Why We Need To Take More Risks with Emily Omier

You’ve made bold moves to get where you are, including having the guts to buck the norm and go solo. But are you still taking new (calculated) risks to build the business and life you’ve imagined? Consultant to open source start-ups—and confirmed risk taker—Emily Omier believes we need to take more risks.

Emily shares her gutsy story and what it’s taught her about risk:

What happens when you hit rock bottom in your life (while running your business) and must pull yourself out of it.

The difference between something that is risky vs. something that feels risky.

Why we—women in particular—don’t take nearly enough thoughtful risks.

The road from “mercenary” (where it’s mostly about the money) to collaboration (where it’s all about relationships and outcomes).

How paying attention to these two emotions will teach you what risks are worth your time and investment.

LINKS

Emily Omier Website | Podcast | LinkedIn

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

BIO

Emily helps open source startups accelerate revenue growth with killer positioning. She writes about entrepreneurship for engineers, and hosts The Business of Open Source, a podcast about building open source companies.

RESOURCES FOR SOLOISTS

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TRANSCRIPT

00:00 – 00:32
Emily Omier: It’s not about not being afraid. It’s about doing it anyway. And I think that that’s a message that both men and women need to hear, but I think it’s probably especially for women, that something can make you really uncomfortable, but you do it anyway. And I mean, you wanna be obviously like conscious of I’m doing this because like, I think it’s gonna be good for my business, but don’t let the fear of looking bad or the fear of humiliation stop you from doing things that are gonna be really good for your business that are basically, you

00:32 – 00:34
Emily Omier: know, putting yourself out there.

00:38 – 01:17
Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to Soloist   Women, where we’re all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I’m Rochelle Moulton. And today I’m here with Emily O’Meer, who I like and respect so much. And 1, because she pretty much says exactly what she thinks and it’s always interesting. And 2, because she’s never shied away from adventure or made excuses, even when life dealt her a rough hand. So Emily helps open source startups accelerate revenue growth with killer positioning. She writes about entrepreneurship for engineers and hosts the Business of Open Source, a podcast about building open source

01:17 – 01:24
Rochelle Moulton: companies. And she’s also a card carrying member of the soloist women community. So Emily, welcome.

01:24 – 01:27
Emily Omier: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on, Rochelle.

01:27 – 01:49
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, I’m so excited about this. So we could talk about your recent move from the US to Paris, and I suspect we will. But I know that that’s not even close to the riskiest move you’ve made. So we’ve got a lot to talk about. I’d like to start with what made you decide to first start your business. Do I remember rightly? Did you begin as a content writer?

01:50 – 02:21
Emily Omier: Yes. So I’m going to go ahead and start at the beginning-ish, if that works for you. Sure. So first of all, thank you for having me on the show. And I also just wanted to mention like why I’m so excited to come on the on the show. There’s something in it for me too, which is that I’ve noticed at this point in my career that a lot of things that I did really early on that didn’t used to really make sense to me are starting to make sense. Like I feel like I’m pulling together a lot

02:21 – 02:53
Emily Omier: of experiences that I’ve had, but I still feel like it’s a little bit disjointed. And so I’m actually using this as an opportunity to figure out where all the threads are and make sense of things. So I’m gonna go ahead and start at the beginning. So I am from Oregon. I lived in Switzerland when I was in high school. When I was in college I lived in Russia for a while. Well I did like a year in Russia, but I also worked in a bar there. So it was not like your average year abroad in some

02:53 – 03:30
Emily Omier: ways, some very important ways. And then I finished college and I was like, I’ve got to get a job and got like an office job. And I just like, so bad, so bad. And I think a lot of people in the community have had the experience of like getting a job and then being like, what the hell was I thinking? Like, this is, this is not me. But I got the hell out of there. I moved to Spain with my boyfriend at the time, later became my husband. And you could say like, that was the first

03:30 – 03:48
Emily Omier: time that I had a business, I was like I was teaching English, but it was freelance. So like I had to go, I had to hustle for clients and stuff like that. And then I also had an idea to build a company doing audio podcast tours. This never took off.

03:48 – 03:51
Rochelle Moulton: You didn’t know that about your story. Okay.

03:51 – 03:54
Emily Omier: I know. I know there’s a lot of things you don’t know about me, Rachelle.

