Nissue #5: Gina Pell, Co-Founder of The What.
I think it was around 2005, just a few months after Yelp launched, that I first encountered Gina Pell. She had co-founded the style and culture site Splendora and I wanted to catch some of her fierce fans and get them reviewing every lovely place they went. Years later, she co-founded The What—again with her co-founder from Splendora, the equally cool Amy Parker—which to this day keeps setting the tone for what women and really all perennials want and need to know.
She’s a cool mom to two kids and wife of Dave Pell, the founder of Next Draft, and curiously has memorized over 100 digits of Pi. In a way, she gave me some inspiration for In Search of Lost Answers when she featured me on The What some years back. Indeed, Gina is the only interviewee thus far who, ahem, offered to edit and improve some of the questions I asked. I suppose I’m getting her back…
Nish: What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Gina: Perfect happiness. Heavy sigh. My answer would have been very different in 2019. Currently, it would be the simultaneous eradication of Covid and QAnon. There is so much more to wish for but I’ll start there.
Nish: What was your worst job ever?
Gina: A graveyard shift (9pm-6am) during my college years involving the opening of PG&E envelopes — separating the invoice from the check into two distinct piles under the punishing gaze of a sadistic supervisor who only allowed bathroom visits during the allotted break time.
Nish: What was your first job ever?
Gina: Telephone solicitor of film processing services (to compete with Kodak drive-thrus) which promised 50 rolls of free film to an elderly demographic. Drivers would stand by to pick up checks made out to Filmco Processing and drop off 50 mail-in pouches. Here’s how it worked: you mail in your undeveloped film and get back glossy photo prints plus a free roll of film. Turns out they were a scam operation that took the money and only delivered empty envelopes. I sold 12 packages my first week there. I arrived the second week to a padlocked, empty office and bewildered fellow solicitors (a motley crew). The company packed up shop and split town. It was my summer between 8th grade and high school. I was relieved to have my summer back but never stopped feeling bad for the poor people who mailed in their film rolls. I always imagined all the lost memories.
Nish: What was your best job ever?
Gina: Aside from my own companies the first which launched in 2000, my favorite job was Luminare Multimedia founded by Caitlin Curtin who was then in her early 30s and a fearless, highly intelligent badass who pitched and won a $6M contract to build a help system for CSAA, which we installed using floppy disks! She taught me how to lead by helping team members develop skills where they showed promise and interest, not necessarily what they were hired to do. I started as a Traffic Coordinator, quickly became a Producer, and evolved into a Creative Director five years later. I worked there from age 24–29 and learned so much — how to pitch, design, write, and manage teams, and win business. Luminare prepared me for the Wild West of Internet 1.0. After I sold my first company, I wrote to Caitlin and told her that if we were vampires she’d definitely be my maker. She liked that.
Nish: What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Gina: I have a Pandora’s Box of deplorable traits but I would say my tendency to take over a situation and forcefully “solve” it rather than carefully assess the problem and be inclusive of other points of view is my signature “dick move”. In other words, my frequent belief that my way is the only way. Definitely not the best way to parent either.
Nish: What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Gina: It’s a tie between insincerity and desperate neediness. I love and admire intensely private people and if I wasn’t in the media biz I would NEVER be on an open social network. Never.
Nish: What’s some advice you’d give to yourself at 23?
Gina: None though I wish I could just relive 23. I barely remember it so it must have been good.
Nish: What is your greatest extravagance?
Gina: My health.
Nish: You have dinner reservations for 4 at Noma, excluding family and close friends, who are the three people (alive, dead or imaginary) you’d invite?
Gina: My husband, my mother-in-law, and my father in-law. My in-laws were our favorite couple to have dinner with as they were always on top of what was happening in the world and could give savvy insight on any topic. Both are Holocaust survivors and my father-in-law passed away suddenly the last week of 2020. We buried him on New Year’s Eve and I’d give anything to have one last double date with him. After every indulgent meal we enjoyed he’d lament, “Vhy, did I do that?!” It was so funny that it became a meme among our family and friends. Now, whenever any of us overdo it especially with food we exclaim, “Oy, vhy did I do that?!” [Yes, she read the question but answered it her own way].
Nish: What is the theme song of your professional life?
Gina: I Feel It All by Feist.
Nish: What is your motto?
Gina: Curiosity. Generosity. Reciprocity.
Nish: What is something you’re really excited about right now?
Gina: I’m really excited about the power of real community where people share, gain, and create together — the opposite of performative social networks. I couldn’t have psychologically survived the pandemic had it not been for my personal, physical community as well as the private digital communities we have created online as part of The What.
End Interview.
