Speaker 1: I'm Jesse Hemple, host of Hello Monday. In my twenties,
Speaker 1: I knew what I wanted for my career, But from
Speaker 1: where I am now, in the middle of my life,
Speaker 1: nothing feels ascertain. Works changing, We're changing, and there's no
Speaker 1: guidebook for how to make sense of any of it.
Speaker 1: So every Monday, I bring you conversations with people who
Speaker 1: are thinking deeply about work and where it fits into
Speaker 1: our lives. We talk about making career pivots, about purpose
Speaker 1: and how to discern it, about where happiness fits into
Speaker 1: the mix, and how to ask for more money. Come
Speaker 1: join us in the Hello Monday community. Let's figure out
Speaker 1: the future together. Listen to Hello Monday with Jesse Hemple
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to sheep Pivots. I'm Cindy Gallop.
Speaker 3: Welcome to she Pivots, the podcast where we talk with
Speaker 3: women who dared to pivot out of one career and
Speaker 3: into something new and explore how their personal lives impacted
Speaker 3: these decisions. I'm your host, Emily Tish Sussman. Welcome back
Speaker 3: to she Pivots. I'm your host Emily Tish Sussman. Today
Speaker 3: we've got a guest who calls herself the Michael Bay
Speaker 3: of business, so basically, she likes to blow shit up.
Speaker 3: I'm so excited to share my conversation with the remarkable
Speaker 3: Cindy Gallup. Cindy started her career in the eighties and
Speaker 3: climbed her way to the top of the advertising world,
Speaker 3: snagging the Advertising Woman of the Year title in two
Speaker 3: thousand and three. Then, on her forty fifth birthday, she
Speaker 3: had what she describes as her personal midlife crisis. Never
Speaker 3: thinking she'd be an advertising her whole life, she took
Speaker 3: a leap of faith, leaving behind the agency she'd been
Speaker 3: with for over fifteen years and not fully knowing her
Speaker 3: next steps. A staunch feminist, Cindy has changed how we
Speaker 3: as a society think and talk about sex through her
Speaker 3: ted talk Make Love Not Porn, where she launched her
Speaker 3: company of the same name, centered around the idea of
Speaker 3: sex positivity and celebrating quote real world sex, Cindy is
Speaker 3: tackling the stigmatization of sex and hoping to promote sex
Speaker 3: education through real world demonstration. Throughout her life, Cindy has
Speaker 3: continued to push and question the boundaries set by society
Speaker 3: and as a result, has curated a life truly her own.
Speaker 3: She says, if Sheryl Sandberg wants us to lean in
Speaker 3: within the existing system, she wants to redesign the system.
Speaker 3: And there's no question she is doing just that. Let's
Speaker 3: dive right in.
Speaker 2: So I'm Cyndi Up. I'm the founder and CEO of
Speaker 2: Make Love nor Poom. We all pro sex pro pawn
Speaker 2: pro knowing the difference.
Speaker 3: So you were born in the UK. We're going all
Speaker 3: the way back. We're going all the way back, right,
Speaker 3: But you grew up in Brunei, that's right?
Speaker 2: Yes, how long were you there for?
Speaker 3: What was that move? What was that community?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 2: So my father was English, my mother is Malaysia and Chinese,
Speaker 2: and my father's passed away. My mother is ninety living
Speaker 2: in London. But basically I was born in the UK,
Speaker 2: as you say. But when I was six, my father
Speaker 2: got a job in Brunei, and you know, he met
Speaker 2: my mother in Singapore and my father just absolutely loved
Speaker 2: Asia and very much wanted to move back there and
Speaker 2: live and work. And equally, obviously, you know, that was
Speaker 2: where my mother has family, so she was very happy
Speaker 2: to go back there as well. And so my father
Speaker 2: got a job as an assistant head master of a
Speaker 2: school in Brunei and we moved there in nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 3: Wow, So were you living as part of a British
Speaker 3: community like English international English speaking community.
Speaker 2: Not now case. No, because my father got a jobb
Speaker 2: as head master at one of the local Brunei schools.
Speaker 2: There certainly were expat communities, but they were focused around
Speaker 2: the fact that there was a lot of oil in
Speaker 2: Brunei still is, and so Shell and BP had very
Speaker 2: significant expat communities there. The rest of the expats were
Speaker 2: a bit ad hoc, and certainly in the places we
Speaker 2: were living Qualabolite and then Tutoon, there were not many
Speaker 2: other experts.
Speaker 3: So what was that like to to adjust to acclimate,
Speaker 3: to learn the language.
Speaker 2: Well, I would say that growing up in Brunei is
Speaker 2: a lot more boring than it sounds, because it's an
Speaker 2: orthodox Muslim state. It's one hundred miles long. When we
Speaker 2: were there, the population was two hundred thousand. I don't
Speaker 2: know what it is these days. But my parents would
Speaker 2: regularly apologize to me and my sisters for our childhood
Speaker 2: because Brunei was distinctly lacking in more international cultural pursuits,
Speaker 2: and so for English speakers that there was not a
Speaker 2: lot going on. My father, you know, loved Malay culture.
Speaker 2: You know, he would do regular walking tours into the
Speaker 2: jungles of Borneo, you know, the center Borneo. But in
Speaker 2: our case, honestly, you know, it was a wee bit tedious.
Speaker 3: What ages were you there for?
Speaker 2: So we moved there. I was six and when I
Speaker 2: was fourteen, my parents sent me and my next sister,
Speaker 2: Annabelle back to the UK to go to boarding school.
Speaker 2: But because my father worked for the Brunei government, they
Speaker 2: paid for us to go back to Brunei for vacations
Speaker 2: twice a year until we turned twenty one or completed
Speaker 2: full time education, you know, whichever came first, And so
Speaker 2: we would go back twice a year on vacation from
Speaker 2: university and then I guess it's indicative that, you know,
Speaker 2: once the government paid for leave ran out, we never
Speaker 2: went back. My parents understood it wasn't the most inflating
Speaker 2: place in the world, so they were fine with that.
