Emily Hickey

Bio:

I’m a co-creator and the Chief Marketing Officer of Hashable. Prior to Hashable, I was the VP of Product and an original employee at HotJobs.com, which IPO’d on the NASDAQ and sold to Yahoo! in 2002. I also previously helped build (as COO) a company called PhotoShelter (a General Catalyst-funded start-up that is the market leader in e-commerce software for professional photographers) and was the Assistant Executive Director of WildAid, an NGO dedicated to stopping the illegal wildlife trade. I’ve been building early stage companies in NYC and California for about 12 years, with a focus on defining and building products and getting them adopted. I grew up in St. Louis, went to UNC-Chapel Hill for undergrad, and then Stanford Business School for graduate school. I live in Alphabet City with my awesome husband Sean Mahoney and our all-star son Tee.

• Title: CMO and Co-Creator, Hashable
• Age: 37
• Location: East Village
• Contact: @emilykhickey

You’ve taken on a number of different roles in the past, which Joanne Wilson describes well in a recent blog post of hers.  Let’s imagine that you suddenly had a month off with no responsibilities.  What would you do with this free time?

Indulge my monastic streak! Sean, Tee and I would hit the woods. We’d go live in an airstream trailer for a month with no internet and just enough electricity to run a record player. We’d bring guitars and cook simple dinners and drink Miller Lites in a can and watch Tee run around barefoot. Personally I’d meditate a lot and paint, read, write songs... That’s truly the stuff I do when not internettin’, and doing it as a family is even better.

What are some of your personal favorite parts/memories from SXSW this year?

Gosh the whole thing was so awesome. Very tiring but awesome. Hanging out with the Hash-team, after three months of really intense work, was really truly deep and pure fun. Honestly our party at the Driskill was a pretty classy A+ concentration of great people, I loved that. And the Hashable/GroupMe party – doing tequila shots on the last night, that was the only night I really kind of let loose so that was a blast. And I’ll confess my personal ‘Jerry Maguire’  highlight moment: waking up on the morning it was all over and I was packing and sort of checking tweets and emails - and I saw Louis Gray’s wrap-up post go up with the headline ‘SXSW Winners: Foursquare and Hashable’ - and I was doing fist pumps. We got a lot of great press and seeing that on the last day for some reason really made me feel satisfied. Plus I’m stupidly competitive, so anything with the word ‘winning’ and ‘Hashable’ – I’m pretty psyched. Just as long as it’s not #winning!

Back in 2004 you had a band, the Emily Hickey Band, in San Francisco. Have you ever played anywhere here in New York?  Also, what are some of your current favorite bands/musicians?

YES the rock continued in NYC with a band called The Custom Kitchens. We played at the Living Room and Banjo Jim’s several times. It was a total side project but we recorded a little EP at Trout Studios in Brooklyn and it was a blast. We keep threatening to rock again – maybe this summer actually! And it pains me to say that we don’t listen to much music at home these days – we have a 2-year-old and we both work sort of non-stop. My husband is a composer (trying to get a show to Broadway) and a professional DJ – so we talk about music constantly and are always strumming ideas on a guitar or whatever. And Sean stays up on all the new stuff but doesn’t want to listen to it at home. On Sunday mornings we’ll turn on the Grateful Dead just because it’s a deep love we both have and we want Tee to have it in his soul! But what I love is that we never talk about the internet at home. We talk about music and art and read rock biographies and Sean’s tomes on the ‘7 Great Plots’ and talk about choruses and hooks and bridges. (We also read the NY Post and subscribe to US Magazine – so no airs here ;) But I love that Sean keeps music in our house as a core topic even if we don’t listen to much these days. Although we did crack out on the new Girl Talk album for a bit – that is awesome!