Yellow clay bus

liz

I intentionally gave myself a long layover in Sydney on my way to Brisbane. It gave me a chance to catch up with a dear friend over lunch and spend time in a place for which I didn’t know I was homesick until the first time I visited. After landing and freshening up, my first order of business was coffee. Opera Bar, a café perched below the Sydney Opera House, offers one of the most iconic views in Sydney, a 180-degree panorama of the CBD, Harbour Bridge (with Luna Park on the far side), and the Opera House.

As I finished my coffee and got up to leave, I noticed a woman taking a picture. What I thought was an awkward selfie turned out to be a social experiment. Her niece had given her a small statue of a yellow clay bus. The directions taped to the bottom instructed whoever came across it to take a picture of it, post it online, and (at some point now or in the future) leave it behind for someone else to find.

As anyone who’s ever been in an Uber with me knows, I love meeting people and I love stories. The woman, who had come from Adelaide, motioned for me to pick up the bus. She liked that it might make its way to the States. Before heading off in the opposite direction, she called over her shoulder, “When you get tired of carrying it around, just put it down and leave it.”

Good advice.

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Published by liz

From history major, with side quests in Medieval Studies and chemical engineering, to nonprofit finance leader, Big 4 tax partner, technologist, researcher, and now co-founder of Divine, nothing about my career has been linear. The throughline has always been systems: financial systems, organizational systems, technological systems, and human systems. I have an MBA in Operations and Supply Chain Management and a PhD in Organizational Leadership Psychology, and I’ve spent my career trying to understand how complex systems shape people’s choices, opportunities, wellbeing, and sense of belonging. Today, my work sits at the intersection of psychology, technology, human-centered design, and digital trust. I am co-founder of Divine, an open-source, decentralized social video app built to put creativity back in human hands and replace doomscrolling with joyscrolling. Divine is part of a bigger question I care deeply about: how do we create online spaces that support safety, creativity, identity, and belonging without defaulting to surveillance, extraction, or control? At Divine, I wear a lot of hats across engineering, finance, operations, and strategy, while helping shape the app’s trust, safety, and values work. I focus especially on teen online safety, human-generated content, participatory design, and healthier relationships with technology. I am a postdoctoral alum of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Computer Science, where I worked with Dr. Pam Wisniewski’s Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab. I continue to write, speak, and research at the intersection of online safety, digital trust, decentralized technology, and youth wellbeing. I was named a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Data Integrity in 2023. In 2025, I had the honor of serving as President of Division 13 of the American Psychological Association, the Society of Consulting Psychology. I also live with major depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In 2020, I took a leave from PwC to focus on my mental wellness, and I now speak and write openly about mental health, especially in the workplace and in relation to digital wellbeing. This blog, Seriously Jerk Brain, chronicles much of that journey.

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