03:55 – 03:56
Rochelle Moulton: Well, good. Let’s hear

03:56 – 04:32
Emily Omier: it all. So I had this idea and at the time iPods were kind of new and I was like I’m gonna I’m gonna I’m gonna do this and so somebody asked me or no so I asked somebody like how do I build a website like I don’t I don’t know any of that and they recommended that I use this software called Drupal. Drupal incidentally is an open source software. So is WordPress, which is their main competitor, at least at the time. And anyway, WordPress would have been the better option. Drupal is really, really fucking complicated. And

04:32 – 05:09
Emily Omier: this was terrible advice, but I like figured out how to do it and I built this website on Drupal. I never made a business out of my iPod tour guides, but I did record, like I did record actually a bunch of, they existed. It’s just that I was really good at marketing myself as a service provider and not good at marketing a product. I wouldn’t even say that I was not good at marketing a product. I lacked the self-confidence to even tell people that this existed. That’s a problem. Yeah. In fact, when I think back now,

05:10 – 05:47
Emily Omier: as somebody who later went on to professionally do marketing communications, I think that part of some companies, even real companies, not like my fake company, are like, it’s a lack of confidence issue that can be behind some marketing issues, almost like people not being really confident that like, hey, this thing I created is like so cool that you should check it out and buy it. So anyway, then after a couple of years, I moved to New York City. I was a tour guide. So I had the tour, the podcast tour ideas. I was like, how am

05:47 – 06:19
Emily Omier: I gonna figure out how that works? Well, I’m gonna be a tour guide when I move to New York. So I did that. I did tours in, I did tours in English. I also did tours in German and Spanish. And I really liked it. It also was really good for learning how to be comfortable speaking with public speaking because every day you were speaking in front of a group and it was always different. There was always something that you couldn’t control about what was going on. So I did that. Then I went to graduate school. I

06:19 – 06:39
Emily Omier: went to graduate school at Columbia University and then here in Paris at Sciences Po. And then tried to be a freelance journalist for 3 years. I went to journalism school and that like being a journalist that was financially an absolute complete failure. Yeah, period.

06:40 – 06:43
Rochelle Moulton: Well, usually nobody goes into journalism for the money.

06:43 – 07:21
Emily Omier: Yeah, well, you don’t go into journalism for the money, but like you do hope to like be living somewhere like slightly above the poverty line and that didn’t work out for me. So anyway at a certain point, well not just at a certain point, so then I got married then a couple years later I got pregnant and my husband when I was pregnant was diagnosed with cancer and he fucking died. So that sucked. And that was, It was actually not just his death that made me like, wow, I better like stop fucking around and like make

07:21 – 07:41
Emily Omier: some money. That made me decide that I really need to get serious about like a business that actually pays. And guess what? Journalism is not a business that pays. I didn’t start my business immediately, incidentally. So my mom also died a year after my husband. So like an infant, my mom was sick. I was taking care of her.

07:41 – 07:44
Rochelle Moulton: So your husband passed away after your daughter was born?

07:45 – 08:21
Emily Omier: Yeah, 2 months after she was born, but he was very ill. So he was diagnosed with cancer when I was 5 months pregnant. And then he was like from moment of diagnosis to his death, very, very ill, like increasingly ill, but like even at the beginning, we’re talking like multiple hospitalizations, like doctor’s appointments almost every day. I mean, it was really a nightmare. And I do wanna like put this out there because a lot of people have asked me, they’re like, Emily, how did you keep your business going? Well, all these other things were going on.

08:21 – 08:57
Emily Omier: And I’m like, I didn’t. Like, I mean, you don’t like there, there is a point at which you just can’t realistically keep a business going because it’s so in the situation I’m thinking about literally like there would be an urgent doctor’s appointment like every other day you can’t have a meeting with a client like scheduled because you would just be canceling it all the time and you have all these other you know managing somebody’s illness is it’s like a job in and of itself, like you’re making appointments. Anyway, long story short, if you’re like going through

08:57 – 09:07
Emily Omier: a really rough time like that, do not think, oh, everyone else out there is like managing this and keeping their business afloat, because they’re not. They’re not. Exactly.

09:07 – 09:12
Rochelle Moulton: And so where were you in the world when all this happened? Were you back in the States, or were you overseas?

