How to Enter Side Doors with Maja Wilbrink & Carly Valancy
Many of the best jobs, collaborations, and creative opportunities never appear on a job board or application page. They begin when someone notices the right person, finds an imaginative way to approach them, and makes their interest and usefulness impossible to miss.
But knowing you want to reach out is the easy part. The harder questions is: what can you possibly say and offer that won’t sound generic, transactional, and easy to dismiss?
In this workshop, Maja and Carly will help members of the audience find their side door. They’ll work through real scenarios in real time—brainstorming the most compelling approach and the cold email that might open the door.
You can submit your scenario when you RSVP for the chance to have Maja and Carly workshop it live.
About Carly
Carly began her career in musical theatre, performing everywhere from old barns to Broadway stages. After a year of hustling, nothing happening, and hearing that the industry was “all about who you know,” she decided to test the theory by reaching out to one new person every day for 100 days. In three and a half months, she booked a national tour, found her dream agent, quit her coffee-shop job, and met Carol Burnett.
While reaching out, Carly found her voice and had the beautiful epiphany we all do at some point, which is that you are responsible for your life, your opportunities, and your luck.
Now, making connections is what she's known for, and what she can help you do.
About Maja
Maja Wilbrink is a narrative operator and the writer behind Velvet Noise, the wildly successful Substack newsletter, where she writes about attention, desire, love, beauty, technology, and the conditions that make people feel more alive, perceptive, and creatively capable.
Her viral essay How to Enter Side Doors is a field guide to jobs, cold emails, and making yourself legible to the right people. It grew partly from her own experience: at eighteen, she got her first growth consulting job by sending an “extremely long, earnest, and probably objectively unhinged email” to the CEO of Calm.