Chief Change Officer - Food52 CEO Erika Ayers Badan: No One Cares About Your Career - Part One

Episode Date: September 21, 2024

Part One I’m joined by none other than Erika Ayers Badan, the current CEO of Food52—a leading innovator in the food, cooking, and home space. Before her time at Food52, Erika was the first-ever CEO of Barstool Sports, and her career spans across media, marketing, and tech, with roles at companies like Fidelity, Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo. But let me be clear—this isn’t about interviewing someone with big titles. On my show, I bring on guests who are willing to share real, lived stories. And Erika has no shortage of those. In fact, she’s gathered so many lessons along the way that she decided to write her first book, titled No One Cares About Your Career. When I saw that title, I knew I had to develop a two-part series featuring Erika. In this episode, we’ll dive into the book—why she wrote it, why now, and why this title. Plus, we’ll unpack some key nuggets of wisdom, including five simple things anyone can do to succeed at work. In the next episode, Erika will open up about her life and career experiences—her upbringing, her parents, her leadership approach, and even her thoughts on toxic work cultures. And here’s something you won’t hear in other interviews: What career advice would Erika give her own two middle and high school-aged kids, especially in today’s rapidly changing world? Episode Breakdown: 0:38—A special 2-part series on Erika’s book, career, life, and more 4:40—Revisiting the Roots: A Walk Down Memory Lane to Discover the Past’s Impact on the Present 8:25—The Brutal Truth Behind ‘No One Cares About Your Career’—How Did Erika Land on That Mic-Drop of a Title? "Nobody's coming to help you. It's up to you to save yourself, grow yourself, push yourself, teach yourself." 12:04—What Sparked the Inspiration Behind Writing the Book? 18:17—What Makes This Book a Game Changer in a Sea of Career Guides? 21:36—Who Is This Book Really For? Unpacking the Audience Behind the Pages "Just because you went to Princeton doesn't mean you have to go work in finance. A lot of times people get caught up in what everyone else thinks they should do. That's the lore. What everyone else thinks they should be and the reality is that nobody's really thinking about you that much. You should do what makes you happy and tell everyone else to jump off a cliff." 25:45—30 Years, 5 Simple Lessons: How to Succeed at Work Without the Overwhelm Connect with us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Erika Ayers Badan Chief Change Officer: Make Change Ambitiously. A Modernist Community for Growth Progressives World's Number One Career Podcast Top 1: US, CA, MX, IE, HU, AT, CH, FI Top 10: GB, FR, SE, DE, TR, IT, ES Top 10: IN, JP, SG, AU  1.3 Million+ Streams 50+ Countries

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation. Today's episode is a special one for me. I'm joined by none other than Erica Ayers-Barden, the current CEO of Food52, a leading innovator in the food, cooking, and home space. Before her time at Food52, Erica was the first-ever CEO of Barstool Sports, and her career spans across media, marketing, and tech, with roles at companies like Fidelity Investments, Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo. But let me be clear. This isn't about interviewing someone with big titles.

On my show, I bring on guests who are willing to share real, lived stories. And Erica has no shortage of those. In fact, she's gathered so many lessons along the way that she decided to write her first book titled, No One Cares About Your Career. When I saw that title, I knew I had to develop a two-part series featuring Erica. Why does this title hit so hard? Because it's the truth. I've learned it the hard way myself,

through the twists and turns of my own career. I'm excited that Erica has captured this reality so perfectly. And I'm grateful she is saying it out loud. Helping others who feel stuck in their careers confront the truth and break free from the baggage holding them back. In this episode, we'll dive into the book, why she wrote it, why now, and why this title. Plus, we'll unpack some key nuggets of wisdom, including five simple things anyone can do to succeed at work. In the next episode,

Erica will open up about her life and career experiences, her upbringing, her parents, her leadership approach, and even her thoughts on toxic work cultures. And here's something you won't hear in other interviews. give her own two middle school children, given we are in such a rapidly changing workplace. That's our in-depth look at Erica Ay Thanks for being here. Thank you, Vince. I'm excited to be here. Erica, let's start with a bit of your career history. Okay, great, Vince. So I'm Erica. I live right around New York City. I work in New York City. I worked known for my last job, which I spent a decade

building a company called Barstool Sports, which in the American market is one of, if not the most wild, fast-growing, creative, dynamic, disruptive companies in sports and media and entertainment in the past two to three decades. So I'm most known for my time at Barstool Sports. Prior to that, I worked at a lot of really big companies like Microsoft and Yahoo and AOL. I worked at a bunch of startups in the fashion space, in the music space, in the entertainment space. I started my career thinking I wanted to be a lawyer, and I didn't. I had been laid off. I was a receptionist. I had a bunch of career changes. I had a very meandering career path. I worked at a bunch of ad agencies. I've worked all over the world. So I've had, I would say, a really unique career in that I've

really tried a lot of different things. I've worked at a lot of different places. I've learned from a lot of different types of people, all in pursuit of really becoming a better person and a better leader and a better executive and a more interested whole being. And I don't know if that works, Vince, but that's how I would describe it. So initially, you planned to go to law school, or perhaps it was more of an expectation from your parents. But in the end, you chose a different path. What led you to that decision? Yes, I had gotten an internship.

