The Why

This book has been mine to write. The agency has been ours to build.

Across the chapters that came before, I have described the people I have built CI Web Group with — the Heney cousins, the Marshall family, the Hernandez and Osio and Nodine and Parker and Humble names that the operational chapters carry. I have described them from my own perspective. I have told the reader what I think makes each of them structurally consequential to the company. That description was honest, but it was incomplete. It was incomplete because it was mine.

This book has been mine to write. The agency has been ours to build.

This section is theirs. The team members whose voices you are about to encounter have written, in their own words, the answer to a single question: why CI Web Group? Why this agency, this work, these clients, this team — across years, sometimes decades, of their professional lives? I asked them to write what they wanted the reader to know. I edited nothing. I am putting their voices on the page exactly as they sent them to me, because the company is more honest with their voices carrying the closing than with mine carrying it alone.

Kathy Marshall — the former Physician Assistant who became my only equity partner in 2011, who lived through the technically-homeless year, who has been the head of customer service for sixteen years, who is in 2026 on the last round of treatment for Stage 1 uterine cancer — is the first voice in this section. She sent me her Why essay near the end of my writing of this book. Here it is, in her own words, with no edits.

Kathy Marshall

Equity Partner, Head of Customer Service

My Why

I loved medicine and my patients. I graduated from Baylor College of Medicine on November 30, 1992. I have had the opportunity to work in several medical specialties, including Neurology, Infectious Disease, Medical Oncology and Haematology, Gastroenterology, and Internal Medicine. I had the opportunity to serve patients for 18 years and learned many lessons and life skills along the way.

As much as I loved medicine, I knew I had a higher purpose.

I tried many things, invested in the wrong opportunities and learned even more lessons.

Due to my very strong entrepreneurial tendencies and the need for a great website, I found Jennifer online due to her education and training. At the first live meeting, I became a customer, and Jennifer’s team created my first website, which I still believe was the best ever!

Back in the day, my custom WordPress website was an amazing place to create my message, story, and purpose. I blogged daily, but they did make me turn off my live music. LOL. Jennifer began bringing up that I should consider changing my career to CIWG.

My second meeting with Jennifer was in person; she was conducting a live CIWG customer training session, which was the best training I had ever experienced. This is when I knew I had found “my spot.”

I was in Friendswood, TX, so my trip to Dallas was a 5-hour drive, but it didn’t matter; I was hooked.

By the third live meeting with CIWG, Jennifer was speaking for an area Chamber of Commerce, and within 5 minutes, the audience all stopped scrolling on their cell phones and doodling on their napkins; they all started to engage, laugh, and participate. The audience shifted; it was visible, they all sat up taller, their eyes became alive. CIWG had me at “Hello,” game over. So later, at dinner in Dallas at “Raw,” when Jennifer asked me to come work with her, I said “YES” without hesitation.

It was with great relief to have finally found my purpose and to work alongside a brilliant professional who just never gave up, persisted during hard times, and worked with excitement and joy for life.

Over the years, and even now, CIWG remains the best workplace to be part of. We have the best HR department that has selected some of the best medical benefits, which have gotten me through Uterine Cancer Surgery, Radiation, and Chemotherapy, allowing me to remain financially stable.

I have one word for Jennifer. She is just brilliant and remains strong in her purpose and growth. She continues to train and inspire our team and customers, for those who come with capacity and are open to change and learning new things.

— Kathy Marshall, May 2026

That is Kathy’s voice on the page — the founding entry in this section, written by the woman who has been in this story since the earliest days and by my side since September of 2010, in her own words, with no edits from me. The rest of this section is reserved for the additional voices that will be added in the editions and printings that follow this one. The team is bigger than this book’s first pass can carry. Their voices will arrive. When they do, they will be added here, exactly as Kathy’s is, with no edits, attributed to the writers themselves. The company has been built by people. The book about the company should let those people speak.

And then Clay's arrived — first as two paragraphs, then, days later, as the whole story. Clay has run business development beside me for nearly nine years, and he will be the first to tell you he hates the spotlight — which is exactly what makes what follows precious. The longest continuous witness to how this company actually operates, exactly as he sent it:

Clay Howard

Sr. Director of Business Development

A Nine-Year Education in What Real Leadership Looks Like — by J. Clayton Howard, Jr.

I met Jennifer Bagley at a Daikin trade show in Houston, Texas, almost eleven years ago now. I was working for a different company at the time, and as it happened, our two tables were set up right next to each other on the show floor — hour after hour, booth to booth, the way you end up talking to whoever fate seats you beside at those events. We talked off and on all day. That was all it took. Before the show wrapped, Jennifer looked at me and said, half-joking and half-not, “At some point in time, you gotta work for me.”

I laughed it off. I was happy where I was. I didn’t need anything. I had a job I was fine with, a paycheck I could count on, and no particular reason to think about making a change. I had no idea that conversation would end up reshaping the entire trajectory of my career.

But we stayed in touch. What started as a passing comment at a trade show turned into an actual friendship. Over the next year, year and a half, I’d run into Jennifer here and there — at another industry event, on a phone call about something unrelated — and I got to know her, not as a potential employer, but as a person. What struck me even back then, before I had any stake in her success, was how she talked about the business she was building. There was no arrogance in it, no empty bravado about being the best. It was more like she was solving a puzzle out loud, thinking through how contractors could actually compete in a changing world, and she was clearly a few steps ahead of most people having that conversation. I liked how she thought. I liked her energy. I filed it away, the same way you file away a good idea you’re not ready to act on yet.

Then my own situation changed. I found myself in a different position, looking to make a career move, and Jennifer’s name was the first one that came to mind. I don’t know that I can fully explain why, other than that the memory of her energy and her vision had stuck with me all that time, quietly, in the back of my mind, waiting for the moment I’d actually be free to act on it. I called her up. There was no lengthy interview process, no drawn-out back-and-forth, no committee weighing my resume against a stack of others. She hired me right there on the phone. By the end of that same day, I had a contract sitting in my email inbox. That was it. That was the leap.

I want to be honest about how that leap felt, because I think it says something about the kind of leader Jennifer is that people are willing to take it. I didn’t have a background in marketing. I didn’t know the first thing about HVAC, the industry CI Web Group was serving. I couldn’t have told you the difference between a condenser and a compressor, let alone explained why a homeowner should trust one contractor over another. And on top of all of that, I was going to be making less money than I had at my previous full-time job. That’s not a small thing. That’s the kind of detail that keeps you up at night when you’re weighing a decision like that.

