I’ve written a few times about how blogging has been the single most important accelerant in my career. I mentioned this when I asked more of you to blog, in remarks about other peoples’ posts on blogging, and so on. But I’ve never actually explained how.

The arc of this journey is simple: I was a complete outsider with no money or connections, living in Scotland. Blogging allowed me to found two startups, build at least one enduring open source community, find multiple jobs, and enjoy career opportunities that otherwise would never have come my way. There is precisely zero chance that I would be doing my current job without it — or any job I’ve had since 2005.

I’ve been blogging since 1998. Because of that, I was familiar with the mechanics of what we’d later call social media very early on. I built a viral social site that was hitting millions of visits a day in my bedroom in 2001.

When I started to work in e-learning at the University of Edinburgh in 2003, I was able to immediately see the deficiencies in how people were learning and sharing online, and suggest a better alternative based on what was already happening. I collaborated with a PhD student who was studying education, and we wrote a white paper about what that might be. And then I published it on my blog, and he published it on his.

It was picked up by other bloggers in educational technology, who liked the idea. We offered it to the university, who declined (“blogging is for teenage girls crying in their bedrooms,” was the official response), so I quit my job and started building it full-time, narrating the whole journey on — you’ve guessed it — my blog. We built the platform into one that was used by universities, Fortune 500 companies, social movements, and NGOs around the world — all through word of mouth, driven by blogging.

When I left, it was my blogging that led me to be invited to speak at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Hauser School of Governance. After that talk, I met up with two of the attendees, who were journalists who saw the need for entrepreneurship to revive a flagging industry. I continued to collaborate with them, and together we built Latakoo, an enterprise video platform which continues to be the way NBC News and others gather footage and send it back to their newsrooms, in the format that each newsroom needs. Of course, I narrated the whole journey through blogging.

When I left Latakoo, it was to start Known, which could be described as a blogging platform. Because I’d been blogging heavily about an ongoing tech ethics issue at the time, it just so happened that I was quoted in the New York Times on the day that I was interviewing to be funded by Matter Ventures. It certainly didn’t hurt that Corey Ford, the General Partner, saw my name that day.

I blogged that journey too. Ultimately, Known had a small acquisition by Medium, and I continued to blog about indie web and tech ethics topics externally — and about things that Medium could be doing internally. That helped me build enduring relationships with people on the strategy team there. (“I don’t think Ben’s really an engineer,” someone accurately commented. “He could be running Medium,” they less-accurately added.)

One of the factors to Corey offering me a job at Matter was the writing I’d done around the dangers of Facebook as a single point of failure. In the wake of the 2016 election, that was significantly more clear to more people. So I joined the team, and used blogging to get the word out about what we wanted to fund.

When Matter stopped investing, I moved to Unlock Protocol — a company whose founder, Julien Genestoux, I had met through blogging and the indie web. After that, I worked at ForUsAll, which knew me through my work at Matter. I can’t draw a direct line between blogging and my work as CTO at The 19th, but there’s zero chance I would have gotten that job without everything that came before it. And then my current work as Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica came from that.

Without narrating my journey, my opinions, and things I’ve built, I might still be in my starter career. Which, by the way, there’s nothing wrong with at all! But my arc has definitely been blogging-informed.