Speaker 3: I just I think this background is so interesting because
Speaker 3: you talk a lot about you know, we're going to
Speaker 3: skip ahead later to the culture that we're in and
Speaker 3: how people are raised and the ideologies around sex and intimacy,
Speaker 3: and actually you had quite a different upbringing than the
Speaker 3: US or even Western culture in general. So how do
Speaker 3: you think the Eastern Asian piece played into your thinking
Speaker 3: around what is culture and what are cultural constructs?
Speaker 2: I grew up very much in Asian culture, and so
Speaker 2: first of all, it certainly gave me a global perspective
Speaker 2: with everything I've done since, I absolutely believe in bringing
Speaker 2: a global lens to anything that I'm working on or
Speaker 2: you know, my own ventures. And I think it just
Speaker 2: it absolutely broadens theal horizons and makes you think differently
Speaker 2: about how different people respond to different things.
Speaker 3: After moving back from Brunei, Cindy attended Somerville College at
Speaker 3: Oxford University, one of the university's first women's colleges. It
Speaker 3: was there that she found her first love, theater.
Speaker 2: I fell mad in love with theater at Oxford, which
Speaker 2: has a very thriving student drama scene, and I alreally
Speaker 2: threw myself into that. I was present in my college
Speaker 2: drama society. I wrote actor directed stage manage, and I went,
Speaker 2: oh my god, all I want to do is work
Speaker 2: in theater the rest of my life. But I knew
Speaker 2: I wasn't good enough to be an actress or directors.
Speaker 2: Many of my friends wanted to be professionally and I
Speaker 2: used to draw a lot when I was younger, and
Speaker 2: so my friends would pull me into a Sydney can
Speaker 2: you design a theater poster for our show? And from
Speaker 2: there I got sucked into, you know, helping to promote
Speaker 2: and sell the shows. And I really enjoyed that, and
Speaker 2: I thought, gosh, I suspect it's easier to find a
Speaker 2: job in theater doing this than acting or directing. And
Speaker 2: I was absolutely right, because I had no problem at
Speaker 2: all finding jobs as a marketing and publicity office in theater.
Speaker 2: So that's how I came to occupy that role.
Speaker 3: Did you enjoy it? It sounds like you must have enjoyed it,
Speaker 3: like why not stay in theater forever?
Speaker 2: No, it was enormous fun to begin with, but then
Speaker 2: you know, after a few years of working theater, I
Speaker 2: got completely fed up with working twenty four to seven
Speaker 2: and earning chicken feed, which is what happens in theater.
Speaker 2: And just as I was starting to feel quite disillusioned,
Speaker 2: I was the marketing office at the Everyman Theater in
Speaker 2: Liverpool and part of my job promoting the theater was
Speaker 2: to give talks about it. So I gave a talk
Speaker 2: to a group of women in Liverpool and after the talk,
Speaker 2: one of them came up to me and she said,
Speaker 2: young lady, you could sell a fridge to an eskimol
Speaker 2: And I thought, that is the universe telling me something.
Speaker 2: Time to sell out going to advertising, and so I did.
Speaker 3: With her mind made up, she made her first pivot,
Speaker 3: but changing her career from theater had its challenges.
Speaker 2: This was gosh the UK back in the eighties and
Speaker 2: advertising was considered the sexiest profession going. Everybody leaving university
Speaker 2: wanted to work.
Speaker 3: In advertising, you know.
Speaker 2: I mean it was the golden heyday of British advertising
Speaker 2: and it was therefore extraordinary different to beginning too. And
Speaker 2: so I tried, you know, applying for my theater job
Speaker 2: and got stuck in that bind of no one would
Speaker 2: give me a job in advertising because I didn't have
Speaker 2: experienced advertising. But I couldn't experience in advertising and they want to
Speaker 2: give me a job. So then I went back to the
Speaker 2: beginning and I applied for entry level graduate trainee roles
Speaker 2: and took the first one I was offered at an
Speaker 2: agency called head Baits and actually that was a good
Speaker 2: thing to do, because I've got no idea whether UK
Speaker 2: ad agencies still do this, but back then they had
Speaker 2: these very thorough training programs where you literally spent six
Speaker 2: months working in every single department in the in the agency,
Speaker 2: learning the entire advertising creation and production process end to end.
Speaker 2: And that was a phenomenal grounding in the business. I mean,
Speaker 2: advertising was not just sexy but sexist. You know. I
Speaker 2: really asked this question about what sexism I encountered coming
Speaker 2: up through the ranks advertising, and honestly, my response is
Speaker 2: always a fish does not know wh water is. It
Speaker 2: was all around me, but it was the norm and
Speaker 2: I never noticed. Right, that totally makes sense.
Speaker 3: I think you probably get that question in the US,
Speaker 3: in particularly a lot because mad Men were so popular here.
Speaker 2: Whenever I you know here mad Men mentioned, I have
Speaker 2: to bring this up. So I was on the inaugural
Speaker 2: board of Advertising Week in New York, which started, Gosh,
Speaker 2: I guess that must have been twenty years ago or so,
Speaker 2: in order to celebrate the industry make young people more
Speaker 2: keen to come into it. And in our very first
Speaker 2: board meeting twenty years ago, I said, and by the way,
Speaker 2: I wish I had a video or audio of this,
Speaker 2: but I literally I said to the gathering, which was
Speaker 2: full of like luminous and advertising industry, I said, if
Speaker 2: we want to elevate the states of the advertising industry,
Speaker 2: you know, really excite people about it, make many more
Speaker 2: young people want to come to our industry versus Wall
Speaker 2: Street or Silicon Valley. Then what I think we should
Speaker 2: do is, this was back in the day when the
Speaker 2: Sopranos had just ended at HBO. I went, HBO is
Speaker 2: bound to be casting around for the next big show.
Speaker 2: We should have a competition. We should invite Because every copywriter,
Speaker 2: every art director has like a student in their bottom drawer.
