Liz Slone

I was born into an overlap.

My childhood happened in that strange in-between where two worlds existed at the same time and nobody thought it was weird. We had a VCR under the TV and a landline "home" phone on the wall. Friday nights meant a run to Blockbuster, walking the aisles and hoping the movie you wanted hadn't already been rented out. Road trips started at the family computer, printing directions off MapQuest and folding them into the glovebox like treasure maps. That was normal. That was just how life worked.

And at the exact same time, in the exact same years, Apple was releasing its first iPhone. Netflix was quietly transitioning from mailing you DVDs that you picked up out of your mailbox to streaming whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted it. My schools went from teaching us how to format a Word document on old Windows 98 desktops and sending us home with a paper "packet" to handing out Chromebooks with an entire semester's curriculum at our fingertips.

Nobody sat us down and said, "you are living through a transition." It didn't feel historic. It felt like Tuesday. The old world and the new world overlapped so completely that you couldn't see the seam. Then one day Blockbuster was gone and nobody mourned it, because we were already somewhere else.

If you had asked that kid what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would have told you something in the medical field. I was intensely interested in diseases and illnesses. Why did they exist? How did they spread? How did we treat them? I could get lost for hours in questions like that. I didn't want to just know facts. I wanted to understand the machinery underneath them, the way one small invisible thing could move through a population and change everything it touched.

I thought that curiosity meant I was supposed to be in medicine. It took me years to realize the curiosity itself was the point, and that it would end up aimed at something no career quiz ever offered me.

I didn't know it at the time, but that childhood overlap was training. My entire career has been lived inside that same seam, the place where one world is ending and another is starting and everyone is too busy surviving the week to notice history happening around them. I've spent almost ten years at CI Web Group now, and every chapter of it has been some version of that Friday night at Blockbuster: standing in one era while the next one loads quietly in the background.

Eighteen

To explain how an eighteen year old ends up at a company like CI Web Group, I have to back up a little further, because the real beginning of this story isn't a job application. It's a boy I met in high school.

His name was Torel. We were high school sweethearts, the kind of thing adults smile at politely because they assume it won't last. It lasted. He is my husband now and the father of my child, but at the time he was just the person I wanted to be around more than anyone else. And Torel came with something I didn't fully understand yet: his mother, Jennifer, who had built a company called CI Web Group.

Jennifer invested in me. I want to be precise about that word, because it's the right one. She didn't just give her son's girlfriend a job to be nice. She looked at a lost teenager and decided I was worth betting on before I had given the world any evidence that I was. I started working at CI Web Group when I was eighteen, right before I graduated high school. My job, on paper, was manual data entry and optimizing Facebook business accounts for customers. In less fancy terms: I was making sure businesses had all of their account fields filled out. Hours, address, description, categories. It was not glamorous. It was a starting line.

Here's the truth about who I was at eighteen, and I'm going to say it plainly because I've earned the right to: I was not equipped for life. My life constantly felt like it was on the edge of falling apart, and the uncomfortable fact is that most of the time, nothing was actually wrong. The problem was me. I fell apart at the smallest inconvenience. A schedule change. A hard conversation. A bad day. Any of it could level me, because I had never learned to steer myself. I let every emotion drive while I rode along in the passenger seat of my own life. The world felt large in a scary way, not because the world was out to get me, but because I had built nothing sturdy in myself to meet it with. I was lost, and I knew it, and knowing it didn't change it. Awareness without ownership is just watching yourself drown.

I remember one day in particular. I was inconsolable. Nothing catastrophic had happened. It was a bunch of small things that had added up, the way they always did back then, because I let them. I ended up lying in Jennifer's bed while she stroked my hair, and she said one small thing to me that changed everything.

"You can choose to be happy."

For some reason, I had never once thought about it that way. My whole life, I had allowed my emotions to control me instead of the other way around, and I had never questioned it. It hadn't even occurred to me that there was another way to live. And here was this woman telling me, gently, while I fell apart in her bed, that I had a choice in the matter. That I could take ownership of my own inner life. My emotions, my thoughts, my feelings. Mine to steer.

I don't share this to inject vulnerability into the story for its own sake. I share it because you cannot understand CI Web Group, or anything that comes later in these pages, without understanding what Jennifer actually does. Yes, she shapes the future of an industry. But she also shapes the future in a quieter way: she inspires people to get out of their own way. Her leadership is built around taking the leap, again and again, whether or not the fear ever goes away. The lesson I absorbed from her wasn't "don't be afraid." It was this: if you're afraid, do it afraid.

