Walks of life
I’ve been quiet on here as I heads down building a company in the assisted reproduction space. I am exhausted, having the time of my life, and meeting lots of people.
Founding is hard
The learning curve between senior product manager and CEO is steep. I am comforted by the fact that there is no preparation that ever gets you from here to there, that you are never really ready until you take that first step, and that I really lucked out on an amazing team and a cause I really care about. I don’t think I would have made it this far without either of those.
When we’re out of stealth, you can probably expect a long post about how deeply thankful I am to each of them - my head of design, founding eng, and product advisor - for unconditionally leveling me up.
Like most, I have gone through a couple false starts in assembling my core team. But I feel very, very grateful and lucky to have arrived at this combination — and a very deep sense of power//responsibility that my cofounders are putting their lives and time on the line, trusting me to look out for them, steer us towards good financial outcomes, keep us moving forward on the right track.
I have been the beneficiary of many different communities of support in the last few weeks. Here are just a few of them.
Community: d.school
Stanford’s d.school community is endlessly creative and it is always a pleasure to be back on campus.
Earlier this month, Seamus from the d.school pulled together design event 09293043 of the year and as always it was impeccably designed, well attended by students from all of Stanford’s schools, and full of inspiration. Most of the Health team have full time outside jobs and volunteer outside of work, whether teaching full courses or otherwise.
Everyone comes from different walks of life — college professors, designers, gender-affirming care clinic directors, who cheerfully travel across the peninsula to make it to these events — and you truly would not know from the energy.
I took the opportunity to reconnect with a bunch of attendees from Designing for Working Parents and take a long, slow walk out to and back from the Philz on university.
As a student and even younger alum I used to kind of half laugh at the earnestness of the d.school, how seriously it takes itself.
But now that I have gotten behind the scenes — seeing the challenges of fundraising, the incredible logistical challenges of programming — I am starting to realize that the d.school’s serious devotion to creativity - whether it’s after work, after school, more classes, late nights — is a practice and a craft like any other.
And if I have the wherewithal to keep up my involvement, I know I will be better off for it.
Community: brunch turned almost book club
Courtesy of Yada.
2 Saturdays ago, a very small and intimate housewarming at my new friend Yada’s place became unexpectedly a half-formed book club #1 for High Output Management by Andrew Grove because half the table was reading it and very keen to talk about TRM.
I am usually shoulder deep in healthcare circles and it was particularly cool meeting these women from outside of healthcare.
Dom stepped off the deep end to run The New Club for women in engineering.
We talked briefly about the courage to get started.
Ruchi is a PM at Sigma Computing.
We talked a bit about being a GTM focused PM and I recommended Talking to Humans.
Neha was about to join Snowflake full-time.
She also runs an education company on the side.
We also talked, among other things, about:
Interiors. One of us was just moving into her own place and trying to figure out the rules of making a place look good. When the conversation turns here I find myself talking a lot more and cannot help myself.
Paying for productivity. aka “The courage to overcome our immigrant parents’ instincts, and pay good money for headspace (aka. washed, folded and delivered / picked up laundry)”
Mangoes. They were in season and there were a lot of them.
Community: Startups (w/ biases)
In traversing the early stage company fundraising circuits, I am coming to realize exactly how much founders and investors both rely on heuristics like school and job and a certain way of speaking and behaving, as proxies of talent and future success — and how high the barriers then tend to be for the few who don’t have those backgrounds.
I also have started wincing a bit at how much fundraising starts to become a big “very affiliated” game (to quote my extremely funny friend Julia) full of name-dropping and loss aversion.
Prove you are “in-network”.
Worthy of being buoyed by network effects
Trusted for having spent years collecting all the right signals of power.
Quickly eliminated for not having chased or achieved certain indicators.
I think there’s some truth to all of that given how challenging entrepreneurship is and how much you really have to be among others like you to leverage network effects, engineer your luck to succeed. But — especially in my line of work in reproductive care — I’m not necessarily convinced that being “in-network” is the powerful thing it may be in other places.
It doesn’t, for instance, guarantee at all that you’re going to build something great that people want.
It doesn’t, either, guarantee that you’ll connect effectively with the large # of consumers it takes to turn a profit. Who chances are, do not look and think like you, and still have to feel like you are solving their problems trustworthily and capably to open their wallets.
It doesn’t, either, guarantee the grit and humility and loyalty that I think is critical for an effective or enjoyable founder journey that plays nicely with others.
It turns out that everyone loves a good underdog story but no one is willing to take a chance.
If I get really quiet and still, I’d really like to spend more time focusing on opportunities for transformative work to get done, and actively empathizing with - not condescending to, while being reliant on - the end user.
I’m keeping all of this in mind to see how I can embody these beliefs as I learn my way around the industry, decide how to hire, who to trust.
