Inside the Muse’s Founding Story with Editor-in-chief Adrian Granzella Larssen

By Jen­na Abdou

One of my most spe­cial inter­views was with Jeff Wald, the Co-Founder and Pres­i­dent of Work Mar­ket. Although Jeff intro­duced me to the rise of the soon to be tril­lion dol­lar free­lance econ­o­my, I was most intrigued by his descrip­tion of Phase One peo­ple — The team mem­bers who worked on the ear­li­est iter­a­tions of Work Market.

He said, “Phase one peo­ple, there’s some­thing a lit­tle bit wrong with them. They aren’t wear­ing shoes all the time. They don’t show­er for a few days. They are bril­liant in a very unstruc­tured way.”

I was struck by Jeff’s dec­la­ra­tion that he missed the ear­ly days. I assumed he was unique in that sense; How could you miss work­ing until 4:00 a.m. sev­en days a week?

My recent con­ver­sa­tion with Adri­an Granzel­la Larssen, the Edi­tor-in-Chief of The Muse, answered that question.

As she described the ear­ly days of Co-Founders Kathryn Min­shew, Alex Cavoula­cos and her squeez­ing on a couch, eat­ing what­ev­er they could, she sim­i­lar­ly said, “I look back on those days quite fondly.”

Despite The Muse’s $10 mil­lion Series A and a thriv­ing com­mu­ni­ty of over 3 mil­lion active users, today’s suc­cess is ground­ed in the late nights dur­ing Phase One.

“We had crazy impromp­tu brain­storm­ing ses­sions and no real idea of what was going to hap­pen in a day or a week,” Adri­an shared.

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