(photo of my sister Hawa, me (as a blonde) and my Mom, Marianne, in Abu Dhabi)

My friend Tereza (who I’m going to refer to as Terezko from now on) wrote the loveliest tribute to her mom this mother’s day and it started me thinking about my own mom. I’m fortunate to have my Mom (and my Dad) still around, but I can make a tribute to her while she is only a phonecall away.

My Mom is inspirational, too, though I was pretty hard on her growing up. She didn’t work outside of the home. As a fierce feminist at a young age, this bothered me. I thought my Mom was wasting her brilliance on making us lunches and feeding the cows. It took me until I was mature enough to see how much she impacted my life and my own independence. She didn’t need to go to an office every day to do this. She was incredibly wise and made choices that were right for her and her happiness.

A little about my Mom. She is an artist and that is what makes her the happiest: creating art. Growing up, I judged her for not pushing her career (she had a degree in biology and her father wanted her to become a doctor), but I failed to see that she had crafted the exact scenario where she could push her career in the direction that she wanted (she didn’t want to become a doctor, she was an artist). The only thing that was missing for her was the time to focus on her art 100%, but I think daily life inspired her. The farm life inspired her. Us kids inspired her. My Dad inspired her. Her lifestyle gave her the space to experiment and explore her creative thoughts. When it didn’t work, there was no financial pressure to make her throw in the towel. When it worked, there was no financial pressure to pigeon hole her creativity. And she became a great artist because of it – selling lots of paintings, being juried into frequent shows and having her art win awards and be showcased in international publications.

All along the way, she was a wonderful and dedicated mother. She was the kind of mother who paid attention to details like making halloween costumes from scratch and sitting down with us as Christmas approached to build elaborate gingerbread houses. I was in figure skating for 10 years and she made most of my skating dresses and costumes herself. I think the most I had time to make for my own son growing up was a…wait…I don’t think I handmade anything. I remember him reveling over some cookies I baked at one point because it was such a rarity! Being a mother fulfilled my Mom. She involved us in creating, from stained glass sculptures (we were in charge of the foiling around the edges) to sewing costumes to gingerbread villages to you name the creative outlet, she involved us. I became a writer because of it.

She also gave me tidbits of wisdom along the way that have become the core to the way I operate in life. I call them Momisms. I think they are the most important lessons I have ever learnt:

1. If a person is nice to you, but treats the wait staff like garbage, this is not a nice person. Not only did it help define my judge of character, but it also made me keenly aware of how I treat EVERYONE around me.
2. Those kids at school are teasing you because you expose their greatest fears. See here that she didn’t say, “because they are jealous” or “because you are special”. The difference here is couched in empathy. I already knew I was different. I was an oddball. What I didn’t realize until my Mom told me was that I was teased because my being different made my peers question their sameness. Instead of reacting hautily or defensively, I could act with empathy to the people who were being mean to me, which almost always neutralized the situation.
3. You are a child of the universe…you have the right to be here. She had the poem, Desiderata, posted at her bedside all of her life and often jokingly called me the pet name ‘child of the universe’. I didn’t pay much attention to it until a recent trip when I read it again and found it profound and very similar to many of my Mom’s basic lessons. It obviously means a lot to her. The basis is to live your life with intention and purpose – not seeking outside validation or comparing yourself to others. I’m still learning this.
4. I hate wastefulness. Not really a quote, but something that shaped me into the anti-blind-consumption person I am. I became incredibly mindful of waste: running a washing machine for a few towels bothers me, I avoid buying things with crazy amounts of packaging and re-use when I can, I turn off lights as soon as I leave a room. When I was 16, I embarrassed my group of friends by lecturing a restaurant on serving their ‘eat-in’ meals in styrofoam containers and wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper calling out the local businesses that need to learn how to reduce, reuse and recycle. (why I was unpopular!) I think my Mom was incredibly proud.

