I recently resigned (100 percent amicably) my position on the Board of Vox Media, the company that I co-founded over 10 years ago as SB Nation. As part of that resignation, I am selling a large percentage of my remaining equity holdings, which means that I have now achieved a level of financial security I never could’ve imagined.
Ironically, it still won’t make me a one percenter. That would require assets of $8.4 million. But it’s more than sufficient to take care of my family through two college educations and retirement. It’s enough to help out our extended families.
This has certainly been a long journey for me, first arriving in the United States as a war refugee from El Salvador at the age of nine. As violent as El Salvador was, much of which I carry to this day, I was still ripped from my comfortable circle of family and friends, from my home, my pets, my school, and thrust into a hostile environment where I didn’t know the language, I was thin, weak, looked years younger than I actually was, and was bullied mercilessly. That psychological violence felt worse to me than El Salvador’s physical violence.
My parents were working class—my mother working as a secretary when those still existed, my father moving furniture in the warehouse of an office furniture company. Both worked their way up to middle class status at a time (the ‘80s) when that was still possible. Money was tight, but they provided, whether it was piano lessons or subscriptions to two newspapers (never realized how expensive they were until I went to college and got my own).
But money was tight enough that college looked like a tough sell, so no problem, I joined the Army, at a time when that was still possible without getting shipped off yet another war of choice. To this day, that was still the best decision I’ve ever made, making everything I’ve done later in life possible. It gave me confidence, taught me to be a leader, and gave me the ability to go to college.
I always worked 2-3 jobs to either learn skills (running the school newspaper at Northern Illinois University, or working as a legislative aide to a state senator in Boston) or to make ends meet. It was never a problem for me, I enjoyed it. So don’t see this as complaining. It was just who I was, someone who loved to take on new challenges, learn new things.
This was a very bohemian time for me, out of necessity not choice. A coffee table was a cardboard box with a tablecloth over it. It worked! Good enough. I even considered becoming a full-time student, maybe collect PhDs as a “career”. Instead, I went to law school.
After law school (which I pretty much blew off) I moved to San Francisco with my soon-to-be-wife in order to work the dot.com world. That didn’t work out so well. In fact, our lives crashed at the same time as the first dot.com crash happened. We were living in San Francisco with no jobs and with a tiny $2,000/month studio apartment.
Coming home from my first day on a new job, I caught my wife eating key lime pie. I was enraged! It cost $4.50, or as I said exasperatedly at the time: “You just spent 50 percent of our life savings!” True story! My math was accurate. I’m still not quite sure how our marriage survived.
But we ended up with good jobs, with great bosses who helped us through our tough times. It’s a reason I pay it forward to every employee who needs it. We were in a bad place, but because of good people, we suddenly weren’t.
In fact, my boss was so cool that when I finally came clean to him in 2002 that I was working on Daily Kos on company time, he basically said, “As long as you still do your job, keep doing what you’re doing. Just don’t tell others because that would look bad for us.” In other words, as long as I got my “real” work done, and as long as I didn’t create problems with other employees, I had freedom to build Daily Kos.
Had he clamped down, this site wouldn’t exist today.
In 2003 I dabbled in political consulting, working on the Howard Dean campaign, with Jerry Springer (that’s a story!), and several other candidates. I had quit my stable, great, supportive job with my wife four months pregnant. I remember her being 100 percent supportive. She remembers it differently. In hindsight, it might’ve not been the smartest decision. But it worked.
So as a consultant I was flying to DC every week while my wife was at home with a one-year old. I was taking brutal red eye flights because that way I didn’t have to pay for a hotel that night and I could save a few of our meager bucks. I can’t believe our marriage survived that nightmare period, but it was just more proof of how amazing my wife was and is. She could’ve killed Daily Kos at that time, but she didn’t.
At the end of the year I decided consulting wasn’t for me and I quit, finally focusing on Daily Kos full-time. Well, for just a bit, because 2004 was also the year I started SB Nation with a bunch of my friends. Daily Kos was generating enough revenue to pay my rent, food, and the one person working on SB Nation full-time. It was probably not the best decision, since we weren’t anywhere near being financially secure. The debt piled on. But somehow it worked.
We built SB Nation around the same idea of Daily Kos—the importance of building community around a partisan topic, in this case, teams. Democrats vs Republicans wasn’t much different than Chicago Cubs vs St Louis Cardinals. Or Boston Red Sox vs New York Yankees. Somehow, we recruited great bloggers to write about their favorite teams, and we grew. We attracted some incredible tech talent, and then convinced the guy who created TMZ and other high-profile blogs for AOL to come run the joint. His credibility in the VC world parlayed that into investments over the years from Accel Partners (the guys who first backed Facebook), Comcast Ventures, Vinod Kohsla (founder of Sun Microsystems), General Atlantic, a bunch others, and finally, a few months ago, NBC Universal.
