How life prepared me for building a startup in 2020
30 years ago today, my parents and I boarded a train to immigrate to Sweden. This experience came with incredible challenges and obstacles. But mainly it opened up opportunities that I could never have dreamed of otherwise.
As 2020 is luckily nearing its end, I’ve reflected on how my immigrant background and other outsider experiences have prepared me for starting a company in a crazy year like this.
It’s not people like myself (women, immigrants, no family wealth) who get most of the opportunities to start companies. We don’t fit VC’s pattern matched molds. But we’re actually the ones to have the grit, determination, and scrappiness to build a great business, particularly when things get hard, like in a financial downturn.
Here’s a few examples that came to mind:
1. Resilience: As a dark haired kid in a very homogeneous Sweden, I faced racism at every stage. I quickly learned the language, then how to adapt, persist, work harder than everyone around me, and ultimately succeed on the merits. Good preparation, because that’s what building a new company during a financial downturn is all about as well. Closing contracts is harder than ever, even if you uniquely solve your customers’ biggest problem. Investors will not throw money at you like they did with companies in the years prior. They’re now particularly risk averse with anyone who doesn’t neatly fit their pattern matching of what a startup founder looks like. So we need to work harder than ever and succeed on the merits. It’s the only path.
2. Scrappiness and a maker mentality: Growing up, I worked for an environmental magazine. Wind power was highly debated in Sweden at the time. I wanted to make wind power less abstract to help other kids participate in this conversation about their future. So I built a mini wind turbine on the roof of our office out of an old bike wheel and a dynamo light for a story in the paper. It was a hit and a lot of fun. This experience (and many like it) taught me the value of scrappiness and focus on “making” to bring about the change I want in the world. A similarly scrappy mentality has helped us figure out our course as an early stage company in this 2020 turmoil.
3. A sense of humor: After high school, I bought a one way ticket to Dublin and applied for jobs from an Internet cafe at the airport. Never so much as having met anyone with an Irish accent before, I was up for a challenge. Next morning, after an eventful interview (long story!), I got a job as a song and drama teacher. Later, my boss promoted me to … a fairy princess. Working children parties in my fairy outfit with a group of much older performing artists taught me to see humor in everything and laugh at life because what else can you do. So whenever things wouldn’t go as we hoped for our company this year because COVID hit at the worst time, or the 2020 election made some users change-averse, or our California based team got impacted by the smoke from the record-breaking wild fires, we would find the funny in every situation. Humor is how you overcome great challenges.
4. Empathy: My first home in Sweden was an asylum camp with refugees of war, political persecution, and other disasters. Nothing opens up your mind as a child like interacting with people from different countries who’ve been through so much. Some of it I only truly understood years later. Empathy is the core of my thinking process. It’s how I think about team building, product development, sales, customer research, etc. It’s my superpower and I’m lucky to have found a co-founder who shares it. When I see him talking to our users, I know we will succeed because we care.
5. Focus on impact: I achieved things early in my career by working crazy hard. I worked hard on every single thing. But then I became a mother and that fundamentally changed me. I became laser focused on identifying impact before putting in the hours because I now had other demands on my time. Focus on impact is critical for building a company, where there are always 100 more jobs to be done than you have time for. But it’s even more critical when building a company during a financial crisis. You need to use your resources that much more efficiently to stand a chance.
6. Knowledge that everything will ultimately work out: After everything we’ve overcome already, I just know that we will ultimately succeed building a great business. That knowledge helped us move through this crazy year and continue building our company.