Jennifer’s pitch to me wasn’t a bigger paycheck up front — it was a promise. She told me that if I hung in there, if I put in the time to learn the ropes, learn how SEO worked, learn web design, learn the business end to end, and stayed loyal to the process, she would absolutely make it worth my while down the road. She didn’t dress it up. She didn’t oversell it. She just told me plainly what the deal was, and something about that honesty made it easier to trust her.

That’s a hard thing to ask someone to bet on — their income, their stability, their whole professional identity, on the promise of a person they’d known socially for a year and a half. But something about the way she said it made me believe her, and so I took the leap of faith. Looking back now, from where I sit almost nine years later, I can say without any hesitation that it was the best professional decision I have ever made. But I didn’t know that then. Then, it was just a leap, and a nervous one.

That first year was rocky. I won’t pretend otherwise. I was learning an entirely new industry and an entirely new discipline at the same time, and there were plenty of days I went home wondering if I’d made the right call. Every day brought some new acronym, some new concept, some new piece of the puzzle I hadn’t known existed the day before. SEO. On-page optimization. The mechanics of how a search engine actually decides which contractor’s website to show a homeowner searching for emergency AC repair at eleven o’clock at night. Web design principles I’d never had reason to think about. The particular language and pain points of HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and every other trade we served — the seasonal rushes, the emergency call culture, the way trust gets built (or lost) with a homeowner in the span of a single phone call.

I had a coworker on the sales team at the time, someone I actually knew from a previous position, who helped train me and show me the ropes when I first got there. I’m grateful for that head start; having someone who could translate the basics for me in those first weeks made an enormous difference. But head start or not, I was determined — determined in a way that went beyond just getting through the day — to actually understand the marketing side of the business. I wanted to know what made CI Web Group different from every other agency calling on the same contractors, competing for the same accounts. I wasn’t satisfied learning the script; I wanted to understand the “why” behind it. Why this approach to a proposal worked better than that one. Why one contractor’s website converted visitors into phone calls and another one, built by a competitor, quietly bled traffic. I read everything I could get my hands on. I asked more questions than I probably should have. I wanted the whole picture, not just my slice of it.

That determination paid off faster than I expected. In no time at all, I had surpassed the very teammate who trained me — not because I was smarter or more talented, but because I refused to stop at “good enough to get by.”

Here’s the thing about that, though — and it’s maybe the most important part of this whole story. My teammate was sharp. She was capable. But there was one thing she could never quite adjust to, and it’s the same thing that, looking back, taught me more about leadership than anything else in my career: Jennifer moves fast, and she doesn’t get attached to “the way we’ve always done it.”

She’d walk in and teach us a new process for something — a sales approach, a way of framing a proposal, an outreach method, a way of positioning a particular service against a competitor’s — and we’d run with it for two or three days. We’d start to feel confident in it, start to see it working. Then, on day four or five, she’d come back with something different. Something better. Sometimes it was a small refinement. Sometimes it was a near-total rework of how we were supposed to approach a whole category of prospect. To an outsider, or to someone not used to that pace, it could look almost random, like she was changing her mind just for the sake of it. My teammate experienced it that way, and honestly, it wore her down over time. She could learn a system. What she couldn’t do was keep re-learning one every week, and eventually, that ground her down enough that she didn’t last.

I understood the frustration, because at first, it wore on me too. I wasn’t used to things shifting that quickly. I liked to get comfortable with a process before it changed on me — I think most people do. There’s a real security in mastering something and then just running it on repeat. But the more time I spent around Jennifer, the more I realized something important: it was never random. Her mind was always working two or three steps ahead of the rest of us. She’d implement something new, and rather than settling into it and getting comfortable, she’d keep turning it over in her head, looking for the better version of it — sometimes finding that better version days later, sometimes weeks later, and sometimes within hours of rolling the first version out.

It took me a good two years to fully make peace with that rhythm. Two years of catching myself getting frustrated by a change, then stopping to actually look at the results, and realizing every time that the new way was working better than the old way had. It took two years for that pattern to sink in deeply enough that I stopped resisting it and started expecting it. But once that clicked, something in how I approached my own work changed. I realized that every single time she made one of those changes — every pivot that used to catch us off guard — the company got stronger for it. Every time I leaned into the change instead of resisting it, and put in the work to learn the new process, it worked out to the company’s advantage. So I made a decision: I was going to go with the flow, whatever the flow was, because in all my years working for her, not once has she steered us down the wrong path.

I’ll say that again, because it’s the heart of the matter: not once has she steered us down the wrong path. That’s an extraordinary thing to be able to say about a leader after nearly nine years, across dozens of shifts in strategy, technology, and approach.

What used to feel like a weakness in myself — needing time to adjust to her speed — I’ve come to see as one of the sharpest advantages we have over our competition. While other agencies are still executing on last year’s playbook, still selling contractors the same templated website and the same tired SEO checklist they were selling five years ago, Jennifer has already rewritten our playbook twice. And because I learned, eventually, to pivot at her pace instead of fighting it, I’ve been able to stay right there with her, which means I’ve been able to help the company stay ahead of an industry that is not exactly known for standing still. I see it now in the tools we’ve built and the platforms we’ve rolled out — the kind of work that didn’t exist as a concept in our industry two years ago is now just what we do on a Tuesday. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because someone at the top refuses to stand still, and because the people around her learn to move with her instead of watching from the sidelines.

Fast forward to today, and I look at what we’re building — websites and platforms that are, frankly, more efficient and more forward-thinking than anything else being built in our space — and it makes me genuinely proud to be part of this company. I need to say something here that might sound like a contradiction, but I don’t think it is: I have a real problem with being in the spotlight. I don’t like tooting my own horn. I don’t need the accolades or the attention. I’d rather be in the background, doing the work, helping the company get better one day at a time. That’s just who I am, and it’s probably why writing something like this feels a little uncomfortable, even now.

But pride is different from attention-seeking, and I can say without hesitation that I am proud. Proud of our team. Proud of the work we put out into the world. Proud that when I look at what our competitors are still trying to figure out, we’re already three steps past it. And proud of our fearless leader, who has never once let this company get comfortable with where it is.

I don’t want to paint this as some kind of fairy tale where everything has always gone smoothly, because that wouldn’t be honest, and it wouldn’t do justice to what actually makes Jennifer remarkable. There have been times over these nine years where she and I haven’t agreed. There have been disagreements about approach, about strategy, about how to handle a given situation with a client or a process internally. That’s normal. That’s what happens when you work closely with someone for the better part of a decade, and honestly, I’d be suspicious of any testimonial that claimed otherwise. Two people who never disagree over nine years either aren’t paying attention or aren’t being honest with each other.

