System Changer Interview: Jen Lewis
For this issue of System Changers I spoke with Jen Lewis who is Co-Founder of Lex, the app for finding LGBTQ+ friends and queer community (update: check out Jen’s Substack). Jen and I met when I was looking for a job in advertising right at the beginning of my career. We had a fun, challenging conversation over a coffee a few doors down from the agency she worked for, Wieden+Kennedy. I really admired this agency and their work, so I was nervous and eager to perform. I’ve never forgotten her asking me how I’d brand loo roll in a compelling way and thinking, “AAHH I can’t lose this opportunity because of loo roll,” as I worked out how to respond! I must have said something right because I got through to an interview with her boss, and subsequently joined the planning team at W+K.
That chat with Jen has always stayed with me because I was so inspired by her confidence and intelligence. It was so helpful, and refreshing, to have a powerful young woman to look up to in that industry. I’ve followed her journey ever since.
Fast forward just under a decade and I spot this post:
I was excited to discover Lex, and intrigued to hear more about Jen’s personal connection to their mission, so I reached out and asked her for an interview. It was so lovely to re-connect with her; she was as inspiring as ever. Jen is a great example of someone growing and thriving at the nexus of transforming self to transform systems and drive positive change in the world. I really hope you enjoy reading.
Jen has 15 years of global experience building brands from early stage startups to Fortune 500 companies. Her early career started building business models for companies spun out from British Telecom’s tech incubator.
She then pivoted to become a strategist at world class advertising agencies Wieden+Kennedy, Leo Burnett and 72andSunny, in London, Shanghai and New York. Working for iconic brands like Nike, Gap, Pepsi, Unilever, Jen learned how to create brands that drive culture and capture consumer trends to drive business results.
She spent the last 5 years in the NY startup scene helping pre-Seed to Series A companies scale up, partnering with founders on customer acquisition, product strategy, business modelling and fundraising. Her most recent role prior to Lex was the Head of Growth Marketing at Tia. Joining as the first marketing hire after Series A, she scaled up the user base and team to raise a $100M Series B round.
Jen has a degree from Oxford University, she is a Chartered Institute of Marketing Post Grad, and she’s won three Global Marketing Effectiveness Awards and over 40+ Creative Awards.
Can you describe how you’re leading systemic change in one sentence?
Lex’s core mission is giving LGBTQ+ people access to queer community.
The Surgeon General of the United States made an announcement last week about loneliness being the biggest health epidemic in the US right now. So community is important for everyone, but it’s especially important for LGBTQ+ identifying people. If you’ve not been raised in an accepting environment you’ll find it harder to get the support and community you need. We all need to be around others we can share freely and be ourselves with.
There’s this phrase, “chosen family”, which is really big in the gay community, and elsewhere. If your family can’t accept you as you are, you have to choose and build your own family. So that’s one of the changes we’re helping people to make.
So you’re building a whole new way for LGBTQ+ people to find and build community, using technology to reach and connect people more easily and scale these efforts?
Traditionally queer people have found community in physical places. If you look back in history to queer liberation, important moments like the Stonewall riots in New York and the AIDS crisis for example, people were finding community in physical spaces and experiences, and through protesting and organising. Gay bars are the spaces we’re all aware of.
Bars and alcohol aren’t necessarily things that people want anymore, Gen Z especially, and sadly a lot of gay bars are being shut down in the US. The way we talk about Lex is to explain that the queer community used to have to go to designated physical spaces to find each other, but with our support the queer community can take over any space. So we have people who come to Lex to arrange basketball leagues, hiking groups, birdwatching, Dungeons and Dragons…
The idea is that queer people don’t have to go to a limited set of physical spaces to feel safe and be in community. We can take over any space.
That must be really empowering and liberating!
Yes, we’re excited by the idea of finding and building community everywhere. Queer people aren’t limited anymore to these allocated areas where it’s acceptable for them to be who they really are.
So how did you come to work on this mission? Tell us your story.
There’s two parts to my journey I think. There’s the personal journey and the professional journey, and they’ve ended up coming together at this point. The trajectory for both has been pretty similar, but they weren’t always connected.
I realised at a particular point whilst working as a strategist in advertising that I felt really disconnected from the work I was doing. Clients were spending a lot of money on things that weren’t really going anywhere, it was frustrating. I wanted to be working with companies and brands who were at the cutting edge, changing their industries. So I decided to make a move into the startup world. That’s what I’ve always loved about the startup energy, especially the first five years. To have an idea and to make it happen, you have to really believe in it. You have to really believe that the world needs it. The people I’ve worked with in this space are innovators and changemakers who have real belief in what they’re doing, and I was really drawn to that.
