Startup Parent

What does it look like to take your work from the corporate world to the freelance world and begin the path of entrepreneurship? How do you take the piecemeal career acquired from many different projects, companies and job-hopping and then go into starting a business?

One of the things that I am fascinated with here at Startup Pregnant is the idea that we are in perpetual startup mode in many senses of the word: in our own lives, in our own careers, in our own journeys. We don’t just pick corporate versus entrepreneurship. That is a false dichotomy. Instead, I find that people end up with these really interesting layered careers where they follow projects or purposes or people and they embed their time and their energy in these various different projects whether or not it looks like a traditional tried and true company, or it looks like building a new endeavor on the side as a branch of a company, becoming an entrepreneur, starting a new initiative or starting a freelancing or side hustle career or even starting a company on your own.

Today, we talk to Randi Zinn, who is the founder of Beyond Mom. Randi lost her father when she 25, which affected her emotionally, philosophically, psychology, and also, it set her on a new career path. Her dad was an entrepreneur, and while she thought that she would be going straight from graduate school into a world of media, she ended up on a slightly different path.

Randi is an author, a wellness expert and the founder of a site, company, blog and suite of tools called Beyond Mom. Beyond Mom is a company that provides things like wellness retreats, mindfulness at work, encouragement for women an overall philosophy and ethos supporting women interested in taking back their right to self-love, self-care and community. Randi encourages moms to cultivate a life beyond mom, one that embraces the gifts of motherhood, but expresses all that they are as individuals.

IN THIS EPISODE WE TALK ABOUT

• How Randi’s first pregnancy ended in miscarriage but going through a loss with her husband brought them closer together.
• How as an only child herself, Randi loves to learn about the sibling relationship by watching her son and daughter together.
• The way the loss of her father impacted her career trajectory, leading her away from a traditional path in media to following in her entrepreneurial father’s footsteps.
• How yoga entered her life as a stress mediator through this process, but that once she was a mother, teaching and “schlepping” from studio to studio became untenable.
• Her surprise at meeting other mothers who were using their transformation into mothers to gain momentum in changing their career paths as well.
• The organic origins of Beyond Mom and how by spending time with and serving her ideal customer, Randi was able to create an authentic, deeply desired service and brand.
• Beyond Mom’s focus on supporting the entire woman, both on her journey through motherhood and, above all, on her personal journey as she evolves and grows as a whole person.
• How in the inspiration behind her book was to make her message and platform accessible across socioeconomic and geographic lines.
• Why, despite all of the challenges, she commits a large portion of her business to bringing women together in person because that is w

Why is it that the burden of childcare, children and the home is so unequally dumped on women's shoulders? Where did this come from? Why is it happening and what can we do about it?

Women have fought for equality in the workplace for a long time. It’s something that is publicly talked about and advocated for and a current movement in today’s society. But what about our not-so-public lives? What about life at home?

For many women, there is nothing as maddening as coming home and realizing that there is the second shift and an incredible amount of work that disproportionately falls on your shoulders. For women across the country, this includes the domestic labor of the home, caring for children and all of the maintenance required from invisible labor to mental load. Some would call this emotional labor to the organizational and the logistical work. Well, it’s enough to drive people crazy, or to divorce.

The hardest part is that once children enter the picture, people who believe that they are in equal partnerships often find that women are the ones that take on the burden of domestic work. Why is this happening? Why isn't it budging and why is it so enraging?

Today we get to have Darcy Lockman on the show to talk about exactly this. Darcy is a former journalist turned clinical psychologist and the author of a book called All The Rage: Men, Women and the Myth of Equal Partnership. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Psychology Today and Rolling Stone, among others. She lives with her husband and children in Queens.

Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startupparent.com/119.

Darcy Lockman is a former journalist turned clinical psychologist. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Psychology Today, and Rolling Stone, among others. She lives with her husband and baby daughter in Queens.

