So I woke up one day because I got an e-mail from my boss, and it was just like an email
talking about how great the company's doing.
How excited everyone is, and how happy everyone is at the company.
And I was annoyed because I had put filters on my work e-mail to not get e-mails like
these, and they kept taking them off.
[Laughter] You know.
I was also annoyed because it was in direct contrast with what I was seeing and experiencing
at work.
My co-workers were struggling in a way that shouldn't exist.
People were qualifying for Section 8 housing and then not able to move to that housing
because they would have had to take time off work.
They would have had to quit their job and, like, travel for four hours and all of this
other stuff.
And it was just unlivable, and it was weird to me because I was working at Yelp, a $2
billion dollar tech company.
And the entirety of the customer support department was struggling to an extent that we just accepted
it.
And that was weird to me.
And I didn't realize it was weird to me until I was standing there drinking a glass of water.
My hands were shaking more than they are now.
Waiting for a pot of rice to boil.
And I was drinking water while watching — oh, I should mention that the email was a vlog.
My CEO regularly makes vlogs to talk about himself.
One of them he actually talked about how he styles his hair.
That's why I had the e-mail filters, you guys.
[Laughter] So I was waiting for this pot of rice to boil,
drinking water because my stomach hurt because I hadn't actually had a proper meal in about
two weeks.
My hands were shaking and I realized this isn't normal.
So I did what anyone would do.
I looked up to see if he was on Twitter, and he was.
So I sent him a couple of tweets.
I told him I'll edit your vlogs if you just pay me a living wage.
Pretty easy.
I'll even put you on some no-name podcasts because I know a couple people.
Not that many, but I can get you hooked up if that's what you're after.
And I pointed out that we have this revolving door at the company where it takes a lot of
training to be good at the job that we have to do.
And yet people end up leaving before they're at that point.
Like, my first month, I gave out $600 in food credit to customers.
And in my last three months, I gave out $10.
And only because my manager told me I definitely had to.
But I didn't have to give out $600.
I just learned how to be really good at customer support.
So you have all these employees who are bad at customer support giving out tons of money
that you could be funneling back into those employees to keep them around.
Seemed pretty simple.
And by the time I wrote this tweet — “anyway, fire me or ignore me.
Either way, I'll keep on struggling all the same.”
By the time I wrote that, I realized sending a bunch of tweets doesn't really get the point
across.
It's like a fly buzzing around your ear.
So I wrote an open letter to my CEO.
I even gave it a really clever name.
[Laughter] And two hours later, on my six-month anniversary
of my first day at Yelp, I was fired.
And if you think that just the letter itself might have, you know, started going viral.
That was, like, firing me turned a match into, like, a fire tornado.
It was everywhere.
This is some of the news if you just Google it, and it's -- it's in different languages.
Someone actually messaged me saying, hey, you're in the paper in Italy.
And I was, like, I hope they're saying good things because I don't speak Italian.
[Laughter] But my favorite headlines were from Germany.
[Laughter] But wait.
There's more.
[Laughter] You don't even need to speak German to know.
But as the Germans would say, “das ist good.”
Which, by the way, fun thing I learned while preparing for this talk, “shitstorm” is
German.
[Laughter] You learn something new every day.
But aside from the news coverage, I also had regular people commenting on this.
I had memes made of me.
That's my face on a piece of bread.
Which was unfortunate because they missed the obvious pun.
The Anticrust.
[Laughter] But I went for it.
I went for it, you guys.
[Applause] That's what happens when you try trolling
a writer/comedian is that they end up making an even funnier joke than you.
This is a porn company that e-mailed me asking me to do a ten-person gang bang for entitled
millennials, and I said a million dollars per dick, including the ones that e-mail me.
[Applause] This may surprise you guys, but they did not
respond.
[Laughter] This next slide has some graphic content,
so I guess close your eyes.
This is what it looked like on Twitter.
Yeah, that's fun, right?
Being that one person that all of these things are directed at.
It was overwhelming and kind of scary.
But at least I'm not this guy that favorites his own tweet, am I right?
[Laughter] Come on, Steve.
You already have a typo, have a little self-respect.
But let's look at the data.
So this is 49 days prior to my letter.
This is an average of 10,000 impressions on my Twitter account a day, which is not bad
because I had about 5,000 followers at the time.
This is the week of my letter.
20 million impressions over the full week with a peak at a little over 4 million impressions
the Tuesday after my letter.
