Exit music from a startup

There is no easy way to say this: We are winding down ChairmanMe.?

Right now, the assets are essentially in the hands of our venture debt firm, WTI, who has been extremely gracious about the process thus far as we tried to figure out the best steps forward and how to do right by the many people who have backed and supported us over the years. Efforts are ongoing to find a home for it, or the assets, but clearly, it’s a market where tens of thousands of startups are doing the same. Not great.

While we’ve been preoccupied with this process for more than a month, it wasn't real until I sent it out (a version of this post) in our newsletter, earlier today.?

I’ve spent more than five years telling our community every single thing I’ve gone through personally and professionally in that space, connecting with tens of thousands of you on topics like aging parents, raising queer kids, confronting my own internalized misogyny and prejudices, surviving a global pandemic with young kids and a demanding career, recession proofing my finances, and so much more.?

I’m pretty good at putting intense, often conflicting, emotions into words.?

But with this one, I knew my words would’t do it justice.?

I will never be able to thank our investors enough for seeing past the industry’s atrocious 98% gender bias to disproportionately back us and keep backing us and keep backing us through brutal times. I have been given a shot that almost no women get. My deepest wound is that I have let them down.?

Our team, both the ones who rotated in and out over the last five years, but mostly Shea Ryan and Monica Engel, our incredible technical duo, who were with us from the very beginning and built so much out-of-this-world complicated technology that they made look easy.?

I am flummoxed as to why they trusted us as much as they did with their two incredibly precious resources: Their time and their massive brains and creativity. They could have made so much more money and had such an easier life elsewhere. Monica has moved on to a job at Zoom and MOTHERHOOD!! (yay!) As for Shea. . . well, You’re welcome, I say to the recruiters that swarm her at every moment and have for five years. They are two of the most brilliant people I’ve worked with in my entire Silicon Valley career, and I can’t wait to see all they achieve.???

Catherine Connors and Adimika Arthur were wonderful friends to me during this journey and co-conspirators in all the courses and zooms we created. Fabiola Arroyo has never hesitated to take on anything we’ve asked of her, and Lily Herman has written that d*mn newsletter most of the last five years, without fail or complaint.?

There’s all of the incredible course instructors who have worked for a fraction of what they would normally get paid to help make your lives more rich and more equitable. I’m so grateful for their friendship and belief and brilliance. I will find a way to always collaborate with Lesley Gold, Lisa Cron, Joanna Bloor, Kim Scott and so many others. I owe y’all for life.?

And of course, there’s Paul, who pushed me to do this when I was still scarred and bloodied from Pando, and intended only to work part time on it, before becoming as obsessed with our mission of equality as I was. Building a business with the goal of making the home and the workplace more equal was harder in a lot of ways than investigative journalism. Both were far, far harder than a bookstore. (One day we will pick an easy business to build…)

Without those listed above, (and many more!) we would not have made it this far.?

And every single day we’ve been in business has mattered. Every day we were in business, we changed someone’s life. That’s been the case right up until the week I’m writing this, as we completed our two last bootcamps we’d ever run. I am so proud of all the thousands of individual stories I know of and what we helped you do, accomplish, unlock. I see you all and have carried your wins with me through every stumble this company has faced.?

And that’s why I don’t feel like I’m letting you, our community, down today. You have been our success story, our return on investment. I’ve listened to what you’ve needed and I’ve always tried to build it, calling in every personal favor I can think of along the way. When you’ve been ready to take that step and invest in yourself, we’ve been here to give you anything in our power to get you there. And I am so, so proud of all of you.?

This is why we’ve done it, persisted as long as we did, through chest pains from the stress, days I could barely face the world, or even when Paul and I had to put our own money into this or go without salaries to keep going. I love you. I believe in you. And I’m devoted to you all. I knew together we could get so much farther than we could alone. And we have.?

The journey was the thing for this company, not the outcome. And now it’s time for our journey together in this space to come to an end.?

What happened? In short, the economic headwinds were too great in a market where funding for female founders has fallen below 1%, companies are putting off purchases that aren’t essential, fewer people care about diversity and inclusion, and our core customer is experiencing their own corner of a down market and is spending less. This is to say nothing of our bank failing, other non-competitive, female-founded companies sabotaging our fundraising efforts earlier this year, and our most recent large investor firing our partner in the last year, essentially orphaning us with one of our largest backers. It’s startup life, in other words.

I am writing this well before anyone will read it. I am writing this before I’ve even told many of our stakeholders what is happening. Because for the last five years, nothing in my life has truly happened until I’ve written about it in the newsletter. It’s only in fuzzy black and white before I tell you, and it’s time to move this to the sharp reality of technicolor.?