Speaker 2: We should invite people the advertising industry to write a
Speaker 2: really compelling series for HBO about our industry and get
Speaker 2: HBO to agree that if they find a really brilliant concept,
Speaker 2: they will absolute commission it and shoot it. And that
Speaker 2: would engage people in ndustry. No end and lo and behold.
Speaker 2: A few years later, mad Men certainly did.
Speaker 3: While her idea may have been swiped, it became her
Speaker 3: reality when she was sent to New York City to
Speaker 3: open her Advertising Agencies American office in the late nineties.
Speaker 3: It was now Cindy, who became the new hotshot advertising
Speaker 3: executive running around the city.
Speaker 2: The advertising agency I used to work for, Bartle Bogle
Speaker 2: Hegety sent me here to open up its American office,
Speaker 2: which began as me in a room with a phone,
Speaker 2: starting an ad agency in the world's toughest advertising marketplace.
Speaker 2: But you know, I absolutely got my dream job because
Speaker 2: I love New York. I had seized every opportunity to
Speaker 2: vacation over here, to stop off on business trips, and
Speaker 2: very soon after I arrived here in September of nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety eight, I went I found my spiritual home. I'm
Speaker 2: never going back to London and that was it. I
Speaker 2: am now a New Yorker for life. I love this city,
Speaker 2: and you know, I love it for all sorts of reasons.
Speaker 2: It's absolutely my kind of pace. You know, I love
Speaker 2: the dynamism, the energy, but I also love the diversity
Speaker 2: and the cultural melting pot of New York, which is
Speaker 2: very special. And so you know, the business I founded
Speaker 2: here and now work on is global in its scope.
Speaker 2: But I think that having been started up in New
Speaker 2: York just you know, not just for my own business,
Speaker 2: but for other businesses. There's something about that energy and
Speaker 2: that open mindedness, and that willingness to embrace difference, that
Speaker 2: absolutely informs, you know, businesses that started here in certain
Speaker 2: informs mine.
Speaker 3: I think it's an important point because I think that
Speaker 3: for people who were born and raised in the US,
Speaker 3: they actually don't appreciate that the willingness to create something
Speaker 3: new and to cross lines is pretty unique to the US.
Speaker 3: How did you find that that was not the case
Speaker 3: in London.
Speaker 2: After I moved here, you know, and I absolutely said
Speaker 2: this to people when I would go back and visit
Speaker 2: London after New York, London felt so much smaller, sleepier,
Speaker 2: more parochial. And actually one of the reasons I'd wanted
Speaker 2: to move to New York in the first place. I
Speaker 2: made this ambition known within within BBH was because I observed,
Speaker 2: and by the way, things are still not greater on
Speaker 2: this front, so that this is a massive in diamond
Speaker 2: of the UK. But I observed that when it came
Speaker 2: to women in business, the US was ten years ahead
Speaker 2: of the UK in terms of welcoming women working and leading.
Speaker 2: And I observed this because while I was based at
Speaker 2: BBAH in London, I was running big global pieces of
Speaker 2: business Coca Cola, Polaroid, RayBan, and I was running their
Speaker 2: business across Europe. But what that meant was working with
Speaker 2: teams from the US and quite often visiting you know,
Speaker 2: Atlanta for Coke, Boston for Polaroid, Rochester for RayBan, and
Speaker 2: I realized that my American clients had no issue at
Speaker 2: all with me leading the business, saw me as their
Speaker 2: first point of contact. I built amazing relationships with them,
Speaker 2: and I have to tell you that with you know,
Speaker 2: white male clients in the UK, that was not always
Speaker 2: the case. So interestingly, one of the things that made
Speaker 2: me want to come and work over here was the
Speaker 2: fact that even though as I said, things are still
Speaker 2: not great in this front, at least if you were
Speaker 2: a woman, you were more accepted in business and leadership
Speaker 2: role here than you own the UK.
Speaker 3: At that point, Cindy had spent over fifteen years as
Speaker 3: a top executive at Barto book or Hegarty, and despite
Speaker 3: being at the top of her game, she felt as
Speaker 3: if there was something more that she was missing in
Speaker 3: her career than in her life.
Speaker 2: Basically, in two thousand and five, I turned forty five
Speaker 2: and I had what I described as my very own
Speaker 2: personal mid life crisis. In the sense that I've always
Speaker 2: thought of forty five as kind of a midlife point. Obviously,
Speaker 2: by the way, the happy assumption that one does in
Speaker 2: fact live to be ninety fingers crossed.
Speaker 3: Well like you' have good genes, yep.
Speaker 2: But in a couple of years running up to it,
Speaker 2: I'd always thought, on one's forty fifth birth is the
Speaker 2: moment when you should pause, take stock, reflect, review, where
Speaker 2: am I being, where am I going? And so on.
Speaker 2: February one, two thousand and five, idually did that, and
Speaker 2: that was the moment in which I went, oh, my god,
Speaker 2: I've just worked sixteen years for the same advertising agency
Speaker 2: and by the way, amazing agency, you know, I mean
Speaker 2: love BBH to death, cannot say enough nice things about them.
Speaker 2: But I went, wow, I think it might be time
Speaker 2: to do something different. And the problem was I hadn't
Speaker 2: the faintest idea what because I'd always said to people
Speaker 2: for years, I'm not going to work in advertising forever,
Speaker 2: not gonna work bh forever. But advertisers a very good
Speaker 2: industry to work in to figure out what you want
Speaker 2: to do next, because you come into contact with so
Speaker 2: many different sectors, companies, people. I guess i'd always thought
Speaker 2: that one day my next big thing with Bubblah from
Speaker 2: ether and there I was the age of forty five
Speaker 2: and it hadn't so I basically, in the summer of
Speaker 2: two thousand and five, took a massive leap into the unknown,
Speaker 2: resigned as chairwel of BBH without a job to go to,
Speaker 2: and honestly best thing that I ever did in my life.
Speaker 3: You know, the premise of this show is how personal
Speaker 3: things in our lives end up impacting our professional decisions.
