Founders at Work.pdf

414 Founders at Work
Trott: It’s not like that anymore, but when we fought, we fought out in the
open. That’s one thing that people told me I had to stop. If I’m freaking out
about something, I freak out on the one person I think I can. I mean, I can’t yell
at Barak necessarily, so I’ll yell at the person that I’m married to because it’s
easier to do that.
Whenever we got into really big fights, it was always about something not
working right. And it was me. If something breaks, usually it’s going to be engineering.
It’s not going to be design, because design is something that doesn’t
break. It may not work the way people want it to, but it’s not going to be noticeable.
So I would freak out and say to Ben, “This is down! Don’t you know it’s
down? Don’t you care about the company?” But yelling at Ben isn’t going to fix
it. That’s something I realized. But it’s back to that pregnancy thing; I’ve
blocked out the really bad fights.
Livingston: Why do you think there aren’t more female startup founders?
Trott: This is the part that I always end up regretting because I set the gender
back. I think one of the reasons happens to be that women aren’t always necessarily
that motivated to prove themselves in the way that men are. It’s not saying
that they don’t have ambition; it’s saying that there’s something in our makeup
that makes us be confident more in what we are and what we’ve accomplished
independently without having to say, “I’m a founder, I’m an entrepreneur.”
When I was in school, I was always a class clown. And if I think about the
other people in my class who were class clowns, they weren’t girls. It was me
and a bunch of boys. I think there’s that same sort of personality that makes you
want to do something like start a company, and you can’t do something like that
without wanting to be exposed.
I’ve kind of retreated a bit. I want to be exposed less now. But I’m more
confident in what I’ve done. I’ve always identified more with guys at school and
I’ve always been competitive with them. If you try to figure out the single thing
that made us get to where we are now, it’s my competitiveness with Ben.
When we were in high school, I was practically failing out of my classes. I
hated school. It wasn’t that I wasn’t smart, but I just didn’t care about math and
science. My English and history grades were great, but everything else was horrible.
And then I started going out with Ben and he was valedictorian. I went
from a D average to hanging out with the valedictorian, and I thought, “I don’t
want to be considered the stupid one of us,” so I brought my grade point average
up in the quarter from a D to a B+.
In college, we were always competitive in every class we took. I’d get pissed
off because he was a math major and I was an English major and he decided to
minor in English and then he’d come into my classes and there were a few
where he’d do better than me. I’d say, “Stay in your own field!” But the thing
was with the business, too, I wanted to be successful and he wanted to be successful
at the same time, and so we’ve been competing because we have to be
better than each other.
Livingston: Any other reasons why there aren’t more female founders?