Startup Parent

#042 — All the Single Ladies   With choice comes revolutionary change. As women have experienced an ‘expansion of options’ in terms of marriage and family, there are a growing number of single ladies. As of 2009, less than 50% of American women were married, and the median age for a first marriage had risen from 22 to 27. Also, women are increasingly opting to have children outside of marriage. Wh...

#041 — Designing Your Vision, Mission and Values Few of us would set off on a road trip without a GPS. Yet many online entrepreneurs hang up their shingle without a clear idea of what they stand for or who they want to serve. After a couple of consults with potential clients who weren’t the right fit, Toi Smith designed and published a vision, mission and set of values that clarify her intentions,...

#040 — 4 Ways to Get Better at Saying No  There is power in the word NO, just ask any toddler! But if you’re anything like me, the disease to please often leads to a default YES—or at least a MAYBE. Problem is, that results in total overwhelm and resentment. No one wants a life controlled by the whims and desires of others. So how do you put yourself back in the driver’s seat and get better at say...

#039 — Hiring Team Members (and Clients) Who Are the Right Fit How can you be sure you’re hiring the right person? Or that you really want to work with a particular client, for that matter? Val Geisler has learned the hard way, by giving contractors a chance when they didn’t honor her time and taking on clients who raised a red flag early on. And while there is no magic formula for identifying who...

#038 — Breaking Down The Writing Process The pressure to be perfect can stop us from putting our ideas on paper—or screen, as the case may be. But if you follow Tara Gentile’s wisdom and reframe your writing as the beginning of a conversation that invites others weigh in, that can be a game-changer. Welcome to another of my experiments on the Startup Pregnant Podcast: For the month of March, I’ll...

  #037 — Putting Your Mission Back In The Driver's Seat  With Tara Gentile  Rebranding your business is a risk, especially if what you’re doing is still making money. How can you be sure it’s time to shake up the status quo and shift your focus? Tara Gentile can attest to the fact that there is no easy framework for making that decision. But a good place to start is by asking the question, “What i...

#036 — Race, Social Justice and Political Branding with Tepsii If you don’t use your voice to share your experience, to call out prejudice and promote social justice, are you part of the problem? Tepsii contends that you are, and she is in the process of rebranding her business to add activism to the platform. I’m living the ‘learning out loud’ core value today as Tepsii and I get into a dialogue...

#035 — Ask For The Damn Sale with Tepsii To do your best work for clients, you have to be taken care of yourself. Yet so many entrepreneurs struggle with asking for the sale. We hide. We play small. We fail to follow up. Tepsii understands the ongoing challenge of changing your money mindset and learning to value yourself and the work you do. Though she understood marketing conceptually, her first...

#034 — Truthbombs on Parenting, Entrepreneurship and Pleasure with Danielle LaPorte “They’re not yours. They are their own soul, and you get the honor of caring for them. They’re their own person, and it is not their job to please you in any way, shape or form.” Danielle LaPorte’s intuitive nature informs her parenting style, and she shares her spirituality with her son—despite the eye rolling. In...

#033 — Revolutionizing Parental Leave with a Workplace Advocate With Tracy Candido and Karina Mangu-Ward Becoming a parent is a transformative experience. And an ideal parental leave policy would offer support before, during and after your time off. What if your organization went so far as to provide an advocate—someone who was prepared to communicate your point of view in your absence and keep yo...

#032 — Imago, Infertility and 50/50 Parenting with Tracy Candido and Karina Mangu-Ward “[The fertility struggle] was hard for us both, but it was hard for us together. We were able to kind of knit our relationship, and knit our sorrow and our eventual success into something that made us stronger.” Tracy Candido and Karina Mangu-Ward are both very driven women with Type A personalities who bring in...

#031 — Taking a Maternity Leave When You Run Your Own Business with Stacey Trock Any entrepreneur will tell you that stepping away from your business for a full year is not really an option. So how do you design a maternity leave that works for you—when ‘leaving’ in the true sense of the word is out of the question? Stacey Trock argues that the answer is in scaling back. You don’t have to put your...

#030 — Motherhood, Tech Startups and Giving Up Control with Sara Mauskopf of Winnie  Motherhood can be a real revelation for those of us with Type A personalities. As much as we would like to control our own destiny and schedule our lives according to a predetermined plan, parenting simply doesn’t work that way. Life doesn’t work that way. And neither do startups. Sara Mauskopf was already dealing...

#029 — Unifying Work and Family with Amber Anderson of MORE There are women who pursue entrepreneurship because they have a creative vision to change the world. And then there are women who pursue entrepreneurship because they have to. Amber Anderson was sitting in a conference room with her colleagues, talking about the George Zimmerman trial. As her peers expressed disbelief in the not guilty ve...

#028 — Learning to Drop the Ball with Author and Activist Tiffany Dufu If you’re still trying to figure out how to do it all—to be great mom, a great wife, and a great employee—and you’re starting to realize that it just isn’t possible, it may be time to drop a ball or two. Tiffany Dufu had a reckoning on her first day back at work from maternity leave. After a hectic day running from meeting to m...

#027 — Reframing the Unexpected as Opportunity with Logz.io VP of Sales Bridget Gleason  The one thing Bridget Gleason knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was that she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, providing her kids and her family with an incredible life. And then the universe handed her something completely different. When Bridget’s boys were one and three, her husband left—and she had no choic...

#026 – Infertility, Invisibility with Anne Do you want to be a mother? When was the first time you were asked this question? For Anne, it was at the age of six. And so much of a woman’s identity is tied up in her answer to this question. Anne wasn’t sure how to answer the motherhood question until she met her husband, and then the answer became a resounding yes. She wanted to have a family with th...

#025 – Live and Learn—Out Loud Core values are part of a living document. They grow, change and shift in relationship to the community they guide. And the only way to craft the ‘right’ core values is by creating a draft and shipping it out into the world to see what sticks. Scary as it may be to publish something that you know isn’t perfect, initiating the conversation by sharing the work helps id...

#024 — Decision-Making with Head and Heart with Bonnie Foley-Wong of Pique Ventures Life rarely goes according to plan.  In 2011, Bonnie Foley-Wong had just moved to Vancouver to pursue her dream job. She and her husband had plans to start a family the following year. But eight months in, Bonnie walked away from the great job with great benefits to start Pique Ventures—and getting pregnant was put...

#023 — 40% of American households believe that it is bad for society if mothers work. Because sexism is a global phenomenon, you might believe this statistic to be universal as well—but it just isn’t. In fact, this kind of maternal bias against women in the workplace is a strictly American phenomenon. Diverse cultures from deeply feminist Iceland to ‘one-child policy’ China simply do not have stay...

#022 —Core Value #10 — Culture change starts with stories. Stories are the first part of culture change. In order to create a new future, we have to tell the truth. Part of the process is unearthing all of the stories of what has already happened, and what is currently happening. For Startup Pregnant in particular, so much of the stories of motherhood and parenting are hidden or silenced, not publ...

#021 — Core Value #9 — Most of us have a sixth gear we don’t know about. We’re all capable of far more than we can imagine. At Startup Pregnant, we believe in the power of human potential, both individual and collective. Parenting often teaches us that we have a previously-unknown-to-us “fifth gear,” and then when faced with a challenge, maybe even a sixth gear we can tap into. I first heard of th...

#020 — Core Value #8: Feelings Matter. Carl Jung says that the paradox is one of our most valuable spiritual possessions. So it makes sense that this episode is both difficult and simple—the paradox of life, as always. Our emotional landscapes, who we are inside, and all of our feelings — they matter. But in the business culture and work life today, feelings are often ignored, undervalued, or acti...

#019 — Core Value #7: You don’t have to do things the way they’ve always been done. And startups are one of the best places to imagine new futures. It’s okay to break things, to rebuild things, and to do things differently than the way that they’ve always been done. Startups and Pregnancy have a lot in common because they are both creators of new things—ideas, businesses, structures, life—and to d...

#018 — Core Value #6: What work looks like today is broken. The current version of work—the idea that we work in offices, that we work from 9 to 5, that we’re continuously productive throughout the day, at equal measures—there is overwhelming evidence that this isn’t true. Research shows that we aren’t effective in an 8-hour workday. We’re seeing the results of a broken workplace with the amount o...