09:13 – 09:14
Emily Omier: Yeah, I was in Portland.

09:15 – 09:18
Rochelle Moulton: OK. And then your mother passed away. So here you are

09:18 – 09:58
Emily Omier: with really lots of major, somewhat terrifying life changes. So what did you do? Well, my husband was from Nicaragua, and I moved to Nicaragua. Which is sort of funny to talk about afterwards, but at the time I was like, well, in spite of being very cynical about journalism, I had a book project that I wanted to work on that required doing research in Nicaragua. It’s a book that is still worth, it should be written. I’m not sure if the archives that I was researching at still exist. I hope so. But so my mom died and I

09:58 – 10:05
Emily Omier: was like, I’m moving to Nicaragua. Yeah, my daughter was 20 months old when we moved there.

10:06 – 10:06
Rochelle Moulton: Gutsy.

10:07 – 10:33
Emily Omier: You know, it’s interesting because I didn’t really even think, I didn’t think like that. I think it also just goes to show you how sometimes the, you know, people are different, the things that seem like risky or gutsy to you. At the time, I was just like, I want to write this book. I want to make sure my daughter gets Nicaraguan citizenship. Not that like a Nicaraguan passport is like the golden ticket, but I thought it was really good to have a connection to her dad.

10:33 – 10:35
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, it’s her father.

10:35 – 10:53
Emily Omier: And you know, and I wanted to write this book and plus like stuff is cheap in Nicaragua and like you can like child care doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. So I was like, that’s also not a bad thing. So yeah, and you know, I’d been there before, like I kind of didn’t know 100% what I was getting into, but it wasn’t a total unknown either.

10:54 – 11:01
Rochelle Moulton: And so what happened while you were there? Yeah. I know the answer, but I want

11:01 – 11:01
Emily Omier: to hear

11:02 – 11:04
Rochelle Moulton: it. Our listeners want to hear this.

11:04 – 11:43
Emily Omier: So Nicaragua being not a very large country doesn’t always get tons of news coverage. But in 2018, there was pretty massive civil unrest that for a while, at least from on the ground, it looked like it was going to civil war. It didn’t. The government sort of effectively, though fairly violently, suppressed the civil unrest that was going on. But yeah, so I left. There was a period of about a week where everybody that I knew like all the expats all the Nicaraguans with like the means to do so they like fled the country. Some people ended

11:43 – 12:01
Emily Omier: up going back but far from everybody. So yeah then here we are We’re a little over 2 years after my husband had died and my mom, my mom’s died and and I’ve just like fled Nicaragua. I will mention like if you ever have to buy a ticket at the airport this is a bad situation.

12:03 – 12:09
Rochelle Moulton: I just have this picture in my head of you and your daughter like fleeing for your lives, trying to get

12:09 – 12:44
Emily Omier: the last plane out. I mean, it wasn’t quite that like dramatic, but yeah, there was like no moment when I really feared for my life. But it was just that you, you know, when you’re in a situation like that, that’s fluid, you wanna sort of mentally make a line, like at what point does this become untenable for us to stay? And what happened is like the line was crossed. We actually had plane tickets to come back to the US just for the summer and they were for like a week later. And I was like, no, we’re

12:44 – 13:19
Emily Omier: not waiting a week. We’re going to the airport and leaving now. So on the 1 hand, I think it was probably less dramatic than it sounds. On the other hand, I think in terms of how it affected me emotionally, not because of the drama of leaving the country in a rush, but rather that I had to abandon this, first of all I had to abandon this professional project that had been fairly important to me and I had to sort of abandon what I thought of as was my plan for the next several years at least. And

13:19 – 13:53
Emily Omier: at the same time, like nobody could relate unless they had been there. Whereas at least when you have a conversation with someone and you’re like, my husband died, they’re like, oh, I have a mental image of what that would be like. Or my mom died. Okay, I can like I have, I have in my head and understanding of what that means. But like, I just had to abandon this project that was really important to me and leave this country. It wasn’t my country, but like I was invested in staying there for a while and I had

13:53 – 14:26
Emily Omier: a pretty real connection because of my husband. And now I’m like sleeping on a mattress on the floor of my dad’s spare bedroom with my 2 year old daughter and like thinking what the fuck’s next. That’s not a thing that people could relate to. And that was really the moment I was like, I don’t know where I’m gonna go next. And at that point I had my business, my business had already been started for, I’d been working on it for a good year and a half. I started it before moving to Nicaragua. So I knew where

14:26 – 14:45
Emily Omier: I was going with my business, but I had no fucking idea what I was doing with my life. It was like the third straw or the third shoe drops and it was, yeah, it’s pretty intense. So I tried to answer your question as fully as possible 20 minutes later.

