Headwinds
Female founders have come too far to fail. But give me a moment…
Female founders have come too far to fail. But give me a moment…
Last week I and my Virago Co-Founder hosted our launch event for 250 people in New York City — men and women, all in service of helping female startup founders succeed. In the aftermath I received notes from men and women alike thanking us for the opportunity to be a part of it.
That night after the conference, I sat with my co-founder having a glass of wine at the hotel bar recounting the day. We touched on what went wrong (acoustics) and on what went right: The spirit of camaraderie was palpable among everyone in the room. Women of extremely diverse backgrounds — white, black, and brown; Millennial, GenX, and Baby Boomer; mothers, divorcees, and singles; many of whom had been C-level execs in their previous lives — were now on the same learning level as other women starting their own enterprises. They shared contacts, stories, struggles, and made connections on the spot.
I felt we and our colleagues were touching on a new model of business building. One that didn’t exalt the home run at any cost so much as support meaningful, profitable change. One that truly leveraged our differences to help all boats rise.
I looked up at the television — the Cubs were about to win the World Series — something that I, a native Chicagoan, thought I’d never see in my lifetime.
And, in a week, we would likely be electing the first woman as President of the United States. I always said, “likely” thinking I didn’t want to jinx anything. But really, it was a given.
“It’s time for us,” I thought to myself. “It’s time for change.”
Today is day two of my numbness. The pragmatist in me is still picking up the phone, making calls, and having conversations about how to expand upon what we did last week. But the weight in my gut is not going away. It slows me ever so slightly.
This feeling is not new. The last time I had it was in 2008, when, in reaction to a market crash that leveled many startups, I sat down with my co-founders, our company in the midst of a massive growth phase, talking about how we were going to take pay cuts and dismantle a new extension of our business.
Like in 2001, when I walked around Pacific Heights in a daze, having just seen a plane on television crashing into the second World Trade Center tower. I had been at a startup that was starting to see difficulties, and I had dug in my heels to help generate new business. And yet this plane struck me somewhere deeper, exposing the absurdity of my assumptions of invincibility in the face of challenge. I wondered if I would ever go back into the office again. I wondered, what’s next? For the first time in my risk-riddled life, I felt unsafe.
A Trump Presidency does not in any way meet the level of tragedy that we experienced on September 11, 2001. It can’t be an American tragedy when so many of us chose it. But I have a similar feeling of fear, deep in my gut, that things are not what they seemed; women are going to lose the priority we gained these past few years, when we shed light on the shortcomings of the corporate and investment worlds and showed how powerful alternatives could be. I’m now realizing that we didn’t power through this alone, but in tides of warm water that helped move us along. Those tides, I suspect, are going to run cold.
I just watched the end of the Netflix series Stranger Things. Without giving away the plot, it’s about a small Midwestern town struggling when the reality of an alternative universe is revealed. A girl who can access this alternative universe with her mind calls it “The Upside Down”.
I’ve been stuck in my own version of Hawkins, Indiana, thinking that progress looked one way, while in an alternative universe it looks very differently. I thought we as a nation were on a similar path, acknowledging that racism, misogyny and economic inequality existed, but we were on a shared trajectory, a new way of being. But I see that’s not where we are…yet.
And scarier still, we are not now becoming aware of The Upside Down. To most in this country, we ARE the Upside Down.
Am I done? Nope, not even close. I know that, just as I remember all the other times I’ve been knocked on my ass, it will hurt for a while. I’m slowed but not stopped. We have an alternative universe that’s not going away. Seeing it comes first. Now to breathe in it.