Moses and the Startup CEO

This article is about what I learned getting my company, Story2, through the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was first published on Medium in April 2022 (where you can find the original version) and revised for Passover 2024, based on selling Story2 to Revision Learning in September 2023 and subsequent events in Israel and Palestine since October 7, 2023.

In November 2019, I said to my executive coach, “I feel like Moses must have felt at the burning bush. I’m ill-equipped for the job I’ve been called to do. I’m not the right person to get this storytelling company into the world.”

He said, “I think you should reread Exodus. That’s just the beginning of the story.” I reread Exodus on the plane home from my fifth trip to China in twelve months.?

The burning bush

As soon as the voice of liberation calls to Moses, he starts to resist. He sees enslaved workers beaten by their overseer. He kills the overseer and runs away. And then from a bush that is engulfed with flames but not consumed, he is called to a much larger task: to overthrow the whole system of slavery and lead the Jewish people to freedom. “I am the wrong person,” Moses cries out again and again. Tradition says that Moses stuttered and resisted speaking out loud. And yet he was called to speak directly to Pharaoh, the prince of all Egypt, whose father had raised him like a son.

I understand that the visions we most need to pursue are the ones most rooted in our earliest beliefs about ourselves and our closest kin, and so the work we need to do, for ourselves and the world, is often the thing we are most likely to resist. The person who pursues such a calling anyway becomes a mystic, a madman, or an agent of social change.

In the fall of 2008, when my daughters left home — one for college, one for boarding school — my world started to spin. I watched the windows splinter into shards of broken glass, bright colors flying around the room. It was as if every secret of my childhood, every traumatic wound, was open and on display. A wise friend asked me, “Carol, what is this panic trying to tell you? What do you need to learn here?”

“No one knows me,” I whispered.

The next day, I woke to a vivid dream: students in Shanghai and New York laughing and talking to one another on their phones, their phones translating between languages, years before this was technically possible. Even more enticing to me, there seemed to be an invisible thread connecting these students across cultures. I had just started studying storytelling, and I knew — in a flash, my body first and then my brain — that storytelling was the shared language that connected them. When I told my son about my dream, he said, “Mom, I think you should start a company to teach storytelling. You could help a lot of people.”

Of course Moses felt unworthy: he was born into slavery, cast off by his own mother to save him from the edict that all Jewish sons be killed. Moses’ sister Miriam cagily got him taken into Pharaoh’s house to be raised as Pharaoh’s son, and in her most deft move as a survivor, Miriam convinced Pharaoh’s family to hire Moses’ own mother to nurse him. When Moses was weaned, his mother had to abandon him again. Moses was raised as a prince, but deep in his bones, he must have sensed that he was not the same as them, not one of them. He did not feel even a bit worthy of the vision and task he’d been called upon to lead, and at every turn he tried to resist.

“Moses, you need help”

But somehow, for all his resistance and failures of faith, Moses and his brother Aaron and their sister Miriam lead the Jewish people out of Egypt and across the Red Sea. At first, there is dancing and celebration, and then chaos ensues. Moses’ father-in-law is the first to notice that Moses has taken all the responsibilities of liberation upon himself and as a result everything is failing. He gives Moses a plan to build all those cantankerous individuals into an organized community: put your brother Aaron in charge; have him build a team of leaders, and then have them choose local leaders, who are responsible for controlling their close family and friends.?

That top-down, hierarchical order creates cohesion and stability, and the voice of liberation calls to Moses again, this time to trudge up Mount Sinai to receive laws for his well-disciplined people. The journey is arduous; Moses doubts himself again and again. The voice of liberation loses patience with Moses, becoming angry and dramatic, while also guiding him forward. Up there on the windy mountain, Moses hears it all clearly: ten simple rules that will keep his people orderly and secure.

But Moses has been away too long. Just as his faith is tested, his people’s faith is tested too, and under that pressure order breaks down. The Jewish people violate the first rule — worship no external gods — before Moses can even give it to them, melting down all their gold jewelry and creating an idol they can see and worship outside themselves. Even Aaron, the dutiful brother who has created and maintained order in the community, fails while Moses is away. Angry and exhausted, Moses throws down the tablets with the ten commandments, and they shatter on the ground.

I understand Moses’ exhaustion traveling up and back, searching for a simple, enduring expression of the vision that got him started in the first place. He is alone in a new way; the task is inward and his own. He cannot get it to the people until he listens to that voice, which is oddly both within himself and outside himself, and codifies the vision out of air and stone. I also understand the fury that drove Moses, in that moment, to destroy everything that had been given to him on the mountain. Or perhaps what looked like fury was the expression of a doubt so profound it had no other way out.

