I spent 8 years at my dream job on Nike's design desk. Here's why I left and what I'm leaving behind as I grow my own business.

• Kristen Shenk worked as a senior designer at Nike before leaving the company in 2016.
• After a brief stop at PepsiCo, Shenk founded the creative agency MLTI NYC in 2018.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kristen Shenk, the 36-year-old founder of MLTI NYC. Shenk is a former senior designer at Nike and started at the company as an intern in 2008. She worked as a creative director for PepsiCo from 2016 to 2018. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. This story was originally published in August 2022.

I will never forget my first day on the Nike campus. It's incredibly impressive. You drive up, and there are waterfalls and this humongous orange swoosh at the gates.

I was nervous and excited. I walked up to the check-in booth as a graphic-design intern, and I asked, "Should I be nervous?" I expected the woman to tell me, "No, you're good. You belong here." She said, "This is Nike. Of course, you should be."

That set the tone. For the next almost 10 years, that feeling never left me, in a good way. I always felt like I was pushed.

I grew up in Ohio and went to school at the University of Michigan. My sister and her husband were both athletes at Ohio State. My family is very much rah-rah Ohio State. I went to the school up north, like a traitor. I wanted to take a risk and do something off the beaten path.

Michigan's art school is multidisciplinary and teaches people how to think, not just execute.

I'm also a fitness junkie. I started running marathons when I was 17.

Nike is a beautiful gestalt of everything that interests me.

I had never been to Oregon. I had a couple of other opportunities, but Nike was my dream job. I couldn't say no.

My first boss was Karen Korellis Reuther (then Nike's global creative director, now a senior fellow at Harvard). I remember running into her at the printer when I was a few weeks into the internship, and she commented on a piece in my portfolio. She said it showed systems thinking. "That stood out to me. I can see how you think," she said.

It's hard to teach people how to think. Technical skills can grow and improve over time, but being able to ideate, conceptualize, and come up with a big idea is not an easy skill to teach. It takes a lot of practice, and you have to be thrown into problem-solving environments.

Nike provided a continuing education in that. We had to extrapolate: What's the core benefit of the shoe, and how do we tell that story?

I'd been interning for almost a whole year when Nike had a massive round of layoffs in May 2009. It was my first time seeing layoffs. I witnessed a colleague with a family get escorted to his desk and told to pack his stuff. The very next day, I got offered a job.

At Nike, nobody forgets if you don't deliver

Nike is a storytelling company. It's very obvious when you start working there.

There are a lot of people at Nike who didn't grow up in Oregon or Portland. All of my friends worked at Nike. I very much lived and breathed the culture.

The line between work and play can blur. Consequently, the professionalism sometimes is a little bit blurred. Sometimes, people will say things that are not appropriate for a work environment. That happened a number of times.

I would be remiss if I didn't say it's very male-dominated. It's not necessarily that I felt held back or that I felt like I wasn't given opportunities. I always felt aware that I was a woman.

After a few years at Nike, I transitioned to brand design. I worked in Nike Basketball for a couple of years on LeBron James' and Kobe Bryant's brands. I designed the space for Nike's women's summit at Spring Studios in 2014. One of the last big projects I worked on was a big innovation summit in New York in 2016. We launched big products in running, basketball, and football.

They were high-profile, big-budget projects.

If you're going to make moves in your career, you do that by creating great work. Everybody forgets if you go over budget, but nobody forgets if you don't deliver.

I remember other instances where full campaigns would get developed and millions of dollars would be spent, and it would go up to the top and get killed. The quality of the work is king.

It wasn't uncommon for me to work over the weekend or work in the evenings. That didn't feel cumbersome to me. It just felt fun. There wasn't a lot of balance.

It's probably no different from any big corporation. People are vying for the next position. With Nike, it's probably exacerbated a little because there are so many type-A people who work there and have that athlete mindset.

'Am I crazy to want to leave here?'

Leaving Nike was a decision I did not take lightly. I loved Portland, but it was getting a little small for me. I wanted to move to New York.

It seemed kind of wild to leave my dream job. My first creative director, the one who stopped me by the printer, had done this TED Talk about leaving your dream job. I remember watching it. I sent her a note and said that was exactly what I was going through.

"Am I crazy to want to leave here?"

Staying at a company for 25 years is just not the way millennials think. To a lot of people in the millennial demographic, it's a stale way of approaching your career.

My thinking was, "I'm young. It's important to have a diversity of experiences. Now's the time."

I looked around for a year or two. I interviewed at Apple and a few other places. I ended up at PepsiCo in New York in 2016.

It was at an interesting stage where it was building an internal design organization. The department was still pretty young and had an inspiring leader named Mauro Porcini. He inspired me to see the vision of what he and his team were building and how consumer packaged goods could be transformed through design.

PepsiCo has a very different corporate culture from Nike's. At Nike, there's a looser way of doing business — hallway conversations and informalities. PepsiCo was in stark contrast. It was more corporate in terms of having everything in writing.

In an overall sense, it dawned on me that the higher you climbed the corporate ladder, the less creative it became, the more political it became. I felt like I was losing touch with the reason I wanted to be a creative.

In 2018, I founded MLTI NYC, a play on the word "multidisciplinary." We partner with brands to create campaigns, stories, and multidisciplinary designs to build brand love. I bootstrapped it.

Starting my own company was something I had in the back of my mind throughout my 20s. I had seen other people do it who were inspiring.

One of the biggest adjustments is the uncertainty. You don't have that steady paycheck.

But I've always been willing to put myself in situations that are a bit uncomfortable.

I've taken many tools from Nike, the ability to be a thinker, specifically. Even my aesthetic — bold, powerful, cuts through the noise — is somewhat shaped by my experience at Nike. I left behind things like going over budget.

Competition can be healthy. But there is a tipping point when competition shifts from healthy to toxic. In my post-Nike life, I've tried to maintain the right amount of competition and lead with collaboration and creativity.

My goal is to grow to a 10- to 20-person shop. I don't want to become a design factory. I struggle with getting swept up in my work. But I've learned to take lessons I learned at Nike forward about creating some separation between myself and my work.

I landed a couple of big clients pretty early on, including Foot Locker. PepsiCo is now our client. We worked with Amazon in the fall. And in a full-circle moment, we worked with Foot Locker on a campaign centered around the Nike Air Max.

I look back on my time at Nike fondly. That being said, I'm very happy with what I'm doing now. You have different chapters in life; my time at Nike was a foundational chapter that I've carried with me throughout my career.