I went to a liberal arts college in Maine in the U.S. and I had gotten an internship in Boston. And most of my family are teachers and my parents were teachers and educators. My dad was my principal when I was in middle school, which is probably a story for later. And I felt my parents really sacrificed so that my brother and I could go to very good schools. And I felt a very significant sense of obligation to do something with that. I feel that my parents had sacrificed themselves to give us opportunity. And I felt a very big debt of gratitude on that. And when I had gotten this internship, it was at Fidelity Investments. It was in Boston, Massachusetts, and I loved it. And I got this bug to work in a corporate environment. I was, I don't, no one else in my extended family works in a corporate

environment, but I got the bug. And it made me think, oh, I want to go to law school and I'd like to get a business degree. I never ended up doing either of those things, but what I did do is set out to be very successful in the corporate world and to do it the best way I could, which was really learning on the job and as an apprenticeship. Now it's time to dive into your book. I have to confess to the audience, when Erica and her team reached out to me about doing this interview, I immediately said yes, like no hesitation at all.

Why? What drew me in so quickly was the title of the book, which is No One Cares About Your Career. This is a punchy title. And given Erica's expertise in marketing, I'm not surprised she came up with something so catchy. But it's not just about the phrase. It's about those five words. They resonate with me Seriously, I learned this truth a hard way in my own journey. It's one of life's realities. And once I understood it, I accepted it and even embraced it.

Erica, you and I were in a studio together right now. I would give you a hug or at least a solid high five for speaking my mind so perfectly. I take a hug, Vince. Thank you. Thank you. So one day when I come to the States and interview you in person, let's do that. Anyway, back to the book title. I'm curious, how did you come up with No One Cares About Your Career as the title? Was it something you had in mind from the start of your writing process? Or did it come up later?

Maybe as a result of collaboration with your publisher or editor? So Nobody Cares About Your Career is something someone told me once since probably 15 years ago, and it always stuck in my head. And when I was writing the book, it was the title of one of the chapters. And to be honest with you, I never thought about it as the title for the book, but I did feel very strongly about it as the core of the book, which is that nobody's coming to help you. You need to get over your insecurity and your ego and put yourself into what you're doing every day and that work is tuition that you get paid for. And it's up to you to save yourself,

grow yourself, push yourself, teach yourself. And so it becoming the title of the book really happened towards the end. I was honestly quite stuck about what the title should be. I thought about the title of get comfortable being uncomfortable, or you can be yourself and be successful. And there was a really interesting woman at the publisher who said, we're on a conference call trying to figure out the title of the book. And she said, why don't you just go look at your chapters? Like maybe the book has a lot of punchy chapter titles, I think. And she was like, why don't you go look in the chapter list and see if there's a title?

And I looked to the chapter list and it was obvious that was going to be the title. Yeah, I read this chapter specifically. We'll come back to this in a minute. The book, what inspired you to write it in the very first place? Oh, a lot. One is I've always been that person at work that just feel too much about work. I actually hate this about myself, but I'm deeply emotional about work. I think about work all the time. I think about how things could

be better or different or what I could change or what I could do differently or better. And I remember working at AOL a long time ago, probably 15 years ago at this point, and a coworker saying to me, I used to send these really long emails. And then my coworker was like, why do you do that? What a stupid waste of your time. Everybody's out partying after a work day and you're on your phone writing emails about what we did the day before. And so I've always really felt the need to share how I feel emotionally about work. It's very motivating to me to lay it out and hopefully

it's motivating or interesting or compelling to others. And I was at a point, I had been at Barstool Sports for about eight years, almost nine years, and we had sold the company to a new company that was much bigger than ours, that was publicly traded, that was heavily regulated. And I felt my creativity at work, Vince, just totally get zapped. I had been running this wild, creative, amorphous, freewheeling, fast, fast growth company. And all of a sudden the brakes got pumped and I was trying to do daily financial reporting and daily forecasting and re-forecasting. And I was feeling my creativity just go to the wayside. And so I started to write the book on my commute because I felt like it brought me back to the things that I

had loved about Barstool Sports that were so creative. And then the second piece is over the pandemic, I had created a podcast when I was the CEO of Barstool Sports because at Barstool, we had never worked remote. We didn't have a remote working culture before the pandemic. Everyone was in the office every day, all the time. We didn't have any need for technology because everybody worked together in person. When the pandemic hit, it was very alienating for me and it was very alienating for our company. And so I started emailing everyone in the company every week. And there were 250 people in the company at the time. And I was sending 250 emails.

