Let Go and Haul:
Week 14, 2018 – Brooklyn
Journey: where we’re at
Demo day was a huge success. Having been raised in a bit of a “A is fine but where’s the A+?” sort of environment, it’s constant personal work to get comfortable with acknowledging success before moving on to the next thing, so this is me trying, friends! Objectively, all the feedback we received was that our presentation was one of the best (if not the best), so that is p nice feeling to feel for a minute 😅
My personal goal was a verbal commit from an investor before demo day which we hit (yesss!), and the activity and inbound since then has been so much it’s actually been kind of difficult to keep up with. We’re in the middle of a bunch of key negotiations on multiple fronts that are exhilarating and stressful because some of this stuff we’ve never done before, but all our challenges are Good Problems to Have and I’m extremely grateful for the tack we’re on right now.
In other words, I’m just listening to Bodak Yellow and Work B**ch on repeat and trying to memorize every page of Venture Deals. I had a lot of teachers tell me I needed to apply myself more to math growing up, but it turns out I have zero problems with this subject when there’s a dollar sign in front of the numbers.
Journal: what I learned
This week I had the pleasure of speaking with an extremely talented woman who is top of her field. We talked about risk, particularly the risk of startups vs, other jobs and some of the feedback she was hearing from other people about this. I said something to her I want to share here because nobody said this to me, I had to learn it the hard way, and these topics are exactly what this newsletter is all about.
When people see you as a woman with a ton of potential, they don’t want you to fail. They want to see you succeed! However, this often leads to feedback that leads you away from taking risks. YEP. But of course, high risk; high reward. If you want to take a shot at it, some degree of risk is an essential ingredient. I can’t count how many times I’ve been told to play it safer… you know, maybe gain more experience first before starting a company (lololol) or consider doing a B2B product instead of B2C (because there’s no formula for success in consumer). I absolutely check my privilege recounting these anecdotes as a white woman; what I’m experiencing is only a fraction of this bullshit.
Layer on to this that we’re not “allowed” to fail over and over the same way men are, and yeah, people are going to tell you not to take risks if you ask them their opinion.
So, don’t ask!
What I’ve found to be more helpful when soliciting feedback on an irreversible decision with a high degree of risk is saying: “hey person who’s done this before, I’m strongly considering doing this thing. What’s your perspective on the top challenges I’ll face as I do this thing, and what did you do to overcome them?” That way, you’e not asking for their opinion on whether they think you should do this thing or not (you know yourself best!), and you can still get helpful data points on what this thing actually entails (which you’ll need if you’ve never done it before).
If we listen to these people tell us not to take risks, we’re denying ourselves the possibility of huge reward. We’re also denying ourselves the opportunity to fail on the scale that men can, and this is what we should be allowed to have too. I’ve had to teach myself to give zero fucks, because ultimately, if I fail and make it a bit better for all the other women out there who want to take risks, GREAT.
Jams: What I’m into
Obviously, y’all should be listening to the new Cardi B
These tweets from my friend Camille on the new Drake video