My friend Ryan Frankel is publishing a book, and he asked me to write an excerpt for it.  I made some edits for this blog, but I thought I’d share it.

*****

When I was in college in Gainesville, FL, on the weekends my friends and I would visit a nearby rock quarry that was filled with water. Picture a limestone, man-made lake surrounded by high cliffs, with alligators lurking lazily in the waters below (all freshwater in FL has alligators in it!) The highest point of the quarry was about 50 feet above the water, and our weekend activity was to hang out at the top of that cliff, drink too much, and dare each other to jump in. Occasionally someone did.

The day I jumped is seared in my mind, as an out-of-body experience.  One where I watched myself as an observer. A mist had settled over the water so you couldn’t see the surface, the air was thick with humidity so you were perpetually perspiring, and the sky was gray with low clouds. Frogs and alligators croaked, cicadas were so loud you had to shout at someone next to you, the smell of damp earth was pungent, and the air was cool on my skin. I don’t know what compelled me to jump. I was relaxing comfortably on a blanket listening to my friends prattle on about nothing important, and suddenly there I was, standing at the edge of the cliff, trying to see the water through the mist, listening to the alligators I could not see, and hearing nothing other than my blood thrashing in my ears. And without thinking about what I would land on, I jumped.

The way down was exhilarating because a 50-foot freefall takes longer than you’d think. The water was hard and cold, and I never swam faster to the shore than I did that day for fear of alligators. I wasn’t hurt in any way, other than stinging body parts from the impact of the water. By the time I got back to my blanket, I was breathing hard, trembling with adrenaline, and felt more alive than I had in a long time.  My friends thought I was crazy (I was), but every time we went back there, I jumped again and again. And I dreamed about jumping when we weren’t there. To this day I dream about going back there and jumping into the mist to the sound of the unseen alligators croaking their warnings beneath me.  I’m honestly not sure I’d have the courage to jump again, but I dream about it.

Entrepreneurs do this every time they start a company. They fundamentally understand the risks of ‘jumping’ into a startup, but they don’t dwell on it, or they would never do it. They have confidence in themselves that they’ll figure it out during their freefall, and they ignore the sounds of alligators croaking their warnings. They have that level of “crazy” one needs to jump without knowing what they will land on.

For those of you thinking of becoming an entrepreneur, there are no guarantees.  You could fail.  The odds are stacked against you.  You have you enjoy operating with extreme uncertainty, high stress, very few clear answers, wearing every hat, with little to no income…  but if you think too hard about all that, then you’ll never do it.  The best guidance is to just jump and figure the rest out on the way down.

And for those of us that work with entrepreneurs, that exhilaration rubs off on us.  We bask in their adrenaline and they help us feel alive.  When they jump, we get to help them create something, to author our own future, expand our skill sets, participate in the blanket party at the top of the cliff, and hope no one lands on an alligator.  They take the risks, they create jobs, they change our realities, and the rest of us soak it up.  Every day I am thankful I get to work closely with entrepreneurs, I salute their bravery and hope that I can be there for them when they get hurt.  Founders, I salute you.

I read this awesome post by Katie Womersley and I love it.  The quick synopsis is that people who identify with a specific stereotype could cause them to do WORSE.  I believe in diversity and think it makes all of us stronger, but I don’t actually identify with ‘being a woman in tech’.  I have never liked the label, and part of me resents it a little bit. I am just ‘in tech’.  Or rather, I just ‘am’.

Recently, I’ve become fascinated with this idea of the player and the victim, and I’m seeing it everywhere.  The player is someone who looks at the situation and wonders how they impacted the outcome.  “Wow, that was a big fight.  In what way did I create or contribute to the situation to cause that fight?”.  The victim is someone who takes more of a blaming stance. “That jerk took his bad mood out on me”.  I’m seeing it literally everywhere.  “The investors don’t get my business” vs “I’m not articulating my business in a way that makes investors excited”.  “You don’t trust me” vs “What am I doing that causes you to doubt me?”.  “My startup failed b/c we ran out of money” vs “My startup failed b/c I didn’t understand the economics of my business well enough”.  “This meeting is brain damage” vs “I have an experiment I’d like to try with the format of this meeting, if you’re game”

I worry that being identified as the victim here, as a woman in tech, creates victims.  In fact I can think back on 2 specific  situations where I walked out of a meeting extremely frustrated from not being heard, thinking “I’m just in a room full of men, THIS is what they mean by being a female in tech”.   But in retrospect, I took the victim stance. I should have asked myself “What am I doing that’s contributing to my inability to get my point across?”.  If I can answer that question, I can take myself to the next level (which I have by the way!).  Blame them for not being included in the boys club, and I move backwards, never in control of my own destiny.

