Hello! Let’s welcome summer with a fresh Themeisle interview. In this one, you’ll get to hear the beautiful journey of Val Vesa – community manager at Cloudflare. Read further for his cool insights about the WordPress community.
Before that, make sure to check last month’s interview with Maddy Osman (where she talks about marketing, productivity, and WordPress) or explore our full collection of interviews to find many other interesting people for your inspiration.
Val Vesa believes in the power of human interaction as a way to bring positive impact to this world.
That’s why he is fully involved in the WordPress community and helps people whenever he sees the opportunity.
As a matter of fact, he is making a living from being the people person at Cloudflare – one of the leading CDNs of the web.
Moreover, Val is leading the Photography Team at this year’s WordCamp Europe. This is the perfect way for him to add his passion for photography to the mix.
In this interview, Val shares what it means to be a community manager, plus a lot more insights on social media, success, marketing, and his personal mission. You won’t be surprised to notice that most of what he says revolves around people.
Val Vesa Interview – “Although people now heavily rely on AI and automation, the most productive engagements are still direct human interaction”
When and how did you start working with WordPress? Is there an interesting story here?
I installed my first WordPress site back in 2009, to set up an online presence for Shoebox Romania. It’s basically wrapping gifts before Christmas every year in shoe boxes and just offering them to underprivileged children, orphans, or families having issues or having a hard time.
At the time, I was talking to my wife, and she was like ok, we cannot go on doing this out of our Yahoo messenger chatbox. For those people out there that are too young, they might not even know what that is. For us, we remember a time when all chat online was done either via ICQ (if you remember that) mIRC chat, or Yahoo messenger.
I used to have a status description in the Yahoo messenger chat saying “we collect boxes for children with needs”. We just couldn’t get the words and the letters to match in a meaningful sentence, because there was like a 65-character allowance. Then Yahoo sometime later offered the opportunity to also add a website URL to a status field. You could say something in there like “for more details click here”. Then you had a URL field.
So my wife said why don’t we just build a website? I was like how in the world am I going to make a website? I’ve never built a website. I was doing web hosting as a side gig, but I never actually created a website by myself.
I started looking online. The famous “be online in five minutes” catchphrase caught me immediately. I was like ok. So there is a system that allows
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This article was written by Adelina Tuca and originally published on ThemeIsle Blog.