I've been doing it afraid ever since.

The Wrench

Over the next year, Torel, Allula, and I transitioned into optimizing brand new websites for on-page SEO. New skills, new responsibility, the first of many reinventions. I was learning how search engines think, how a page gets found, how structure and content and intent all fit together. Looking back, it scratched the same itch as those childhood disease questions. Why does this work? How does it spread? What happens if you change one variable?

Meanwhile, in my other life, I was in college for dental hygiene. On paper it made perfect sense. It was medical-adjacent, stable, respectable, exactly the kind of practical version of my childhood curiosity that a guidance counselor would approve of. And I was miserable. I had always loved school. I loved learning, loved being good at it, loved the feeling of a subject opening up in front of me. This wasn't that. This wasn't fulfilling me. I despised it. But I kept going anyway, because that's what you do, right? You pick a path and you stay on it.

Then Torel invited me to join a trip to Spain with his family.

I had never left the country. I wanted to go desperately. And the wrench in all of it was finals. I had to be in Seattle, sitting in a classroom, proving I could pass exams for a career I already knew I hated, while the person I loved was on the other side of the ocean living a life I was only hearing about in phone calls.

So I stayed. He went to Spain. I took my finals.

He got back from his trip. I finished my first year of college. And I made a decision in that moment that changed the trajectory of everything: I wanted freedom, and I dropped out. I would not miss out again.

People love to frame dropping out as giving up, and I braced myself for that reaction. It never came. The people around me encouraged it. They celebrated it. In a world of self-made human beings, walking away from a path that was crushing me was not something to be discouraged. It was the first brave thing anyone had watched me do. Nobody in that family was going to shame me for choosing my own life; they had all done the same thing, in their own ways, at their own crossroads.

It was still terrifying. I did it afraid.

The Shift You Can Feel

A couple of years later, COVID hit. It was the kind of world-changing event where you can feel the shift in history in real time, like the floor tilting under your feet.

I remember exactly where I was. Torel and I were in the sauna at the gym when Jennifer called, warning us about some sort of illness going around. We were in our early twenties, and in true early-twenties fashion, we did not believe it would make an impact on our lives. We sat there sweating, invincible, humoring her. The kid who once spent hours reading about how diseases spread somehow could not imagine one actually reaching her.

A week later, everything was shut down.

With that much uncertainty in the air, we packed up and left for Houston to stay with Mike and Jenn while we figured out what the hell was going on. What was supposed to be a stopgap turned into a chapter of its own. We stayed until 2022, and honestly, we enjoyed that time tremendously. Bike rides. Pool swims. Time with family while the rest of the world felt like it was holding its breath. In the middle of global chaos, we found a rhythm. And when the chapter closed, it closed the way I never could have predicted at eighteen: in February of 2022, Torel and I purchased our first home in Seattle, in the city where I grew up. The girl who fell apart at the smallest inconvenience was now a homeowner who had weathered a pandemic.

Work transformed just as completely. CI Web Group pulled everyone in from travel. In-person events were at a standstill. The whole playbook of trade shows, conferences, and handshakes evaporated overnight. And in the middle of all of that, I made one of the biggest transitions of my career: I moved from back end work to forward facing, working directly with our customers on their website strategy.

That meant that for the first time, I got to hear every single one of their challenges in real time, unfiltered. People didn't want to come to work. Supply shortages and bottlenecks were choking businesses from one side. And simultaneously, their customers, everyone's customers, were stuck at home, staring at the four walls of a house that had suddenly become their office, their school, their gym, and their entire world. They wanted a comfortable, safe space, and they were willing to pay a premium for it.

I was watching, in real time, an entire industry get handed a moment. The businesses that stayed curious and adapted were drowning in demand. The ones that froze got left behind. I have never forgotten that split.

Because here's what I believe, and it's the thread that runs through everything in this chapter: in a world where technology is constantly changing and evolving, regardless of whatever else is happening on the planet, only those who remain curious and insist on resilience despite setbacks will survive the velocity. I don't mean that in a morbid, literal way. I mean it in the way a dandelion grows between the cracks in the concrete. Pressure from both sides. Feet everywhere threatening to stomp it out. And it still insists on seeing the sun.

The Ordeal

Then came Webflow.