So I started to use the skills I’d learned in advertising to start solving on-the-ground problems for younger companies, getting new brands up and running. Having worked with Nike, I was really interested in health and wellness. One of these was Moody, which I believe we connected over at the time!
I was newly married to my husband who I loved and who I’d known since I was 24. We had a really stable, wonderful marriage. But I had this feeling that I couldn’t understand. I now have the language I need to talk about it, but at the time I’d never done any therapy and my sense of personal understanding was very basic. I think I’d started listening to podcasts, learning about the brain and psychology, but I wasn’t really thinking about this stuff for most of my 20s. I had a sense of discomfort, that I was in a life I didn’t want to be in, but I couldn’t really articulate it. Some of it was the job, so I knew I had to move out of advertising into something else, but there was more to it. On the surface I had a really amazing life; a good job, a nice house, great friends, a nice husband, nice holidays… I had all the things that, at age 30, should have been more than enough. But I felt so stuck. I felt bored and stagnant.
Then the catalyst for change was falling in love with a friend and former colleague, and she was a woman. It brought sudden life back into me, and I realised there was a part of my sexual identity that I’d been suppressing for years. It’d come out in various ways before, but because I’d grown up in a heterosexual world, I didn’t even meet someone who identified as a lesbian until I was 25. I couldn’t even fathom it. So it was only when I fell in love that I realised there was a side of me that I needed to explore.
I realised that there was so much in me that I couldn’t explore from the life that I was in. It was obviously really messy and challenging, and I didn’t have the language to articulate what was happening for me. My reaction was to not tell anyone and keep it a secret. I just didn’t know what was happening, but I knew that I needed to explore this part of me. My husband and I got divorced, and I had a relationship with this woman for three years.
And it was the same year that I went freelance. I remember speaking to my therapist and saying “everyone thinks I’m crazy… I’ve left my marriage, quit my job, I don’t have anywhere to live, my friendship community has gone,” but it seemed crazier not to do it all at once. I tore down all the structures of my life and rebuilt them to be more aligned to who I was. I had the freedom to fully embrace myself by doing it all at the same time.
You’re so incredibly brave, Jen!
It’s funny, the ego part of me wanted to pull things back together, fix and resist the changes, but even when I tried to do that I couldn’t. It was like being pulled. For a while I talked about all these things happening to me but in hindsight, and with therapy, I realised that I made those choices. I showed up in those ways, I did those things. And saying it was happening to me was a way of avoiding responsibility.
In responding to that pull, you were showing up for a version of yourself that was true and core to who you are, but who was still emerging and new.
I finally felt free and like myself for the first time. I hadn’t realised how long I hadn’t been that person, you know? In all ways, obviously sexually, but also in friendships, in my creativity, in loads of ways I think I’d been keeping a part of me hidden, for fear of being abandoned and rejected. Through therapy I’ve learned about experiences of standing out too much as a teenager and being rejected, there’s all that stuff, you can understand where it comes from. So I realised I was facing this as an adult too.
As I started to embrace this part of myself I was trying to work out, am I a lesbian? Am I bisexual? What do these terms mean? None of them felt right to me, and the idea of coming out didn’t feel right to me as I just happened to fall in love with a woman. When I dated this woman for three years, I came across a lot of biphobia in the queer community. I was experiencing this in my 30s, wondering how this could change having children. Lots of people go through this as a teenager when they have a totally different set of needs and experiences. Everyone has a different experience, and it took me a long time to realise that my experience of coming out was as valid as someone’s who came out when they were 13. It took me some time to accept the validity of my queerness.
As all of this was happening, I was freelancing for various different early stage startups doing brand and marketing. I was in a co-working space one day and overheard a woman, Kel, who is now my Co-Founder at Lex, talking about an app that she wanted to make. I guess my radar was on for anything gay as I was exploring that for myself! I was too afraid to interrupt her in the moment, but I found her on Instagram and sent her a message saying “hey, I work from this co-working space too, I think I can help you,” and so we met for coffee.
