Hong (@quan) and Liên (@paliendrome) talk about homeschooling, how parenting applies to starting over and building a business, gender/racial/etc balance in companies, and how your heritage can drive your legacy. Topics include: getting into Yale (1:30), getting started with homeschooling (2:53), the trivium educational process (5:36), the origin of PHNX / "Phoenix" (8:33), managing work-life balance with kids (10:00), managing a gender/racial/etc balanced company workforce (11:00), what differentiates PHNX Creative from other agencies (14:24), the origins of this podcast/show (17:25), on being treated as an "outsider" & your responsibility to tell your story (18:00). Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/zzjv6ipTHOM
Hosted by Hong Quan (https://twitter.com/quan)
Produced by Van Nguyen (https://twitter.com/thegoleffect)
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- Start-up mom, single mom, and it was never 50/50. Unfortunately I was in a situation where I was doing all of the work and it wasn't working for me. No matter where you're from, no matter who you are, you can build something. You have a story to tell, you can help other people.
- Hey, folks, this is Hong from Fund BMC, welcome back. This is episode four, and my guest today is actually, I like to call her a personal friend of mine, even though we've recently met or recently started working together, known her for a long time, Lien Johnson, welcome.
- Thank you so much, Hong, we're happy to be here.
- As a founder of PHNX Creative, which is a agency in San Jose, and fun fact, we used Lien's Services for our last Kickstarter campaign. So I think they did a amazing job. Made a super cool video, you may have seen it, the Karmic Oslo. Lien also has a few other things in common with me, besides the term Phoenix and the name Phoenix. She's Yale 2001, a history major, which is rare here in The Valley. Worked as a Heritage Foundation research writer for a while, but then became a educator for 14 years. And then in 2008 she started PHNX. How far back do you wanna go? Do you wanna talk about Yale, you wanna talk about?
- Anything you want.
- Education?
- Sure, I'm up for anything.
- Let's talk about Yale.
- Okay.
- How'd you end up there?
- Well, I wanted to make my parents proud, and please them, and so went, got good grades, went to Yale, became a history major. And then, as you said, I ended up at the Heritage Foundation. I actually started off as their educational coordinator, and ran their intern program. And then I was quickly swiped up to the president's office, where I was his research assistant, wrote his speeches, wrote articles. Mostly on things like economic policy, educational policy. But I worked with them for about two years, and then stopped, because I started a family.
- Yeah.
- So after the Heritage Foundation, you said you stopped because you started a family.
- I started a family, yeah. I got married when I was 23, had my first daughter when I was 25. So when I was dating, he was a Yale alumnus, 11 years older than I am, and he was working in the Department of Education. And I was still a student at Yale, and he asked me what I thought of homeschooling. Honestly I thought it was a little funny, I thought it was strange, which is most people's initial impression of it in the 80s and 90s, it wasn't all that common. But I had a very open mind, I was like, "I'm not sure, I would love "to read about it and learn more." Because at least one fault I noticed with my own education, was like I mentioned to you earlier, was the learning burn. Learning for the tests, getting exhausted, learning the system, but not really learning for mastery or the love of learning, which I really tried to do in college. I would take classes that I wanted to take, and learn for the sake of learning, and not necessarily learn to just check off a box. And so I thought, "Wow, if I have the opportunity "to provide my kids with an education "that caters to their learning styles, "but also can contribute to their love of learning, "I really want to do that." And so we decided that when we had kids, we would homeschool them together, 50/50, and assess it sort of annually. And as long as we could provide a better education to the kids than what was available to us, then we would homeschool them. And it's kind of like, every parent makes this decision, like what do I wanna outsource for my child? Like I'm their parent, I'm the manager. Maybe I'll outsource music lessons, maybe I'm gonna outsource education, maybe I'm gonna outsource X, Y and Z. And so it's sort of the question that you ask.
- Yeah.
- When you're parenting a kid. And so I homeschooled my three kids from the beginning for 14 years.
- Wow.
- Yeah, yeah.
- But this is early. Homeschooling is still a very like--
- Yeah, well I learned then that there were more people doing it than I realized, and it was growing very quickly. So I homeschooled in Washington DC, New York City, and San Francisco, and helped to build many independent learning communities. And so the stereotype maybe was more like, apropos for the '60s and '70s, but certainly by the mid 2000s when I was homeschooling, they were just very active, homeschooling communities and lots of people. Like single moms, two-income working families, homeschooling their kids. And you can do anything from buy boxed curriculum, you could get the curriculum from the state that you live in, to parents who write their own curriculum, to parents who unschool. And people homeschool for so many different reasons. You can't assume to know.
- What's Trivium?
- Oh, Trivium?
- Yeah.