CI Web Group went through the painful transition of Webflow, and I want to be honest about it: it was brutal. WordPress was just not an option anymore. The writing was on the wall for anyone willing to read it. And at the time, Webflow was the gold standard. They had acquired Intellimize, a platform that used AI to A/B test and make changes based on data, and you could see where the whole thing was heading.

But knowing you're right doesn't make the transition hurt any less.

Try to picture what this actually meant. Forcing a massive change on developers who were comfortable on WordPress, and not comfortable in a lazy way, but comfortable in the way of people who had spent years mastering a craft and were now being told to set it down. Training an entire team not just to use a brand new platform but to discuss it, to explain to customers why the move made sense. Trying to educate an entire industry that had been sold WordPress for decades on why staying put was the real risk. And doing all of it while the naysayers stood around waiting for us to fail.

The pressure was intense. We had a full pipeline of websites that still had to ship. We were learning new tools daily. Creating new processes from scratch. Training hundreds of people. Investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into a transition with no guarantee. Changing entire mindsets, rethinking everything we thought we knew about how our own work got done.

If you asked me for the low point, it wasn't one dramatic crash or one call that went badly. It was quieter and heavier than that. It was the stretch where the pipeline was so full that it genuinely felt like we would never get through it, while at the same time we were rebuilding our technology and our processes underneath ourselves midflight, because protecting our customers was not negotiable. Imagine changing the engine on a plane without landing it, while every passenger deserves and expects a smooth ride. We would solve one bottleneck and another would pop up in its place. Some days the finish line didn't just feel far away. It felt fictional.

And I would do it all over again.

Because I truly believe Webflow was our catalyst. It was our kick in the ass. It was our ordeal, that moment in every story where you're given a choice to sink or swim, and the choice reveals who you actually are. We were swimming like hell.

Then, just as we found our rhythm and our footing with Webflow, OpenAI and Anthropic started dropping bombs.

Suddenly we were being handed tools that let us work faster and more efficiently than we'd ever imagined. We got a taste of what it felt like to have the burden eased. Actually eased, not just shuffled around. And that taste didn't make us complacent. It made us hungry. We were inspired.

And from that inspiration, Hydra was born.

The Elephant in the Room

Before we dive into the beast that was, and is, Hydra, I need to stop and acknowledge the elephant in the room.

On February 3rd, 2025, I found out that Torel and I were going to have a baby, due in October.

The boy from high school, the Spain trip I missed, the sauna where we ignored a pandemic together, the house in Seattle: all of it had been leading here. We were going to be parents. I was overjoyed and terrified in equal measure, which by that point in my life felt familiar. Do it afraid applies to more than career moves.

The pipeline was still full of Webflow websites, a backlog of sites making their way through our transition. We would solve one bottleneck and another would pop up in its place, like a game of whack-a-mole where the moles were deadlines. And the pressure was high to get those sites out before I had to leave the team to figure it out without me.

Here's the funny thing about CI Web Group: if you take even a week away, the entire company is different by the time you get back. System improvements. Platform improvements. Changes to the entire technology and marketing landscape. You name it. A week is a lifetime here.

I was preparing to take three months off. With a brand new baby. As a first-time mom.

I was shitting my pants. Because by the time my due date arrived, we were already in the infancy of Hydra, the most significant thing we had ever built, and to leave right then was a risk. I knew that when I came back, I wouldn't be walking. I'd be sprinting just to catch up.

On October 19th, 2025, our son was born. And a whole new slew of fears set in.

The normal first-time parent anxiety was there, ever present. Is he breathing, is he eating, am I doing any of this right. But layered on top of it was something bigger. Picture the scene: I'm sitting in Jennifer's living room with a newborn, hallucinating on two and a half hours of sleep, and around me the conversations are all about AI. How fast it was moving. How the models seemed to leap forward every few months instead of every few years. What it meant that machines could now write and reason and build. What work would even look like in five years, in ten. What our industry would look like. What every industry would look like. I would drift in and out of the newborn fog and catch pieces of it, and every piece pointed at the same conclusion: the ground was moving again, faster than it had ever moved before.

And this time it wasn't just my career on the table. I was holding the stakes in my arms. These were conversations about things that I believed would change the entire landscape of my son's future. Not my industry's future. Not my company's future. His.

There's a detail here that I need you to sit with, because it's the heart of this whole story. The woman leading those conversations was not just my boss. She was my mother-in-law. The newborn in my arms was her grandson. Three generations of one family were in that living room, and the oldest of us was looking at the youngest of us and deciding, in real time, what to do about the world he would inherit. I could tell by the look on Jennifer's face that she was thinking exactly what I was thinking.

