After graduating from Art School in 1992, I worked at a nonprofit (the Bonner Foundation) in Princeton, NJ for about a year. The foundation was admirable but I wanted to use my brand new BFA so I interviewed at advertising and design agencies all over the east coast – lugging my huge portfolio from city to city. There were no web sites so everything was a hard copy and every art student had a black portfolio case full of their work.
The problem was that it was 1992 and due to the recession there weren’t many jobs. After being told I’d have better luck interviewing in a skirt rather than a pant suit, I decided to look beyond the east coast. College friends had moved to San Francisco, so it seemed like a safe option and I packed up my Corolla and made the 3,000 mile drive from NJ to SF. I had never even been to San Francisco but this move seemed totally logical as a 22 year old.
Once in SF, I was hired fairly quickly at a “New Media Agency” called Redgate Communications to do some copyediting and desktop publishing. I was paid $17,500 a year – a pay cut from my job at The Bonner Foundation but I knew I was lucky to be there and I loved it. I had a car loan and a student loan along with rent ($350) and cost of living….. but I made it work.
One project I worked on with all the other recent college grads was to create a web site directory. Eight hours a day of finding, categorizing and describing web sites before the majority of people even knew that the Internet existed. It was exciting and I had absolutely no idea it was setting the path of what was to come for the next 24 years I’d spend in SF…including 3 acquisitions by AOL. It became a bit of joke among start ups I worked for that I was employed by Ted & AOL 3 times.