Almost every time an investor came in, I sold some stock. The first time allowed my wife and I to pay off our student loans and massive credit card debt. The second time it allowed us to buy our house (in the Bay Area!). During the Great Recession I was able to take money out and run Daily Kos without a salary for several years. Without that, I would’ve had to lay people off or maybe even quit the site. Thankfully, that wasn’t (and has never been) necessary. Without SB Nation and those institutional investors, however indirectly, Daily Kos wouldn’t exist in its present form.
In short, SB Nation, and eventually Vox (after a rebranding), allowed me to build a life while continuing to run Daily Kos as a labor of love, not a capitalistic one. I hope it’s obvious, but there’s a difference between the two. With one, I was working on my financial security, with the other, I was working to change this country (and the world).
I admit it, it was great fun being on a board with people from a world in which I am in constant conflict—Wall Street finance types, Comcast, etc. We had some fun chats about Net Neutrality let me tell you!
But the big NBCU investment ($200 million total) was an opportunity for me to significantly cash out, while leaving a company in which I had little more to contribute. My passion is in building new things, not growing things that are already big. In other words, I am at heart an entrepreneur, not a businessman. Routine is boring, but taking crazy risks in pursuit of something brand new? That makes me feel alive!
At Daily Kos, I still feel we are building something new, even 13 years later. And we’ve got HUGE plans for the coming two years that will keep that startup feeling alive. And I really feel eager to focus on Daily Kos 100 percent. The slow decay of much of the traditional liberal media (from magazines to MSNBC) puts us at a crossroads:, we either step it up and take advantage of this moment, or we ourselves might also suffer the same fate. And there’s too much on the line for me to allow that to happen.
Now of course, if you are a conspiracy theorist, you have a new excuse to beat up on me. So happy for you! High five! I am totally in the pocket of Comcast, and I won’t publish anything before running it past my new Wall Street friends. Obviously!
But seriously, I know that this will lead many to question or mistrust me. As Susan Gardner once said, “Money is to liberals, what sex is to Republicans.” And now I has it. So this is my way to ensure full transparency. If you want to distrust me or consider me a sell-out, all the power to you. At least you can’t claim you were deceived.
But I can’t and won’t forget to long path to get here, a path littered with hardship and difficulty, but also with incredible fortune and luck. It amazes me how reluctant many successful people are to credit luck as part of that success. Being at the right place, at the right time, and running into the right people at the right moment have had innumerable impact on the outcome of my efforts. All the while, I’ve seen smarter, harder working people than me fail. Luck is huge, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
I’m not a religious person, but every day I run through an affirmation of what I have. I walk through my house, in wonderment that I was able to buy one in this crazy expensive corner of the world. I thank my lucky stars that I get to live in this … paradise of a place. I can’t believe I have the honor to have the friends I have, and the co-workers that have built both Vox and Daily Kos to what they are today. Both companies would look a lot different if I had made 100 percent of the decisions, and both companies would’ve been far poorer because of it. If I have one real talent in life, it’s surrounding myself with incredible people. You know how in most sitcoms there’s always the “dumb” friend? I don’t have the dumb friend.
So if I can’t forget my struggles to get here, why would I change the values that drive my advocacy?
For example, one of the things that happens when you get a big payday is you get to calculate how much of the money will be taken away by taxes. In my case, it’ll be around 50 percent. (39.6 percent federal rate, 13 percent California rate, Obamacare surcharge on capital gains, etc.)
So it’s easy to see how people with money might suddenly become more conservative, because they’re thinking holy shit the government is stealing my hard earned money!
I won’t pretend that thought didn’t cross my mind, but it was quickly followed by holy shit I can’t believe how much money I still have left over!
And then I thought of all the government spending that helped get me to where I am today, from the roads and infrastructure that enable a modern economy, to the schools that educated me and my employees and my investors, to the regulatory regime that made investors feel secure enough to invest, to the legal system that protects both my rights and those of my investors. All of that stuff costs money! And if I got a chance to pay into that system so that others can benefit like me? Why, that’s just paying it forward. I’m cool with it!
So that’s where I am. A little bewildered. A little comforted. A little excited. A little trepidatious. This is certainly a new phase of my life. But it doesn’t change who I am or what I stand for or who I fight for.
In fact, it only redoubles my resolve. Because people shouldn’t have to rely on luck to get ahead in life. They shouldn’t have to take crazy risks that put their families at financial or health risk. They shouldn’t have to depend on meeting the right people, at the right time, to earn a living. They shouldn’t have to work to the bone to scrape by a living, while others do a fraction of the work and earn far more … because of luck.
So I was a lucky one, and that allowed me to achieve the American dream. We need to build an America where more people can achieve it based on the work they do, not the luck of the moment. That’s my job, and will continue to be my job. Lots of things have now changed in my life, but my goals and resolve aren’t one of them.