Monthly Archives: May 2009

Seven years ago you would have found me surrounded by children living in extreme poverty in Tibet. Five years ago you would have found me rebuilding a community in rural Mongolia. Three weeks ago, you would have found me working with Tibetan Refugees, a pickaxe in hand, and knee deep in the rubble of a 300 year-old Buddhist Monastery located in a village called Chairro tucked away in the Himalayan mountains of Nepal. Today, I’m on the 2nd floor of a San Francisco high-rise working on investments for Meltwater Group. What’s the connection, the common link, the motivation? The answer…

I started with Meltwater News in September 2006, joining the most common entry-point into the company, the International Management Trainee program.

Starting out in the Silicon Valley office, I can’t honestly say that I knew what I was getting myself into. I knew from the interviews that I liked the people and that a sales role was going to be challenging. I learned soon after joining the office, that Silicon Valley was the breeding ground for most of the current leaders in the US Meltwater organization. It was a hot office; people were fired up and there was a difficult-to-describe energy and pulse in…

I thought opening up the first office of Meltwater News in New Zealand would be a challenge, but right now I am faced with even a bigger challenge: how to start my very first blog post???

Introducing myself seems like a good idea…

So here goes: my name is Kathrin – called Kathi though by everybody – I am 27, and I started working for Meltwater in Berlin in February 2007, right after graduating with an International Business and Cultural Affairs degree from the lovely University of Passau in Germany.

After graduating I was open to doing a lot of things but I did…

When asked in January of 2008, “What are your career plans? “…
My answer was the inevitable: ”I’m moving to New York to work as a consultant by day, and fashion designer / entrepreneur by night.”

And that was the plan.

I was already designing, manufacturing, and selling a popular line of Pin-UP Girl inspired dresses in Texas with a small business that I had built from the ground up with my best friend / business partner… and we were most definitely ready to take on the Big Apple, 1950’s style.

I also had a BA in Inter-Cultural Communication, a Minor in Russian Studies, and…

I was sooo close to ditching the Meltwater interview. Standing in a hallway high in a center city Philadelphia hotel, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to work for anyone who made me wait around for 20 minutes—I didn’t even know why I was there in the first place.

After graduating from Cornell in 2002, I bounced around a little, but had most recently worked as a Project Manager for a pharmaceutical start-up. My desired career path was typical of any highly ambitious, but maybe a little clueless, guy in his mid-20s. I wanted to come in off the street,…