Speaker 3: And it sounds like you had a couple along the way,
Speaker 3: like wanting to live in the US, but it was
Speaker 3: a lot of professional decisions that you made. You know,
Speaker 3: who you wanted to work with, where you wanted to work.
Speaker 3: Do you think there were really driving personal factors in
Speaker 3: the first half or did that come later in the
Speaker 3: second half.
Speaker 2: Honestly, none of any of this was consciously planned. I'm
Speaker 2: a big fan of serendipity. My ex boss at BBH,
Speaker 2: John Hegerty, has this great mantra. He says, do interesting things,
Speaker 2: and interesting things will happen to you, and that's been
Speaker 2: very much I've made my professional life decisions.
Speaker 3: So what did you end up doing in those? Because
Speaker 3: we became a founder a couple years after you left
Speaker 3: the firm, but not right away.
Speaker 2: So when all these things came to me, I went, Okay,
Speaker 2: I still don't know what I really want to do.
Speaker 2: So I'm going to be employment slut. I'm going to
Speaker 2: talk to everybody. I'm going to take every phone call,
Speaker 2: I'm going to do every meeting, no preconceived notions. Even
Speaker 2: if I think to myself, I'm not sure i'd want
Speaker 2: to work for this company, I'm going to go meet
Speaker 2: with them. So I embarked on a fascinating exploratory which
Speaker 2: was as good for telling me what I didn't want
Speaker 2: to do as what I did want to do. That
Speaker 2: that really helped kind of give me a sense of
Speaker 2: what needs to be in place where I work next.
Speaker 2: At the same time, to support myself, I was working
Speaker 2: as a consultant and a public speaker and I've been
Speaker 2: doing that ever since. And the way my path went
Speaker 2: was an ex cloud Aman of Bee was starting up
Speaker 2: a new tech venture. This is back in spring of
Speaker 2: two thousand and six, and he asked me to partner
Speaker 2: with him on it, and I saw an opportunity to
Speaker 2: make this venture something much more interesting. You know, He
Speaker 2: and the team loved it. The VC's backing the venture
Speaker 2: didn't get it, and so I ended up walking away
Speaker 2: from it because they wouldn't give me the equity I
Speaker 2: wanted to go forward, and by way, it was a
Speaker 2: very good thing I did, because they just took it
Speaker 2: in a very bad direction and it never it never
Speaker 2: went anywhere in the end. But what that meant was
Speaker 2: that I spent three months out of Cambridge in Boston
Speaker 2: steeped in the world of tech startups and of what
Speaker 2: was essentially a social networking platform. And so when I
Speaker 2: came out of that, a headtime to call me up
Speaker 2: about the job of CEO of a Small World. He
Speaker 2: just raised some funding and knew he wasn't the right
Speaker 2: person to take it to the next level. So he's
Speaker 2: looking for a CEO to take over, and I was
Speaker 2: really interested because I just spent three months steeped in
Speaker 2: this whole scenario, and A Small World back in the
Speaker 2: day was a very special community. The level of gatedness
Speaker 2: meant there was an extraor amount of trust within the community,
Speaker 2: and you could tap into that anyway you went all
Speaker 2: around the world. So I didn't get that job entertainingly
Speaker 2: because of Harvey Weinstein. So Eric had just raised some
Speaker 2: money from the Weinstein brothers, and so he wanted me
Speaker 2: to do the job. The whole team wanted me to
Speaker 2: vince CEO, but I had to be interviewed by Harvey Weinstein.
Speaker 2: And by the way, I'm extremely grateful. I clearly wasn't
Speaker 2: in any way harvest type. The interview lasted five minutes
Speaker 2: at the Direka Film Center. I mean literally, he came in,
Speaker 2: said Hi, asked me a couple of plunctory questions, dismissed
Speaker 2: me because he had already decided that this job could
Speaker 2: not be done by some you came from the advertising world.
Speaker 2: It had to be someone from Taker Entertainment. So that
Speaker 2: didn't happen. But another one of the investors was Bob Pittman,
Speaker 2: you know, the founder of MTV, and and he and
Speaker 2: I got on really well. And so he said to
Speaker 2: me this, you know, sorry, isn't going forwards, but if
Speaker 2: you ever have any ideas for anything you might like
Speaker 2: to do, I'd love to hear them. And I thought, gosh,
Speaker 2: you know, that's a very nice offer. So I might
Speaker 2: go and thought about what I would do if I
Speaker 2: start something myself, and so I came up with the
Speaker 2: ideas my first startup, If We Ran the World, which
Speaker 2: I shared with Bob, and he really liked it, and
Speaker 2: so that gave me the confidence to pursue it. And
Speaker 2: If We Ran the World was based on our observation
Speaker 2: that the single biggest pool of untapped natural resource in
Speaker 2: this world is human good intentions that never translate into action.
Speaker 2: And so I built a platform to take not just
Speaker 2: human good intentions, but corporate good intentions and combine the
Speaker 2: two to enable brands and businesses to implement what I
Speaker 2: believe is the business model of the future. Shared values
Speaker 2: plus shared action equals shared profit, financial profit, and social profit.
Speaker 4: You can decide exactly how you want to make money.
Speaker 4: You can design your business model to be anything you
Speaker 4: wanted to be. I believe that the business model of
Speaker 4: the future is all about doing good and making money simultaneously,
Speaker 4: and that the business model of the future therefore is
Speaker 4: shared values plus shared action equals shared profit, financial profit,
Speaker 4: and social profit.
Speaker 2: But which I mean that you know when brandom businesses
Speaker 2: come together with the audiences, consumers, employees on the basis
Speaker 2: of values that you all share, which, by the way,
Speaker 2: is the most important requirement for good relationship in life
Speaker 2: as much as business. You literally bond, finish, share the
Speaker 2: same values. And when you were then enabled to collectively
Speaker 2: and collaboratively coact on those values, to walk the talk together,
Speaker 2: you can then make things happen in the real world.
Speaker 2: It will benefit consumers, benefit society, and benefit the brandness business.