14:45 – 15:23
Rochelle Moulton: I mean, no, but this is why I wanted you to come on the show, because this odyssey is so unusual. And yet there are so many pieces of this that are relatable. I mean, most of us have been metaphorically on the mattress wondering what’s next. Not your specific set of circumstances, but I mean, the question becomes, what do you do when you’re at your lowest point? Like, how do you get yourself back up and do the next thing? Right? So, So your next thing was the shall I call it a writing business content, strategy content, writing.

15:23 – 16:06
Emily Omier: Yeah, so at the time, and that wasn’t new, when I sort of restarted my professional life after my husband’s death, actually after my husband’s death, as my mom was declining, I had really thought through how do I take the skills that I already have, apply them to something that I think is reasonably interesting that I’m not gonna hate doing, but also where they’re willing to pay me a good amount of money. And I wanna highlight here that I was extraordinarily mercenary when I first started my business, because I was not thinking like, how am I gonna

16:06 – 16:41
Emily Omier: make a positive change in the world? No, fuck that. I was thinking, how am I gonna work the minimum amount of time and make the maximum amount of money with my current skillset? And that was definitely the right thing to do at the time. And yeah, so like content marketing, like content writing was what I was doing. I already sort of knew something about that world, but it’s a pretty common path for former journalists to take. And I not immediately, but slowly broke into writing for technology companies. And I actually, I had that experience already with

16:41 – 17:21
Emily Omier: Drupal, with building Drupal websites. And I actually, after Sputnik Guides, which was the tour guides, I had another failed business idea that was a online magazine for English learners, for which I created a much more complex website using Drupal that actually used a lot of Drupal’s capabilities. And what else did I do? I think a very small number of people paid me to make websites for them, which was probably not a good idea on their part. But anyway, so I already had a non-zero experience with technology, shall we say. But I sort of identified that as

17:21 – 17:56
Emily Omier: an area where there was money, that I was fairly interested in it, and also that I had skills that would be useful. And I think another thing that really set me apart is that I, well, I really like to learn stuff. And so the first time I was gonna work with a startup that has actually since gone out of business, which is not uncommon for startups, that was in the serverless space. But anyway, so like I did a bunch of research before I met with them, and I was like, sort of more or less understood what

17:56 – 18:33
Emily Omier: their space was all about. And they ended up being super impressed because they were like, wow, most writers, they wouldn’t even have bothered to figure that out and they they wouldn’t they wouldn’t know so then that was how they ended up hiring me to do writing work for them and I just wasn’t intimidated by by you know something that I wasn’t familiar with already. And then I ended up, I don’t know if I should say slowly because it actually happened fairly quickly, moving into writing exclusively for people and startups predominantly, also some larger companies in a

18:33 – 18:41
Emily Omier: very specific, very technical space. And yeah, that’s that’s kind of how

18:41 – 18:58
Rochelle Moulton: it happened. I just want to like track some of this. So you came back from Nicaragua, you’d already had your business. And then you started really kind of niching and in some ways niching down a little bit here. How long did it take you to hit your first hundred thousand? Do you remember?

19:00 – 19:26
Emily Omier: Yes, I do. I guess suppose it’s kind of depends on how you count. My first year in business, I think I made in the vicinity of 30, 000. In the second year, The second year was the year of the flight from Nicaragua. It was between 70 and 80, 000. I don’t remember exactly what. The third year, I made over 200 grand.

19:26 – 19:46
Rochelle Moulton: Third year was the charm. Yeah. That’s awesome. So let me ask you this. What do you see, I’m curious, is your gutsiest, riskiest move so far business-wise? I mean, Nicaragua, was that like, do you think that was your gutsiest or was there another 1?