What’s not normal — what I think genuinely sets Jennifer apart — is how she handles those disagreements. She has this ability to separate the business from the personal in a way that a lot of leaders talk about but very few actually practice. When we don’t see eye to eye, she listens. She actually listens, not the kind of listening where someone’s just waiting for their turn to talk. She takes the feedback seriously, even in the moments where she might be the one who’s wrong — and yes, there have been instances where she was wrong, and she owned that too, plainly, without excuses. She doesn’t get an attitude about it. She doesn’t get defensive or arrogant or make you feel small for having pushed back. She just absorbs it, learns from it, and moves forward, usually faster than I expect her to. At her core, she’s a deeply humble person, which is not a word most people would think to use about someone who is, by any honest measure, a genius. But it’s the right word. She wants to make everyone she touches better — her employees, our clients, everyone — and that desire to lift people up is not an act. I’ve watched it up close for almost nine years, in good quarters and hard ones, in moments of success and moments of frustration. I believe it from the bottom of my heart, and it’s a big part of what has kept me here and kept me loyal to her and to this company.

That generosity shows up in small ways as much as big ones. It’s in the way she’ll take the time to explain the reasoning behind a decision instead of just issuing it. It’s in the way she has invested in people who, like me nine years ago, walked in without the exact background the job seemed to call for, because she was more interested in whether someone was willing to learn than in whether they already had every box checked. It’s in the patience she’s shown me personally, more than once, while I caught up to a pace that didn’t come naturally to me at first. A less generous leader would have just moved on to someone easier to manage. She didn’t.

I’ll admit there’s a part of this story that wasn’t easy for me to sit with, and I think it’s worth telling honestly, because it’s where I learned something about myself as much as I learned something about Jennifer. I came into this industry with more than twenty years of sales experience behind me, including time running my own sales-related business. I know what building and leading a sales team looks like, or at least I thought I did. So on two separate occasions, when other people were promoted into VP or senior management roles over me, I was salty about it. There’s no other honest word for it. I looked at those decisions and felt, in my gut, that I had more experience, and that I could have done a better job growing a sales team than the people who got the nod.

Then, a little over a year ago, Jennifer told me something that changed how I saw all of it. She admitted, plainly, that she never promoted me into one of those roles because she didn’t want to lose her number one sales performer to a desk. She knew that the moment she buried me in administrative work, mundane meetings, and people management, I’d stop doing the thing I actually loved and the thing I was best at, which was connecting with people and educating them about our product. She wasn’t holding me back. She was protecting the part of my job that mattered most, both to me and to the company, even when I couldn’t see it that way myself.

That conversation landed hard, because she was right, and she’d apparently known she was right for a long time before she ever said it out loud. I was at a point in my career where all I honestly wanted to do was educate, build relationships, and focus on growing our clients’ businesses. Not manage a team. Not sit in more meetings. Just do the work I was made for. From that day forward, once I accepted something she had known about me all along, I was completely at peace with my role and my place in this growing organization. It’s a strange kind of gift, having someone see you more clearly than you see yourself, and having the humility to admit it to you honestly instead of just letting you keep guessing.

That journey has come full circle in a way that still catches me off guard some days. I’ve gone from being one of several people on a sales team, to being — at one point — the only salesperson at the company, to now being back on a growing team again. And watching our MRR climb the way it has, blowing past numbers that felt like pipe dreams just three years ago, watching it keep climbing month over month with no sign of slowing down, I’ve never been more proud to be part of what we’re building here.

I’ve also gotten to see, over these years, what our work actually does out in the world, and that has changed how I think about my own job. I’m not the owner of this company. I don’t have equity or a stake in it in that sense. But I’ve watched what we do — the strategy, the websites, the campaigns, the countless hours of figuring out how to help a home service contractor compete and grow — actually change people’s lives. I’ve sat across from contractors who were exhausted, who were doing everything by instinct and elbow grease and a phone number scribbled on the side of a work van, and I’ve watched them, a year or two later, running a business that finally reflects the quality of the work they’ve always done. I’ve watched family-owned companies that were on the edge of closing their doors find a second wind. I’ve seen owners who were working eighty-hour weeks finally hire the office help they needed because the phone was finally ringing enough to justify it. That is an extraordinarily rewarding thing to be part of, and it’s not something I take for granted, even in the middle of a busy week when it’s easy to get lost in proposals and deadlines and forget what all of it adds up to.

That’s what motivates me now, nine years in. Not a title. Not recognition. Just the fact that I get to show up, suit up, and contribute to something that is genuinely making a difference for the people we serve — and that I get to do it under someone who has never stopped pushing to be better, and who has never stopped trying to make the people around her better too. There’s a version of this story where Jennifer builds a successful agency and just protects that success, plays it safe, keeps doing the thing that’s already working. That’s not the version I’ve lived. The version I’ve lived is one where she keeps asking what’s next, keeps looking past this year’s results toward what the industry is going to need three years from now, and keeps pulling the rest of us along with her, whether we’re ready for it or not.

When I think back to that trade show in Houston, sitting at a table next to a woman I’d just met, hearing her say, almost as a throwaway line, “you gotta work for me” — I don’t think either of us fully understood what we were setting in motion. I certainly didn’t. I was comfortable. I wasn’t looking for anything. But a year and a half later, when I picked up the phone and called her, I was ready, and she didn’t hesitate. She hired me on the spot and had a contract in my inbox before the day was out. That kind of decisiveness, that willingness to bet on people, is the same quality that has driven every version of this company I’ve watched her build since — the same instinct that made her confident enough to hire someone with zero marketing experience and zero HVAC background, and the same instinct that has, time and again, told her when it was time to tear up a good process in favor of a better one.

Nine years. Nearly a decade of watching Jennifer refuse to sit still, refuse to get comfortable, refuse to let good enough be good enough. Nine years of learning, sometimes the hard way, that her instincts about where this industry is headed are almost always right — and that when I trust that instinct and move with her instead of against her, it works. Nine years of watching a genuinely brilliant, genuinely humble person build a company that leads rather than follows, and do it while still finding the time and the generosity to invest in the people around her, to hear them out when they disagree with her, and to admit it plainly on the occasions she gets something wrong.

I don’t need my name on anything for this to matter to me. I don’t need to be the one standing up front. What I need — what I actually care about — is that this company keeps doing what it’s doing, that our clients keep getting the kind of results that change their businesses, and that I get to keep being part of building that, quietly, in whatever way I’m useful. That’s enough for me. That’s always been enough for me.