I would go through the A's and then the B's and then the C's. And what I realized was that was impossible because I was just getting flooded with email and I was flooding email right back and it seemed silly. So I started a pod, a daily 10 minute podcast where I talked about what we were doing at Barstool Sports. And I used it as a way to connect with people who I worked with. And then it became interesting to people who worked outside of, or what were well beyond barstool sports. And so what I gravitated towards was I was getting all sorts of Q&A questions from people about their careers.

And it built over time where I get probably 200 questions a week at this point. So I'm getting a massive amount of work questions. And in the same way, I felt making a podcast was a better way to talk to a 250-people employee base, I felt that writing a book was perhaps a more thoughtful, complete way to respond to people's work questions. With the pandemic, everyone was stuck at home, and you used a podcast to keep your team engaged instead of just sending long emails. It helped keep everyone active and connected. Soon, more people outside your firm started paying attention, sending in career-related questions, which you began answering. Eventually, it led you to think, why not put all of this into a book? A way to reach a wider audience and share your

experiences and thoughts more broadly. Does that sound like a fair summary of your journey? A far more succinct way to do it, Vince, for sure. Maybe one day you could become like Ray Dalio, one of the billionaire investors in the U.S. After retiring, he's turned his life's work and lessons into a 600-page book called Principles. I'm sure you've heard of it. He even collaborated with professors to develop courses around content. Maybe one day you could go down a similar path, turning no one cares about your career into something more, perhaps a teaching platform or a series of courses to help people navigate the modern workplace.

What do you think about taking that approach? I'd love to teach. Yeah, that's what in the what about taking that approach? I'd love to teach. Yeah, that's what in the, what are my future plans? I would love to teach. I think Principles is an incredible book. It's also really dense. You have to be awake when you're reading it.

And I hope for this book was that it was more conversational and in some ways lighter and more digestible, but I too love principles. I thought it was a really powerful way to think about building yourself and building a company. So I started skimming through the first few chapters of your book. As you mentioned, it has a more conversational tone, but it's also packed with real-life stories. Tell us more about how your book stands out from other business or career-oriented books.

Oh, I think this book is quite different for a bunch of reasons. Before I wrote it, I went to the bookstore, and I went on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and I went and looked at the business book article aisle. And I really found two things. The first was a lot of books written by people who were professing to be perfect. So their heads were on the cover and it was all about me and my perfect career. What I've accomplished, aren't I so great? And the second majority of the books I found were that they were much thinner,

much smaller, and much more prescriptive where you're supposed to do a very small set of things to unlock yourself and unlock your career. And I left the aisle thinking, well, I'm not perfect and I don't have a three-step habit that is going to unlock everything for anybody, including myself and my career. What I do have is the receipts where I'm a CEO. I'm in the middle of my career. I have made every mistake in the book. I have learned an incredible amount. I have tried and endeavored to do a whole lot. And I wanted to speak to people that what I would call in the mid chapter. So it's not people who don't know where to get started and it's not people who've made it all the way to the end or the top.

It's really for the people who are getting up on a Monday morning or a Wednesday morning and they're trying to make the most of their life and they're trying to make the most of their work. And for me, work changed my life. And I really think work is where we spend the vast majority of our time and effort and energy. And I wanted to write a book like a conversation with someone who is still going through it, who has messed up a whole lot, who has done a whole lot, and who is kind enough to shake you, but also to give you a hug and say, you can do this. So is Like a Friend talking to you? I think so. I think it's written honestly. It's told from my experience, but it also leaves it to the reader to make their own conclusion about what path they want to take and what course they want to choose. In the early part of the book, I noticed you actually list out who would be the readers for this book. You lay out all the criteria, and as I read through them, I thought, oh, I fit this, I fit that. So I know this book is for me, I check off, if not all, at least 9 out of 10 of those points. Then you also make clear who the book is not for with a list of about 20 things. I was relieved because I wasn't

any of those. But I would say for sure this book is for people who desire a change at work and understand that change at work is a gateway to changing their life. That's actually the first criterion you list. That's exactly right. Those who like to follow rules and are comfortable following rules, this book is not for you, unfortunately. Inside, there are a lot, a lot of different stories. And one specific story stands out to me is about your interview with a few major decision makers when you were trying to get a job, the CEO job, at Barstool. I found it very, very interesting and I'm mostly honest. I can definitely relate to your point about how this book is different from others because you tell the truth about what happened.