- It is a method of learning whereby, it follows the three stages of learning for children. So the three stages are the grammar stage, the dialectic stage, and the rhetoric stage. And it was developed by ancient Rome and ancient Greece, and it roughly correlates to our own elementary, middle, and high school schools. And the ideas of the grammar stage, when children are in the grammar stage of learning, they're basically like sponges. They want to absorb information, that's the best time for them to learn about the, like names, dates, the who, what, where.
- Yeah.
- All the physical stuff. Biology, numbers, shapes, things like that. That's elementary school. And that's why kids have such great memories of them. In elementary school, they can remember like taxonomic clades of dinosaurs, or the names of all their different Hot Wheel cars. They're just absorbers of information, it's very easy for them to remember. At that time, I had my kids memorize a timeline with over 166 points, with names and dates, and they could do it pretty easily, and I still can't do it. And then you have the dialectic stage, which is sort of the how and why. Like how those names and dates, when you put them together, how does something happen, why did it happen? And it's connecting more of the timeline, that's the dialectic stage. And then the rhetoric stage is the, so what? Now that I know all of this information, how do I apply it to me, to the society I live in? Why do we learn about the Second World War, and how is that relevant today? Is it relevant today? And yes, so that's the Trivium.
- Okay.
- Yeah, and no, it's a classical. So I used a classical method of homeschooling, but I would call it classical eclectic, because for like the younger ages, I definitely used sort of a Montessori approach, and really a Reggio approach. Yeah. Very hands-on. Was on the floor with my kids a lot, we just did stuff. Younger kids tend to be very kinetic learners, they love to move around, and mine were no exception. Though, there are a lot of exceptions, which is why people choose different curricula for their kids. And then we did classical, and I taught grammar, writing, and mental math to third through sixth graders for a long time. That's the middle stage of writing, now I forget where I was going with that thought. But yeah. That's the dialectic stage.
- It's okay. I feel like we laid the foundation for the first stage.
- Yeah.
- So the second stage of this is when you started PHNX.
- Yes.
- Because, in a way, it's sort of a starting over, right?
- Yes. Yep, so PHNX, which I don't know, you haven't mentioned yet, but your name means Phoenix in Japanese. Mine means lotus blossom, similar metaphysical concepts there.
- We're talking about spirit animals, I think.
- Yeah.
- My spirit animal is phoenix obviously, but yours is?
- Phoenix, lotus blossom, yeah. Lotus blossom is the meaning of my name, but I identify a lot with the phoenix, and my partner and I, he suggested PHNX for the name of our company. But it's sort of a rebirth, and a starting over. And I'll talk to you about why I did that, and how we chose the name. So, like I said, I was homeschooling, and it was never 50/50. Unfortunately, I was in the situation where I was doing all of the work, and it wasn't working for me, and it wasn't working for the family. Let's see, I guess it was about. I separated from my children's father about five years ago, and my children are now, they're in their second year of public school. They made a pretty seamless transition to the schools in San Jose, which has been great. So I have one in elementary school, one in middle school, and one in high school.
- The usage.
- Yes, it's a lot of driving and coordinating rides for the kids right now. And I do 90% of the parenting, and the working out of all of that. And then I started PHNX with Jamie Baughman, and he's been in video production for 20 years, and I've been in communication for 20 years, and writing. And we wanted to create a creative agency that even though we both have worked in creative fields, and communications for a long time. But one that was really mission-based, and founded on diversity, equity, and inclusion. And so that all of the projects that we agree to do are at least 50% women and underrepresented minorities working on each project. But we also make sure that the projects that we do are good for the community, and good for the people that we're working with. Like that was really important to us, 'cause the world doesn't need necessarily more creative agencies, or more business in general. We just need more responsible ones. And so we really wanted to make it our mission to create a company that was good for the community.
- Yeah. So most agencies, I will say, are profit-driven, just the nature of the business. Their job is to help these companies tell their stories.
- Sure.
- I feel lucky that we were able to work together, because when I started Karmic, we had these ideals, and it's been really hard to stick to them. And one is this idea of using at least 50% of your team female, and we're still working on that. But from day one, we wanted to do that. And it's not because today, like diversity and inclusion is kind of a hot topic, and everybody wants this veneer of it, but I think it's really important, like to the core of who we are.
- Yes. Well, it's the core of who you are, and also helps your company reach more people, to reserve that natural empathy of having it built into the bones, into the foundation of your company, being able to reach out to the entire population very authentically. But also it's just like, it's kind of the right way to do things. It's moving in the right direction. Only when people are seeing that everything needs to be 50/50, are we going to realize equal pay, are we gonna realize other ideals, like family leaves or paternity leaves. That doesn't just fall on the shoulders of the mother, right? There's equal responsibility on both sides, not just for the physical needs of family, but the emotional burden as well.