I picked a very different path than my Mom, who tells me it took her a while to breathe easy for my decisions, but that she admires them nonetheless (she often compares our relationship to the one in Beaches – where I’m Bette Midler’s character and she is Barbara Hershey’s – another reference I failed to understand until more recently as I took it too literally). She knows she raised a strong-willed, independent daughter and the residual outcome of that is that I would always choose the unclear path. As a Mom myself, I understand how this can be both a point of pride and a point of stress. But even though she knew the monster she was creating, she did it. She never prepped me to marry for money or to get a steady job. She allowed me to believe that I could be a pirate when I grew up. She held her breath and tongue many times in my life as I made “wrong turns” – some that went awry and some that turned out great. Of course, she encouraged with positive reinforcement when I made decisions that would stabilize my life, but she also knew that those decisions weren’t always true to my being. And in spite of the grey hairs I’ve given her over the years, she still sings the theme song to Beaches to me periodically. I tell her, “Someday it may pay off, or maybe not, but I have lots of experience and stories to tell.”

So…Happy Mother’s Day to Marianne Hunt! Thank you for making me a better person and teaching me the most fundamental lessons of being a human being who is true to herself and her life path. Without you, I don’t know if I would like the person I am. Thank you.

photo taken in my Galaxy Tab in East Baltimore and ‘prettified’ with EyeEm

They call this increasingly popular middle-class ritual “Ghetto Tourism” and I was guilty of it a few weeks ago when I visited Baltimore for the amazing InSquared Conference. I was almost giddy about the idea of touring the poorest parts of East Baltimore brought to my attention by one of my favorite television shows of all-time, The Wire (also #85 in Stuff White People Like). I wanted to see the neighborhood with my own eyes. I couldn’t wait to capture the ‘No Trespassing. If Animal Is Trapped Inside Call ….’ stencils on the boarded up houses. We drove around in a luxury SUV and captured poignant shots like the one above with our iPhones and Tablets. The irony wasn’t lost on me.

I don’t tell you this because I want to make anyone feel guilty, but there was something more poignant than pictures that I took away from this ‘ghetto tour’ and my entire time at the conference. That poignant thing that hit me is core to the problems of North America: the divide between the haves and have nots. And, until the is an overall awareness of privilege, it won’t change.

A conversation on a gmail group I’m part of raised this point for me: Yes, we all have the ability to achieve success by working hard and smart, but some of us have more obstacles in our way. This is not an excuse by any means. The world is what it is for better or for worse, but there is an odd sense of entitlement in our cushy worlds that forgets that, yes, we work hard to achieve what we’ve achieved, but we have experienced privilege along the way to help us get there. Education, skin color, strong support systems, good manners, speaking the right native tongue, access to strong networks, the advantage of being a specific gender or orientation that is the normative, inheritance of wealth and many other leveragable assets give us a different starting point than those without these assets.

I was not born to a wealthy family. My father worked hard to build his business from a place of poverty. He worked his way through university, then he and my mother slowly, patiently, built his veterinarian practice, paying off student loans and slowly climbing up the ranks of comfortable living. We lived in a trailer on his family’s land until I was 10. A second-hand, broken down trailer, but we had the privilege of having land passed down, which gave us more leverage than many of our neighbors. And we lived in a small town in Alberta, which was incredibly inexpensive to grow a business in. Another advantage.

But they gave me oodles of other privileges that helped me to start from a pretty advanced place of leverage. I attended university didn’t have to take out too much for student loans because my parents supported me and post-secondary is subsidized in Canada. I always had enough. I also had my parents’ example of a couple who sacrificed in the short term to make long term gains.

When I was in Baltimore, I saw a very different experience. Entire neighborhoods of abandoned houses, boarded up and falling down. Our guide described them as ‘unburied corpses’. Most people in those neighborhoods are untouched by the lovely startup/angel/VC world we live in that afford us to be connected the way we are. I took photos of those rows of unburied corpses with my iPhone and tablet – and felt incredibly aware of the juxtaposition. Many of the inhabitants of this neighborhood have their mindspace occupied by survival, not how to get followers on Pinterest.