I’m not saying that prejudice and bias don’t happen.  They do.  And they did in both of those meetings where I was frustrated. But the only way I can change what the world thinks of me is by not playing the part of the victim.  I don’t want to play the part of a woman in tech – but rather of someone who excels in her role, who can adapt to constantly changing and fast paced environments, with people that I do and do not identify with.  It’s not about me being a woman.  It’s about me kicking ass at whatever I chose to.

Thanks Katie.  Don’t lets stop this conversation.

I just spent the morning alongside David Brown, talking to 115 middle school students about entrepreneurship.  I do this periodically and it’s one of the most fun days of my year.  The amount of unbridled energy and enthusiasm in the room is always palpable, and the kids have wonderfully insightful questions on how to startup a startup.  Questions like:

• What should I do if someone tells me my idea is stupid?
• How do I know if my product is a good idea?
• What happens when you fail?
• How do I identify my target market?
• Once I identify my target market, what kinds of questions do I ask them?
• What is better, a product business or a service business?
• How do I get the money I need for my startup?

Rewording some of these questions, they sound identical to the same topics we often discuss at Techstars.   I can only imagine that if we really taught entrepreneurship to kids at this age, imagine how much more quickly adult entrepreneurs could move through the stages of a startup.  Maybe they would be less afraid of failure, know more about when they’ve hit product/market fit…

I’m all for teaching kids entrepreneurship and wish more middle schools did it. Consider pushing your local school to add it to their curriculum, or mentoring a young student if they have a program in place already.

 

Hullabalu, a company in the Techstars NYC class of 2014, is known for they’re great artistry.  Cassady Benson, one of the artists there, doesn’t even take notes with words.  Cassady uses images to take notes.  I love it.

 

And here’s one from Del Laramie

 

I get a lot of invitations to evening events – all for great things.  Startup judging events, student entrepreneur events, networking events, happy hours, open houses, startup launch parties, and more.  I could go to an event a night easily, and often times its more.

When I was in my 20s, evening events were great fun.  But now that I’m, uh, not in my 20s anymore, evening and weekend events are really hard because I have two young children.  I travel a ton, I’m often away, and the only time I get to see my kids is 2 precious hours in the evening and on weekends.  And weekends are even tough because I’d like a LITTLE personal time – so even on the weekends I’m not with them 100% of the time.  So when asked to attend an event at night – I want to join you, I really do, but the decision I have to make is between your event and my family.

I’m often asked how to make startups and the tech environment more female-friendly, and my easy answer right now is “hold lunch events instead of evening events”.   So tech, consider hosting more lunches!  Bonus, you don’t usually have to buy alcohol and the food is less expensive.  🙂  Or at least hold happy hours where the event is done by 5:30 or 6.   That way people (notice I didn’t say women, I said PEOPLE, because this is a family issue not a female one) with families can still get home for dinner and bedtime, like we did with our 7 Weeks of Awesome series at Techstars.

As an aside, I look forward to the day when my kids are old enough that they don’t want to hang out with me anymore and my evenings will be more free.

I spend a lot of time meeting new people who are interested in becoming Techstars mentors.  Recently, at the end of one of those quick 30 min meetings, the guy I was meeting with, Ben, said to express his gratitude, he’d like to extend his personal Apple Employee Discount to me, giving me 25% off anything in the Apple store (for personal use of course).  Fabulous! I’d been wanting an iPad mini!  So I bought myself one on the spot, enjoying that discount.

Later that evening, I got an email from Apple telling me my order was cancelled because Ben was over his hardware discount quota.  I didn’t think this was a big deal AT ALL, it was overly generous of him to offer in the first place, but he was embarrassed when I told him and he spent too long profusely apologizing.

