Chief Change Officer
#133 Food52 CEO Erika Ayers Badan: No One Cares About Your Career - Part One
Sat, 4 Jan 2025
Erika Ayers Badan, CEO of Food52, joins me for the first part of a compelling two-part series. With a career spanning Barstool Sports, Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo, Erika is no stranger to bold moves and big titles. But this episode isn’t about resumes—it’s about stories. Erika’s journey is filled with lessons that inspired her first book, No One Cares About Your Career. Intrigued by the title? So was I. In this episode (Part One), we’ll dive into her book—why she wrote it, why now, and why this title resonates. We’ll also explore five actionable tips anyone can use to succeed at work. In Part Two, we’ll step behind the scenes of her life, discussing her upbringing, leadership style, and her take on toxic work cultures. Plus, she’ll share the advice she’s giving her own kids about thriving in today’s fast-changing world. Key Highlights of Our Interview: Revisiting the Roots: A Walk Down Memory Lane to Discover the Past’s Impact on the Present The Brutal Truth Behind ‘No One Cares About Your Career’—How Did Erika Land on That Mic-Drop of a Title? "Nobody's coming to help you. It's up to you to save yourself, grow yourself, push yourself, teach yourself." What Sparked the Inspiration Behind Writing the Book? What Makes This Book a Game Changer in a Sea of Career Guides? Who Is This Book Really For? Unpacking the Audience Behind the Pages "Just because you went to Princeton doesn't mean you have to go work in finance. A lot of times people get caught up in what everyone else thinks they should do. That's the lore. What everyone else thinks they should be and the reality is that nobody's really thinking about you that much. You should do what makes you happy and tell everyone else to jump off a cliff." 30 Years, 5 Simple Lessons: How to Succeed at Work Without the Overwhelm Connect with us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Erika Ayers Badan ______________________ --Chief Change Officer-- Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself. Open a World of Deep Human Intelligence for Growth Progressives, Visionary Underdogs, Transformation Gurus & Bold Hearts. 6 Million+ All-Time Downloads. Reaching 80+ Countries Daily. Global Top 3% Podcast. Top 10 US Business. Top 1 US Careers. >>>100,000+ subscribers are outgrowing. Act Today.<<< --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.18 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 1.5% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>170,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: Who is Erika Ayers Badan and what is her background?
So I'm Erica. I live right around New York City. I work in New York City. I worked in New York City for, I don't know, 15 years, almost 20 years. I grew up in a really small town in New England. I was born in Colorado, and I'm best known for my last job, which I spent a decade building a company called Barstool Sports, which in the American market is one of, if not the most
wild, fast-growing, creative, dynamic, disruptive companies in sports and media and entertainment in the past two to three decades. So I'm most known for my time at Barstool Sports. Prior to that, I worked at a lot of really big companies like Microsoft and Yahoo and AOL. I worked at a bunch of startups in the fashion space, in the music space.
In the entertainment space, I started my career thinking I wanted to be a lawyer, and I didn't. I had been laid off. I was a receptionist. I had a bunch of career changes. I had a very meandering career path. I worked at a bunch of ad agencies. I've worked all over the world. So I've had, I would say, a really unique career in that I've really tried a lot of different things.
I've worked at a lot of different places. I've learned from a lot of different types of people, all in pursuit of really becoming a better person and a better leader and a better executive and a more interested whole being. And I don't know if that works, Vince, but that's how I would describe it.
So, initially, you planned to go to law school, or perhaps it was more of an expectation from your parents. But in the end, you chose a different path. What led you to that decision?
Yes, I had gotten an internship. I went to a liberal arts college in Maine in the US, and I had gotten an internship in Boston. And most of my family are teachers, and my parents were teachers and educators. My dad was my principal when I was in middle school, which is probably a story for later. And I felt my parents really sacrificed so that my brother and I could go to very good schools.
And I felt a very significant sense of obligation to do something with that. I feel that my parents had sacrificed everything.
themselves so to give us opportunity and i felt a very a big debt of gratitude on that and when i had gotten this internship it was at fidelity investments it was in boston massachusetts and i loved it and i got this bug to work in a corporate environment i was i don't no one else in my extended family works in a corporate environment and but i got the bug
And it made me think, oh, I want to go to law school and I'd like to get a business degree. I never ended up doing either of those things. But what I did do is set out to be very successful in the corporate world and to do it the best way I could, which was really learning on the job and as an apprenticeship.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of the book title 'No One Cares About Your Career'?
So Nobody Cares About Your Career is something someone told me once, then probably 15 years ago, and it always stuck in my head. And when I was writing the book, it was the title of one of the chapters. And to be honest with you, I never thought about it as the title for the book, but I did feel very strongly about it as the core of the book, which is that Nobody's coming to help you.
You need to get over your insecurity and your ego and put yourself into what you're doing every day. And that work is tuition that you get paid for. And it's up to you to save yourself, grow yourself, push yourself, teach yourself. And so it becoming the title of the book really happened towards the end. I was honestly quite stuck about what the title should be.
I thought about the title of get comfortable being uncomfortable or you can be yourself and be successful. And there was a really interesting woman at the publisher who said, we're on a conference call trying to figure out the title of the book. And she She said, why don't you just go look at your chapters? Like maybe the book has a lot of punchy chapter titles, I think.
And she was like, why don't you go look in the chapter list and see if there's a title? And I looked to the chapter list and it was obvious that was going to be the title.
Yeah, I read this chapter specifically. We'll come back to this in a minute. The book, what inspired you to write it in the very first place?