I’m not saying all of this to make anyone feel guilty or to downplay your or my struggles. I’ve struggled and worked hard. I’ve gone without being able to pay my rent. I’ve gone without eating many times. We are all given our lot in life, but I also know that there is a different starting line for everyone. Those that start from behind my position have to run harder, smarter and overcome lots of barriers before they even get to IMAGINE creating a social commerce platform that helps people make better buying decisions.

And yes, it’s reality. There is no room in our world for whining or feeling sorry for ourselves.

But dammit. The arrogance of privilege really makes me hate the world we live in sometimes. And makes me question so much of what we deem as important or successful or admirable or inspirational. We spend so much time and money and energy and editorial space celebrating a certain type of person and funding a certain type of business. And yes, there are a few great funds (Good Capital, Omidyar Foundation, Google.org and Gates Foundation) and government programs and fundraising avenues, but all-in-all, I see more money lost on investing in the new shiny thing that doesn’t work than goes into investing into our own communities.

On a positive note, gb.tc (Greater Baltimore Tech Council), the organization behind InSquared Conference, has the goal of bringing wealth to the area we toured. The organization’s lead instigator Jason Hardebeck, who drove us around, is one of those guys who has examined his privilege and decided to use it to level the playing field for everyone, not just those who already have assets. As we speak, gb.tc, is creating innovative centers with tools, instruction and other resources in many of the poorest neighborhoods of Baltimore and reaching out to the inhabitants of those neighborhoods to offer them these resources at little to no cost. When I asked him how they plan to make money, he replied, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” In other words, when the poorest people in Baltimore have stable income and futures, everybody will profit. I love this idea. And it’s been shown that in cities like Philadelphia and New York, this is the case: reduced crime, increased local spending, cleaned up neighborhoods, better valued real estate, innovation and more come from these programs. It’s something that we all need to be invested in.

As a final note, I’m aware that I’m not building a business that is going to help those neighborhoods get to a level playing field, but that doesn’t mean I’m not trying to build something meaningful (I wouldn’t work on a business that doesn’t have a higher purpose). There is room in this world to build all sorts of businesses that serve all sorts of people. But I do want to live in a world where we are serving even the most ‘unprofitable’ looking business prospects because it’s better for everybody.

My haul is a bit different. I definitely didn’t spend hours on my hair and makeup (maybe I should have?) and I’m pushing 40 instead of in my early 20′s. But I was compelled to make it because of the surprisingly great finds I bought from Simons*.

I had fun making it and I think I’ll have even more fun wearing my new finds. It isn’t very often these days that I get to go on a spree.  :)

* Full disclosure, Simons sent me a gift certificate, but they didn’t ask me to follow up with a video or a post or anything. In fact, I get stuff like this all of the time and rarely feel compelled (I’m on some sort of Canadian fashion influencers list…which is funny, but awesome).

Just to give you a little glimpse into what went down…

So yes…it was a RESOUNDING success!! Even though it rained like crazy for the first two days, women were already lined up at 9am for their manicure and mimosa and many stayed and came back. Many reported back that it was an oasis in the middle of SXSW. We really hope to be able to do this again next year!

Big ups to our partners:

and our sponsors:

LoveThatFit – Jewelmint – Bloom

In the tale, The Little Red Hen finds a grain of wheat, and asks for help from the other farmyard animals to plant it. However, no animal will volunteer to help her.

At each further stage (harvest, threshing, milling the wheat into flour, and baking the flour into bread), the hen again asks for help from the other animals, but again she gets no assistance.

Finally, the hen has completed her task, and asks who will help her eat the bread. This time, all the previous non-participants eagerly volunteer. However, she declines their help, stating that no one aided her in the preparation work, and eats it with her chicks, leaving none for anyone else.

(from Wikipedia)

I had this book as part of my collection growing up and was heavily influenced by it. There is obviously a moral to this story: you can’t  benefit from someone else’s labor when you didn’t contribute. It’s been one of my community philosophies and, really, the reason I think I’ve been successful over my career. Sure, I accept help readily from people, but I always think about how I’m going to contribute back when I’m able to. And when I feel I’ve taken more than I’ve earned, I feel guilty.

