The Startup Wife(53)
“What was Rory’s objection?” I ask.
“The inside of the hardware contains plastic,” she explains. “He’s against plastic in all forms.”
“I guess there’s going to be a lot of leftover plastic in the afterworld,” Destiny says.
“Rory lives in a plastic-free commune in Bushwick, and they make their own toilet paper.”
“Out of what?”
“Out of other pieces of paper.”
“His poor butt,” I say. “You should definitely have sex with him. For the sake of his raw behind.”
“What? I’m not going anywhere near that thing.”
“I just meant in general—never mind. Let’s go talk to other people.” Just then the host takes to the stage, and the room goes quiet. “I’d like to introduce our panel for the evening,” she says. “Ladies, welcome to Mary McGreen, Manishala Brown, and Selina Lewis.”
We clap. Three impeccably dressed women take seats onstage. The woman in the middle, Manishala Brown, has long braids falling down over her shoulders and enormous boots on her feet. I love her immediately. She is flanked by two white women, both sporting the kind of calm confidence and grooming that comes from being older, wiser, and richer than everyone else in the room. “Each of our panelists has had enormous success in crashing through the glass ceiling. They’ve started companies, taken companies public, sat on boards, and seen the whole funding cycle through from seed to IPO. What would you tell your younger selves about the challenges and opportunities of being a female founder?”
The woman on the left, Mary McGreen, speaks first. “I would tell her to relax and have more fun,” she says, and the audience titters. “No, but seriously. Ask yourself if you’re enjoying the ride. Because with all the pressures heaped on us, it’s easy to forget that we need to find joy too.” I nod, feeling joyful, or maybe just high from Li Ann’s pot.
“I would tell her to take less bullshit,” Manishala Brown says.
“Amen!” someone from the audience shouts.
“The number of times I brushed off some sexist or racist comment, thinking, well, that guy’s a product of his generation, he didn’t mean it—each of those times, I knew I was giving a free pass to someone who did not deserve it, but I didn’t have the confidence to call him out.”
More cheers. I find myself doing a “Woo-hoo!” and thinking of Crazy Craig and those guys in suits and even Rupert, who almost never looks at me, even if he’s asking a direct question about the algorithm I invented.
Selina Lewis clears her throat. “If I may,” she says in a clipped British accent, “I must disagree. Let’s be realistic. If we don’t sometimes give men a free pass, as you say, we are going to sabotage ourselves. You may think, from reading the newspaper or social media, that the world has fundamentally changed, but it hasn’t. It’s still the same people in power, and if you want to get into the club, you have to first play by the rules. Then, perhaps, you might have the fortune to change it from the inside.”
“Selina, with all due respect, I just don’t buy that,” Manishala says.
Selina does an exaggerated shrug. “You can buy it or not—it’s reality.”
“So you’re saying we should all be on board with a little light workplace harassment?”
“Harassment, absolutely not. But giving a man the benefit of the doubt, not pouncing on everything he says, so that he takes you into his confidence, yes.”
Manishala leans back, rolls her eyes. I sense that the audience of women like me, founders and wannabe founders, are on the fence. They want to agree with Manishala. They want to say “fuck you” every time some guy uses a woman’s body as a way of describing something—We’re already pregnant, let’s just push this thing out or: Should we open the full kimono?—but they know they’re going to walk into that office or that pitch meeting, and they’re going to feel like they have to bro it up with all the other guys, because who wants to be the uptight girl who makes everyone shush the minute she walks into the room? We want to be on the inside, we want to hang. We want to be cool. And we want to win.
Manishala is talking about how she started A Friend in Need, a fintech company focused on lending money to women. She tells us no one would fund her until a female VC stepped up and saw the opportunity. “We have to back each other,” she says. “Not because we’re being nice or because of the sisterhood. We have to back each other because we see things—financial opportunities—that men don’t. My company is worth two hundred million dollars, and I have made money for the woman who bet on me. No one gets to tell her she did me a favor, she just valued the investment on different terms.”
The crowd cheers. We see ourselves on that stage, each one of us, hoping we’re going to defy the odds. And for the first time, I feel a little pang of regret. Why didn’t I front the WAI? Why did I wed my idea to a man and push him to take center stage when I was the one who stayed up nights making it a reality? It wasn’t Cyrus’s fault—at least not initially—that I couldn’t have imagined putting myself out there and saying, This thing is real. Back me. Now it’s too late—the cult of Cyrus has begun, and although I have a seat at the table, it isn’t my table, it’s his. His and Rupert’s and all the other men who are going to fund the business.