Oh, a lot. One is I've always been that person at work that just feel too much about work. I actually hate this about myself, but I'm deeply emotional about work. I think about work all the time. I think about how things could be better or different or what I could change or what I could do differently or better. And
I remember working at AOL a long time ago, probably 15 years ago at this point, and a coworker saying to me, I used to send these really long emails. And then my coworker was like, why do you do that? What a stupid waste of your time. Everybody's out partying after a workday and you're on your phone writing emails about what we did the day before. And so I've always really felt
the need to share how I feel emotionally about work. It's very motivating to me to lay it out and hopefully it's motivating or interesting or compelling to others. And I was at a point, I had been at Barstool Sports for about eight years, almost nine years, and we had sold the company to a new company. that was much bigger than ours, that was publicly traded, that was heavily regulated.
And I felt my creativity at work, Vince, just totally get zapped. I had been running this wild, creative, amorphous, freewheeling, fast, fast growth company. And all of a sudden the brakes got pumped and I was trying to do daily financial reporting and daily forecasting and re-forecasting. And I was feeling my creativity just go to the wayside.
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Chapter 3: What inspired Erika to write her book?
Chapter 4: What are the five actionable tips for success at work?
I remember working at AOL a long time ago, probably 15 years ago at this point, and a coworker saying to me, I used to send these really long emails. And then my coworker was like, why do you do that? What a stupid waste of your time. Everybody's out partying after a workday and you're on your phone writing emails about what we did the day before. And so I've always really felt
the need to share how I feel emotionally about work. It's very motivating to me to lay it out and hopefully it's motivating or interesting or compelling to others. And I was at a point, I had been at Barstool Sports for about eight years, almost nine years, and we had sold the company to a new company. that was much bigger than ours, that was publicly traded, that was heavily regulated.
And I felt my creativity at work, Vince, just totally get zapped. I had been running this wild, creative, amorphous, freewheeling, fast, fast growth company. And all of a sudden the brakes got pumped and I was trying to do daily financial reporting and daily forecasting and re-forecasting. And I was feeling my creativity just go to the wayside.
And so I started to write the book on my commute because I felt like it brought me back to the things that I had loved about Barstool Sports that were so creative. And then the second piece is over the pandemic, I had created a podcast when I was the CEO of Barstool Sports because at Barstool, we had never worked remote. We didn't have a remote working culture before the pandemic.
Everyone was in the office every day, all the time. We didn't have any need for technology because everybody worked together in person. When the pandemic hit, it was very alienating for me and it was very alienating for our company. And so I started emailing everyone in the company every week. And there were 250 people in the company at the time and I was sending 250 emails.
I would go through the A's and then the B's and then the C's. And what I realized was that was impossible because I was just getting flooded with email, and I was flooding email right back, and it seemed silly.
So I started a daily 10-minute podcast where I talked about what we were doing at Barstool Sports, and I used it as a way to connect with people who I worked with, and then it became interesting to people who worked outside of or were well beyond Barstool Sports. And so... What I gravitated towards was I was getting all sorts of Q&A questions from people about their careers.
And it built over time where I get probably 200 questions a week at this point. So I'm getting a massive amount of work questions and In the same way I felt making a podcast was a better way to talk to a 250-people employee base, I felt that writing a book was perhaps a more thoughtful, complete way to respond to people's work questions.
With the pandemic, everyone was stuck at home and you used a podcast to keep your team engaged instead of just sending long emails. It helped keep everyone active and connected Soon, more people outside your firm started paying attention, sending in career-related questions, which you began answering. Eventually, it led you to think, why not put all of this into a book?
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Chapter 5: How has Erika's career shaped her views on work?
Chapter 6: What career advice does Erika give to her children?
Inside, there are a lot, a lot of different stories, and one specific story stands out to me is about your interview with a few major decision-makers when you were trying to get a job, the CEO job, at Barstool. I found it very, very interesting, and I'm mostly honest. I can definitely relate to your point about how this book is different from others because you tell the truth about what happened.
At that time, you mentioned you were not sure about the interview's outcome and even thought you did not do well. Then one of those decision makers you spoke with said, I think we could give it a try, although I'm not sure if you can do it. It's so raw and unfiltered. That's what I appreciate. This is why I'm really enjoying the book and I plan to finish it soon. That's great.
Yeah, I want it to be... Just very direct. I'm a direct person and I wanted to be direct about not only the things that I feel like have done well and that I've done well, but really also the things that I've been insecure about and the things I haven't done well and the lessons I've had to learn the hard way. And I really wanted it to be a good read, but also a book that makes you think about
about what would you do and how do you think about things and how do you feel about things? I think to the point of nobody cares about your career, I think a lot of times people get into a job because it's what they're supposed to do. I talked to someone recently, a college senior, and he goes to Princeton and he, so I said, hey, James, what are you going to do?
What do you want to do after college? And James said, I go to Princeton, so I have to go work in finance. And I was like, why do you think that? Just because you went to Princeton doesn't mean you have to go work in finance. But I think a lot of times people get caught up in what everyone else thinks they should do or what everyone else thinks they should be.
And the reality is that nobody's really thinking about you that much. And you should do what makes you happy and tell everyone else to jump off a cliff. So the book is hopefully motivating to get people to do that.
There are surely a lot of nuggets of wisdom in the book. And one that stands out to me is when you highlight five simple things for anyone to succeed at work. Who you are, what you have to offer, how you show up, what you do with your time, and how much you care. Five core things. Erica, could you briefly walk us through why you chose these five?
After so many years of working across different industry, in different countries and eventually landing leadership roles and become a CEO who turned a company around. How did you distill all those learnings into these five simple points? And how can we as individuals apply them to move forward in our own careers?
Sure. So let's start with caring, right? It's so simple. The idea that you should care and that it's important to find something to care about in your day, whether you're at home, whether you're raising kids, whether you're a career person, whether you're a bus driver, like you, you gotta find a reason to care. And I think that, The people who care at work are the best people at work.
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