I am Sean Caldera, I am our marketing lead here at Linus Media Group and I've been working
here since June 2022. Yeah, so that's about almost nine months, almost a year, yeah.
The unpredictability. And what I mean by that is like, I walk into the office and I have maybe different projects going on,
but it's kind of exciting to be able to be like, hey, we have something you need to respond to.
And you had to help this team out or you get to help this team out.
And it's pretty cool. I think I've worked other jobs where it can become pretty monotonous.
And I kind of don't like that.
I don't like that at all. The unpredictability can also be a little bit of a damper.
Like you might have something planned out and you're like, oh, I just got to get this to the goal line.
And it just might not pan out right away as like you thought it would.
And it's not just on the predictability here at the company.
I mean, it's the unpredictability of just content creation in general, right?
You never know what's going to be a banger and what's not going to be a banger.
I've been in IDM, so Interactive Digital Media Industry for like eight years,
throughout different facets.
You know, I've worked in eSports. I've worked in government to support the industry.
I've worked in education.
And it's always been this desire to kind of go to the bleeding edge and kind of go to an industry that I see has growth.
It's easy when you're in a specific industry to say it has growth and et cetera, et cetera.
But I found myself not really believing in that as much.
But something that I have seen that has been growing has been the content creation industry.
And to be able to bring that skill set and be able to help some people I know.
And the fact that like Linus Media Group was like local, relatively local to the Metro Vancouver area was pretty sweet.
So I got to know a few people here and then I was watching.
I was actually, I had quit my government job.
I was working as an active manager for a city in an interior British Columbia.
And I was watching some content and I got my girlfriend Mia into it and she was like, why don't you just work there?
I was like, oh, that's a great idea. That's fantastic. Why not?
And I took the shot. Yeah. And the rest is history.
So yeah, the main reason in a nutshell is that I wanted to be able to have an impact on how people are interacting with content
and in an industry that shows quite a bit of promise and that's been around for quite some time.
Very different. I mean, it was weird.
I was just like this hybrid of a government person and also working in eSports and gaming.
And it's different because it's stability.
It's weird. Like you'd think government is pretty stable, but it's sometimes molasses.
It's so slow moving. And if you want to bring something up, it has to go through how many rounds of council review, drafting, et cetera, et cetera.
And on the eSports side, maybe it's just very nebulous.
It's like, we don't know how to solve this problem because the industry is so new, et cetera, et cetera.
And so this has like the happy medium of having stability, but being able to do exciting things.
Yeah, it's night and day.
There's a few things.
But I think a lot of people understand maybe just kind of how we operate, right?
It's not as easy as we made a video. There's people behind it and that's the whole story.
No, it is a full blown company.
There's nuances on running a business, et cetera, et cetera.
There's so many more people at play for that video that you just watched, right?
From the business department, from the people who are connected to the sponsors, to the writers who are writing the concept of the video, the script, the editing team behind it, the hosts.
And each person involved is their own person, right?
Everyone has everything, something else, completely different company happening in their life.
And I think that nuance is a lot of the time forgotten that this is made by not just one person.
This is made by the whole unity of a team.
And then that can, when you lose that nuance, it's really easy to direct something at one person.
And I think that's just something that a lot of people don't understand.
It's like, wow, every aspect of this company takes a lot of people to get something done.
And just like anything with a successful company, that's the same effect, yeah.
It's interesting because I feel like we're at a pretty interesting point of our company's trajectory, right?
Where we're adding quite a bit of operational efficiencies and just boosts to how the company runs.
I would say just keep doing that. Honestly, I'm a pretty operations and kind of efficiency growth type of person.
I think everyone has potential to do something great.
So being able to lean into that belief of like, yeah, you know, if we have something that needs to get done, let's lean into it.
Let's have, let's understand how we can do it better, right?
I think, yeah, that is probably one of the biggest things.
So I think it's not like weird and bad way.
It was super cool. So I love flying drones, right?
I'm a marketing business dev guy, okay?
But I got to fly drones to film Dennis and Colton doing stunt driving and Mission Raceway.
It was Mission Raceway? Maybe. Yeah.
Yeah, Mission Raceway. And that was just so strange.
Like, I'm being paid to do this right now.
I'm just doing my hobby here. And it was weird to me because like, I usually go droning on weekends.
And here I am now ripping it behind a Crown Vic, trying to match speed.
And I'm like, oh, I'm on the next drone pilot for Michael Bay.
This could be so cool, right? It was just like, I just stopped at the end of the day.
I was like, huh, this just happened. Okay.
Another weird thing has been I had to do like an ad for a robo vacuum.
And I spent like an egregious amount of hours trying to find a way to stick the sad Linus
meme face on a robo vacuum.
And I was like, I guess billable hours, but also I was like, this shouldn't be this hard.
Yeah, probably those two weirdest things have done so far.
You have to know that nothing, I think it's like, it's like a forced gump moment, right?
Laugh is like a box of chocolate. No, it's really, it is really unpredictable, right?
It's more as in you never know what you're going to get thrown into from a project standpoint
on your team, right? So regardless of where you're coming into, there might be a video, if you're an editor,
there might be a video that you have to kind of jump out of your comfort zone to do.
If you're in the business department, they may be a sponsor, you need to grab that you,
you aren't used to being able to talk to, right?
If you're writing, this might be a video that's completely left field to what you're used to.
I mean, that's the same thing for life, but without getting all existential and philosophical
at the end of the day, it's really amplified here, right?
You are going to be facing a whole mishmash of different opportunities and challenges at the same time.
And sometimes it's not going to be all fun and games because you might have that back and forth
where you're like, how do I fix this problem? How do I get this solved?
How do I approach this? And I think that's the biggest thing.
I think a lot of people think, oh yeah, YouTube company, super easy peasy.
You make the number go up, make the light go up.
No one knows what the dislikes look like anymore.
Right? Well, we do.
We do. Yeah, I think that's the biggest thing.
It goes back to my, you know, being talking about unpredictability is that how do you prepare for unpredictability?
You just have to be able to be prepared for kind of anything within your scope and also be ready to work with people.
You can't be a lone wolf here. I think that's a big thing I've noticed.
You have to be able to ask for help when you need it and you have to be able to say and give help when people need it too.
I think that's a big thing as well.