So I make sure that I spend any free time or resources I have on contributing in one way or another. But I’m constantly surprised by the number of people who exist who – like the farm animals that wouldn’t help the Little Red Hen, but felt entitled to the resulting bread – take advantage of the hard work of others.

As Matt Ridley discusses in one of my favorite books of all time that even the most virtuous person is NOT truly altrustic. Donating time to a food bank does everything from making you feel good to looking good on your resume to opening up the ability for you to meet other charitable people (like-minds) to mate with. Smart farm animals would understand that helping the Little Red Hen along the way would improve their possibility of getting a piece of warm bread at the end.

I don’t believe in Tit-for-Tat thinking, but I also don’t enjoy the level of entitlement I see around me. So when I put my own neck on the line (risk), skin in the game (money) and efforts to making something happen (time), I don’t share the results of it unless others show they are willing to do the same on some level.

I’m with the Little Red Hen on this one. I am happy to share…with those who share with me.

Just recently, a friend of mine asked in a group email about how to further her speaking career. Like me in 2006, she is getting asked to speak fairly frequently, but like me in 2006, she is feeling like it’s taking enough of her time and effort to start asking for remuneration for the task.

First off, with a few exceptions, I think everyone that speaks should be compensated for it. It is work and takes time to put together a good presentation. Compensation can come in the form of free marketing – say if you are the CEO of a company that is trying to get the word out, or in the form of residual income (consulting gigs). But most often (and in my case), I needed to get paid. I spent more time working on presentations and traveling to give presentations than I could consulting, so I required payment for my time.

In early 2007, I was out with a group of people and one of my favorite speakers, danah boyd, was talking about her agent. Upon further inquiry, I found out having an agent helped her get from unpaid speaker to paid speaker. So I asked her for an introduction and the rest was history. Over the next few years, I built a career speaking. I only ‘quit’ (I still do very occasional gigs if the situation is right) to do Buyosphere. But before I quit, I was commanding everywhere from $10,000-20,000 a gig. Not bad.

So, I had advice…and after I gave it, I was encouraged to post it here. So here it goes…if you want to get paid and make a career out of public speaking (assuming you are already speaking and people are responding well), here is what you need to do:

What I’ve also noticed that there are more and more women attending each year. I asked Hugh Forrest, the man in charge of the show, what his estimates on women last year were and he replied, “A VERY conservative reply is that 1/3rd of our signups are women.” That’s about 6,800 women if my math is right. Wowsers!

What I also noticed last year was that there wasn’t much catering to that growing population. From what I could tell, the only women-focused event was Digitini, a really cool event honoring the women contributing to Tech. I’ve heard that it’s probably not happening in 2012. :( Guy Kawasaki, Kirtsy and Alltop also did a fun event called Guy/Gal a couple of years back (I couldn’t attend, but I heard it was great). But for 1/3rd of the population of SXSW, I would hope there would be more!

Sure, we’re all equal here, right? An event is an event and it’s non-gendered, right? Well…yes. Most events are neutral. In fact, life is neutral. Until you realize what neutral is…

Back in my cultural studies classes (where I have my degree), we examined the problem with the center and otherness. The center/neutral/sameness is the cultural pivot point. The idea that there is a characteristic or persona that is neutral makes everyone else necessarily conform. So think UNISEX t-shirts. They aren’t really unisex are they? They are t-shirts designed for a male body that are a little bit more tapered. They end up looking boxy on women (and probably fit a very distinct version of a male physique). Think of neutral colors like beige. They work for muted, quiet designs. They don’t offend, but they don’t express either.

So here I was, running between meetings and panels and events and thinking, “Where can I get a good manicure?” and coming up short and knowing that there wasn’t really a place where women could just BE WOMEN (and that doesn’t mean anything in particular, but spaces that are built for women do feel different). So I decided there and then that I would create something in 2012 come hell or high water that would be THAT thing. Completely UNneutral.

So here it is:

Beauty Bar X

And I posted it to Eventbrite and Facebook and did mostly nothing with it yet, but am getting a steady stream of signups and messages like, “OMG…this is SO needed!”