The way she saw it, there were two options. We could scoff and ignore that the world was changing, that yet again technology was evolving underneath us. Or we could prepare for it. We couldn't fight the current. So we'd build a boat.

When my maternity leave ended and I returned in January of 2026, the boat was small, but it was there. And I was determined not to be left behind. I followed the senior development team around like a shadow. I listened to everything they said. I practiced and researched and did not stop until I understood. My days were filled with "why" and "how," the same two questions I used to aim at diseases as a kid, now aimed at a technology spreading through the world faster than anything I'd ever studied. Why does this work? How does it move? What happens if you change one variable? The curiosity I thought was supposed to make me a medical professional turned out to be the exact tool I needed for this moment.

I threw away everything I thought I knew. I rebuilt from the ground up and completely trashed my ego in the process, which, it turns out, is the price of admission for every real transformation. The ego goes first or nothing goes at all.

Jennifer asked me one day if I thought this transition was harder than Webflow. My honest answer was no.

Did we still have a full pipeline going into summer, just like we did during the Webflow transition? Yes. Did we still have to learn entirely new technology and reframe everything we thought we knew? Yes. Did we literally just finish doing this same kind of transition a year ago? Yes.

So what was different this time?

Our team. Our mindset. Our experience. Our utter determination to be ready this time.

Webflow taught us how to survive an ordeal. AI arrived and found us already swimming.

Hydra

So. Hydra was born.

We named it Hydra for a reason. Cut off one of its heads and it grows three more. That's not just mythology to us. That's our company culture, distilled into a single image. Every setback we've ever taken has multiplied us. Every head we've lost, we've grown back stronger and stranger and harder to kill. Naming the platform anything else would have been a lie.

And here's what Hydra actually is, because it matters: Hydra is not your website. Hydra is an operating system that learns your business and deploys changes based on data. It's everything behind the scenes. The thinking, the testing, the adjusting, the relentless iteration that used to take teams of humans weeks and now happens continuously. The website is just the part you can see. Hydra is the part that never sleeps.

I'm writing this while we are still in the midst of Hydra's evolution, and I need to be honest with you: I do not believe Hydra will ever be done. What we knew last week has already changed. What was available to us yesterday has already been improved upon. That's not a flaw in the plan. That is the plan.

These days I build and design sites myself. The girl who started out filling in Facebook business fields now builds the thing customers actually see, and I help evolve our AI tools, the things they never see. But what I want to tell you about isn't my job description. It's the people. Many of the people on our AI team have grown into human beings who weather storms and keep rowing for the love of the game. They care. They are curious. They want more. They are dandelions, every one of them.

To Whoever Is Reading This

Those fears about my son's future are still there. What will he do? What will the world look like when he's old enough to ask me what I did during all of this?

But then I look around, and I know: if we do this right, if we keep pushing, he will be just fine.

He has a father who chose me when we were teenagers and has been choosing our family ever since. He has a grandmother who looked at a world tilting on its axis and started drawing up boat plans in her living room. He has an entire team of curious, storm-weathered people building the future he'll grow up in. And he has a mother who was once so afraid of the world that a schedule change could level her, and who now runs toward the things that scare her, because a woman stroking her hair in a quiet bedroom once told her that happiness was a choice.

Because here's the thing I finally understand, sitting in the seam of yet another transition. The world I was born into, the Blockbuster runs, the MapQuest printouts, the landline on the wall, didn't end because anyone defeated it. It ended because curious people kept building the next thing while everyone else insisted the old thing was fine. My son is being born into his own overlap, the way I was born into mine. There will be a version of Blockbuster in his childhood that vanishes before he's grown, and he won't mourn it either, because he'll already be somewhere else.

I can't tell you what the tools will be called in ten years. Whatever we're using now will sound as quaint as a printed MapQuest page. The transition you're in the middle of, whoever you are, whenever you're reading this, will feel impossible. It's supposed to. Ours did too. Every single one.

So this is what I want to leave here, for my son, for my team, for whoever picks this up long after Hydra has grown heads we haven't imagined yet:

Stay curious. Insist on resilience. Trash your ego before the world does it for you. When the current comes, and it will keep coming, don't waste your strength fighting it. Build the boat.

And if you're afraid?

Do it afraid.