The Execulink Effect
The systems we suffer, the communities we build, and the people behind both.
Prologue: Loading From the Top Down
Before Porchlight, CRMs, call centers, or exchanging troubleshoot skills for money, it was just me, my new top-of-the-line 28.8k modem, and a whole lot of waiting.
I was one of the only kids in my grade with the internet at home. I was the "gopher of information" for many a school project. I was the one people asked when something broke or confused them. I loved it. Not just because it connected me to something bigger, but because I understood it. And like so many other awkward kids, that understanding became my currency.
Somewhere around grade seven, my mom brought home a book from some tech expo about the future of high-speed internet. I remember one image: the Mona Lisa, partially loaded on one half of a page, fully on the other. The caption showed how long it would take to render depending on your connection speed, compared to new, high speed internet. It stuck with me how silly it seemed to have that in print, as if to say it proved it. Still, it felt like a prophecy at the time. The idea you could be fast and always connected.
Where I Last Left Us
I was twenty. Working twelve-hour shifts at a small dial-up ISP three days a week.
Even several years after that promise of fast pictures and fast access, the internet still wasn’t quite so ambient yet. It was faster, but still a process. If you weren't lucky enough to have access to cable options, you dialed in. You hoped it worked. And if it didn’t, you disconnected (if you ever connected at all) and called someone like me.
My job was often less about troubleshooting, and more about translation. Most people weren’t just asking how to fix something—they were asking:
“Am I doing this wrong? Is this broken? Or am I just broken?”
It was the first time I realized how failure usually doesn’t look like sparks flying—it looks like quiet frustration. Like giving up, not because the system is broken, but because you don’t know if you’re doing it right.
Porchlight was my first real tech job. And while it barely qualified as “corporate,” it introduced me to a different kind of learning: the invisible weight of a misunderstood process, and how systems shape behaviour.
So, that lens naturally came with me when I joined Execulink—a larger, more structured (but still local) ISP. I didn’t just feel like I was bringing troubleshooting experience with me. I believed I also brought an early understanding:
that how something works is never separate from who it’s supposed to work for.
But what I didn’t bring (and didn’t know I needed) was the understanding that not everybody will meet your logic with good faith.
Spoiler: I got fired. Just days after finding out I was pregnant.
Onto Execulink
Execulink was more than just a "graduation" from local dial-up to DSL.
They had regional office locations, equipment rentals, business clients, and techs literally climbing satellite towers. We weren’t just troubleshooting dial-up connection issues anymore. We were staging modems, bridging infrastructure, and coordinating dry loops and truck rolls with outside providers.
I learned a lot while there—not just technical skills like how to bridge a router or what the heck a dry loop was (a phone line, but just for your internet to talk to its internet friends), but about people.
I saw how community forms within teams, across offices, across towns. It was the kind of place where a friend’s cousin worked with you in provisioning. Where you ran into customers at the grocery store. Kinda like an MSP. (Not that I knew what that was yet.)
It was the first place I saw the concept of community at work as more than just being sporadically social with coworkers. How connection wasn't just something you stumble upon, but something you could actively help to build. Systemically.
I joined the social committee. I drove to other offices to meet with committee team members (well, not me, I didn’t drive yet lol, but carpooled). We planned events, talked about morale, and built culture like it was part of the job. Because it was.
I learned how much culture lives in the little things—like when our teams competed to raise the most money so the company could match it, to buy holiday gifts for kids whose families already carried so much. These small, localized efforts meant fewer worries for the families, more smiles for the kids, and showed what people do when they're given the chance to care together.
People show up when they can unite around something fun and meaningful. How they bond through celebration of those achievements is a positive after effect.
Somewhere in there, I got my first piece of corporate swag. One of those classic, translucent blue mugs with the logo etched into the side. You’ve probably seen a hundred like it. I was weirdly proud of mine. Nearly two decades later, I still have it.
That mug felt like the right artifact to anchor this memory. It might even be what sparked my odd love for brand swag. I’ll go deeper into that in a reflection later. My thoughts on belonging (and how tied it can be to stuff like swag) deserve more space, and will really start to connect when I talk about Auvik. So I’ll save it for then.
I still wonder what it would’ve been like to grow up inside a place like that—to become the kind of person who stayed. But I wasn’t meant to. Not there, anyway. Not then.
Sometimes it’s not the system that’s broken, it’s the people inside it misusing the levers.
Like I said, I got fired. It wasn't expected. But it sadly wasn't unexpected.
After confronting a manager for the behaviour of a team lead, he dismissed it. When I went above him to his boss, he told me that because I went over his head, he'd resurface something from weeks prior that we’d already agreed shouldn't have been an issue, and used it as justification to let me go there on the spot. And yeah, I had also just told him I was pregnant. So, you can do the math. (I heard neither the team lead nor that manager lasted there much longer after that, strangely.)
I don’t hold any of those actions against the company. There were too many good people for me to write it off. You can see it in the tenure of some of the previous (and even current) employees: 23 years. 19 years. 15. 11. People who started on support teams or sales teams and moved into project management, product, marketing, training, leadership. People who stayed there for decades. Because when it worked, it worked.
I just had the wrong person in charge of me at the wrong time. That happens all the time to better people than me, unfortunately.
Execulink is the first company on my LinkedIn profile for a reason.
It helped shape who I became. It carved out what I started to understand as my role: technical, community-engaged, process-aware. I started to realize I could exist in-between the interpersonal and the operational.
It wasn’t just about skills, but about how teams work. About how cross-office collaboration and shared goals can create belonging.
How different teams rely on each other.
How trust is earned, and belonging is built.
And how quickly both can be lost when power is misused.
How different teams rely on each other.
How trust is earned, and belonging is built.
And how quickly both can be lost when power is misused.
Great stuff.