But here is the rub…I got Buyosphere to sponsor it, but we have a wee bit of seed funding that cannot cover an event that costs $25,000 to put on (I’ve asked our amazing event planners if we could cut back and they tried, but SXSW makes the city uber costly). I squeezed $5,000 out of my company (my board and co-founders won’t approve more – that’s an entire month of runway!). I may be able to put a couple of grand into it from my own pocket as well…but we really need to raise $20,000 (or something close to it) to make this happen.

Crazy awesome part of this is that this is the PERFECT OPPORTUNITY for any brand focused on reaching influential women to do so. We will have a space catering to women at SXSW. Women from all over the world with tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of followers. Not only that, we will be offering them a great space to be pampered in. Hello skincare companies! Hello nailcare companies! Hello health companies!

So…in order to make this happen, I’ve set up an IndieGoGo campaign:

http://www.indiegogo.com/Sponsor-The-BeautyBarX-Event

The goal is to raise $20,000 or as close to it as I possibly can so we can make this happen. The sponsorship levels are spelled out on IndieGoGo, but people that want to see it happen can also help out. I was ready to pull the plug last week, but something just made me want to push on. I know we can do this. I’d love to see it happen. Can we crowdsource it? I know it’s needed. Let’s make it happen!

Now that Buyosphere is funded, I’m writing a regular column on INC.com and the myriad of other things that I’ve committed to are going on, I find myself looking at the clock everyday thinking, “OMG, where did the day go?” and the calendar at the end of every week and wondering, “It’s not THAT DAY already, is it?” Time really is relative.

I used to be that person who would get back to everyone who emailed me lickity split. I would say yes to every coffee/lunch/drink invitation because, well, you never know where that relationship may lead. I took on all sorts of projects and talks and columns and mentorships and whatever I could pack into my days because I wanted to build my Whuffie and build my reputation. I took pride in all of this. I was approachable and generous with my time and I really believed it is what helped me go from a total nobody born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and raised in a small town in Alberta to being paid to stand in front of audiences of thousands of people and  blah blah blah about how I see the world. So it’s really hard to become that person who lets email inboxes fill up with thousands of unreplied email and tells people NO on a regular basis.

I still think that stuff is important. Don’t get me wrong. But I only have so many hours in my day and, as it is, I’m not spending near enough of it taking care of myself. I need to be smart with the time I have left over and, unfortunately, many of my decisions on how to spend it go back to whether or not it will help me and my business and not the other way around.

From what I hear, though, this is a temporary state of being. I’ve been told by people who have worked hard and become very successful that they can now go back to giving instead of taking again. But instead of rationalizing about it, I just need to keep focused.

All of this is to say…I won’t be blogging much here for a while and everywhere else I’m communicating, I’m going to seem less like Tara and more like, I don’t know, someone else who is obsessed with building her business. I can’t wait until I have the time again to share everything. Thanks for your support and someday I hope to buy all of you a cruise around the world with me.

Perhaps it is because I was so pre-occupied. Between being busier than I’ve ever been in my life and starting a new relationship, I lost track of time. You can say what you will about the challenge of startups, but they define a new level of focus that I didn’t even know existed before this year. Even though I’d been working pretty diligently last year on things, it wasn’t until this year that ‘shit got real’ (so to speak).

When I started thinking about my #themeword for this year (thanks to Laura, Karen and Liza), I looked back at how REAP worked out for this past year. What started out as a rocky year actually turned out pretty REAP-worthy. It unfolded slowly and I hardly even saw it shifting because it never got easier, but there it was. There was still time in 2011 and we started to REAP the benefits of the long road of work we put into things. But let me back up.

Number one was the relationship. I met someone right away. Only. That wasn’t the right person. I thought it was because, well, I asked for the ability to find one. But it was pretty quickly apparent that it wasn’t the right one. But it didn’t take long and those closed doors made way for open ones.

