After a quite unfulfilling freshman year, Julia transferred to the Gallatin School at NYU to follow a more creative and self-motivated path within their school of individualized study. While in college, she took a part-time job as a customer service rep with a relatively young online video company at that time, Vimeo. She and younger brother Jimi ’09 had become fans of Vimeo a few years earlier.

“In 2006-2007 Vimeo was such a young video community, but so inspiring. That was the year I did animations in Holbrook as my independent study rather than doing a sport.“

After graduation from NYU, Julia began working for GroupMe, a group messaging app, providing customer service for their users. “Hack Week,” one week where most of GroupMe’s employees get to work on a special project of their choice, was approaching, and Julia was told that customer service reps did not get to participate. Disappointed and thinking it was all rather unfair, Julia took takea day off anyway to work on her own special project. 

“I noticed that people emailing the company were always asking about new emojis. So I went through email requests, picked out 10 of the most requested emojis, and created them as my “hack week” project, presenting it at the big end-of-the-week party. The bosses liked them! They decided to use them, and they asked me to create more.”