Speaker 2: So that's what if rand the world was all about,
Speaker 2: and that was what I was in the process of building.
Speaker 2: When life was in a completely different direction.
Speaker 3: As you were trying on different things, taking different calls,
Speaker 3: consulting for different projects, how did you side what was
Speaker 3: worth your time to spend bandwidth on and what would
Speaker 3: end up just being a suck to suck your energy
Speaker 3: and suck your creativity so you couldn't also be a
Speaker 3: creative like, how did you balance the space for both?
Speaker 2: I was pursuing my own philosophy of be your own filter.
Speaker 2: And what I mean by that is, you know, as
Speaker 2: anyone who follows me on social media will have seen
Speaker 2: my LinkedIn bio and my biocross all the other channels,
Speaker 2: is I like to blow shit up. I'm the mothel
Speaker 2: bear of business. And where that came about was you know,
Speaker 2: back in those years I was in the meeting talking
Speaker 2: to some potential consulting clients about my approach to consulting,
Speaker 2: and I said to them, I consult very selectively, only
Speaker 2: for clients and brands who want to change the game
Speaker 2: in their particular sector. So you come to me for radical, innovative, groundbreaking, transformative.
Speaker 2: I don't do status quo that I like, hartly said
Speaker 2: off the calf, I like to blow shit up. I'm
Speaker 2: the Michael Bear business and I really laughed. I left
Speaker 2: the meeting and I thought, actually, that's a really good
Speaker 2: way of summing up what I do. So I've been
Speaker 2: using that line ever since. But I use that line
Speaker 2: entirely deliberately. It's not a bit of fun or bit
Speaker 2: of whimsy. I use it because when I characterize what
Speaker 2: I do in that way, it attracts me the people
Speaker 2: who want what I do. It repels the ones who don't.
Speaker 2: And I want to repel the ones who don't because
Speaker 2: of the waste of time, effort, and money. So I
Speaker 2: am my own filter, and that's how I make sure
Speaker 2: that what I'm focusing on is always worth it.
Speaker 3: After pivoting out of advertising and leaving room for exploration
Speaker 3: and opportunity, her next big pivot actually came as a
Speaker 3: result of work that she had done for the advertising agency.
Speaker 3: She was doing product background in research to pitch an
Speaker 3: online dating client. So she created a profile, and much
Speaker 3: to her surprise, I.
Speaker 2: Got an avalanche of responses, but the vast majority were
Speaker 2: from younger men, and most of those were much younger men,
Speaker 2: And I went, wow, Okay, I hadn't thought about this
Speaker 2: approach to dating, but here I am. You know I
Speaker 2: do not. I've never wanted marriage, I've never wanted children.
Speaker 2: I just want to have some fun. So I date
Speaker 2: younger men. They tend to be men in their twenties.
Speaker 2: And about fifteen sixteen years ago, I began realizing through
Speaker 2: dating younger men that I was encountering very intimately and
Speaker 2: directly what happens when two things converge. And I stress
Speaker 2: the dual convergence because most people think it's only one thing.
Speaker 2: I remembered I was experiencing what happens when today's total
Speaker 2: freedom of access to hardcore porn online meets our society
Speaker 2: is equally total reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex.
Speaker 2: When those two things converge, Paul becomes sex education by default,
Speaker 2: in not a good way. So I far myself encountering
Speaker 2: a number of sexual behavioral memes in bed. I went, whoa,
Speaker 2: I know where that behavior is coming from. I thought, gosh,
Speaker 2: if I'm experiencing this, other people must be as well.
Speaker 2: I didn't know that because fifteen years ago, no no
Speaker 2: one was talking about this, no one was writing about it.
Speaker 2: This was me an isolation as a naturally action order person,
Speaker 2: going I'm going to do sorry about this. So nearly
Speaker 2: fifteen years ago now I've put up on no money,
Speaker 2: a tiny, clunky website at makelovenoporn dot com pure as
Speaker 2: a side venture, kind of a public service announcement. You know.
Speaker 2: The construct was porn world versus real world. Here's what
Speaker 2: happens in the porn world, here's already happens in the
Speaker 2: real world. I had the opportunity to launch Make Love
Speaker 2: Not Porn at TED in two thousand and nine. I
Speaker 2: became the only TED speaker to say the words come
Speaker 2: on my face on the TED stage six times in succession.
Speaker 2: The talk went viral as a result, and it drove
Speaker 2: this extraordinary global response to my tiny website that I
Speaker 2: had never anticipated.
Speaker 5: I date younger men predominantly men in their twenties, and
Speaker 5: when I date younger men, I have sex with younger men.
Speaker 5: And when I have sex with younger men, I am
Speaker 5: counter very directly and personally the real ramifications of the
Speaker 5: creeping ubiquity.
Speaker 6: Of hardcore pornography in our culture. So I am launching
Speaker 6: at TED today. I am unveiling make loovelotporn dot com.
Speaker 6: This is a website that posts the midst of hardcore
Speaker 6: porn and balances them with the reality.
Speaker 2: Thousand people wrote to me from all around the world,
Speaker 2: young and old, male and female, straight and gay, pouring
Speaker 2: their hearts out, telling me things about their sex lives
Speaker 2: and their porn watching habits they've never told anyone before.
Speaker 2: And I realized I'd uncovered a huge global social issue.
Speaker 2: And so that was the point of which I went,
Speaker 2: oh my god, I now have a personal responsibility. I
Speaker 2: have to take make Love Not Porn forwards in a
Speaker 2: way that will make it much more far reaching, helpful
Speaker 2: and effect And so I backburned if we ran the world,
Speaker 2: because even I, superhuman as I am, cannot run to
Speaker 2: startups simultaneously. And I turned Make Love Not Porn into
Speaker 2: what it is today. We are as our tagline says
Speaker 2: pro sex pro porn pro knowing the difference. So make
Speaker 2: love mo porn is the world's first and only user
Speaker 2: generated and importantly one hundred percent of human curated social
Speaker 2: sex video sharing platform.