At that time, you mentioned you were not sure about the interview's outcome and even thought you did not do well. Then one of those decision makers you spoke with said, I think we could give it a try, although I'm not sure if you can do it. It's so raw and unfiltered. That's what I appreciate. This is why I'm really enjoying the book and I plan to finish it soon. That's great. Yeah, I wanted to be just very direct.

I'm a direct person and I wanted to be direct about not only the things that I feel like have done well and that I've done well, but really also the things that I've been insecure about and the things that haven't done well and the lessons I've had to learn the hard way. And I really wanted it to be a good read, but also a book that makes you think about what would you do? And how do you think about things? And how do you feel about things? I think to the point of nobody cares about your career,

I think a lot of times people get into a job because it's what they're supposed to do. I talked to someone recently, a college senior, and he goes to Princeton. And so I said, hey Hey James, what do you, what are you going to do? What do you want to do after college? And James said, I go to Princeton. So I have to go work in finance. And I was like, why do you think that? Just because you went to Princeton doesn't mean you have to go work in finance. But I think a lot of times people get caught up in what everyone else thinks

they should do or what everyone else thinks they should be. And the reality is that nobody's really thinking about you that much. And you should do what makes you happy and tell everyone else to jump off a cliff. So the book is hopefully motivating to get people to do that. There are surely a lot of nuggets of wisdom in the book. And one that stands out to me is when you highlight five simple things for anyone to succeed at work. Who you are, what you have to offer, how you show up, what you do with your time, and how much you care. Five core things. Erica, could you briefly walk us through why you chose these five? After so many years of working across different industries in different countries and eventually landing leadership roles and become a CEO who turned a company around,

how did you distill all those learnings into these five simple points? And how can we, as individuals, apply them to move forward in our own careers? Sure. So let's start with caring, right? It's so simple, the idea that you should care and that it's important to find something to care about in your day. Whether you're at home, whether you're raising kids, whether you're a career person, whether you're a bus driver, like you got to find a reason to care. And I think the people who care at work are the best people at work.

And it's not about how intelligent you are. It's not about how pedigreed you are. It's not about how experienced you are. The sheer act of caring about something can change everything. So I really start there as if you don't care, people will see through it in a nanosecond and it will prompt other people not to care about you. So I often think that the things that can make us most successful or be most detrimental in holding us back come down to really simple things, caring being one of them. So I can't overstate that enough. I think the other four, it's really about just making the most of your every day. And I know that also sounds simple, but I talk a lot in the book about having a vision

and for having an idea in your head and your heart about who you want to be or what you want to accomplish or where you want to go that gets you out of getting lost in all the minutiae or the office gossip or the problems at work. One of the things I talk a lot about in the book is your job isn't perfect and neither are you, but you both can be great. And I spend a lot of time thinking about that. Every company has problems. Every person has problems. Every company has things that it's overcome or trying to overcome. Every person has things that they've overcome or trying to overcome. Every company has that thing deep down inside that's broken and it needs to fix. People are the same way. So I really do believe that just by getting started and by doing something and having a commitment to yourself of a place you want to get to or something you want to be, that can make all of the lives of many successful people I know,

their career decisions, how they present themselves, and history of their parents or grandparents, these become powerful force that shape who they become. Could you share a bit more about your younger years? Maybe something from your family and life or childhood that nurtured your business instincts despite not going to business school? Was this something from your past that helped shape the person you are today? Motivated, ambitious, successful, yet always true to yourself? Our childhood, if I had to describe it, was you could read, you could play sports, you could hang out with your friends, but you'd have to go find something to do with yourself. You could stack wood or do chores. And that was pretty much it. So my brother and I shared, we didn't have a TV for a long time, and then we got a TV. And my brother and I shared an hour of

TV a week between us. And I always say that's where I learned how to negotiate because my brother and I really had to duke it out to figure out what we were watching. And ultimately we had to learn that if we both compromised to watch something we both wanted, instead of getting a half hour each, we could get a full hour of television. I also learned my mother used to block MTV, which MTV was huge when I was a kid. So I would just call the cable company every month and say that I was my mother so that I could get the MTV turned back on. In the next episode,

Erica will open up about her life and career experiences, her upbringing, her parents, her leadership approach, and even her thoughts on toxic work cultures. And here's something you won't hear in other interviews. What career advice would she give her own two children who are in middle school, especially in this rapidly changing workplace. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget,

subscribe to our show, leave us top-rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.