19:48 – 20:27
Emily Omier: I’m going to have to think about this. So I do think that what happens in conversations with people is that I definitely do things that other people perceive as being really ballsy. And to me, I’m just like, I don’t know, it’s not really that risky. I will share something I’m working on right now that feels really risky, which is putting on a conference. And I spent this morning looking at venues and at some point this week probably I will have to sign a contract and like put some money down on a venue. It’s not actually a

20:27 – 20:59
Emily Omier: huge amount of money, but this feels much risky. This feels like the riskiest thing that I’ve ever done. Even though the amount of money on the line, it isn’t actually a massive amount of money. Like I’ve spent over the life of my podcast, I’ve spent like drastically more money on my podcast than I just would spend on this venue and like that I would lose if this if this conference is a total fail but nonetheless the idea of like putting money down on a venue for some reason this like that scares the shit out of me.

21:00 – 21:22
Rochelle Moulton: Well and this is what’s so great because the perception of risk is very personal, right? I mean, because I remember when we were talking about this and I said, oh, you know, let’s talk about your move to Paris. You’re like, that’s not even close to my riskiest thing yet. So let’s dial into risk some more. I mean, I’m not even sure where to start because

21:22 – 22:00
Emily Omier: there’s so many juicy avenues we could explore here. But 1 of the things that you mentioned offline is the difference between something that is risky and something that feels risky. Shall we start with that? Yes, absolutely. This is a really interesting concept for me because I would say 99% of things that feel risky to us are not actually risky. So when I think of like, what is something that is a real risk? It’s like, is it likely that this is going to harm you? Like, are you putting your life or your health at risk or that

22:00 – 22:34
Emily Omier: of somebody who’s somebody who you love. There are of course, financial risks that if they go wrong could really hurt you. But most of us are not out there making what people would consider like really stupid moves, right? And I think most people know the difference between, oh, it feels risky to me to put like a deposit of 10 grand for a conference venue versus like, you know, and I’m somebody who can afford to spend 10 grand on something and like lose it. I would not be happy if I lose 10 grand, but I would be

22:34 – 23:16
Emily Omier: okay. Versus like, let’s mortgage the house and we don’t have any savings. Conversely, if 10 grand is all you have, then like, don’t put that as a deposit on a conference venue, that’s stupid. But there’s a lot of things that feel really risky. So a lot of things feel really risky, I think, because we fear humiliation more than anything. And in fact, when I say the idea of putting money down for this conference venue feels risky, what feels risky to me is it’s partially like I might lose my money. But it’s because in doing something like

23:16 – 23:48
Emily Omier: putting on a conference, I’m really sticking my neck out there and saying, hey, I have this idea. I think I can put on a really awesome conference and you should come. And by the way, you should buy a ticket. And by the way, I’m gonna have to talk to sponsors and they’re gonna like I’m gonna tell them like hey you should pay for this you should sponsor it and that risks people saying like actually know your idea is dumb or Just like I’m not really that interested and it risk being a failure in a much more

23:48 – 24:18
Emily Omier: public way than just like, oh, I privately lost 10 grand. So for a lot of people, things that are feel like a risk of any sort of public humiliation feel incredibly scary. When in fact, first of all, the actual risk of like people really thinking poorly of you is pretty low because most people have other stuff going in their life. They’re not gonna like spend very much time thinking about like, Oh my God, Emily is such a loser.

24:18 – 24:19
Rochelle Moulton: They don’t have time.

24:19 – 24:39
Emily Omier: No, they don’t have time. They don’t care. Yeah, exactly. Nobody is going to like think even if they do think that I’m a loser, like they’re not going to think that for less for more than, you know, 2 minutes, then they’re going to move on with their life and they’re not going to give it another thought. So I really think that that’s part of it. Now I will go out on a limb. I think this is a problem that women have more than men on average.

24:40 – 24:42
Rochelle Moulton: That’s where I wanted to go.