Speaker 3: It's knowing that if we were able to have access
Speaker 3: and the freedom for people to choose to see things
Speaker 3: in the same way as they do on Instagram on Facebook,
Speaker 3: how amazing will that be?
Speaker 5: Literal social sex revolution.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about it without there being such a stigma
Speaker 3: and this pressure. Oh my god, everything's so terrible. No,
Speaker 3: we were here.
Speaker 2: To have a conversation, so a kind of what Facebook
Speaker 2: would be if it allowed you to socially sexually self express,
Speaker 2: which it clearly doesn't. The way to think about make
Speaker 2: Love not Porn is if paun is the Hollywood movie,
Speaker 2: may Clove, not porn is the badly needed documentary. We
Speaker 2: are a unique window onto the funny, messy, loving, wonderful
Speaker 2: sex we will have in the real world. And what
Speaker 2: we're doing is we are socializing, normalizing, and destigmatizing sex,
Speaker 2: bringing out of the shadows into the sunlight to promote consent, communication,
Speaker 2: good sexual valuism behavior. We are literally sex education through
Speaker 2: real world demonstration.
Speaker 3: Now, one of the things that you made a point
Speaker 3: of saying here is that it's human curated. That was
Speaker 3: interesting to me. Why do you make that point in particular?
Speaker 3: You know, I'm glad you asked that.
Speaker 2: I mean, because we operate very uniquely as a business,
Speaker 2: and we don't get enough credit for it because people
Speaker 2: get stuck.
Speaker 3: On oh my god, people have sex and video.
Speaker 2: So I want to contextualize my response in the broader
Speaker 2: tech landscape as a whole, because the young white male
Speaker 2: founders of the giant tech platforms that dominate our lives today,
Speaker 2: they are not the primary targets online offline of harassment, abuse,
Speaker 2: sexual assault, violence, racism, rape, revenge, porn. Therefore, they did
Speaker 2: not and they do not, proactively design for the prevention
Speaker 2: of any of those things on their platforms, and we
Speaker 2: see the results of that around us every single day.
Speaker 2: Those of us who are most at risk every single day, women,
Speaker 2: black people, people of color, LGBTQ, that disabled. We design
Speaker 2: safe spaces and safe experiences. I designed Make Love Not
Speaker 2: Porn through the female Lens to be the safest place
Speaker 2: on the Internet because I designed around what everybody else
Speaker 2: should have. Nobody else did human curation. There is no
Speaker 2: self publishing of anything on Make Love Not Porn. Our
Speaker 2: curators watch every frame of every video submitted from beginning
Speaker 2: to end before we approve or reject and we publish it.
Speaker 2: No one ask does that. We review every post on
Speaker 2: every member profile, and by the way, on Make Love
Speaker 2: No Porn, those posts can be as safe work or
Speaker 2: not safe work as you like, you know, text photos, illustration,
Speaker 2: but we review them, we approve, our reject, and we
Speaker 2: publish them. No one else does that we review every
Speaker 2: comment on every video before we approve or reject and
Speaker 2: publish it. No one else does that. We can vouch
Speaker 2: for every single piece of content on our platform in
Speaker 2: a way that nobody else can. And one thing to
Speaker 2: bear in mind, I mean is that we are tiny, bootstrapping,
Speaker 2: have no money, and we've human created everything for over
Speaker 2: ten years. Imagine what Facebook and you do you do
Speaker 2: their billions if they chose to safety on the Internet
Speaker 2: is not a matter of viability, It's a matter.
Speaker 3: Of will, right. It's a matter of choosing to prioritize
Speaker 3: exactly putting your resources there. So what is the business
Speaker 3: model for it?
Speaker 2: So I foresaw the creator economy fourteen fifteen years ago
Speaker 2: when I concepted Make Love Not Porn around a revenue
Speaker 2: sharing model which I've designed to democratize access to income.
Speaker 2: So our members pay to subscribe and then rent and
Speaker 2: stream social sex videos. Half the income goes to our contributors,
Speaker 2: whom I call our Make Love Not Porn stars. And
Speaker 2: as I say, this was like over a decade before
Speaker 2: the creater economy OnlyFans, you know. I designed my own
Speaker 2: startup around my own beliefs, and one of those is
Speaker 2: that everybody should get to realize the value of what
Speaker 2: they create. And I feel that especially strongly because my
Speaker 2: background is theater and advertising, two industries where ideas and
Speaker 2: creativity are massively undervalued, even by the creators themselves. So
Speaker 2: I believe that when you create something, anything that gives
Speaker 2: other people pleasure, that might be a video, a piece
Speaker 2: of journalism, you know, a book, you should see a
Speaker 2: financial return on it. And the more people you give
Speaker 2: more pleasure to, the greater that financial return should be.
Speaker 2: So when we launched Make Love Not Porn, I introduced
Speaker 2: our business model with a blog post that I titled
Speaker 2: how Make Love Not Porn can Help the Global economy,
Speaker 2: and I began it by saying, you know all those
Speaker 2: little scam ads that pop up on the Internet all
Speaker 2: the time going make ten thousand dollars a week working
Speaker 2: from home, Well now you can. And I said in
Speaker 2: that post, my vision is that one day make Love
Speaker 2: Nott Porn hits the kind of critical mass where your
Speaker 2: video gets a million rentals at five dollars per rental
Speaker 2: and we give you half income. By the way, that's
Speaker 2: still our vision, where some way off from achieving it
Speaker 2: until we get funded. But I was thrilled when during
Speaker 2: the pandemic, like everybody else, our make Love Nott porn
Speaker 2: stars lost jobs, couldn't find work. They told us that
Speaker 2: our monthly payouts were what kept them going, help them
Speaker 2: pay rent, help them survive. And that's exactly why I
Speaker 2: designed that revenue showing business model.
Speaker 3: Now, you said, in the sense of the interaction of
Speaker 3: the personal and the professional, if you've always dated men
Speaker 3: who are primarily in their twenties, did you see a
Speaker 3: marked difference in behavior over time or was it sort
Speaker 3: of a gradual change? And then does that basically turn
Speaker 3: you into the instructor? And does that get exhausting?