When COVID-19 arrived in February 2020, I began rethinking my vision of storytelling – from a way to help students get into college and jobs to a vessel of shared human expression. I was severely tested in 2019 when I made five trips to China to create KanKanTu (wise rabbit), the Chinese half of my original vision: a diverse community where people learn to communicate joyfully across our differences. In China, I experienced myself moving the business forward in its simplest, most powerful form. Yet each time I was away, something broke down in the U.S. company: key employees failed at basic tasks; new features we were about to release lost sight of the user; we ran out of cash. I was on the brink of giving up, too tired to go on. Most companies fail right there, worn out, bootstrapped to death, an angry, inelegant mess.

And then the pandemic gave me another trip up the mountain. This time, really for the first time for me as a CEO, I listened to my own instincts, not the advice of outsiders, launching an online storytelling circle to build community and help people process the grief and confusion so many were feeling from the pandemic. This use of storytelling for community-building and healing pushed me in an entirely new direction. When I first wrote this article, I thought of myself as Moses leading the Jewish people through the wilderness, and I wondered where that process was going to lead.?

The tabernacle in the wilderness

The story of the tabernacle in the wilderness is a part of the Hebrew bible I know quite well, as I had studied it, read from it, and discussed it with the congregation the week before my wedding.?

I had described the tabernacle in the wilderness as a metaphor for a strong marriage: it is built on attention to details, the specific woods, the colors, the tapestry. “Of course there are hammered thumbs and hurt feelings in the making of the tabernacle, but it is the beauty of the whole thing that endures, not the challenges along the way,” I wrote as a young woman about to get married. Over that tabernacle, the voice of liberation becomes a protecting cloud, guiding the people on their journey through the wilderness, and the community endures.

Rereading that story during the pandemic, I saw the building of the tabernacle as a story of operational excellence. The description is extremely detailed: the specific length of every wooden post, the exact color of each covering, which precious stones go in the middle, and which at the sides. The text notes several times that every worker is the very best at their craft. Each worker is named; each has a very specific task, to which they are completely devoted and which connects them to the whole. Moses’ job is to maintain the vision of the whole while others build parts of the whole that he sees. He no longer attempts to do all the work himself; no one person alone builds a lasting vision or community.?

When I was young, I failed to notice that when the tabernacle was finished, Moses placed inside not only the whole, second set of tablets, but also the first set, the ones he threw to the ground – the ones that are broken and wounded like him.?

In the final chapter of Exodus: Moses’ has a? vision of a land he cannot enter because, it is said, he broke the first tablets he was given in a moment of rage. There are many stories of Moses’ anger; he’s a survivor, and his anger is both the external expression of that survival and an impediment to community peace.?

Like Moses, I am a survivor of complex childhood trauma, and until recently my anger was often my only way to exhale. In Israel’s unrelenting, genocidal war against Gaza – now over 200 days long, with over 35,000 Palestinians killed – I see the profound limits of acting on generations of trauma and loss.?

To get past where I am stuck in anger, again and again, I go back to my moments of loss and grieve through them – both specific memories of when I was specifically harmed, and generations of Jewish people, the descendents of Moses, who pushed that harm through their own children and the people already living in what they thought of as a land promised to them.?

The Passover story holds together these two sides of liberation: the drive for liberation, and the truth that liberation is messy and imperfect and inadvertently causes harm. As Jewish people, we are to imagine that we were brought out of the narrow place of slavery “by the hand of Almighty.” I love this vision of the Universe as a parent guiding me, like a child, to a new place. For the year of selling Story2, every day I gave my un-knowing back to the Universe and asked the Universe to show me what came next.?

I sold Story2 and within a week, Hamas invaded Israel and Israel retaliated with an AI-driven, genocidal war that tapped into the Jewish people’s deepest fears of annihilation as a community. But it also tapped the other side of that story, the part of Jewish tradition and faith that identifies with the stranger and welcomes the stranger into our own home to celebrate our shared liberation.?

If we are alive today, we descend from both victims and perpetrators. In our blood and bones and DNA, we remember both things. As we do the work of healing as an intersectional collective, each of us also needs to do the work of? grief individually. Grief is not solitary work; it is the work of thousands of diverse and dedicated workers trudging through this wilderness of growth and change. We need to attend to all those details, and keep the vision of the whole in front of us at all times.

We are in the midst of a profound shift among many people, building a community that enables us to move together through the wilderness of change. Of course there will be many challenges and mid-course corrections; that is the nature of building something new. But frequently, from our very different individual stories and histories, we see the same vision and are working with a shared plan, one in which each of us gives what we are truly best at. We discover who we are and what we are capable of as individuals and as a community together.

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