Do You Need To Be A Little Mental To Launch A Successful Business? (Like I Was.) – with Christel Hyden
I considered not publishing this interview because I worried it would show you how much of a mental patient I was when I launched Bradford & Reed in my early 20s (with my brother, who was still a teenager). Christel Hyden was the first person we hired, so I invited her on Mixergy to talk about the old days.
What I think you’ll see in this interview is how strongly I believed that building a successful company was going to undo everything that was crappy in my life. Since I dressed like a dork in high school, I was going to build a business that was so profitable that I could hire someone to dress me properly. Since I felt like an outsider who couldn’t fit in, I was going to build a business that forced the in crowd to pay attention to me.
If Mixergy was aimed at a mainstream audience, I’d serve you some populist bull about how business wasn’t the answer, that some eye-opening, politically correct realization was the revelation that turned my life around. But screw that. Almost everything good that happened in my life is a direct result of building a great company. Even discovering my inner self was only possible because the money and time Bradford & Reed gave me allowed me to go on a meditation retreat and travel.
Christel watched the business grow and was a part of making it great, and in this interview you’ll hear her talk about how we did it.
Christel Hyden started at Bradford & Reed as a writer, but eventually did at least a little bit of every non-technical job at the company. (Because that’s the way things go when you find someone sharp at a fast-growing company.) Today she’s a Project Director at Albert Einstein Medical Center, an Adjunct Professor at Hunter College, and a Researcher at Harlem Health Promotion Center.
The transcript for minute 0 till minute 5 is BELOW this line.
Haystack ad:
Andrew: Instead of telling you again how great Haystack is I invited my friends at Hashrocket to shoot this video
I got into web design at a very early age. I was always fascinated by the internet, you know, dial-up modems and all that. I brought the “Entire Idiots Guide to HTML” to reading class in elementary school.
Design is my passion, I love it. It doesn’t feel feel like a job, I can be as creative as I want. I can start with a blank canvas and make something out of nothing.
The greatest gift you can ever give me is an opportunity and that is exactly what Hashrocket gave me. The opportunity was to take some of the best programmers and developers in the world and then build a design team to match that quality. The part that I like most about being a designer at Hashrocket is definitely the ability to create an entire application from start to finish. And...
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