Speaker 2: Obviously, you know dating men my own age previously and
Speaker 2: so you know, this was the first time that I
Speaker 2: identified what Make Love Not Porn was created to address,
Speaker 2: which is when I realized, my god, you know, the
Speaker 2: ubiquity of online porn now means that that is what
Speaker 2: these young men are taking instructure from. And yes, absolutely,
Speaker 2: I then had to tackle that. And you know, I
Speaker 2: think this is why people have responded so positively Make
Speaker 2: Love Not Porn from the get go, because I completely
Speaker 2: understand the issue. I'll be in bed with a younger
Speaker 2: man and I'll go, Okay, we're going to have a
Speaker 2: conversation about this, and the moment I've broached that conversation,
Speaker 2: the atmosphere ben is going to change. But I have
Speaker 2: to do this for every other woman he'll ever sleep with,
Speaker 2: and I have to tell you that what I've found.
Speaker 2: And again, this is how I reassure people, because the
Speaker 2: entire point of Make Love Not Porn, in socializing sex,
Speaker 2: is to make it easier for every single person in
Speaker 2: the world to talk about sex, and people welcome the conversation.
Speaker 2: I'm a big fan of radical simplicty. I like to
Speaker 2: keep things very simple. The single biggest turn on in
Speaker 2: this world is to be in bed with somebody and know,
Speaker 2: they're having a bloody, amazing time because of you. That's
Speaker 2: what everybody wants. And so when you broke communication around
Speaker 2: this topic with that goal in mind, you know, the
Speaker 2: young men I date love that and they welcome the
Speaker 2: education and they see the results, and that makes them
Speaker 2: all the kuna to make sure that they adopt that
Speaker 2: approach going forwards.
Speaker 3: Now, you mentioned that you would never want to get
Speaker 3: married or have children. Was that something that was just
Speaker 3: always kind of in you.
Speaker 2: It wasn't consciously in my you know, because obviously I
Speaker 2: grew up with the same social conditioning we all do,
Speaker 2: especially growing up in Asia, where you know, a woman's
Speaker 2: role is especially focused in that culture on you get married,
Speaker 2: you have children. So it was something I realized over
Speaker 2: time that, you know, marriage was absolutely not an end. Girl.
Speaker 2: I really did not want children, And by the way,
Speaker 2: I'm so glad. I always knew that I was supposed
Speaker 2: to find out the hard way by having them, and
Speaker 2: over time I just went I didn't even want to
Speaker 2: be in a relationship. In fact, I remember the moment,
Speaker 2: and this wasn't one moment per se. It was more
Speaker 2: like a gradualization, But it was at some point in
Speaker 2: my thirties that you know, I just went, I'm not
Speaker 2: here for the one anymore. Because from the moment we're
Speaker 2: born as girls and women. Everything in popular culture, you know,
Speaker 2: from the fairy tales were read as babies. Everything tells
Speaker 2: us that we must dedicate our life to finding the one.
Speaker 2: And what that means is that in your teens and
Speaker 2: your twenties, you go to every single social event thinking,
Speaker 2: you know, and I'm straight, so I'm going to use
Speaker 2: the straight colism, but will he be there? What this
Speaker 2: means you spend bloody hours clamming yourself up and making
Speaker 2: yourself up. You go to the social event. This quest
Speaker 2: is a dynamic that forces you to compete with other women,
Speaker 2: which is a out of clause. At the end of
Speaker 2: the night, you trudge him going he wasn't there. Maybe
Speaker 2: next time. And so at some point in my thirsts
Speaker 2: I just went saw this, I'm not give for the
Speaker 2: one anymore. Oh my god, the liberation and the relief
Speaker 2: because now I could go to social events and just
Speaker 2: enjoy them. By the way, obviously there are people who
Speaker 2: want to find the one, who want to find the soulmate.
Speaker 2: But the sheer joy of when you decide that you
Speaker 2: actively do not want to be in love. That strips
Speaker 2: a whole lay of crap out of life. I'm very
Speaker 2: public about all of this. I'm open about, you know,
Speaker 2: not married, not in children, adoring being single, not want
Speaker 2: to relationship, don't want to be in love, cannot wait
Speaker 2: to dialone, date young men for sex. I'm probably about
Speaker 2: all of that because we don't have enough role models
Speaker 2: in our society for women and for men, by the way,
Speaker 2: that demonstrate you can live in your life very differently
Speaker 2: the way to start expected to and still be amazingly happy.
Speaker 2: I want to have this people, I know, did.
Speaker 3: You think along the way of what you were doing
Speaker 3: as revolutionary or you were just sort of like this
Speaker 3: is just the way I am, and other people started
Speaker 3: paying attention.
Speaker 2: You know, this is the way I wish other people
Speaker 2: would look at this. I just realize what makes me happy.
Speaker 2: And so many people live life in oiled grooves. So
Speaker 2: many people are living lives that don't really want to
Speaker 2: be living that don't really want to be in in
Speaker 2: relationships that don't want to really I mean, they have
Speaker 2: children they didn't really want to have, just because of
Speaker 2: what society and popular culture told them. What their parents
Speaker 2: wanted what all their friends were doing at the same time.
Speaker 2: And I urge people to stop, take all those other
Speaker 2: considerations out of your mindset, look deep into your own
Speaker 2: heart and ask yourself what would really make me happy,
Speaker 2: because maybe living life on those oiled grooves won't.
Speaker 3: So do you then find the creator economy right now?
Speaker 3: Like the prevalence of it? Like OnlyFans being in the category,
Speaker 3: do you see them as a competitor or are they
Speaker 3: kind of building the category for you?
Speaker 2: I wish they were building in a category for us.