I’m excited for the next chapter, whatever it looks like, because if the last nine years have taught me anything, it’s that Jennifer is never done building. This coming October will mark nine years since I signed that contract, nine years since I bet everything on a promise made over the phone by someone I’d known for a year and a half. It is, without question, the best bet I have ever made. And I feel privileged to keep building alongside her for however many years come next.

In all my years working for her, not once has she steered us down the wrong path.

— Clay Howard (J. Clayton Howard, Jr.), Sr. Director of Business Development, July 2026

Camille Porco's arrived the same day. Camille runs digital marketing strategy for the agency, and she has told me the truth at full volume since her first month here — as you are about to see. Exactly as she sent it:

Camille Porco

Sr. Director of Digital Marketing Strategy

To start my CIWG journey off, it begins when I was first interviewing. And the funny thing is, I got turned down for the job, which took me by total surprise. I remember thinking, well, that's that. And then about a week later, Melanie from HR calls me up and says something like, "So, I know I told you we were moving forward with another candidate… but we'd actually like to move forward with you too." Which is a wild sentence to receive. Looking back now, I think it's a very fitting plot twist.

Initially, I was a little suspicious. The company website at the time looked like it was designed in a high school class… like, full Photoshop-clip-art energy. I remember thinking, is this company even real? Is this too good to be true? But the more time I spent here, the more I got it: we were so laser-focused on our clients that we genuinely just… never got around to making ourselves look good. The brand took a backseat because the work never did. Kind of a backwards flex, but I'll take it.

Since then, I've been through multiple role changes and multiple restructures, not the "one big glow-up" story, more like several plot twists back to back. We move fast here. Like, sometimes uncomfortably fast. That means long hours figuring out a new role, a new process, a new piece of tech, while you're still holding the last one together with duct tape. There have been more than a few times I've had to physically get up from my home office, walk outside, plant my bare feet in the grass, and just breathe for a second before going back in. Very "corporate employee discovers grounding techniques," but hey, it works.

I remember one of my first meetings with Jenn, I spoke up about something I thought was dumb and could be done better, which is very on-brand for me, since I've always been blunt and said what's on my mind, sometimes to a fault. To my surprise, she genuinely appreciated the feedback and was completely open to hearing my point of view and talking through how to improve it. That was maybe my first month at CIWG, and it set the tone for everything after. Ever since, I've felt confident and comfortable being completely transparent, with her, and with everyone else here.

So with all of that (the chaos, the restructures, the grass therapy sessions) here's the actual why behind why I keep showing up and working as hard as I do: I believe in the vision. I believe in Jennifer. And I've seen, firsthand, what this work actually does in our clients' lives and businesses. That's not a line, that's the thing that keeps me here. I want to help people be successful, and I genuinely care, probably too much, if I'm being honest, about every single one of our clients. That care is exactly what makes the hard days worth it.

Honestly, the hardest part hasn't been the job itself, it's been learning where the line is at home. There are still nights my wife has to physically tell me to put the laptop or the phone down and be present with her. I'm lucky she's as patient and understanding as she is, because she's the one who actually keeps me showing up, for her, and for myself.

If I had to sum it all up: it's been one of the most beautiful, fun, eye-opening, exhausting, psychotic things I've ever done. All of that, at the same time. And honestly? I'd take this ride, gray hairs and all, over an easy one that didn't mean anything. Every. Single. Time.

— Camille Porco, July 2026

And then Rose's arrived — and Rose's entry could only have been written by Rose, because nobody else has watched this company from the inside twice. She was there in 2008, when the whole company fit inside one small office. She left in 2013, built a career in civil engineering, raised three boys — and came back to the AI-era company to work beside me again, when we were still more than a hundred people. She has watched us right-size by more than half from the inside since. She told me she cried writing this, and her kids came in to ask if she was okay. “I'm just so happy,” she told them — and cried some more. The longest arc in this section, exactly as she sent it:

Rose Villarreal

Executive Assistant to Jennifer Bagley

I've been trying to figure out how to write this because my story with CI Web Group doesn't start this year…or even last year.

It started almost twenty years ago.

I first joined CI Web Group back in 2008. At the time it was Jennifer, Chris, Kathy, myself and a few other guys. That was the entire team.

Before that, I had spent about five years in the oilfield industry. I started there right out of high school and moved away from home when I was just 22 years old. I wore every hat imaginable—administration, dispatching trucks, inventory management across five locations, training warehouse teams on new inventory software—you name it. Then the economy changed overnight. We went from managing more than 130 rigs to about 10 in what felt like the blink of an eye, and eventually I lost my job.

A mutual friend introduced me to Jennifer, and when I showed up for the interview, I honestly thought I had the wrong place. It was a small office tucked away, nothing like the busy corporate environment I had just come from. Working for a small company—especially one like this—was completely outside of what I knew. I remember looking around thinking, “Well…this is different.” I'll admit, I was a little skeptical. But I had just lost my job, so I was open to taking a chance.

Looking back now, I almost let first impressions get in the way of one of the best decisions of my life.

If someone had told me that this small office would one day become a company helping businesses navigate AI and employing more than 100 people, I probably would've laughed.

I started by answering phones and helping customers. As Jennifer's speaking opportunities grew, so did the business. Before I knew it, she looked at me and basically said, “Rose, you're going to learn how to build websites.”

So…I did.

Back then it was all WordPress. I built website after website after website. Medical clinics. HVAC companies. Dentists. Music producers. Even gentlemen's clubs. My favorite part? We built a website for a strip club and then immediately built one for a church. We laughed so hard about that because, honestly, work was work.

We eventually outgrew that little office and moved into a bigger one, which felt like such a huge accomplishment. Then, because Jennifer has never been one to spend money unless she absolutely had to, we eventually ended up working from her house. Looking back now, it wasn't about being cheap—it was about being smart. Every dollar she saved went right back into building the company.

The thing is…Jennifer wasn't just my boss.

She watched me grow up.

My twenties were messy. I went through some really hard seasons, and Jennifer was there for a lot of them. I remember helping take Torel to school. She helped me when I became a mom. We weren't just coworkers—we did life together.

Eventually life took me in another direction, and in 2013 I left CI Web Group. I spent years working in civil engineering, learning new skills and growing professionally.

Fast forward to today.

Life changed again.

My husband's job meant he would be traveling for weeks at a time, and I needed something that fit our family's schedule with three boys, soccer practices, tournaments, school, and everything in between.

One day, while sitting at soccer practice, I messaged Jennifer. I had been following everything she was building and simply asked if she had anything available.