24:43 – 25:14
Emily Omier: You tease this in our email exchange. So what are women doing? So there’s a lot of a lot of ways that I could tease this out. First of all, I think there’s been sort of research about sort of how women tend to arrange their social structures. And it’s like the way that women sort of 1 up each other, et cetera. It’s all based on like social approval and things like that. But that means that the risk of humiliating yourself is in some ways like greater than if you’re a guy and like it just matters that like,

25:14 – 25:49
Emily Omier: I don’t know, your biceps are biggest or I don’t know. Now I’m being totally politically incorrect. But the point being that there are differences in the way women manage their social networks and tend to try to 1 up each other to the way that men try to do that. So I think that that plays into this. I think there’s also some other stuff. So I have a daughter. I think that when you’re a parent and you see how children, like how male and female children interact with each other and react to situations and how like the

25:49 – 26:19
Emily Omier: differences I think it’s really interesting to see that and then like look at your professional network and be like, oh I can see this as like this professional network happening as a result of things, both external factors like sexism that happens that I totally saw, I can totally see my daughter experiencing, but also my daughter and other girls reacting in a way to Situations that is different from the way you see boys do on average.

26:19 – 26:20
Rochelle Moulton: We’re socialized differently.

26:21 – 26:59
Emily Omier: We’re socialized differently Personally, I believe that like on average girls and women are also different like the bell curve of how we tend to react to different stimuli is different. But I do think if you’re running a business, you have to put yourself out there. And I have a lot of pep talks with my daughter about how it’s not about not being afraid, it’s about doing it anyway. And I think that that’s a message that both men and women need to hear, but I think it’s probably especially especially for women, that something can make you really

26:59 – 27:35
Emily Omier: uncomfortable, but you do it anyway. And I mean, you want to be obviously like conscious of, I’m doing this because like, I think it’s going to be good for my business, but don’t let the fear of looking bad or the fear of humiliation stop you from doing things that are going to be really good for your business, that are basically putting yourself out there. So I promised a really concrete example. I recently went to a conference. There was a part of it that was an unconference format. And that means that participants basically propose different topics and

27:35 – 28:08
Emily Omier: then like the person who proposes it leads like a little discussion about this topic. So I was in the second to last session of the day And I had actually gone to this part. I speak at a lot of conferences, but this portion of the conference I had gone to thinking that my goal was to learn it wasn’t to speak But I realized in the second to last session that I had not seen a single woman leading 1 of these sessions. I do go to tech conferences, there’s usually more men than women, but this particular portion

28:08 – 28:28
Emily Omier: of the conference was pretty close to 50-50 as far as I could tell. And like, we’re talking, there was like 30, 40 sessions. And I was like, oh my god, I better go see if there’s like that that final slot has any spaces in it and like Think about what I can lead a group on because like we got to have at least 1 woman

28:28 – 28:33
Rochelle Moulton: not a single 1 50% of the group and not a single 1.

28:33 – 29:09
Emily Omier: It ended up that I had missed the 1 woman. I’m pretty sure that she was the only other 1 though. I’m not totally certain, but yeah, I did end up talking to 1 other woman who had led a discussion group, But yeah, I’m pretty sure that she was the only 1. So my point being here though, that this was unconference style. Like you can’t claim that it was bias in the selection committee because there was no selection committee. It depended on individuals saying, hey, I have this idea. I want to talk about it. My idea is

29:09 – 29:40
Emily Omier: worth listening to. And the point was, like, the women just didn’t do it. And, you know, even if I missed, maybe I missed more than, maybe I missed a couple more, the point is like, it was really, really obvious to me that even though it was like a pretty close to 50-50 breakdown of gender, the women were absolutely abysmally underrepresented in the people leading the discussions. And yeah, you just, and you can’t say that it was the selection team that did it.

29:40 – 30:14
Rochelle Moulton: Exactly. Well, yeah, I mean, I’ve talked a lot about this lately on both podcasts. There is this idea about voice and using our voice. And I’ve been guilty of it too. There are times that I should have spoken up that I didn’t. And you know, if I’ve learned nothing in the last 5 or 10 years, it’s speak up and have something to say. And I think sometimes for women, it’s easier when we’re making it about something bigger than ourselves, right? We make it about the revolution we’re leading, the transformation we want in the lives of others.

30:14 – 30:21
Rochelle Moulton: And Those are all positive reasons to speak up, but we have to speak no matter what or we’re not going to get heard.

30:22 – 30:44
Emily Omier: Yeah. And I mean, and I think you do, you have to, you have to step up. And like I said already, like it’s not about not being afraid. It’s about doing it anyway. And then you build the muscle. And then it’s like, I’m not that nervous about public speaking anymore. It’s not necessarily because I think I’m an awesome public speaker, but like I was a tour guide for 3 years

30:44 – 30:47
Rochelle Moulton: and- In 3 languages, I might add.