- Yes, equal parenting. No, for a fact. In our family, a lot of the emotional labor falls on my wife.
- Yeah, most families.
- Yeah.
- And equal parenting doesn't necessarily mean like every single item is split 50/50, because there are days, and weeks and months where that doesn't work. But if it's sort of, the burden is spread-out, and certainly the emotional burden is a huge one, I think that we just didn't have the vocabulary for for so long, that people are talking about now, and it's really important. And I think that CEOs, founders, managers, anyone in a position of power, to initiate to conversations should have a responsibility to do that, because it's important. If you're thinking that your female/women employees, like seem distracted, maybe they are. Allow them to bring your whole selves to work, and talk about that. Because that's the thing that they bring to work, and sort of accept and work with that, and we need to change society's ideas about who's job it is to bear the burden of raising the next generation.
- I guess, what differentiates your process from other creative agencies, who may be a little more straightforward? Like as a start-up, if I'm going to an agency, and say I need a video, or a launch video, or a product video. How do you think about it, versus like what the typical process would be?
- Well, like a lot of agencies, first I'll really try to understand what the problem is. After that initial step. But then I have a really large network of reaching out to not just women, but all sorts of underrepresented minorities, whether they be like people on the spectrum, people with disabilities, different people of color. And I have made it my mission to sort of, really try to get out there in the network as much as possible. And so, having access to a bunch of different pipelines, and being able to cultivate a crew, and really curate a crew, rather than just falling back on the same people over and over. Like I certainly had a few of the same people I work with time and again, but really catering each project to my client's needs.
- Yeah.
- And I learn about different organizations, and different pipelines for different types of workers, so that I bring all of that to the table. But then I, as the producer, I work with my client and my crew to really make sure that all their communication is dialed in. Everyone's, 'cause that is huge, right? Making sure that everyone understands what is going on, what's the timeline, what are the potential snagging points, friction points. And just working with everyone to make sure that the process goes really, really smoothly, and then just take it upon myself to just manage like. Manage all the juggling balls.
- Yeah.
- One of the things behind PHNX is people, bringing in the diversity of people, bringing your full self to work. Part of that thread is, like I just love people. We tell stories about people, we tell stories about things, we tell stories about products, and we want to reach people with our stories, and connect with people with our stories. And so it's not just telling the story of the thing that we wanna tell the story, but it's connecting with the stories. People need to be able to identify with the story that you're telling, a piece of them. And it's kind of making all of those connections. And yeah, I just love people. I wanna help people, I wanna be a better person.
- Lien, I'll say the two that you impressed to do, is like one, actually the idea for this podcast started from a lot of conversations we had in the car, or I will say the minivan.
- Yeah, swagger wagon.
- swagger wagon. And like, this is super uncomfortable for me to be in front of the camera. I don't like to do it at all, but I think it's important.
- On the other side of the camera, it is--
- These are important, that's the reason that we're doing it, and that's why I'm like kind of pushing myself, or you're pushing me. It's really your fault. To tell these stories, because--
- I'll take credit.
- There're not enough of these stories.
- Right, no, I think especially of, and I'll say it because you probably won't, that someone who has traveled a great distance, right? Someone who, a refugee immigrant, Hong, who was born in Vietnam to parents who were fleeing their country, and postponed it a few years. Well, it was still very dangerous to come here. And then grew up facing great economic hardship and social hardship, and like even, like nowadays when people as minorities. Like I'm biracial, and you're Vietnamese. Like we both have experienced like this outsider, like what are you? Where are you from? Go back to where you came, all of this stuff, we need a model that no matter where you're from, no matter who you are, you can build something. You have a story to tell, you can help other people. And we need to do it so it's not just like, like very stereotypical podcasts and things out there. Like it's open to everyone, I think, as a refugee immigrant, you have a very important role to play in the conversation.
- I think that's another episode.
- Sure.
- Yeah, a friend of mine, she's like, "Well, the world does not need another podcast."
- I was like, "Just give it a chance, "wait until you see what we put out." Because we're not telling they typical story, behind what we're doing. But I think, like to your point, the story has been consistent, even for me through the last 20 years. It's about helping people, it's about getting the best out of folks, giving them opportunities. Like recruiting is not typically a role that you kind of look up to. It's like HR, people usually think it's part of HR. It's not part of HR. It's really about giving people opportunity, right? And sharing your story, and sharing my story eventually, maybe there's a kid out there who thinks, "I should be doing something," or, "I can do something." And everybody around them is telling they can't.
- Right, or at least see something. They see part of their story in you.
- Yeah, cool. All right Lien, thank you very much--
- Thank you so much, Hong.
- For Fund BMC.
- Yeah, thank you so much for the opportunity.
- Yeah.
- Are you ready?
- Hello Fund BMC. This is Hong Quan. We should have her do it.