She told me she might have something toward the end of the year. Then came months of waiting. Meetings got rescheduled, plans kept changing, and I honestly started wondering if she'd forgotten our conversation. Meanwhile, my husband had already accepted his new job, and I was quietly panicking. But deep down, I knew Jennifer. If she said she'd keep me in mind, she would.

Then one day, it wasn't Jennifer who reached out.

It was her Chief of Staff, Melanie.

That alone told me everything I needed to know about how much things had changed. The Jennifer I worked with years ago would've called me herself. Now she had built something so much bigger that her Chief of Staff was the one reaching out. I remember thinking, “Wow…look at what she's built.”

When I officially started and finally got to catch up with Jennifer, the first thing I said was, “Damn…I have to work with you just to talk to you now!” We both started laughing because it was so true.

Walking back into CI Web Group after all those years was surreal. The company I left had six people. The company I came back to had more than 100. That blew me away—not because I ever doubted Jennifer, but because I knew exactly how much it took to build it. I had seen parts of that journey most people never will.

I remember times when money was tight. Jennifer made sure every one of us got paid before she paid herself. At the time, I don't think I fully appreciated what that meant. Looking back now, as a mom with a family of my own, I realize the weight she was carrying while making sure ours stayed off our shoulders.

Seeing where she is today makes me incredibly proud.

Working here now is completely different.

First of all…Jennifer is a full-time job all by herself. 😂

Back then I sat right next to her. If she forgot something, I reminded her. If she missed a meeting, I could literally wave at her. Now we're remote. If she doesn't answer my call, I'm texting…then calling…and if that doesn't work, I'm calling Hicklen — her husband.

The biggest difference isn't just the company—it's the technology.

If I hadn't come back to work with Jennifer, AI probably would've meant ChatGPT to me—and that would've been about it.

Now I feel like I'm drinking from a fire hose every single day.

Twenty years ago Jennifer looked at me and said, “Rose, you're going to build websites.” Today she's saying, “Rose…we're building AI.” It feels overwhelming sometimes, but then I remember…I've been here before.

Jennifer has always had a way of seeing where the world is going before everyone else does. She pushed me into websites before I ever imagined building one. Today she's pushing all of us toward AI.

So I'll keep learning.

I'll keep showing up.

Because that's what this company has always taught me to do.

Some people come into your life for a season. Jennifer has somehow been part of almost every chapter of mine.

Jennifer…

Looking back now, I don't think you even realize the impact you've had on my life.

You became one of the people who helped shape the woman I became.

Thank you.

You didn't just give me a job twice.

You gave me stability twice.

The first time, I needed someone to believe in a 22-year-old who had just lost my job and was trying to figure out what came next.

The second time, I needed someone to believe in a mom trying to hold everything together while raising three boys, juggling soccer practices, tournaments, school schedules, and supporting a husband working out of town.

Both times…you showed up.

As I'm finishing writing this, I'm sitting in the passenger seat somewhere in South Dakota, headed to Blaine, Minnesota, where my son will spend the week playing in the USA Cup soccer tournament.

It hit me that this is exactly why I came back.

I didn't come back just because I needed a job. I came back because I wanted a life that let me be present for the people who matter most.

Who would've thought I'd be able to travel across the country with my family while still doing work I love?

Certainly not me.

Twenty years ago, I thought success meant sitting in an office from 8 to 5.

Today, success looks a little different.

It looks like answering emails from a hotel room, taking meetings between soccer games, working from the road, and still being present for one of the biggest moments in my son's life.

That's a gift this company has given me, and one I don't take for granted.

Watching your dream become the company you always talked about building has been one of the greatest privileges of my career. I got to see the little office days, the office days, the working-from-your-house days, and now the AI days.

Turns out…that little office wasn't the wrong place after all.

I walked in looking for a job.

I walked out with a career, a mentor, and a lifelong friend—I just didn't know it yet.

I walked in looking for a job. I walked out with a career, a mentor, and a lifelong friend — I just didn't know it yet.

— Rose Villarreal, Executive Assistant to Jennifer Bagley, July 2026

Melanie's arrived next — and if you have read this book carefully, you have already met her twice without knowing it. She is the Chief of Staff Rose mentioned a few pages ago, the one whose call told Rose “how much things had changed.” She was hired as our Director of HR. Watching what she became has been one of the joys of my career: she found her voice. She learned to code. Marketing, interviews, hard conversations, a new language — she engaged every single corner of this business, down into the roots, and motivated the people in every one of them while she did it.

And she changed me as well. She challenges me. She gets on my ass. She makes me slow down when slowing down is the last thing I want to do. She is my eyes and ears in the organization, and she jumps in anywhere when I need to focus somewhere — knowing that somewhere and anywhere can change in the blink of an eye. She has been beside me through the most difficult parts of this business — legal, financial, people — and she has learned the intricate details of how my brain operates, ebbing and flowing with me, available on a Sunday, or at 1 a.m. on a Tuesday, to brainstorm. If this book has a definition of Chief of Staff, it is her. Exactly as she sent it:

Melanie Osio

Chief of Staff

Building the Company That Builds You — by Melanie Osio

When I joined CI Web Group, I was hired as Director of HR.

I stopped being HR a long time ago.

Nobody handed me a new job description. The company kept evolving, and I evolved with it. Today my title is Chief of Staff, but the real story is everything that happened in between.

Before CI Web Group, I came from ad tech. The work was fast, data driven, and built for scale, but somewhere along the way I'd lost the connection between what I was building and the people it affected. Here, every system we improve helps a contractor grow a business, hire another technician, support another family. That changes how you approach your work — and it's a big part of why I stayed through everything that came next.

When our CFO departed, someone had to keep the finances running. That someone turned out to be me. I'm not a finance person, and I didn't pretend to become one. I worked alongside our fractional bookkeeper, took over managing what the CFO had managed, and put systems in place so the financial side of the business could keep moving. I never became the expert. What I learned is that you don't always have to be — you have to be willing to sit in the seat, ask the questions, and build the structure until things run without you.

When we shifted systems and built a few of our own, I could have watched from the sidelines. HR doesn't build websites. But I wanted to understand what this company was actually building, how it worked, and what we needed to do to succeed. So I learned alongside the tech team, and I built the front end of a few websites myself. Not expert work — but enough to speak the language, enough to understand what our team lives every day. I'm on all the production calls now, not just the people-related ones, because you can't help lead a company you only understand from one department's view.

Somewhere in all of that, a lesson took hold: your job isn't something you protect. It's something you improve until it no longer needs to exist in its current form. Then you help build what's next.