#118 — If You Work Hard Enough You Can Do Anything, Except Get Pregnant: A Journey Through Infertility

What happens when the medical establishment ignores your concerns, complaints and symptoms? When your doctor tells you everything is normal even though everything in your body is telling you it's not? How do you recover from a traumatic birth and near-death experience that could—and should—have been prevented?

Today we get to hear from Lucy Knisley, New York Times bestseller and author of the brilliant, brave, terrifying, and hilarious graphic memoir Kid Gloves: Nine Months of Careful Chaos about all of those questions.

Having always known she wanted to be a mother and having considered herself very well-informed on reproductive rights and health, Knisley was shocked by how daunting the actual process of becoming pregnant was. In her words, “I was like, ‘All right. I'm informed. I know what to do. I'm healthy. I'm ready for this. We've got a home. We've got a stable environment to bring a kid into.’ They say there's no perfect time and there isn't, but we were prepared as well as we could be. Then everything went wrong.”

Everything that went wrong included two miscarriages, uterine surgery, grueling nausea once she finally became pregnant and then total exhaustion later in pregnancy. Most frightening and serious of all, Lucy suffered through undiagnosed preeclampsia for much of her third trimester. By the time she finally gave birth to her son via C-section, she suffered a number of seizures, lost half her blood and was in a coma for several days. Knisley almost died because her experiences, symptoms, and fears were dismissed by several medical professionals over months of her pregnancy and birth. (Yes, we are enraged by this too.)

Today we also hear from Knisley about the following: her very structured schedule for creating her graphic novels, why she has decided that it’s best for her son to be an only child, her partner’s journey through deciding whether he wanted to be a parent, and why, despite the deep trauma of her birth story, Knisley feels incredibly fortunate.

IN THIS EPISODE WE TALK ABOUT

• Knisley's view on her comics and graphic novels as a way to share and connect while being true to her introspective, introverted self.
• How, despite volunteering at Planned Parenthood and receiving sexual education in school, Knisley felt shockingly uninformed about what it takes to actually get and remain pregnant.
• The way that experiencing miscarriages flipped her previous understanding of delivering a healthy baby as the top response to intentionally unprotected sex.
• The enormous disservice we do to all potential parents by not properly educating our children on the frequency of miscarriage, infertility, and undiagnosed infertility.
• How shame inducing and isolating it is to be told to keep early pregnancy to yourself, which also of course means, “Keep your losses to yourself. They’re personal and private.”
• How deeply alone and ignored Knisley felt in her grief over her miscarriages until she chose to share her own story. “After I started to talk about it, it seemed like everyone I had ever met had experienced something similar. All of a sudden, these stories came out of the woodwork and everyone had something to offer. That was so incredibly healing for me to hear these other stories of surviva

What happens when you and your co-founder are both mothers? Can you modify your work schedule without altering your ambition? What type of project is worthy of your precious time and attention? 

Sometimes it takes a while to find the career path you really love. For Sonia Chang, it took a while to settle into and really own that entrepreneurship was something she felt called to do. Today, she is the co-founder of a brand new company called Playfully. She spent 10 years in product management and digital consumer products before she finally jumped into the entrepreneurial waters.

Sonia is the mom of two young kids and has another one on the way and she is thrilled to be working on building products that make life easier for new parents. Today, we talk about how she took a long-term view of her career. Her advice: don't settle for a job or a career that doesn't feel like it's authentically you. It's also okay to be patient and to wait for the right professional opportunity to come along, even if you have to make short-term sacrifices, like staying in a less an ideal job for longer than you had wanted to.

Her background includes a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She has worked for a long time building digital consumer products at companies including Amazon, Zulily, Poshmark and Shutterfly. Just this last year in 2018, she left the corporate world to pursue her longtime dream of becoming an entrepreneur and she co-founded Playfully.

One of the fascinating things about the company is not the product, although we'll talk about the product on the show. The fact that it is co-founded by two moms who work a very different schedule by design: they agree to meet three times a week in-person, but the rest of the work that they do is done in and around their kids.

Listen in as we talk about Sonia'a career path, her partnership, her fertility story and how IVF (in vitro fertilization) is part of that journey and how she navigates co-parenting and why equal partnerships are, to her, one of the fundamental pieces that make entrepreneurial journeys possible.

IN THIS EPISODE WE TALK ABOUT

• How Sonia’s first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage and set off a multi-year journey through infertility.
• The ways in which Sonia reflects with gratitude on her infertility and IVF journey and how that has profoundly shaped and altered the type of parent she is to her children.
• How Sonia and her partner divide child care and household duties 50/50.
• How a project manager uses Asana at home to maximize efficiency and enjoyment.

 
FULL SHOW NOTES

Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/117.

Sonia Chang is the co-founder of Playfully, a baby and child development app that provides parents quick, fun, expert-backed activities and tips to promote their child’s development. An accomplished product management leader, she has 10-plus years of experience building digital consumer products at companies including Amazon, Zulily, Poshmark, and Shutterfly. In 2018, she left the cor

#116 — Crossing the Threshold to Motherhood: Ceremony, Ritual, and Healing Rites of Passage

How do you prepare for birthing another child when your first birth experience was traumatic? Can new mothers be realistically expected to process and integrate their birth and transformation experience when they work up until 40 weeks and are back just a few weeks later? How can we create space, ceremony, and ritual to promote healing, integration, and to fully honor women crossing the threshold into motherhood?

Kari Azuma was a successful leadership coach for five years before the traumatic birth of her son in 2015. Navigating and healing from her postpartum depression and “full-blown identity crisis” were among the most challenging experiences of her life, but also inform what she views as her life’s work: reigniting the view of motherhood as a rite of passage—full of ceremony, healing, and powerful ritual—for Western mothers.

She also makes the spiritual case for paid leave: motherhood is a profound transition that we simply cannot prepare for when working up until we give birth. Kari believes that much of the trauma we experience in birth as well as the postpartum depression and anxiety is at least partly to blame on the negligible space we give women on either side of their births. In other cultures, rites of passages are demarcated by space leading up to the transition to emotionally and spiritually prepare. This time is filled with ceremony and ritual and ideally, allows the woman to cross the threshold to new mother and give birth in a fully embodied, empowered way.

We speak to Kari at 37 weeks pregnant with her second child, a daughter, and learn about all of the healing work she has done personally over the past three years and how that has profoundly influenced the type of coaching work she does now. We get to hear about the ritual and ceremony she is creating in her own life leading up to her second birth and how we might incorporate this type of slow, quiet, space for ourselves.

IN THIS EPISODE WE TALK ABOUT

• How Kari is creating space in her life for ceremony leading up to the birth of her second child.
• How her desire to have a home birth and her birth expectations with her first child turned deeply traumatic when she ended up with her “worst nightmare” of a hospital c-section.
• The ways in which having a traumatic birth opened a new portal for her and the work she feels called to do, guiding women through the passage to motherhood.
• How she spent three years healing, processing, integrating the birth experience, the death of her old self, and her own birth as a mother.
• The ways in which she is navigating holding hope and setting intentions for the birth of her daughter with a planned VBAC at home, while simultaneously releasing the idea that she can control or fight her way to a preferred birth experience.
• The spiritual case for paid leave or why Kari believes that some postnatal anxiety and depression can be linked to how little time and space we give mothers to slow down and prepare on deeper levels for the birth of their children.
• How she helps clients honor this transition to motherhood through traditional rites of passage ceremonies and rituals.
• How hard it can be to ask for and step into open space before birth when we are used to pushing hard and driving projects forward.
• The counterintuitive healing power of being in a space with people who aren’t expecting you to heal.
• How severing one’s past self and incorporating one’s vision for oneself as a mother are some of the crucial parts of becoming a mother that Western culture is missing today.
• How a coach of pregnant and new mothers balances business with her own pregnancy and maternity leave.

What happens when you get pregnant as you are trying to launch a podcast about bias in the workplace against mothers? Why is the dominant cultural story about miscarriage and fertility trauma that if you end up with a kid, it's all okay? And who should you be looking for in a company when you're considering a new job?

Today we get to hear from Katherine Goldstein, award winning journalist and host of the inimitable, brilliant new podcast: The Double Shift.

Goldstein created The Double Shift to tell diverse, three dimensional, powerful stories of mothers as complete humans. At every turn she was forced to explain that, no, this is not a podcast about parenting. No, this podcast will not hit the single note of just how hard it is to be a working mother. This podcast will, finally, allow us all to see working mothers as people with their own stories, ambitions, and struggles beyond their children.

Before podcasting, Goldstein spent several years researching bias and discrimination against mothers in the workplace. It seemed to her the deepest irony that she became pregnant while in immersed in the hectic world of pitching media companies and just how vulnerable that pregnancy made her professional ambitions feel.

Her pregnancy ultimately ended in a miscarriage, and Goldstein goes deep here, talking about all of the ways we as a culture fail to understand and help parents process their grief and trauma around pregnancy loss.

Today we also hear from Goldstein about: the blatant bias and discrimination against women in the workplace, why people in power love to push the myth of personal responsibility and “leaning in” to workers rather than deal with just how broken our working culture is, and why she feels uniquely positioned to tell diverse, meaningful stories of motherhood in order to highlight and shift just how marginalized mothers are in America.

• How Katherine navigated the experience of early pregnancy while shopping her podcast pilot to major media networks.
• Her experience with miscarriage and her desire to change how we speak about miscarriage and fertility struggles as a culture, moving away from the myth that if you end up with a child, everything worked out. She believes this edits out women whose experiences don’t end with a child from the whole conversation and forces women who’ve experienced real and meaningful trauma to act as though nothing happened.
• Goldstein’s decision to share her audio recordings of her pregnancy and miscarriage with The Double Shift audience as an episode in order to show just one of the three-dimensional, complex experiences that so many mothers have.
• The $2,500 bill Goldstein got from her insurance company to pay for the D&C procedure she needed to have after her miscarriage and her realization of just how harmful our entire healthcare system is to the working poor.
• Her biggest takeaways after spending a year reporting as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard on the open secret of anti-mother discrimination in American workplaces.
• How mothers, but not fathers, are punished for having children in their prime childbearing years and are never able to recover from the massive hit their earnings take as new mothers.

How can or should entrepreneurship change in order to meet our changing life needs? What does it look like to be a business owner as a person without children versus one with kids? And what does it feel like to go through unexplained secondary infertility?

Today we get to hear from Reina Pomeroy, coach, business owner and mother of two, across a breadth of experiences. She shares everything from her experience starting multiple businesses, to her multi-year infertility journey, to how sometimes our professional paths only make sense in hindsight. Through it all, Reina’s openness, vulnerability, and deep passion for her work shine through.

Reina Pomeroy is a focus coach for creative entrepreneurs and the founder of Reina & Co. What began as a side hustle is now a business with six team members that can offer her fully paid maternity leave. That being said, her journey, like so many of ours, felt scattered and non-linear as she lived it but now it makes sense in helping her learn important skills.

Her signature program, called The Dreamy Client Magnet, helps creative entrepreneurs get laser-focused on who they want to serve and who they want to work with and what their boundaries are so that they can book more dreamy clients with ease, get paid to do what they love, and have the freedom and flexibility to enjoy it all. The program covers how to stop doing things just because you’re good at them, and instead how to focus on what you love doing and creating space for freedom and flexibility. If you want to know where you can focus your business, that’s what today’s chat is all about.

We then get to dig into Reina’s very thoughtful and simple Social Glue Strategy, which is all about how to connect with more people one-on-one and how to use connecting authentically with other people as a strategic tool in your business. This is especially useful if you’re an online or a digital entrepreneur and you may be don’t run into a lot of people, because your office happens to be your bedroom, or your closet, or a co-working space.

Along the way, Reina also tells us about her own journey. She shares what it was like to be an entrepreneur without kids (hint: you have a lot more time to “hustle” and are a lot less tired), to switching professions after having her first baby after realizing just how precious her time and energy are. And while she is now planning out her fully paid maternity leave, there was a multi-year period in her life where she and her husband dealt with unexplained secondary infertility, or infertility that occurs after having already had a successful pregnancy. Along the way her son tried to ask Alexa for a baby, she and her husband prepared for IVF, and then ultimately conceived just hours before their first in vitro appointment.

IN THIS EPISODE WE TALK ABOUT

• How Reina helps creative entrepreneurs get laser-focused on who they want to serve and who they want to work with and what their boundaries are so that they can book more dreamy clients with ease, get paid to do what they love, and have the freedom and flexibility to enjoy it all.
• Her non-linear path to entrepreneurship that might not “make sense on LinkedIn” but helped her gain the skills she needed to run her current, very successful coaching business.
• How Reina’s natural inclination to check in with and connect with people has become her most valuable trait and a skill she t

Why is so much parenting advice seemingly in direct conflict with others? How do we determine who is correct? How do we make these emotional decisions for ourselves?

Esther Wojcicki is considered the most influential educator in contemporary times and her pedagogical and epistemological philosophy is being adapted by local Silicon Valley schools as well as national and global educational programs. She is the pioneer of Moonshot Thinking, a program that she uses in schools, and her influence in technology-enabled schools has been central to the tenants and design of new modern education systems.

She is also known as the mother in Silicon Valley who raised three of the most successful women in the United States. You may recognize her as the mother of Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube; of Janet Wojcicki, who has a PhD in medical anthropology and teaches at the University of California San Francisco’s medical center; and Anna Wojcicki, the founder of the biotech and genetics testing company 23andMe.

Today on this episode we get to talk to Esther about her core principles in her pedagogical style and her parenting style. How she promotes independence, critical thinking and encourages kids to dive into topics that truly excite them. Her focus and work is on how to help children become young adults by developing the self-sufficiency to take control of their futures.

• How pregnancy and birth recommendations have changed over the last 40 years.
• How giving even the youngest children jobs or tasks can increase their feelings of accomplishment and self-worth.
• The value behind speaking to babies and toddlers like they are a partner and understanding presence.  
• Her acronym for success, TRICK, which stands for: trust, respect, independence, collaboration and kindness.
• That giving young children the space to be independent teaches them that: they are capable and that you trust them.
• How the single piece of advice Dr. Woj wants to pass on to new mothers is quite simple: trust yourself. No one knows your baby better than you.
• What Dr. Woj considers to be the main value of sleep training (hint: it’s not sleep).
• How successful businesses embody the same relationship with their employees that Dr. Woj used to raise her children and currently uses with her students.
  
  

FULL SHOW NOTES

Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/113.

Wojcicki is a leading American educator, journalist and mother. Leader in Blending Learning and the integration of technology into education, she is the founder of the Media Arts program at Palo Alto High School, where she built a journalism program from a small group of 20 students in 1984 to one of the largest in the nation including 600 students, five additional journalism teachers, and nine award-winning journ

#112 — Universal Paid Family Leave By 2020: Meet One of the Women Pushing for Our Rights

Why is the United States the only developed nation without any guaranteed family leave? How did we fall so far behind Europe, Canada and South America? And who is suffering the brunt of the impact from this lack of policy?

“One in four people {in the US} who give birth go back to work within two weeks. That’s horrendous.” Fabiola Santiago is on a mission with Paid Leave United States (PL+US) to right that wrong and to provide high quality paid family leave for everyone.

Before fighting for this comprehensive leave policy, PL+US had to address several historic blind spots, like: how exactly do we define family to reflect people’s realities and to be more inclusive of “non-traditional” relationships? And how do we expand the type of life events covered in leave policy to accurately serve all types of caretaking and medical needs? And how can we ensure that this type of leave will be universal to all persons in the US?

