The episode below was recorded with Lindy as a special for International Womens’ Month. We wanted to dive deeper into her experience dealing with imposter syndrome and place a specific lens on how this takes shape for female founders across the industry.
“I am large, I contain multitudes”
We are all complex individuals made up of the various experiences we’ve had and the pasts that have added up to bring us to our present. That’s a truism. It’s trite in its obviousness.
What isn’t always so obvious is how we feel about our accomplishments and the various parts of our journey that have brought us to this present moment.
Despite our various accomplishments, our education, our successes, our triumphs, we may still finding ourselves with the dreaded “imposter syndrome” feeling that no matter what we have achieved, we are still just not enough, and it’s only a matter of time until everyone starts to see us as the frauds we believe ourselves to be.
In my experience as a former tech founder, this kind of ‘imposter syndrome’ gets amplified tenfold in the tech ecosystem.
If you are a tech founder, then you live in a world of “show”. What I mean by this is:
- You must be “on show” each and every time you are pitching or talking with potential investors. You want them to be excited about your company and product. You want them to believe in you. You do not want them to hear your screaming insecurities.
- You must be “on show” when you are in sales mode with your customers. And in the early days, if you are the founder, then you should be doing founder-led sales, helping your customers and prospective customers to believe in you and your product. You do not want them to hear your screaming insecurities.
- You must be “on show” when you start onboarding your first team members in the early days. You need your team to believe in you and the company they’ve joined. They need to believe in the mission and their future with the company. You do not want them to hear your screaming insecurities.
And so you are often living a kind of performance. That’s not to say that the performance isn’t real, because it is. Your company and product are THE BEST to invest in, to buy, and to work for. It’s true. You believe this and know this to be true.
And at the same time, you might also feel like a bit of a fraud. Or that it’s only a matter of time until the Jenga blocks you are building begin to topple and fall.
But the reality of these feelings, that consistently seem to be at odds with each other, is nonetheless true. Antinomy refers to the apparent mutual incompatibility of two notions that are equally valid or correct. It applies to this feeling of simultaneously being unendingly confident and excited about your startup – the value creation for investors, the way the product revolutionizes something for your customers, and the workplace that gives a home to your employees – and also being wracked with insecurities.
As a tech leader and entrepreneur, we can feel the weight of heavy decisions landing upon us and not know if we have the right to make such hard choices for those in our ecosystem. It’s a lot to carry on your shoulders as an entrepreneur, especially if the back of your mind is screaming with “imposter syndrome” messages.
So if that is a very common experience, what do you do with it?
Here are two key things to get you started:
- Know that you are not alone. Find your peers. Find your fellow founders. This is one of the values of an accelerator like L-Spark. You can meet other founders at similar stages. They will then be the CEOs of companies growing and scaling alongside yours, and they will continue to be your peers.
- Find your places to be unscripted. If you have to be “on show” in a variety of places, find those places where you can be unplugged and vulnerable. Is that in your yoga class? Maybe when you’re out on a run? Perhaps you go to church or it’s with your family? Wherever those places are where you can put off the bravado and just be a smaller version of yourself can help.
So, rest assured that being a founder can be strange and lonely. You can feel the antinomy of both being amazing and full of confidence AND holding on with sheer, white knuckled terror.
And one day, I’ll tell you all about how that is the same when you go from being a professor to being a tech founder to being a tech executive to being a tech banker! Talk about various antinomies! As Walt Whitman once wrote: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