That sounds exciting on paper. Living it is harder. There were weeks I questioned whether I could keep up, and days that felt like rebuilding the airplane mid-flight. The speed here is real. It forces decisions before you feel ready, exposes weaknesses quickly, and demands you learn faster than you thought you could. Through all of it, I tried to be the person who kept spirits high on the team — partly because they needed it, and partly, if I'm honest, because I did too.

But growth rarely feels comfortable while it's happening. Every one of those uncomfortable stretches was quietly turning me into someone who could handle problems that would have overwhelmed an earlier version of me. Confidence, I've learned, arrives after you've done the difficult thing. Not before.

Working alongside Jennifer changed how I think about leadership. Leaders aren't there to preserve what exists. They're there to challenge assumptions, question what no longer serves the mission, and rebuild even when what's already there is good. Watching her do that — and being pushed to do it myself — rewired the question I ask every day. It's no longer “How do I do my job better?” It's “How do I build a company that doesn't depend on me doing this job forever?”

I'm proud of the systems we've built, the problems we've solved, and the people we've grown. But that's not what I'll remember most. I'll remember becoming someone more adaptable, more resilient, and more willing to step into uncertainty than I ever thought I was.

I joined to help build a company.

Somewhere along the way, the company started building me too.

Your job isn't something you protect. It's something you improve until it no longer needs to exist in its current form. Then you help build what's next.

— Melanie Osio, Chief of Staff, CI Web Group, July 2026

And then Liz's arrived — and Liz's is the longest continuous education this company has ever given one person, because she started at eighteen and she is still here. She is Torel's wife, Dallas's mother, my daughter-in-law, and the senior Hydra OS web designer who builds the sites our customers actually see. Chapter Two already told you how she came into this family. What follows is the story she wanted the reader to have in her own words — the Blockbuster years, the bed where I stroked her hair, Webflow, Hydra, and the living-room boat plans drawn with a newborn in her arms. Exactly as she sent it:

Liz Slone

Sr. Hydra OS Web Designer

Build the Boat — by Liz Slone

I was born into an overlap.

My childhood happened in that strange in-between where two worlds existed at the same time and nobody thought it was weird. We had a VCR under the TV and a landline "home" phone on the wall. Friday nights meant a run to Blockbuster, walking the aisles and hoping the movie you wanted hadn't already been rented out. Road trips started at the family computer, printing directions off MapQuest and folding them into the glovebox like treasure maps. That was normal. That was just how life worked.

And at the exact same time, in the exact same years, Apple was releasing its first iPhone. Netflix was quietly transitioning from mailing you DVDs that you picked up out of your mailbox to streaming whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted it. My schools went from teaching us how to format a Word document on old Windows 98 desktops and sending us home with a paper "packet" to handing out Chromebooks with an entire semester's curriculum at our fingertips.

Nobody sat us down and said, "you are living through a transition." It didn't feel historic. It felt like Tuesday. The old world and the new world overlapped so completely that you couldn't see the seam. Then one day Blockbuster was gone and nobody mourned it, because we were already somewhere else.

If you had asked that kid what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would have told you something in the medical field. I was intensely interested in diseases and illnesses. Why did they exist? How did they spread? How did we treat them? I could get lost for hours in questions like that. I didn't want to just know facts. I wanted to understand the machinery underneath them, the way one small invisible thing could move through a population and change everything it touched.

I thought that curiosity meant I was supposed to be in medicine. It took me years to realize the curiosity itself was the point, and that it would end up aimed at something no career quiz ever offered me.

I didn't know it at the time, but that childhood overlap was training. My entire career has been lived inside that same seam, the place where one world is ending and another is starting and everyone is too busy surviving the week to notice history happening around them. I've spent almost ten years at CI Web Group now, and every chapter of it has been some version of that Friday night at Blockbuster: standing in one era while the next one loads quietly in the background.

Eighteen

To explain how an eighteen year old ends up at a company like CI Web Group, I have to back up a little further, because the real beginning of this story isn't a job application. It's a boy I met in high school.

His name was Torel. We were high school sweethearts, the kind of thing adults smile at politely because they assume it won't last. It lasted. He is my husband now and the father of my child, but at the time he was just the person I wanted to be around more than anyone else. And Torel came with something I didn't fully understand yet: his mother, Jennifer, who had built a company called CI Web Group.

Jennifer invested in me. I want to be precise about that word, because it's the right one. She didn't just give her son's girlfriend a job to be nice. She looked at a lost teenager and decided I was worth betting on before I had given the world any evidence that I was. I started working at CI Web Group when I was eighteen, right before I graduated high school. My job, on paper, was manual data entry and optimizing Facebook business accounts for customers. In less fancy terms: I was making sure businesses had all of their account fields filled out. Hours, address, description, categories. It was not glamorous. It was a starting line.

Here's the truth about who I was at eighteen, and I'm going to say it plainly because I've earned the right to: I was not equipped for life. My life constantly felt like it was on the edge of falling apart, and the uncomfortable fact is that most of the time, nothing was actually wrong. The problem was me. I fell apart at the smallest inconvenience. A schedule change. A hard conversation. A bad day. Any of it could level me, because I had never learned to steer myself. I let every emotion drive while I rode along in the passenger seat of my own life. The world felt large in a scary way, not because the world was out to get me, but because I had built nothing sturdy in myself to meet it with. I was lost, and I knew it, and knowing it didn't change it. Awareness without ownership is just watching yourself drown.

I remember one day in particular. I was inconsolable. Nothing catastrophic had happened. It was a bunch of small things that had added up, the way they always did back then, because I let them. I ended up lying in Jennifer's bed while she stroked my hair, and she said one small thing to me that changed everything.

"You can choose to be happy."

For some reason, I had never once thought about it that way. My whole life, I had allowed my emotions to control me instead of the other way around, and I had never questioned it. It hadn't even occurred to me that there was another way to live. And here was this woman telling me, gently, while I fell apart in her bed, that I had a choice in the matter. That I could take ownership of my own inner life. My emotions, my thoughts, my feelings. Mine to steer.

I don't share this to inject vulnerability into the story for its own sake. I share it because you cannot understand CI Web Group, or anything that comes later in these pages, without understanding what Jennifer actually does. Yes, she shapes the future of an industry. But she also shapes the future in a quieter way: she inspires people to get out of their own way. Her leadership is built around taking the leap, again and again, whether or not the fear ever goes away. The lesson I absorbed from her wasn't "don't be afraid." It was this: if you're afraid, do it afraid.

I've been doing it afraid ever since.

