For Holden Page, director of FinLedger, business writing is changing tech for the better

It all started with WordPress. When Holden Page was growing up in a small Minnesota town, the blogging app was a place where he could connect to an audience and build community. “Looking back, it was just a bunch of people who were being really nice to me, and entertaining the fact that I was writing,” he told Free Radicals. 

Page started building WordPress sites, and landed a series of product-oriented jobs that led to more writing, and then to editorial work. “I probably have set up over 100 WordPress websites—paid, unpaid, multi-sites—and that made me interesting to a lot of folks running media publications on WordPress,” he explained. He spent two-and-a-half years as the managing editor of Crunchbase, and then led research operations at Golden, an SF-based startup that focuses on structured data and natural language processing. 

Page is now the director of FinLedger, a fintech news site that focuses on demystifying the intersection of technology and finance in a way that is easily legible without insider jargon. That theme of accessibility extends out from his editorial approach, into the culture he is building for his team. 

As a veteran of several startups, Page is intimately familiar with both the rewards of grind culture, and the very real toll it takes on people and the businesses that encourage 80-hour work weeks and demand hockey-stick shaped growth. At FinLedger he is thinking deeply about how to support employees at work, making sure his team feels listened to and acknowledged, and that writers feel secure enough to take risks. Each story is an experiment, and there are no failures, just new data. 

Though he’s clear that hustling, working, and learning on the job has been a rewarding path (he went to college for two years, but has largely taken it upon himself to upskill a la carte), even before the pandemic Page had come to realize that job security, a manageable pace for work, and real appreciation for mental health had to be central to any team he would lead going forward. Burnout, he acknowledged, is real, and high churn rates caused by stress and overwork can weaken companies over time. Cultivating a more sustainable work culture and supporting the structures that make it possible are a sign of maturity—of an organization as well as its leaders. 

Sherrell Dorsey spoke with Page about the importance of company culture, his optimistic vision for the future of journalism, and how product and editorial are learning to work together. 

You’ve been at FinLedger since March 2021, less than a year. Tell me about how you ended up there.

I predominantly worked in environments where my multiple, generalist skill sets, from product, from writing, from editing, have come together to where I can do all those things at once. But I can't do all those things forever. I am getting older, and I do want to see some things get more stabilized, I want to have a family. With a startup environment, the expectation is you do all those things. I feel like I've gotten what I've wanted out of those experiences.