I signed my offer in November 2020, when the company was about to be banned and forced to divest. That probably should have been my first clue that this was not going to be a normal corporate experience.
The first few months were chaotic. The business was growing extraordinarily quickly, teams were being assembled in real time, and many of the systems established companies take for granted did not exist yet. But around six months in, things started to change. We brought in great people, the team took shape, and we put more strategy behind where we wanted to take the business. The chaos began to feel more like an opportunity to build. The deeper I got into the business, the more invested I became. I started caring about the decisions, resources, people and outcomes in a much more personal way, and that sense of ownership began to feel very real.
TikTok became the first company in my career that I began to feel like I personally owned. That may sound strange, but it changed how I worked. I treated budgets as if they were my own money, cared deeply about what we were getting back from investments and headcount, and wanted to grow revenue as if the business belonged to me. When something did not work, I felt responsible for understanding why and what we should do differently.
Looking back, I think that sense of ownership was a big part of whatever success I had. When you stop thinking only about your job description and start caring about the broader business, you make different decisions. You notice inefficiencies, question investments that have become accepted, and ask whether an organizational structure still makes sense. And, yes, sometimes you say no. I said no quite a lot. But my favorite version was usually, “No, but how about this?” The intention was rarely to stop something. It was to find a better way to achieve the same goal.
I saw that mindset play out repeatedly. In one large global client partnership, we celebrated progress and almost immediately started asking how we could improve the economics the following year. In another business, what began with a handful of people grew into a global operating model. We eventually moved from a fragmented organization into a smaller, more focused team while supporting a significantly larger business. Both reinforced the same lesson: be proud of progress without convincing yourself that you are finished.
Those experiences also taught me that efficiency looks clean in a spreadsheet and feels very different when people are living through the changes behind those numbers. Keeping people motivated while roles changed, resources tightened, and expectations rose reinforced something I came to believe strongly: operational discipline and empathy are not competing ideas.
That is probably why many of the things I remember most are not the business results. They are the people. I watched individual contributors become managers, managers become leaders, and people take on responsibilities they were not sure they were ready for and discover they were capable of more than they thought. Watching that growth was one of the most rewarding parts of being a leader.
It also changed my perspective on what lasts. Revenue becomes a number in an old presentation. Structures change, strategies get replaced, and processes get redesigned. What stays with you is whether you believed in someone before they believed in themselves, gave them the opportunity to stretch, and helped them become stronger.
I was fortunate to work for leaders who shaped the way I think about leadership. Khartoon Weiss, in particular, had an enormous influence on me and taught me that great leadership does not require choosing between very high standards and deeply caring about people. KO could give you tough love, challenge your thinking, push you further than you thought you could go, and still leave you knowing she was completely in your corner. I have rarely seen a leader so invested in her team, so effective at motivating people, so charismatic with clients and partners, and at the same time so thoughtful and strategic about the business. That balance is something I have tried to bring into my own leadership.
Leaving TikTok is difficult because the company became such a large part of my life. I joined during one of its most uncertain periods and leave a very different person and leader from the one who signed that offer in November 2020.
At the same time, I am incredibly excited about what comes next at Fanatics. In the time I have spent with Mike Hermalyn, what has stood out most is the scale of his ambition for the business and the clarity of his vision for what it can become. He thinks big, but with a real sense of what needs to be built to get there, and that combination is incredibly energizing. I am excited to work with Mike and the broader team to help turn that vision into reality and shape how the business scales. The opportunity to build again and make a meaningful impact is exactly the kind of challenge I was looking for.
The simplest way I can summarize it is this: treat the business like it is yours, treat the people like they matter, and never assume that the way things are is the way they have to stay. Ownership makes you care about things that may not technically belong to you, and leadership makes you care about the people around you along the way.
As I start the next chapter, my definition of impact feels simple. I want to help build businesses that are stronger because I was there, and I want the people I work with to be stronger because we worked together. If I can look back and say both of those things are true, that will feel like a good measure of success.