The Wrench

Over the next year, Torel, Allula, and I transitioned into optimizing brand new websites for on-page SEO. New skills, new responsibility, the first of many reinventions. I was learning how search engines think, how a page gets found, how structure and content and intent all fit together. Looking back, it scratched the same itch as those childhood disease questions. Why does this work? How does it spread? What happens if you change one variable?

Meanwhile, in my other life, I was in college for dental hygiene. On paper it made perfect sense. It was medical-adjacent, stable, respectable, exactly the kind of practical version of my childhood curiosity that a guidance counselor would approve of. And I was miserable. I had always loved school. I loved learning, loved being good at it, loved the feeling of a subject opening up in front of me. This wasn't that. This wasn't fulfilling me. I despised it. But I kept going anyway, because that's what you do, right? You pick a path and you stay on it.

Then Torel invited me to join a trip to Spain with his family.

I had never left the country. I wanted to go desperately. And the wrench in all of it was finals. I had to be in Seattle, sitting in a classroom, proving I could pass exams for a career I already knew I hated, while the person I loved was on the other side of the ocean living a life I was only hearing about in phone calls.

So I stayed. He went to Spain. I took my finals.

He got back from his trip. I finished my first year of college. And I made a decision in that moment that changed the trajectory of everything: I wanted freedom, and I dropped out. I would not miss out again.

People love to frame dropping out as giving up, and I braced myself for that reaction. It never came. The people around me encouraged it. They celebrated it. In a world of self-made human beings, walking away from a path that was crushing me was not something to be discouraged. It was the first brave thing anyone had watched me do. Nobody in that family was going to shame me for choosing my own life; they had all done the same thing, in their own ways, at their own crossroads.

It was still terrifying. I did it afraid.

The Shift You Can Feel

A couple of years later, COVID hit. It was the kind of world-changing event where you can feel the shift in history in real time, like the floor tilting under your feet.

I remember exactly where I was. Torel and I were in the sauna at the gym when Jennifer called, warning us about some sort of illness going around. We were in our early twenties, and in true early-twenties fashion, we did not believe it would make an impact on our lives. We sat there sweating, invincible, humoring her. The kid who once spent hours reading about how diseases spread somehow could not imagine one actually reaching her.

A week later, everything was shut down.

With that much uncertainty in the air, we packed up and left for Houston to stay with Mike and Jenn while we figured out what the hell was going on. What was supposed to be a stopgap turned into a chapter of its own. We stayed until 2022, and honestly, we enjoyed that time tremendously. Bike rides. Pool swims. Time with family while the rest of the world felt like it was holding its breath. In the middle of global chaos, we found a rhythm. And when the chapter closed, it closed the way I never could have predicted at eighteen: in February of 2022, Torel and I purchased our first home in Seattle, in the city where I grew up. The girl who fell apart at the smallest inconvenience was now a homeowner who had weathered a pandemic.

Work transformed just as completely. CI Web Group pulled everyone in from travel. In-person events were at a standstill. The whole playbook of trade shows, conferences, and handshakes evaporated overnight. And in the middle of all of that, I made one of the biggest transitions of my career: I moved from back end work to forward facing, working directly with our customers on their website strategy.

That meant that for the first time, I got to hear every single one of their challenges in real time, unfiltered. People didn't want to come to work. Supply shortages and bottlenecks were choking businesses from one side. And simultaneously, their customers, everyone's customers, were stuck at home, staring at the four walls of a house that had suddenly become their office, their school, their gym, and their entire world. They wanted a comfortable, safe space, and they were willing to pay a premium for it.

I was watching, in real time, an entire industry get handed a moment. The businesses that stayed curious and adapted were drowning in demand. The ones that froze got left behind. I have never forgotten that split.

Because here's what I believe, and it's the thread that runs through everything in this chapter: in a world where technology is constantly changing and evolving, regardless of whatever else is happening on the planet, only those who remain curious and insist on resilience despite setbacks will survive the velocity. I don't mean that in a morbid, literal way. I mean it in the way a dandelion grows between the cracks in the concrete. Pressure from both sides. Feet everywhere threatening to stomp it out. And it still insists on seeing the sun.

The Ordeal

Then came Webflow.

CI Web Group went through the painful transition of Webflow, and I want to be honest about it: it was brutal. WordPress was just not an option anymore. The writing was on the wall for anyone willing to read it. And at the time, Webflow was the gold standard. They had acquired Intellimize, a platform that used AI to A/B test and make changes based on data, and you could see where the whole thing was heading.

But knowing you're right doesn't make the transition hurt any less.

Try to picture what this actually meant. Forcing a massive change on developers who were comfortable on WordPress, and not comfortable in a lazy way, but comfortable in the way of people who had spent years mastering a craft and were now being told to set it down. Training an entire team not just to use a brand new platform but to discuss it, to explain to customers why the move made sense. Trying to educate an entire industry that had been sold WordPress for decades on why staying put was the real risk. And doing all of it while the naysayers stood around waiting for us to fail.

The pressure was intense. We had a full pipeline of websites that still had to ship. We were learning new tools daily. Creating new processes from scratch. Training hundreds of people. Investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into a transition with no guarantee. Changing entire mindsets, rethinking everything we thought we knew about how our own work got done.

If you asked me for the low point, it wasn't one dramatic crash or one call that went badly. It was quieter and heavier than that. It was the stretch where the pipeline was so full that it genuinely felt like we would never get through it, while at the same time we were rebuilding our technology and our processes underneath ourselves midflight, because protecting our customers was not negotiable. Imagine changing the engine on a plane without landing it, while every passenger deserves and expects a smooth ride. We would solve one bottleneck and another would pop up in its place. Some days the finish line didn't just feel far away. It felt fictional.

And I would do it all over again.

Because I truly believe Webflow was our catalyst. It was our kick in the ass. It was our ordeal, that moment in every story where you're given a choice to sink or swim, and the choice reveals who you actually are. We were swimming like hell.

Then, just as we found our rhythm and our footing with Webflow, OpenAI and Anthropic started dropping bombs.

Suddenly we were being handed tools that let us work faster and more efficiently than we'd ever imagined. We got a taste of what it felt like to have the burden eased. Actually eased, not just shuffled around. And that taste didn't make us complacent. It made us hungry. We were inspired.

And from that inspiration, Hydra was born.

The Elephant in the Room

Before we dive into the beast that was, and is, Hydra, I need to stop and acknowledge the elephant in the room.

On February 3rd, 2025, I found out that Torel and I were going to have a baby, due in October.