Which is interesting because anyone in media knows that when you have news on Friday, it
should be dead by Monday.
But I kept trending.
I trended on Facebook for a cool minute.
And that was before they had the bots too, so you know it was real.
[Laughter] So this is just what it looks like.
But what going viral felt like was like being in front of an audience of people you don't
know naked while your closest family members yell things at you that you didn't know you
should be insecure about.
And I'm sorry it's a stick-figure thing.
I couldn't find a picture that accurately represented how I feel in this very unique
situation.
It feels like going into the fire swamp.
[Laughter] Without Wesley there to guide you.
It's extremely isolating because you don't know anyone who's gone viral in this way.
You don't know anyone who's dealt with a lot of harassment, until you've had to deal with
a lot of harassment.
I had people e-mailing me my address, calling my grandparents pretending to know me to try
to get info from me.
I had this feeling of just wanting to log out of everything and pretend it didn’t
exist.
But I couldn’t, because if I did that, there was a solid chance that someone would come
to my apartment.
Like, this guy who e-mailed me my address, he was just being a nice dude.
Just being helpful.
Hey, I was able to figure out that this picture that you posted has this little bar code.
I scanned it and did this whole thing and odds are, people are going to be angry enough
that they're going to try and do that too, so you might want to delete this thing that
has your full name and your address down to your apartment.
And if I had logged out, tried to push it all away, I wouldn't have seen that, and I
may have had some really angry people at my door while dealing with bronchitis and losing
my job and all of these other fun things.
So it's not fun.
A lot of people when I've told them that this happened to me, they're, like, well, that
must be pretty cool, right?
Like, you got to go viral.
Everyone knows who you are.
And I'm, like, no, everyone knows who I am in a bad way.
The rebuttal that was the most popular rebuttal to my piece has 6 million views.
My open letter has 2 million.
So that's four million people out there who hate me and don't know why.
They're just, like, yep, she's the worst.
If I ever see her, I'm going to spit on her shoes.
I don't know.
[Laughter] But through all of this, as scary as it is,
even months later, some cool stuff happened.
Yelp increased their wages, and they actually took my advice on a couple of other things
that I mentioned in my letter too.
No big deal.
[cheers and applause] Yeah.
It's crazy!
Being an entitled millennial can get a living wage for hundreds of people.
Kids these days, am I right?
[Laughter] So these, though, are the only two places
that wrote about it, Death and Taxes and Quartz.
Aside from Backchannel, which is the one that broke the story in a profile on me.
And that's kind of a bummer because there were so many sites covering it initially and
now pretty much no one actually knows that they increased their wages.
But regardless, the news kind of shifted the narrative where there were people who would
just kind of sit around and wait to criticize me on something.
Once this happened, they were, like, oh, I can't insult you anymore about this specifically.
They still find other things.
I am a woman, you know?
There's plenty.
I was no longer entitled or whiny.
I was “a hero”?
[Applause] Yeah, I mean it's a little weird.
I'm very humble and very -- it's, you know, I really don't know how to handle it.
Someone else said that I was Norma Rae, which was a little problematic because I'm a millennial,
and I had to Google that.
[Laughter] If anyone else doesn't know, it's a movie.
I think Sally Field got an Oscar for it.
And some other stuff came up.
This is now the age of Talia Jane, which apparently follows the age of the Aquarius.
[Laughter] That's the boomer age.
And someone said I'm Tom Joad from Grapes of Wrath.
When there's an open letter waiting to be written, I'll be there.
[Laughter] I was even listed in Business Insider’s
Silicon Valley 100, as well as their sister site, Ink.com’s 25 Coolest Women in Silicon
Valley.
And I was listed #84, which means I beat out whatever is 100 to 84, that number of people.
Those people are, like, CEOs and stuff.
I can't imagine how, like -- that must be a bummer for them.
[Laughter] But anyway.
I wrote a letter.
It went viral.
I went viral.
There was a huge pile-on of people calling me, the face of millennial entitlement and
criticizing me for just trying to live and wanting to have a better life for the people
that I worked with.
And, like, that sucks.
But some really good things came of it.
And I got to speak at a really cool festival, you know?
[Applause] And the, you know, higher wages, that's also
important.
It's like they always say.
First, they ignore you.
Then, they laugh at you.
Then they fight you, and then some kind of cool stuff happens.
Thank you.
[cheers and applause]