We started working together from there. It was all very early stage, there was no company yet, I was helping her think through the idea, free of charge. I then became Head of Growth for a company called Tia, which is a women’s healthcare company. Whilst I was there I became an advisor to Lex, meeting her team for a few hours a month to help with their marketing. I went from being her friend to being an official advisor, and then in 2021 she raised some funding and asked me to be COO. At first I was a bit unsure about the role because my background is in marketing and growth, but in the end I realised it’s perfect for me. At previous startups I’d seen growth from 30-300 in less than two years, so I really knew about scaling teams, how to do it well, and what not to do!
At the beginning of this year I started supporting fundraising. Kel saw the impact we were having together and so she wrote me a love letter! She detailed all the years of work we’d done together, and everything I’d done for the company. She said that she couldn’t do this without me, that she couldn’t imagine building Lex without me by her side, so would I be her Co-Founder?! It’s felt really organic and really nice, the way we’ve come together as a team.
It feels so powerful for me to be able to do this work, it’s been really affirming for me and my own identity as a queer person, but it’s also amazing to see the impact Lex is having on people’s lives. My vision is for every queer-identifying person in the world to use Lex, for Lex to be the first place people go when they realise they’re gay, at any age, to find people that will understand and support them. The place to go for queer community.
Wow, what an amazing story, and what an inspiring vision, thank you for sharing with us. Can you tell us more about the app?
So the app is a text-based feed, you can create a post in the feed and then people can reply to you. Off the back of that you can build groups and do other things. People post about how they’re feeling, a struggle they’re going through, or say they’re looking for friends or a date. People use Lex to learn different terms and expressions, and to see how others talk about and explore their identity. This helps them to participate and feel a sense of belonging.
We take a lot of inspiration from the term “queerness”, which really just means different. We’re starting to monetise at the moment, so we’re thinking about how we can bring queerness and mutual aid or community support into our financial model. That’s my vision for Lex, not only to build a new queer space for our consumers, but to be able to build a new model for social networks that supports people, especially with regards to mental health. We’re looking at experimenting with giving models. I’m really passionate about building a new kind of business around giving, sharing, and community building.
That’s so smart. Can you tell us about your role and the work that you do?
So my role as COO has four areas. The first is business strategy, so my job is to make sure that as a company we’re really clear on the vision for our product. What are we building and why, and how do we make sure we’re successful? Working out what metrics we use as a business to prove that we’re getting the results we want. So metrics around our users, downloads, how people use the app, there are lots! Setting a clear vision and then matching that vision to tracking and data every week/month/year.
I do a lot of finance work, managing our cashflow, payroll and taxes etc. I also look after our culture. How do we build a remote team environment that supports and connects people, even though we’re not working together in person?
The fourth part of my role is marketing and growth, so working out how we build a brand which is resonant in the world and the marketplace. How do we articulate who we are, visually how do we show up, what sort of imagery and colours do we use? And then there’s the growth side which is all about how we grow as a business. How do we find new people in the world who might want to know about Lex? We try not to advertise, we do a lot of on-the-ground community building instead, this is our marketing strategy. We find people mainly through social media and by working with grassroots community builders already active in their communities. We pay them to organise and host events for us like hikes and picnics etc. Lex is a community product and so we’re building it through community and word of mouth.
Amazing! What do you love most about your work?
I love that I get to be involved in every part of the business, I get to understand the connections between product, marketing and finance. In big organisations they’re so separate and siloed. I love being able to have a birds eye view of how everything connects.
I love how the thing I’m building impacts people. I can get stressed about fundraising or team issues, but it always feels worthwhile because I know that the impact we’re having is huge. A 21 year old moves to rural Idaho and realises that they want to transition, and they have no idea how to do that, but they can use Lex to connect with people for support and to work out what to do. If I need a little boost I just scroll the feed and see how people are using it to support themselves, and that feels really good.
Everyone in our team is queer and even that is revolutionary for me. In the first few weeks I couldn’t get my head around the experience of being in a space where queer identity is the norm. The last team I worked in was run by women, and they got it, but I would always have to be the advocate, making sure our product spoke to LGBTQ+ people, making sure we had space for pronouns, I was the voice all the time and this could feel isolating. So to come into a space where queerness was the norm, it was incredible. And I was behind! Most of our team is Gen Z and so their understanding of their queerness is so much more nuanced and developed than mine. I’m now being taught by the people around me, which is amazing.
What are your superpowers?
I think I’m good at synthesising information… understanding what’s happening and then forming a plan out of it. I love strategy, ideas, creativity and thought, but I like them when they’re made practical and channelled into direction. In the swirl of a meeting I’m often the one who’s like “ok this is what we’re gonna do.” This is what I’m good at in a startup environment, taking in the chaos and confusion and moving people into a plan of action.
