Hey there.
This is my cover letter. It's a little untraditional, a little lengthy, and hopefully a little entertaining.TLDR: I am a creative, joyous, curious person. I love tech, math, art, nature, coffee, matcha, and travel. I worked at Apple doing sales, support, and success for about five years, then ActBlue doing support for a little under two years.I own a small business called Maas where I sell custom jewelry. I've lived in Colorado, California, and NYC.I love working directly with customers, adore sales and success, and am pretty dang great at communication.
I’m yet another applicant for you to take a look at...
...and I assume y’all are about as tired of reading cover letters as I am of writing them. The problem for me is that I want to put genuine care and intention into the letters I send in with my applications because I actually do care about the companies I where hope to work. It’s a little emotionally exhausting. Likewise, I am guessing that you all care deeply about who comes into this Customer Success role.
You are receiving a much less professional cover letter than I normally write, because I know of you all as people, rather than amorphous beings controlling aspects of technology from the shadowy (well, technically sunny,) corners of Silicon Valley.I’ll still try to cover the cover letter info, just… I need to stretch my creative muscles a little, and maybe you need a break from reading a cover letter that is formatted exactly the same as the last.
I love technology (and art and coffee and math and nature).
When I was a kid, I dreamed of working at the Apple Store, or becoming an astronaut, as one does, and I was lucky enough to achieve one of those things just before I turned 19. I did not become an astronaut and it’s slightly less appealing to me now as I prefer jobs with significantly lower mortality rates. I intended to work at Apple as a gap year between high school and college, but ended up staying for almost five years. I attended classes part time during my journey with Apple. I also met my life partner, Josiah, early on. He’s as creative as I am, and has supported me in every imaginable way for the past six years. He’s the one who found this role for me. Our relationship, and Apple, took us from our home in Denver, CO to Sacramento, CA then Oakland, CA, and finally, NYC.
Like so many tech people, I was very not cool in high school, but working at Apple, and then ActBlue, I thrived. Everything that made me dorky before became a strength. My ceaseless delight, curiosity, and slight silliness endears me to customers and colleagues alike. My coworkers describe me as effervescent because I come to work every day bubbling with excitement to meet and support new customers and work on new projects with my teammates.
Obviously, I hope to join another team where that attitude is a welcome addition.
At Apple, my responsibilities were abundantly diverse. I handled complex technical (and emotional) issues for moms who’d lost precious baby pictures, sold enterprises full stack hardware and software solutions with terms agreements, facilitated customer-facing and employee-facing training events, and supported various operational tasks. I became a top performer at the company for introducing customers to the Business team. I worked with customers face-to-face, over email, and over the phone.
In January 2020, after nearly five years at Apple and four terrifying years of Trump, I needed a change.
I left Apple in hopes of finding a role where I could impact the impending election, and was able to find that by joining the Donor Support team at ActBlue.
ActBlue is the primary online fundraising platform for Democratic and Progressive campaigns, causes, and organizations. The 2020 election was overwhelming for us all, and the volume of work we handled at ActBlue was truly staggering. During the summer, while protests swept the country, ActBlue processed over a billion (yes, with a ‘b’) dollars of donations, and my team and I handled thousands of donor issues each day. As the election season gained momentum, our volume only increased. We processed another billion dollars of donations.
By the end of the election, we'd handled hundreds of thousands of donor issues.
In the rush of volume, my team and I couldn’t support donors individually.
Instead we were forced to provide broad blanket support through mass emails. We didn’t have the time or space to actually improve the donor experience. After the election, when volume returned to something manageable, I felt hollowed out. It was hard to reconnect with the work and the donors, and I was running out of any energy to continue trying to stoke my engagement.
So, in October 2021, Josiah and I packed up our NYC apartment and stored our furniture with my uncle in the city.
We were going to travel for at least three months, maybe longer. I brought my work with me to Paris for the month, and Josiah went to work in Colorado. I hoped the travel would reinvigorate my focus on work, but it actually forced me to reckon with the fact that I could no longer continue with ActBlue.
Just a month later, in early November 2021, I left ActBlue. Josiah joined up with me in Paris, and we gave ourselves a sabbatical through this April. We visited France, The Netherlands, Portugal, Canada, and the Pacific Northwest here in the states. Josiah built out a gorgeous website for me to use to sell the jewelry I make; I practiced creating a variety of new designs, and overthought my business plans.
Which brings us, approximately, to present.
We’re living in New Jersey with my aunts (they’re professors), and I’m working at a greenhouse. I spend my time designing gardens and landscaping projects, caring for plants, and generally enjoying the sun and physical labor. I’ve reset and have been searching for a new job for the last month or two. This time around, I’m most interested in a role that keeps me in front of customers, but provides a little more room for creativity and growth than I had at ActBlue. Hopefully a role with a lot of work, but maybe a little less volume than hundreds of thousands of inquiries, and a smaller team so I can truly connect with every person I work alongside. I’d like to continue having the option to work remotely when I need, but do miss in-person work environments, so I’d appreciate the option to come into an office too.
These are all things I see at The Browser Company.
I’ve spent my entire career so far working with companies focused on giant problems: five years at a company with the mission of improving consumer technology across countless sectors, nearly two years trying to leverage technology to improve our real political world.
I want to have a positive impact on individual lives now.
I want to help people live a slightly less irritating, slightly more relaxed and productive day-to-day. I think we’re so focused on solving the big problems that we’ve forgotten that every big problem is actually an aggregate of small ones, and I’d like to just hack away, one at a time, at those. I see The Browser Company as a place with that mission, so I’d like to join you. I’d like to ensure that every member of The Browser Company enjoys that slight improvement to their life.