dachshunds, there's a group of docs and lovers, but in that group you've got people that were pro Brexit and people that were against Brexit, but when they get together, they connect on a human commonality and interest. The more we can do that, the more that we can do that type of work. I think society is going to be way better off in the long term. I think in the short term there's a ton of challenges and issues that we have to work through. But I deeply believe in Mark's leadership. He is, he is steadfast in trying to build something that he is going to be proud of. He's a dad of two girls, you know, I have two girls and he doesn't think about what's right in the next month or next quarter. He is trying to plant flags to build something that's going to outlast his time here and certainly something that his daughters will be proud of one day that gives me great comfort. We may make mistakes and we do, but I feel very comfortable with the long term direction.

JESSI: You've been here eight years but you are still very young in your career. When you are looking back, what will you be able to say that you've done?

CAROLYN: Well, certainly as the way I've described it to my team at Facebook, no one is ever going to at my funeral, no one's ever going to talk about how much revenue I oversight Facebook or how many people are on my team or how many clients or advertisers we had. No one's ever going to say that. But what I do hope they will say is that Carolyn was a leader who cared more about people than anything else. She was a leader that believed people could have exceptional careers but also have exceptional personal lives. And that if you round that out with giving that to your community, that's a life well lived.

JESSI: Again, that was Carolyn Everson, Vice President of Global Marketing Solutions at Facebook. Do you have a story about what it means to be vulnerable at work? I want to hear from you. Send a voice memo to [email protected]. Or, post on LinkedIn, using the hashtag #hellomonday.

If you enjoyed listening, subscribe, and rate us on Apple Podcasts – it helps new listeners find the show. And join me next week for a conversation with Michael Lombardi – he’s an analyst for the NFL, and host of the new podcast, the GM Shuffle.

Hello Monday is a production of LinkedIn. The show was produced by Laura Sim, with reporting by Caroline Fairchild. The show was mixed by Joe DiGiorgi. Florencia Iriondo is Head of Editorial Video. Dave Pond is our Technical Director. Our music was by Podington Bear and Pachyderm. Dan Roth is the Editor in Chief of LinkedIn.

I’m Jessi Hempel, thanks for listening.

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