I’m also really interested in people, partly because of my own journey I think. I love being able to unlock people, and myself. All the stuff that we get stuck with in our personal life comes through in our work, and we all need help with this. We spend so much time at work. I’ve been in jobs with bosses that I’ve hated and who I don’t feel valued by, and it’s horrible. I’ve been in amazing workplaces too, and I want to create that for our team.
I heard another superpower in a recent podcast interview you did. Compassion, and specifically self compassion.
Ah that’s nice thank you!
You’re welcome! Compassion and self compassion are so important for people like you who are driving change, especially if you have a strong personal connection to the problem you’re solving. They’re invaluable if you’re working on themes that are sensitive and polarising, and with people who are marginalised and discriminated against. I love hearing the self-compassion in your reflections.
My co-founder is really good at this. She called me out on something fundraising-related that I was upset about recently, helping me to put things in perspective, seeing how far we’ve come and all that we’ve achieved. I’m really grateful for that.
That’s such a great thing to have in a co-founder partnership, I’m glad to hear that.
I recently had an experience with the team where I changed direction really suddenly and it was a bit confusing for everyone. I had to explain why, but I also had to acknowledge how disorientating it was. I was angry with myself for five seconds and then I realised that this is always going to happen, so as long as I can be clear about it and the impact it’s having, owning any mistakes I’ve made, we’ll be ok.
This job has helped me to work out what kind of leader I want to be. My instinct is to want to have all the answers all the time and not show when I’m vulnerable, but I know that’s not going to work!
And it’s interesting, I don’t think I’d have the skills to share mistakes and be vulnerable at work if I hadn’t done this in my personal life. You know? “I had an affair and I lied about it, and here’s the impact!” I had to do that in a really painful, personal way. This makes the work stuff easy!
What does your support system look like?
I have a personal coach who helps me see my old ways.
Great, helpful! Can you tell us about some successes have you had in this work?
We've raised money from some amazing VC firms who really support Lex's missions and Kel and I as Co-Founders (Female Founders Fund, Slauson & co, Stellation VC).
We have a thriving community of Lexers - 500k active users last year. And we've been recognised by Apple as top app for Pride in 2021 and upcoming in 2023.
We've been featured in Vogue, NY Times, had a Hallmark movie made about us, even inspired a queer zine.
More than that we've changed the lives of queer people, here are some nice recent reviews!
Amazing, congrats Jen and team Lex!
Can you tell us the three hardest things about your work?
Making sure we stay true to our queer identity. Queerness in essence is about breaking outside the binaries of established norms. So for Lex that means how can we build a business that solves our user problem is a truly new way? How can we monetise in a way that truly serves our community? How can a digital app be a place for IRL connection?
Resource management - there are so many things we want to build to support the community and we simply can't do it all.
Mental health and the Trust & Safety of our users - how can we build a social product that heals not harms and protects users?
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned working on this mission?
When you build for a marginalised community, you have to be extra thoughtful about how you grow. Building a queer product means putting trust and safety at the heart of all we do. Safety for all means focusing on the margins. We acknowledge that to develop a truly safe platform, we have to centre the experiences of those whose safety is disproportionately threatened online.
What have you learned about yourself doing this work?
The importance of self compassion! That there will always be more I wish I'd learned quicker. But also I've learned that I’m capable of so much!
In what ways are you trying to grow as a person?
Getting faster at making tough decisions and having challenging conversations. When something isn't right - a hire, a feature, whatever, it's so much better to call that out sooner than drag it out. It's kinder to be honest sooner than avoid the conflict. Not speaking up doesn't remove the discomfort - it just displaces it.
What does the world look like in ten years’ time if your work has been wildly successful?
No LGBTQ+ person feels alone, unseen or unsupported!
Lex is the go-to space for queer connection globally.
LGBTQ+ people have a welcoming space for expression and belonging - that they can safely find queer community IRL and online.
If you could ask readers to do one thing to support your mission, what would it be?
Introduce us to investors who might want to support our journey now or in the future. We love to meet aligned partners.
If you work at an aligned brand and want to partner I'd also love to hear from you.
If you're LGBTQ+ identifying or know someone who is - download and share the app.
You can find out more about us here.
Update: follow Jen’s journey as Lex’s CEO via her substack .