Traveling
a e k li l a i Soc rfly e t t Bu
STORY BY Melissa Abbey
Jen Friel is arguably the most fascinating person rising in media right now. At 19 she left her home in Connecticut and moved to Los Angeles without having found a job. Since then she’s crashed the Grammies, won The Price is Right, danced on stage with Prince, been skydiving and met Harrison Ford. She went on 103 dates in nine months. She gets paid to blog about her life. Oh, she also traveled around the United States for a year with only $10. This tech and travel savvy minimalist knows a thing or two about going and doing for next to nothing.
I
n May of 2010, then 25-year-old Jen Friel did the unthinkable: She gave up almost everything she owned in exchange for a nomadic lifestyle. She launched a blog, donated the belongings filling her Los Angeles apartment and left – immediately beginning to barter social media as a way to live. With only $10 to her name, Friel traveled around the United States for exactly one year. She mostly couch surfed, staying with fans of her website for two to three weeks at a time. She was invited to prestigious events, went on thrilling adventures and met hundreds of fascinating new people. “Literally for one year I couch surfed, traveling all around the country with only $10 to my name, bartering,” she says with a laugh. “It was fantastic. Pretty scary, but fantastic.” HER OWN PATH Friel grew up in West Hartford, Conn., a town her longtime friend Adam Reisinger describes as affluent, quiet and predictable.
“She always seemed, well, not to rebel against it, but you could see it was holding her back,” he says. “As she got older and older she tended to kind of break out.” Friel graduated from high school at 16 and studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York for a year. When she was 18, she and her father took a cross-country road trip. The teen fell in love with the West Coast and shocked her community by up and moving to L.A. at 19 years old. Reisinger, now an editor for ESPN. com, remembers the response when she left. “I think people were definitely surprised,” he says, chuckling. “It was this, ‘I’m not going to go to college, I’m not going to follow the path that other people have laid out for me’ kind of thing.” But Friel speaks pragmatically about it. “I always wanted to be in production in some capacity,” she says. “I didn’t just want to act – that really bored me – but I didn’t know really how else to do
anything in the industry. “So I just found an apartment [in L.A.] on Craigslist, at 19 – cost $400 a month. I had $300 to my name so I basically gave myself 30 days to find work.” And she did. For her first job Friel worked as a temp for Jerry Bruckheimer, helping with post-production. In January 2005 – just a few months after moving to town – she and her roommate made it onto The Price Is Right, and she won. “Literally, Bob Barker furnished my first apartment,” she says with a laugh. “Insane.” Over the next few years Friel worked a few jobs, cultivating her marketing, media and web skills. “I was literally doing anything I could to see how the process worked,” she says. “I’m just so interested in production.” Her interest took a turn toward social media when she was hired as a lifecaster for LiveVideo.com, a company started by Myspace founder Brad Greenspan that launched in February of 2008.