The boy from high school, the Spain trip I missed, the sauna where we ignored a pandemic together, the house in Seattle: all of it had been leading here. We were going to be parents. I was overjoyed and terrified in equal measure, which by that point in my life felt familiar. Do it afraid applies to more than career moves.

The pipeline was still full of Webflow websites, a backlog of sites making their way through our transition. We would solve one bottleneck and another would pop up in its place, like a game of whack-a-mole where the moles were deadlines. And the pressure was high to get those sites out before I had to leave the team to figure it out without me.

Here's the funny thing about CI Web Group: if you take even a week away, the entire company is different by the time you get back. System improvements. Platform improvements. Changes to the entire technology and marketing landscape. You name it. A week is a lifetime here.

I was preparing to take three months off. With a brand new baby. As a first-time mom.

I was shitting my pants. Because by the time my due date arrived, we were already in the infancy of Hydra, the most significant thing we had ever built, and to leave right then was a risk. I knew that when I came back, I wouldn't be walking. I'd be sprinting just to catch up.

On October 19th, 2025, our son was born. And a whole new slew of fears set in.

The normal first-time parent anxiety was there, ever present. Is he breathing, is he eating, am I doing any of this right. But layered on top of it was something bigger. Picture the scene: I'm sitting in Jennifer's living room with a newborn, hallucinating on two and a half hours of sleep, and around me the conversations are all about AI. How fast it was moving. How the models seemed to leap forward every few months instead of every few years. What it meant that machines could now write and reason and build. What work would even look like in five years, in ten. What our industry would look like. What every industry would look like. I would drift in and out of the newborn fog and catch pieces of it, and every piece pointed at the same conclusion: the ground was moving again, faster than it had ever moved before.

And this time it wasn't just my career on the table. I was holding the stakes in my arms. These were conversations about things that I believed would change the entire landscape of my son's future. Not my industry's future. Not my company's future. His.

There's a detail here that I need you to sit with, because it's the heart of this whole story. The woman leading those conversations was not just my boss. She was my mother-in-law. The newborn in my arms was her grandson. Three generations of one family were in that living room, and the oldest of us was looking at the youngest of us and deciding, in real time, what to do about the world he would inherit. I could tell by the look on Jennifer's face that she was thinking exactly what I was thinking.

The way she saw it, there were two options. We could scoff and ignore that the world was changing, that yet again technology was evolving underneath us. Or we could prepare for it. We couldn't fight the current. So we'd build a boat.

When my maternity leave ended and I returned in January of 2026, the boat was small, but it was there. And I was determined not to be left behind. I followed the senior development team around like a shadow. I listened to everything they said. I practiced and researched and did not stop until I understood. My days were filled with "why" and "how," the same two questions I used to aim at diseases as a kid, now aimed at a technology spreading through the world faster than anything I'd ever studied. Why does this work? How does it move? What happens if you change one variable? The curiosity I thought was supposed to make me a medical professional turned out to be the exact tool I needed for this moment.

I threw away everything I thought I knew. I rebuilt from the ground up and completely trashed my ego in the process, which, it turns out, is the price of admission for every real transformation. The ego goes first or nothing goes at all.

Jennifer asked me one day if I thought this transition was harder than Webflow. My honest answer was no.

Did we still have a full pipeline going into summer, just like we did during the Webflow transition? Yes. Did we still have to learn entirely new technology and reframe everything we thought we knew? Yes. Did we literally just finish doing this same kind of transition a year ago? Yes.

So what was different this time?

Our team. Our mindset. Our experience. Our utter determination to be ready this time.

Webflow taught us how to survive an ordeal. AI arrived and found us already swimming.

Hydra

So. Hydra was born.

We named it Hydra for a reason. Cut off one of its heads and it grows three more. That's not just mythology to us. That's our company culture, distilled into a single image. Every setback we've ever taken has multiplied us. Every head we've lost, we've grown back stronger and stranger and harder to kill. Naming the platform anything else would have been a lie.

And here's what Hydra actually is, because it matters: Hydra is not your website. Hydra is an operating system that learns your business and deploys changes based on data. It's everything behind the scenes. The thinking, the testing, the adjusting, the relentless iteration that used to take teams of humans weeks and now happens continuously. The website is just the part you can see. Hydra is the part that never sleeps.

I'm writing this while we are still in the midst of Hydra's evolution, and I need to be honest with you: I do not believe Hydra will ever be done. What we knew last week has already changed. What was available to us yesterday has already been improved upon. That's not a flaw in the plan. That is the plan.

These days I build and design sites myself. The girl who started out filling in Facebook business fields now builds the thing customers actually see, and I help evolve our AI tools, the things they never see. But what I want to tell you about isn't my job description. It's the people. Many of the people on our AI team have grown into human beings who weather storms and keep rowing for the love of the game. They care. They are curious. They want more. They are dandelions, every one of them.

To Whoever Is Reading This

Those fears about my son's future are still there. What will he do? What will the world look like when he's old enough to ask me what I did during all of this?

But then I look around, and I know: if we do this right, if we keep pushing, he will be just fine.

He has a father who chose me when we were teenagers and has been choosing our family ever since. He has a grandmother who looked at a world tilting on its axis and started drawing up boat plans in her living room. He has an entire team of curious, storm-weathered people building the future he'll grow up in. And he has a mother who was once so afraid of the world that a schedule change could level her, and who now runs toward the things that scare her, because a woman stroking her hair in a quiet bedroom once told her that happiness was a choice.

Because here's the thing I finally understand, sitting in the seam of yet another transition. The world I was born into, the Blockbuster runs, the MapQuest printouts, the landline on the wall, didn't end because anyone defeated it. It ended because curious people kept building the next thing while everyone else insisted the old thing was fine. My son is being born into his own overlap, the way I was born into mine. There will be a version of Blockbuster in his childhood that vanishes before he's grown, and he won't mourn it either, because he'll already be somewhere else.

I can't tell you what the tools will be called in ten years. Whatever we're using now will sound as quaint as a printed MapQuest page. The transition you're in the middle of, whoever you are, whenever you're reading this, will feel impossible. It's supposed to. Ours did too. Every single one.

So this is what I want to leave here, for my son, for my team, for whoever picks this up long after Hydra has grown heads we haven't imagined yet:

Stay curious. Insist on resilience. Trash your ego before the world does it for you. When the current comes, and it will keep coming, don't waste your strength fighting it. Build the boat.

And if you're afraid?

Do it afraid.

When the current comes, and it will keep coming, don't waste your strength fighting it. Build the boat.

— Liz Slone, Sr. Hydra OS Web Designer, CI Web Group, July 2026