Speaker 2: And that's because no, I absoutly don't see them as
Speaker 2: a competitor. You know, it's like porn. We are pro
Speaker 2: sex pro paorn pro knowing the difference. So only fans
Speaker 2: is adult content in a performative context because you're performing
Speaker 2: for fans and you're fulfilling fan request, not all of
Speaker 2: which you may feel very happy fulfilling, by the way,
Speaker 2: but you know, if you want to make money, that's
Speaker 2: what you have to do. And the good thing about
Speaker 2: make love not porn is that nobody's requesting anything, no
Speaker 2: one's performing because this is simply the sex you have
Speaker 2: in your life. But you know, it's a huge shame
Speaker 2: because only fans growth and size means that they had
Speaker 2: the opportunity to mainstream adult entertainment in the creater economy
Speaker 2: for all the rest of us, and that's not what
Speaker 2: they chose to do. You know, it is still a
Speaker 2: matter of debate as to whether or not they will
Speaker 2: at some point absolutely do what they did a few
Speaker 2: years ago and kick ad our content off the platform
Speaker 2: in order to get funded and support and be able
Speaker 2: to grow. And they should have just embraced, you know,
Speaker 2: the fact that that was what powered their growth. It's
Speaker 2: absolutely why they started only fans. But honestly, you know,
Speaker 2: with the original found and CEO, he would literally read
Speaker 2: interviews with him where he was asked if you buy
Speaker 2: the information, So you know, obviously adult content is ary
Speaker 2: powered only fans growth. You know, where do you see
Speaker 2: that going? Oh? I think we see our future in
Speaker 2: music and film entertainment. And literally avoiding the question they
Speaker 2: haven't avoided in subsequent years. But that's how much they
Speaker 2: want to present themselves as just a general fan platform.
Speaker 2: How much do they embrace you know what actually they
Speaker 2: owe their success to and so I would have loved
Speaker 2: to have seen them do that. It's a huge shame
Speaker 2: they didn't. What are your markers of success now? Honestly, depressingly,
Speaker 2: my most immediate marker of success is raising funding. Because
Speaker 2: I've kept making Love Not Porn Alive for nearly eleven
Speaker 2: years now as a business on just three million dollars
Speaker 2: of funding from one investor. That's extraorinary feet and by
Speaker 2: the way, all my own savings. I've destroyed myself financially
Speaker 2: for this business to keep it going, and so I
Speaker 2: really need to raise funding now to scale the business,
Speaker 2: to build out the zo I rode to eight in
Speaker 2: and beyond sex education expansion. Parents have asked before since
Speaker 2: day one, make lovenotporn dot academy.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, now measure of success is simply survival, which we
Speaker 2: will only manage if I can raise funding.
Speaker 3: What is something that you saw as a negative at
Speaker 3: some point in your life and then now in retrospect
Speaker 3: you look back and you're like, oh, that actually really
Speaker 3: put me in the right direction.
Speaker 2: There are things that where I'm doubtitely negatives about, for example,
Speaker 2: my industry in my cron advertising, which I wish weren't
Speaker 2: negatives because I was lucky enough not to be impacted
Speaker 2: by them. And I say that because whenever I'm asked
Speaker 2: about my you know what, is always framed as my
Speaker 2: successful cryan advertising, I explain that my success was entirely
Speaker 2: accidental as well, and it was down to luck. And
Speaker 2: it was down to luck on two fronts. First of all,
Speaker 2: I was incredibly lucky that I never got sexually harassed
Speaker 2: in the way the end of my career, and by
Speaker 2: the way, I was absolutely sexually harassed, but not in
Speaker 2: a way that happens to so many women in my industry.
Speaker 2: In every other where you are retaliated against, you are
Speaker 2: managed out of your company, you are managed out of
Speaker 2: your industry, and that honesty was a matter of pure luck.
Speaker 2: Then the second thing I was lucky about was I
Speaker 2: can literally count on the fingers of one hand a
Speaker 2: number of female bosses I had in my advertising career.
Speaker 3: Too.
Speaker 2: I was incredibly lucky because I virtually always reported into men.
Speaker 2: But I reported to men who saw my potential before
Speaker 2: I did, who wanted me to succeed, who championed me
Speaker 2: and gave me every opportune to do so. And that
Speaker 2: is not the experience of most women industry, and most
Speaker 2: women in any industry. And both of those things come from,
Speaker 2: you know, a very negative norm. That is the case
Speaker 2: not only in advertising but in every industry. And I
Speaker 2: wish those negatives have never ever been there, because we
Speaker 2: would have so many more women in positions of power
Speaker 2: and leadership and shaping the world in the way it
Speaker 2: truly should be shaped if the patriarchy and everything that results,
Speaker 2: including sexual harassment us systemic and endemic in every single industry,
Speaker 2: had not prevented so many women from realizing their own potential.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you so much, Cindy, great conversation, So happy
Speaker 3: to have you on.
Speaker 2: Thrill to have been here on the state.
Speaker 3: This is terrific. As you might have guessed it. Cindy
Speaker 3: still lives happily in New York City and is continuing
Speaker 3: to build her company, Make Love Not Porn. Like Cindy said,
Speaker 3: they need capital to keep the movement going, so if
Speaker 3: you're interested in being involved, you can contact us through
Speaker 3: our website, she Pivots the podcast dot com. Be sure
Speaker 3: to follow Cindy on Instagram at Cindy Gallup to stay
Speaker 3: up to date on her general badassory. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening to this episode of she Pivots where
Speaker 3: I talk with women about how their experiences significant personal
Speaker 3: events led to their pivot and eventually their success. To
Speaker 3: learn more about Cindy Make Love Not Porn and all
Speaker 3: of our guests and fun happenings, follow us on Instagram
Speaker 3: at she Pivots the podcast. Leave a rating and comment
Speaker 3: if you enjoyed this episode to help others learn about it.
Speaker 3: A special thank you to our partner Marie Claire and
Speaker 3: the team that made this episode possible. Talk to You
Speaker 3: Next Week special thanks to the she Pivots team, Executive
Speaker 3: producer Emily eda Velosik, Associate producer and social media connoisseur
Speaker 3: Hannah Cousins, Research director Christine Dickinson, Events and Logistics coordinator
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