When I met Carlos, I wasn’t sure. He was definitely handsome, fun, smart and sweet, but I had a very definite ‘type’ in mind. That was my biggest problem. I kept going for the wrong guy. But I was lucky this time. The right guy went for ME. And even when I resisted, he persisted and wore me down. He helped me see that my list was stupid. I wasn’t looking for what I needed, I was looking for what I thought I wanted. And what I wanted wasn’t congruent with what I needed. But it took a man with a will bigger than mine to show me the light.

This has been a big 2011 point of REAPness.

As for Buyosphere, which started out this year under a different awful name. And a bit of a different idea. Well, that took a little longer. And with good reason…in retrospect.

I wrote recently about the anatomy of a pivot. It’s a really personal story. I needed to learn a bunch of things: how to let go of the solution and focus on the problem. I’m stubborn. If it wasn’t apparent in my personal relationship story, I suffer a bit from myopia. I convince myself of something and everything lines up to support that thesis in my mind. I don’t budge. For Buyosphere, I was focused on data as the solution to helping people find what they were looking for. I was so convinced that I didn’t know why everyone else didn’t see it. And, to be fair to my own thinking, it was AN idea and someone will surely do it someday, but it will take lots of time and money and huge leaps forward in web standards…probably resulting in about 10-15 years of blood, sweat and tears on the subject.

It was late spring that we realized there was an issue. People liked the name, the design, the UI and a whole bunch of other bits and bobs with Buyosphere, but it wasn’t solving the problem that it set out to solve and so it fell flat. We knew we needed to be useful now.

The funny thing is that I often told the story of my epic search for a black skirt and nobody ever questioned it…until one day David Rose made a super ‘should-have-been-obvious’ statement to me. I told him that Buyosphere is born from a series of fruitless and frustrating online shopping searches that ended empty handed and the best illustration of this was a search for a plain black skirt that took me 3.5 hours and 14 sites to find. So after giving him a few bars of my pitch, he stops me and asks, “Wait a minute. So when do you find the skirt?” I stammered a bit, “Well, after we gather the data and create this…” He stopped me, “Let me get this right, you took a 3.5 hour search and turned it into a 3.5 YEAR search? That doesn’t sound so efficient to me.” My jaw must have dropped to the ground. He was completely right. I was at a loss. But he’s a smart guy and pushed a bit more, “Stop the deck and show me your site.” And I did. I walked him through some of the features. The next thing he said to me triggered everything else that would come, “Wow, this is nice. Your site has a bunch of Quora-like features.”

*flashbulb*

Black skirt. Quora. What would it take to shift…er…pivot to make helping people find stuff less about data and more about Q&A? Turns out 3 months.

It wasn’t the first time I heard Quora brought up as a comparison or the first time someone suggested we create the ability to ask one another for advice. But it was the first time I was open to it and completely ready to hear it. David Rose is truly an angel.

It’s what turned everything around for us. Jerome started working on the new site. I re-worked the pitch deck and the business plan. Cassandra worked on the business modeling around the new, improved idea. Within 3 months, we had a new site (which we haven’t started any promotion on, but is getting steady sign ups and pick up), our seed funding (oversubscribed!) and a bright new path into the new year that is much more exciting and feels like the winner.

So…yeah…epic 2011. Very very REAPable. Where do I go from here?

Well, I know we still have lots of work to do and a long road ahead. I like the way that road is looking though. And now that I know that the road we’re traveling is the right one, there is nothing left to do but work hard, smart and…well…

GIVE’R

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it comes from my upbringing. I was raised in small town Alberta where bush parties and shotgunning beer are hobbies. If you haven’t seen the movie, Fubar, here is a taste. Ah. Sniff. Memories! The term GIVE’R is often the philosophy of the partier, but I think it applies well to startup life. In essence it means (from Urban Dictionary):

“1. Going all out and/or balls to the wall to take care of business as quickly and as awesomely as possible
2. Acting in a way that is like you’re rocking out really hard, but at the same time, trying to solve a problem that may or may not involve drop-kicking something without hesitation”

Quickly, efficiently and awesomely going all out. That is what 2012 is going to be about. With or without the drop-kicking. Hopefully without. We’re going to GIVE’R through this next year and it’s going to pay off big time.

