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I keep a pair of worn ballet slippers in my closet. The fabric is faded from hours of rehearsal, and the soles are marked from years of turning, stopping, and starting again. Sometimes I put them on just to feel that muscle memory come back. These old shoes remind me of something important: You must keep going when everything hurts.
cLong before I founded Taskrabbit or ever pitched a venture capitalist, I spent years training as a ballerina. Ballet teaches you both physical and psychological discipline. You are expected to make something incredibly difficult look effortless, and to move with control and precision even when your body aches.
There is no moment when you stop and explain that you are struggling. There is no pause to let the audience in on what your feet feel like. You learn early that your job is to hide the pain — and to perform in spite of it.
That same skill set would become useful later, as I built a technology company. Rejection came regularly. Mistakes happened often. My job was to perform anyway. Once, as I arrived at an investor meeting, I accidentally slammed my hand in a car door. I knew instantly that it was broken. I also knew I did not have the luxury of stopping, because I was already fighting an uphill battle as a solo female founder trying to raise capital. So I took a moment to reset, and then walked in and shook every hand with full contact — the kind that says: You can trust me.
In this way, I controlled what the room could see. People saw a confident tech executive, because that’s what I chose to show them.
Today, as an investor with my fund Precedent.vc, I want to see this same skill in founders. I’m not looking for someone who has it all figured out. Instead, I’m looking for someone who can execute when things break. I want founders who feel the pressure, but who don’t let it define or distract them. They must learn to execute confidence, just the way they’d execute any other deliverable. Because after you do that enough times, you can carry confidence into any room.
Just like a ballet dancer does on any stage.
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