Two days later, when I got to my office, there was an iPad Mini (the expensive one!) sitting on my desk from Ben.  WTH???  There was no way I could accept a gift like that.  I don’t even buy my husband gifts like that!  When I tried to give it back, Ben basically said he wouldn’t take it back and that it was his ‘random act of kindness’ for the month.  So in an effort to make it right, I donated what is equivalent to a few iPad Minis worth to Impact on Education who provides tablets & training to at-risk youth who are struggling to read.  I can’t tell you how great that felt, just to keep Ben’s kindness going.  So I kept it going…

With friends that owe me money, I ask them to redirect their repayment to one of a few different charities instead (like Kangu, EFCO, Application Developers Alliance, Kiva or Impact on Education!)  Almost every time I buy coffee, I also buy a cup for the person behind me.  I’m constantly looking for opportunities for random acts of kindness.  In fact, you were one of the reasons I decided that my TEDx Brooklyn talk was going to be on Giving First.  Which led to discoveries of other generosities including this homeless guy who was rewarded nearly $200K for returning a diamond engagement ring, or this tragic story about the Gruners and their 18 month old son.

So thank you Ben.  The iPad was the smallest of the gifts.  You reminded me how much fun and rewarding it is to surprise and delight people on a regular basis.  Keeping that momentum going is one of my big goals for 2014.

Karen Nyberg, a female astronaut, landed back on earth today after 6 months in space.  I saw the news with photos of her reuniting with her preschool aged son Jack.  I don’t know why, but the story really affected me.  I can’t imagine saying yes to a ride on a rocketship with the knowledge that survival rates are low and I might be killed leaving behind 2 small children.  But I can’t imagine saying no to the opportunity either.  I mean, it’s a ROCKETSHIP!  I imagine the decision must have been excruciating for her, and all I can say is Karen, today, you’re my hero.

My husband Mark and I have fundamentally and radically different taste in music.  He listens to a lot of jam bands, like Widespread Panic and the Dead.  I’ve been to a lot of the Widespread Panic shows because many of our friends love the music as well, and the scene is a complete blast.  But when being honest, it’s pretty much the last music on the planet I’d chose to hear if given options.  In fact, I’d rather listen to silence than that type of music.  It’s a source of tension in our marriage because I’ve resorted to snide remarks about it.  (yes, not good, I know).

One day, rightfully so, he had enough of my nasty comments.  And he said to me something like “It’s not that the band sucks or that the music is shit.  Its that YOU don’t like the music – so quit projecting your opinion as fact.”  His comment has stuck with me (and is yet another example of why he’s such an amazing human being), and I began to realize  how often I’ve taken my perspective and generalize it to the rest of the world.  Its more often than I’d like to admit, so I’ve been actively working on rephrasing how I say things to more accurately reflect that something is my opinion rather than a widely-held truth.  It’s true at Techstars as well, we tell mentors to state things as opinions, to share with teams their experiences, rather than stating perspectives as fact.  And we warn teams to beware of the person who states their opinion as fact.

Today, I’m reading Conscious Business and the author put a term to this patten.  He calls it ontological arrogance, and its the belief that your perspective is privileged, that yours is the only true way to interpret a situation.  He goes on to use the example of his daughter, that she says she won’t eat broccoli because its yukky.  But the real truth is that she calls broccoli yukky because she doesn’t like it.

I find this fascinating, and since I’ve discovered there’s a term for it, I’ve noticed how often it happens outside of my own actions.  Nearly daily, if not hourly, someone I interact with does this.

I’m curious as to all the ways ontological arrogance is holding us back, and holding me back.  Off the top of my head, I can tell you it’s probably a huge driver in startups as they seek product/market fit.  A team has a hard time getting out of their own head (hence why customer development methodology has really taken off).  I know it happens in board meetings, I know it happens with investors.  I’d argue that not being able to see other people’s perspectives is a major factor in entrepreneurial and investor success.

So today, I’m making a public commitment to massively reduce my ontological arrogance.  I’ve started by simply rephrasing how I talk In an effort to affect how I think.  Just by saying “my opinion is xxxx” will help (I hope).  But I need your help too.  If you catch me doing it,   highlight it for me.

Maybe we’ll all be a little more successful for it.