So there you go. GIVE’R in 2012. That’s my #themeword.

So, in the tradition that Erica Douglass began on NYE 2007/2008, what is YOUR #themeword?

How to Pick Your #ThemeWord for 2011 (via Erica O’Grady):

1. Think of a word that reflects your hopes and dreams for 2010.
2. Share your ThemeWord with friends on Twitter, Facebook, or Your Blog.
3. Be sure and use the hashtag #Themeword.

What I love about boiling the entire year down into one word is that it helps focus everything else. It’s also a fun exercise. Be sure to tweet and tell me yours.

“Tara…you are a great presenter. You are passionate and can make any story or idea sound interesting. I’d want you to sell anything that I was trying to get out into the world…HOWEVER…when you talk about yourself or your company, you sound uncertain and nervous. You lose that passion. I just wanted you to know how you come across.”

It’s true. And it is the craziest thing. I DO believe passionately in what we are doing with Buyosphere. I’m excited and energized with how awesome the site is progressing and I know in my heart that we are solving a real problem with what is being launched in a few weeks. I’m so excited, I’m up at night feeling giddy and have great ideas on how to grow and monetize and build a really strong, amazing business.

So why the hell do I get sheepish when I talk about it to others?

Because braggarts are irritating and I can’t de-couple myself from my startup. The answer lies in how I tell the story. This is how I’ve been telling it since the beginning:

1. I’ve been dreaming about solving the purchasing experience online since 2007 (I have)
2. My co-founders and I are a tight-knit family who have grown together a LOT over the past 18 months (we have)
3. The broken purchase experience relates to a story from 2007 – a search for a black skirt online that took me 3.5 hours and going to 13 websites (it did)

But none of these things matter. Yes, they matter to ME. This IS where my passion lies. But all three of these things make my business WAY too personal for me. So when I pitch my company, I’m essentially telling a potential investor, “Invest in me and my dream.” Not a good sell. And, when that potential investor passes, he or she is passing on my dream, not my company, so it feels much more personal.

Buyosphere is my precious. And rejection of Buyosphere feels like a personal rejection.

I now understand that this is nuts. And I don’t know if it’s a ‘woman’ thing or what, but it’s definitely a ME thing that I need to un-learn. Yes, investors say they ‘invest in people’, but they aren’t investing in people’s dreams. They invest in people they trust to build a business, sell that business, grow that business and, ultimately, make them a lot of money. These are not charities. They could give a flying snake that I’ve grown or what my shopping woes are. They want to know the big picture and how we get there. No preciousness. I’m starting to understand what some (who are very helpful mentors) have referred to as ‘fluff’.

Someday when I write the chapter on ‘how to speak VC’, this will be the very first lesson (I have yet to know what the next lessons are). Very analogous to how the ring drove Smigel crazy and turned him into a paranoid Gollum, being too coupled with your idea will lead to heartbreak over time. Every rejection will become a personal wound. After a while, you will feel alone and hyper protective. It’s a selfish thing. I have two co-founders whose ideas, input and implementation are just as formative (if not more) than my own. Investors become partners who also bring ideas and input into the mix. It is not ‘my precious’, it is a company. A company that I believe in and I’m excited about and that I will work hard to help succeed and be a great tool that will help people.

I wanted to share this revelation because I don’t think I’m the only one who is stuck in this paradigm. I’ve heard others talk about their companies in the same way. And when you are so close to the idea, it closes you to input and growth. Knowing, instead, that this is your job (not your dream) and your job is to make your company wildly successful opens you up to more ideas and helps you see where you need to let go of others.

I’m working on shifting this paradigm now, but it won’t be easy. I’m seeking outside help from people who can take me through the withdrawal steps:

1. Reframing the pitch – de-coupling it from my ‘dream’ and speaking to the business opportunity
2. Rethinking my relationship with Buyosphere – if it’s not an extension of my identity, what is it? And really, who am I?
3. Becoming the biggest advocate for Buyosphere I can be