Thank you for letting us be part of the most important and intimate parts of your life and your journey and for trusting us with things that matter so much. Thank you for believing in us, and yourself and one another.?

I’m not going to talk about this as a failure or blame myself or our team, say what we could or couldn’t have done. I hate to see female founders do that to themselves when they wind up here. Male founders don’t do that, because, again, this is startup life. Startups are hard. You are supposed to try things that work and don’t work. 90% fail, no matter how hard the founding team tries. They are supposed to be things that may or may not make it, or we aren’t reaching far enough.?

As Catherine said when I told her the news: “CM is more than just a start-up. It’s been a community and a family and a movement and a kind of church. Six years is a great run for something that bucked every single convention and every single rule. It’s a cultural lifetime.”

We tried to do things differently, even for a "feminist company." We never went the route of highly paid, application-only, white woman feminism. We never minced words. We were aggressively pro-woman, pro-queer, anti-racist, despite being funded by an establishment that does not support those voices in anything like equal measure. Many people wanted us to fail, because they didn’t want the world we were making possible, because they didn’t like me in particular, in some cases. Others backed us– maybe irrationally– because they were the opposite of that. We were never a company you felt lukewarm about.?

Startups try to help create a better world, and the world isn’t always ready for it. Between a global pandemic, a decimation of women’s rights, and a startup downturn that’s taking out companies worth billions of dollars, I’m frankly in awe of how many near death experiences we’ve survived; how many long odds stacked against us we’ve beaten.?

Y’all have no idea what it’s looked like behind the scenes here. I’m extraordinarily proud of what we’ve done, and the way we’ve done it. The brilliance of our team doesn’t have a dollar sign attached to it as proof, but I see it. We were brilliant and we worked our a***s off to make this work.

“Totally understand you have tried absolutely everything. No shortage of grit,” our largest investor, Tim Connors said when we told him where we were. (Yet another reason he’s so incredible, because that’s the kindest reaction someone can have when told you won’t return millions in capital. ALL of our investors could not have been more gracious when we told them, in fact.)

I know many of you will email to say you are sorry, ask if I’m OK or ask what you can do.?

First of all, there’s no need to say you are sorry. Building this company and getting to know you all has been the opportunity of a lifetime, and I’m nothing but grateful. My “return on investment” has been in every moment of this work, every win you’ve had that we’ve gotten to be a small part of, not to mention all the lifelong friendships I’ve gained.?

During our very last bootcamp I will ever teach, half the cohort was in tears talking about the change that had happened for them in just a week and the magical space where they were allowed to be their whole selves. I wanted to cry, too, because I knew then it would be the last time I had that moment with this incredible community.?

Second, yes, I am OK. I hate that I’ve let down people who believed in me, but that wound will scab over with time. Every moment of the last year (especially) I’ve left it all on the field, written that last marketing email, called in that favor on top of favor . . . I am leaving knowing I couldn’t have done more to make this work. And we can only control how we go out.?

I don’t want anyone to feel bad for me. I’ve been so extraordinarily blessed in being able to do this.?

Can you do anything? Well, we’re still working on finding a home for all the incredible technological and content assets we’ve amassed. If you know someone who wants to help provide all the answers for underrepresented folks to get ahead professionally, we’d love to talk to them.??

I don’t know what is next for me. I have the very real pressure of mortgage and tuition payments, and haven’t had a paycheck in weeks. But there’s still a lot to do to wrap this up with grace and gratitude, and that’s my focus now. I’m going to spend a lot of time hugging my kids and pets. I’m going to build some outdoor furniture up in Idyllwild. I’m going to sell some books in Palm Springs. And I’m going to have a lot of wonderful dinners with friends in San Francisco.?

I will continue to write about my life because that’s what I do whether anyone reads it or not. If you’d like to still hear from me whenever that happens and in whatever form it takes, go here to let me know. It will take five seconds and would be my honor to continue to be in your inbox.

If this is where we part ways, thank you again. Please always know that wherever you are, I believe in you, and you should be asking for more, because you absolutely deserve it. Please continue to hear my voice in your head screaming about your brilliance, drowning out the critical voices in your head. And please let me know if I can ever help you in any way. I’m always here.?

We may not have changed the entire world together, but we changed a lot of corners of it and I know that will continue to ripple. Please keep sharing your wins with us and with the world. Take up space.

I love y’all, and it’s been an honor to be in the trenches with you.?