In June 2021, I hosted an intimate virtual roundtable for several members of the She Conquers Capital audience. It was a crazy week. I had just moved into my dream apartment with my 8-year-old son, boxes were everywhere, and I had a 200+ person cohort graduation event coming up later in the week to organize and host.
I hadn’t marketed the roundtable in full force. To be honest, I only posted about it once on LinkedIn about a month before. As the session began, only 4 women logged onto the Zoom: two founders and two investors.
If you’ve met me in the past, you know I’m normally dressed up for any speaking or hosting engagement. But on this hectic Tuesday I was in yoga pants and barely enough makeup to make a difference. It didn’t matter.
When women gather to reveal the fullest expression of their voices and their vulnerability, only the truth matters. The moment we allow ourselves to dive deep, everything surface-level fades into the background.
As I facilitated our discussion, what came forward was far richer than anything I could have advertised. Who was there?
- A founder who, while raising capital, intentionally stayed quiet on social media about her toddler twins for fear of deterring investors (FYI – this woman is a badass like few that I’ve met).
- An investor who saw firsthand that the male counterparts on her firm’s investment committee were holding female founders to different, and more stringent, screening metrics.
- A founder who started her company after the corporate division she built from scratch was handed over to a man with far less experience.
- An investor who intentionally downplayed her appearance to avoid the unwanted advances experienced by her female colleagues.
As we ended our session that day, I was both in awe of the dialogue and disappointed that after all of my years of building a female-focused community, I didn’t have a concrete next step to support these women – women who were blazing trails with no roadmap and were clearly undermined in their efforts.
“Powerful women struggle. We ebb and flow between fierce and fragile, because each new level requires a new letting go.”
I wrote those words in a newsletter to my mailing list on November 10, 2018.
That Zoom roundtable allowed me to connect emotionally to a clearer picture of the vision my intuition has been revealing to me for years. A vision that, at times, I’ve been too scared to see. Because I knew what it would mean to claim it.
Join me inside the She Conquers Capital Community to experience where all of this soul-searching has taken me and what my work with women looks like today.