30:47 – 31:02
Emily Omier: Yeah, and I was like talking in front of people all the time. Now I’ve talked at a lot of conferences. And I do try to improve my public speaking, but I think you build the muscle and it’s not scary anymore after a while.

31:03 – 31:32
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, I felt that way about this podcast. For some reason, I was really afraid to do this podcast and I’ve been doing 1 with a co-host for 6 years. So it’s not like I don’t know what to do, but being, you know, in charge of every aspect of it and putting my stamp on it took me a little while to commit. But once I did, and once I started using my voice, try to shut me up now. Right? So I’m conscious of the time that I just I want to ask you 1 more question about your

31:32 – 31:50
Rochelle Moulton: latest move to Paris. So what if you found moving to Paris now, it’s only been, what, is it 6 months? Something like that. Yeah. So has that uncovered anything for you? Has it changed how you work or how you collaborate with people?

31:51 – 32:26
Emily Omier: Dramatically actually. So I mentioned earlier that when I started my business I was really like a mercenary and interestingly enough as I sort of moved up the strategy chain, I would say that I stopped being less mercenary. And I also switched my focus. So you noticed at the beginning, I talked about working with really technical companies. Now I work specifically with open source companies. And that’s because I think that they have really specific challenges and they make up a subset of the companies that I was working with before. But it’s not a perfect overlap. It’s not

32:26 – 33:04
Emily Omier: like a target with my previous market that I worked in. But I found that the strategy issues that open source companies have are more interesting to me. Also, I think that I have some almost like psychological affinity with open source founders. So open source is really all about like building a community. It’s sort of like the hippie software developers, open source is free. And then if you’re building a company around it, then you obviously, like you’re building a software company, you need to make money. And this creates a tension that it exists inside companies. And that’s

33:04 – 33:40
Emily Omier: part of the work that I do is helping to manage this tension. But in my experience, it also can exist inside founders themselves. It’s like a part of them is really attracted to the open sort of like the community building and like building this amazing, like technologically perfect product and having this amazing community. And then there’s also the part of them that is like, hey, show me the money. And I think that I have a little bit of that myself too. I’ve probably become like more and more of a capitalist over the years, but I definitely

33:40 – 34:10
Emily Omier: have that like sort of psychological affinity with the types of companies that I work with. And I really like the challenge of helping people manage that tension. So I have become less of a mercenary over the years. 1 of the reasons, there’s a lot of reasons I moved to Paris, 1 of the reasons was because I wanted more opportunities to do professional events and work with companies face-to-face. I know everybody’s all in on remote work.

34:10 – 34:15
Rochelle Moulton: I know, I feel somebody cringing right now, but I love it, I love it.

34:15 – 34:48
Emily Omier: There’s, I firmly, I mean, I travel all over the world to go to conferences. I would not do that if I didn’t like really firmly believe in the power of face-to-face interactions. And I wanted more of an ability to do that than I had in Oregon. I wanted to collaborate more with other people, didn’t necessarily need to move to Paris to do that. But that was 1 of the sort of goals of the year was to do more projects with other people and sort of like be less of a lone wolf basically. And that has definitely

34:48 – 35:28
Emily Omier: been a success. I have a former client that I’m collaborating with to organize a conference. I’ve organized a local happy hour for people that are in the space with a local startup, a local here in Paris. Just next week, I’m going to a conference actually in San Francisco and I’m working with another person, actually she’s a consultant, but like she runs a consulting firm and we’re collaborating to put on a like a picnic lunch after this conference is over. So that has been like an undeniable success just you know doing things with other people. And yeah

35:28 – 36:06
Emily Omier: I mean I think I think moving to Paris has made things like that possible. I would almost say that as I’ve become less of a mercenary, I have been more attracted to the idea of blurring the line between my personal and professional life. So 5 years ago, I was like, I’m done at 03:00 and I’m like, I’m done. Like I don’t want to think about work. The idea of going to an event after I wouldn’t have wanted to do that. But now I think because I’m more excited about my business, I’m more excited about the types

36:06 – 36:29
Emily Omier: of projects I’m working on. I have more of a personal investment in helping the companies that I work with. Maybe I like my work a little bit too much. So I have no problem getting a babysitter so that I can go to a happy hour that’s at 7 PM. I think that’s awesome. And again, that’s something I wouldn’t have done 5 years ago.

