We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lauren Anders Brown. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lauren Anders below.
Lauren Anders, thank you so much for joining us and offering your lessons and wisdom for our readers. One of the things we most admire about you is your generosity and so we’d love if you could talk to us about where you think your generosity comes from.
It was my first time of many in Haiti, the western hemisphere’s poorest country in 2014. I was filming with a young woman who was a rising football star, her nickname was Marta after a famous Brazilian player because she was that good. She was at an academy where she played football and studied. We spoke to each other in broken French as best as we both could over the days we spent together while I was filming her story. One day, we were waiting for our transportation to pick us up and she saw me using a small pocket dictionary I had with me and asked if she could look at it. She began reading it cover to cover like it was the latest Harry Potter book. By the time the car came to pick us up, I already knew I wanted to give her the dictionary and told her to keep it as it was her’s now. The next day I was leaving, and she came to say good bye to me. She gave me a letter written in French and in English thanking me for spending time with her. We never spoke to each other once in English, she had used the dictionary I gave her to write the entire letter. I don’t think I knew generosity until that moment, when something I gave away without any expectation allowed me to receive such a moving gift.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I grew up around New York City’s largest film studio with my father as the general manager. While most kids built forts out of blankets and pillows, I was using sandbags and scraps of blackout cloth. I developed a love of cameras and had a black and white photography dark room in my home at 14. I had a photography mentor who once criticized my work with, “Your work is good, but it’s all the same subject matter – teenage girls.” I was a teenage girl, what else was I supposed to photograph? That stayed with me, and as I progressed on a well-laid career track in the International Cinematographer’s Guild and fulfilled my dream of working on large motion picture sets in my early twenties I was hit with feeling that I wasn’t where I was meant to be. I was doing good work, but again it was was all the same subject matter – one cop show, or a medical show, or a ridiculous budget feature film that made me question what I actually wanted in my career and it wasn’t the silver platter that was served to me. I wanted to serve others, and so started to break off and become a single-shooting director making my own documentaries. I captured content that at first was close to my interests which eventually led me to focus on the topics I am known for today: global health and human rights. I’ve filmed in over 40 countries, dozens of languages, long and short formats for days or weeks at a time with charities and the United Nations. All before I turned 40, and before I began a second career founding a tech startup. For 12 years I’ve been traveling the world with my dog, and it’s been a journey where I was a strange solo traveler dragging a ton of pet paperwork around to just one of several on a single flight. The paperwork hasn’t got any easier over that time, and having my dog taken from me once at a border inspired me to build an app that would accurately advise and assist pet parents traveling with their pets. I took UX design courses, earned IATA certifications, raised capital, and am now managing an all female startup that’s changing pet travel furever called PadsPass, with our digital pet passport due to launch mid 2025.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
I love upskilling, I do it all the time sometimes like becoming a UX designer which was a several month course covering everything from user journeys to product creation that taught me how to use platforms like figma that are now essential to a tech startup. I also love the small and sometimes less exciting ways I upskill because it still feels like a win. For example, I hate managing numbers and have always avoided it at all costs to the point where it felt like a foreign language. When I began to look into the costs for a book keeper for my startup, I quickly realised that was not an amount I wanted to pay just because I hated numbers and hesitated to learn to love them. I had learned harder things in the past, most recently Arabic for a documentary! So If I could read and speak Arabic, I could read and speak numbers.
So I learned how to reconcile accounts, made a chart of accounts, a balance sheet, all things that are essential to a founder to know and understand to make better decisions for the business. I look forward to the day I can hand over the responsibilities, knowing we’re earning revenue and that I can now ‘speak numbers’.
Don’t be afraid to learn something new, even if it feels like a foreign language. Ask questions, learn how to ask for help, and learn to listen to everything including the things you don’t want to hear. Being an active listener will carry you further than you think.
What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?
From day one, I have always and will always be the founder of PadsPass and from day one I also resisted calling myself the CEO of PadsPass. It could have been a spell of imposter syndrome, but I struggled to give myself that title as I did not feel it was deserved just because I was the founder. To me, a CEO is more than a visionary but someone that executes that vision in every capacity that’s required and it’s a position I never held so I struggled to see how I fit that role simply because I was the founder. For the longest time, I had in my pitch to investors that I would be sourcing and naming another CEO and some admired my honesty. I truly want the best for PadsPass, and in those moments I wasn’t sure I was the best for PadsPass. As we’ve been rapidly growing and development has started, I’ve been taking on more and more responsibilities including raising $200k out of our $500k pre-seed investment round. It wasn’t until I reconciled the year’s pre-revenue expenses and learned my numbers that I finally gave myself that title. I had truly deserved it and was the best person for the role for now. I’ll always have it in my mind to find someone that can truly lead it to make it the success I want for it, but for now I feel I’ve overcome my internal CEO struggle.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.padspass.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/digitalpetpassport/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/landersbrown/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@collaborateideasandimagesb8436
- Other: https://www.instagram.com/laurenandersbrown
Image Credits
3. Meredith Andrews
4. Tania Volobueva
5. Fiander Foto
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