Jen Boynton (C3) is not a law abiding citizen. I mean that in a good way. There’s simply no way we would have been able to build TriplePundit.com (3P) to what it is today without breaking pretty much every rule in the book, inventing our own rules, then breaking those when they didn’t work.
That’s pretty much what you need to do when you’re venturing into completely new territory, bootstrapped to the hilt, and being constantly told you’re doing it wrong.
I met Jen when she was finishing up her studies at Presidio Graduate School and invited her to become a regular writer on 3P. She was immediately one of the best, not just because of her good grasp of sustainability and writing, but because she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind, to challenge things that others might hold sacred, and to treat her writing as a passionate mission to advance sustainability—straight out of the PGS playbook.
As luck would have it, I managed to convince Jen to become 3P’s first full-time employee in 2010. Officially she arrived as editor in chief, but in reality is a key salesperson, our head of HR, budget strategist, and my personal therapist. I’d like to say it’s been history ever since but the journey continues, only slightly more structured than in the early days.
Although Jen is a natural sustainable thinker, it’s obvious that PGS gave her a solid foundation in business that she uses every day at 3P. People rely on 3P for our deep knowledge of sustainability including everything from systems thinking to risk management, to cause marketing and everything in between. PGS honed Jen’s sniff test—she can tell if a sustainability program is bogus, and she uses that nose at 3P all the time.
Moving forward, both Jen and I have maintained a close relationship with PGS. We’ve found the school offers a marvelous sounding board for us as we develop new topics to cover. PGS represents a core audience for us and a fabulous network of people to connect us with companies, story ideas, guest writers, and everything else that we need to keep things moving.
If PGS was the original impetus for the creation of 3P, Jen has certainly been the glue that’s held it together.
This article was originally published in the Fall 2014 edition of Presidian:
