"Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth" - Shamala takeaways from the event "From female Founders to Funders: Challenges and Opportunities"
"Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth" Mike Tyson. I'll get back to this in a bit.
I recently had the pleasure of attending an in-person event honoring female founders and an honest discussion on the current landscape hosted by Kiwitech in San Francisco. An amazing panel of women Jessica CHIN FOO ( She / Her / Elle ) Leslie Goldman Tepper Maryam Haque Shih-Fong Wang spoke about the current landscape and the main takeaways:
*Money is tightening up.
People who do give money are going to give it to those they already know. And this is more of a challenge to women, as men are still the larger set of investors and tend to give to other men first. And white at that.
*As a woman, work and work harder. Get the numbers right.
This one has bothered me a lot and always, everyone on the team and I work tirelessly - but hard work alone does not cut it. In running a start-up, there is a lot of being in the right place at the right time, luck, breaking gender bias, ethnicity bias and so on.
* Show up and get the advice
It is about now that I actually say - show me the money and not advice. Hanai as a start-up has been advised, accelerated, incubated, sometimes intubated. We are walking the walk and doing the work, while we do need advice, we now are drowning in it, we actually need a money boat to bring us to shore :)
* Ride the waves
Which brings me back to the quote earlier - everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face. Being a female founder of a social impact I wake up every day with a plan on how things should unfold for the day, for the week, the month, and as asked often for the next five years. In a world of unpredictability, I plan, and get punched in the face - repeatedly.
But I get up, wipe off the blood, and we carry on.
My eight-year-old, seeing me put up the week's activities on the refrigerator door, asked me recently - why do you plan so much?
Mostly because a semblance of control helps, as we ride the waves of uncertainty that generally punctuates start-up life (and parenthood).
Stay safe all as you ride the waves and may there be fewer punches today.