Today we learn from Fabiola how the current lack of paid leave is most harmful to two groups of already vulnerable populations: women of color and low earners. She shares how our staggering maternal death rate for women of color is exacerbated by a systemic lack of leave and support for new mothers and how low-income earners do not have the flexibility to survive on anything short of full wage replacement.    

PL+US is fighting for a leave policy that:

• is 6 months long;
• includes 100% wage replacement, especially for low earners;
• Includes job protection; and
• Expands the definition of family to meet the realities of all Americans.

On today’s episode, we get to talk with Fabiola Santiago about how PL+US bases their policy on the experiences and moral authority of the populations they most desire to serve and protect, about how current leave policy is really an elite privilege granted to white collar workers, and about the “race to the top” in portions of the private sector to attract top talent with top leave policies.

• Why in order to effectively craft a truly universal family leave we must first acknowledge who has historically fallen through the cracks.
• How the “race to the top” to create top-notch family leave policy in the tech sector is actually serving to increase inequality.
• Why six months is viewed as a crucial amount of leave time, especially for new parent and infant well-being.
• How full wage replacement during leave is crucial for the substantial portion of the US living paycheck to paycheck.
• Who the sandwich generation is and how this will influence the shape of effective leave policies.
• The surprising ways doulas and doctors of color can impact maternal mortality rates and how powerful organizations like “Roots of Labor” are bridging the chasm in how we provide inclusive care for all populations
• Why we need to be thinking “more abundantly” in terms of health outcomes for mothers of color.
• How people in power can most effectively use their position to im

Why is so much parenting advice seemingly in direct conflict with others? How do we determine who is correct? How do we make these emotional decisions for ourselves?

Emily Oster, author of the wildly popular “Expecting Better” is back to apply her economist’s data-driven lens to the big questions of early childhood parenting: Should I breastfeed? Will sleep training harm my child? What are the real risks and benefits of vaccinations?

The data she uncovers is surprising. Some running directly counter to popularly held beliefs, others supporting both sides of a firmly entrenched debate. Oster is relatable and judgment free as she tells stories of how her research impacted her own parenting and which information she mosts wishes she’d had access to before giving birth for the first time eight years ago.

In many circumstances, Oster proves that conflicting information from seemingly opposing camps can actually both be correct. If someone tells you to breastfeed and someone else tells you to formula feed, what are you to do with this conflicting information? According to Oster, be informed and empowered by data, then make the best decision for your child, yourself, and your family.

Oster’s goal is not to shock parents with data or make them act counter to their intuition, but rather to help make parents more empowered, comfortable, and confident in their decision making process. Even for her, data only plays a partial role in her decisions. The rest is a careful consideration of what is best for her child, herself, and her family.

On today’s episode, we get to talk with Emily Oster about the big topics of debate in early childhood parenting as well as learn about how she coordinates her family’s schedules, how she interprets her personal work vs. stay at home debate, and what she wishes she knew before giving birth for the first time almost a decade ago.

IN THIS EPISODE WE TALK ABOUT

• Why so many of the conversations around parenting are completely baby-centric and what is missing when we don’t consider parental and familial well-being.
• Emily’s own struggles with breastfeeding and how the data around the benefits of breastfeeding really surprised her.
• The ingenious decision Emily made to implement the task management software at home that she uses at work and how that has changed her and her partner’s communication.
• How to set up an operations manual for your family so that you can travel (for work or pleasure) and someone else can smoothly run your day-to-day family operation.
• Why we can be more confident about the data on sleep training than other areas of parenting. And importantly, why whether you choose to sleep train your baby or not, you are correct.
• How Oster herself chooses to use (and not use) data in her own decision making around her family and children, and how you can implement her three-pronged approach to making your own choices.
• The surprising ways the complex-sounding economic term “decreasing value of marginal utility” is applied to parenting and work.

FULL SHOW NOTES

Get the complete show notes with episode qu