36:29 – 37:03
Rochelle Moulton: Well, I like the way you called that blurring the lines, because I think we all have different ways of managing our business and our lives, and there’s no 1 right way. And what I love about what you described is you move from 1 model to another, And you might move back again at some point. I don’t mean back to the US, I mean back to where you keep it more separate, but it doesn’t matter. It’s what works for you and kind of figuring out what that looks like. So just 1 last question, Emily, which I ask

37:03 – 37:11
Rochelle Moulton: everybody, which is if you could go back to who you were when you first started your business, what’s the 1 thing you’d advise her to do?

37:13 – 37:54
Emily Omier: So, you know, part of me wants to say, I should have like niche down and increase my prices sooner, but honestly, I move pretty fast on that. In retrospect, I don’t think that would have been realistic advice. I mean, I kind of wish I had spent less time being a journalist, but I don’t know. I think that it’s that’s more like a financial regret. You’re like, gosh, what if I had spent those 3 years like actually making money? But It’s really hard. So now I will end with some thoughts about regret and also envy. So these

37:54 – 38:30
Emily Omier: are 2 emotions that I think get a bad rap, but I think they’re really useful. So it’s really useful to notice when you feel regret because it tells you what you should do in the future. The same goes for envy. I know there’s a lot of people out there, they’re like, you shouldn’t feel envy ever, which is like, it just, it’s stupid because everyone’s, you’re gonna be envious. It’s human. It’s human. So when you feel envy, pay attention because that’s telling you what you really want. And if you tell yourself, oh, like, you know, I shouldn’t

38:30 – 38:50
Emily Omier: be envious, then you won’t pay attention to those signals. But I think regret and envy are 2 emotions that will give you really strong clues about what you should do in the future so that you avoid the regret and also, you know, So you avoid the envy because you get it for yourself. So anyway, that’s what I’ll end on.

38:50 – 38:59
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, I like that. Well, there’s signs, there’s sign posts. And the more we pay attention to those, the better off we’re going to be, or the faster we’re going to get where we want to go.

38:59 – 39:13
Emily Omier: And if your friend says, Hey, I felt envious about XYZ. Don’t tell them to shut up and or like, to be like, Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, what could you do in your life so that you

39:13 – 39:27
Rochelle Moulton: exactly that would be the friend you want to have. Like, is that a valuable friend or what? Versus the 1 who kind of turns away feeling like, oh, gee, I’ve outshined someone that I didn’t mean to outshine.

39:27 – 39:52
Emily Omier: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I don’t know. It’s hard. It’s hard for me to pinpoint a regret or a thing that I would tell myself to do differently because, you know, okay, here’s something I’ll think of. I would say I would focus on building relationships with people sooner. I have not done a bad job on this, but I think it was not a focus of mine at the beginning.

39:54 – 39:55
Rochelle Moulton: It doesn’t go with being a mercenary,

39:56 – 40:04
Emily Omier: right? Exactly. It is now. It is absolutely now. And yeah, I think that’s, it also makes you like your job your work a lot more

40:04 – 40:05
Rochelle Moulton: a lot more fun.

40:05 – 40:06
Emily Omier: Yeah, exactly

40:07 – 40:23
Rochelle Moulton: Well, Emily, thank you Awesome, you know you lived up to my hype of being right up front and telling it like it is and sharing your experiences. So thank you. Thank you so much.

40:24 – 40:26
Emily Omier: Yeah. Thank you for having me on.

40:26 – 40:33
Rochelle Moulton: Well, we’re going to be putting your links in the show notes, but where’s the best place for people to learn more about you and your work.

40:34 – 40:52
Emily Omier: So I’m very active on LinkedIn. I also have a website, which is EmilyOMear.com. And I have a lot of cool stuff on my website. I have a podcast, The Business of open source. I have an ebook that I wrote about positioning open source projects. Yeah, that’s where you can find me.

40:52 – 40:59
Rochelle Moulton: Awesome. Thank you. So that’s it for this episode. I hope you’ll join us next time for