Releasing Fear
Playing at the edge to find out what's beyond it
“If I fuck you, will you invest in my company?” I said with a perfectly straight face.
And then we both burst into laughter.
I was sitting across the table from an ex-founder who had successfully IPO’d his company and did have significant resources to invest in my company.
We were each playing a role in a “persona” dinner at a founder retreat hosted by Dave Kashen. Each of us had been tasked with stepping into a persona that was far from our usual identity in order to learn what could be found from exploring the edge of who we thought we were. He had been invited to act like the douchebag he was very far from, and I was invited to “show romantic interest in every person there” (with consent).
When I’m invited to play at the edge, I rise to the challenge.
Over the next 10 minutes after my opening line, we collectively conspired to create a deal that was absurd both for how wild it was and how it pointed to something so unspoken in Silicon Valley that all we could do was laugh. And for me, it was deeply healing.
One of my great fears as a founder that never happened was being hit on by potential or current investors. I had heard stories from other women founders who had experienced this. I was running an explicitly sex-positive company serving non-monogamous communities, and I thought investors would interpret that in a way I didn’t want them to. I had been inappropriately propositioned in almost every job I’d ever had and from MIT professors. Before fundraising, I experienced a lot of agitation and distress by anticipating the fear of what might happen. And it never did.
Getting to step into that fear directly and play it out was incredibly empowering and healing. The deal we “arranged,” though absurd and fantastical, is perhaps a deal I might have taken with the right energy. I joked in our banter that “everything has a price.” And while that deal was imaginary, getting to explore it from a place of empowerment helped me release the last remaining dregs of the fear.
My YC company is profitable, so we’ll never again be reliant on prospective investors who may or may not want additional benefits for their investment. I’ve also shied away from fundraising out of fear of investors having control and exerting that for whatever additional benefits they want. Was this fear real? Well, all fears are. Whether it will happen or not is beside the point.
Releasing the fear creates choice. Optionality. If I’m not afraid of investors making bonus requests as part of their investment decision, I have more choice as to whether to raise money or not.
As founders, we’re all running fears on a subconscious frequency in our psyche, and they affect every decision we make and the way we run our business. Bringing them into the light can allow us to understand them, get curious about them, and release them, so that we have more opportunity to make different choices than the patterned cycle of decisions that led us here.
If you want explore your underlying fears to create more space in your decision-making, this is something I coach founders on as an executive coach. Reach out for a discovery call: lunarayemail@gmail.com.