Startup Parent

#004 — Most new moms head back to work about 12 weeks after giving birth. The problem is that this is often several months before women are physically and emotionally ready. Scientific data and anecdotal evidence point to the six-month mark as the time when moms start to feel adept again (and for some women, it takes longer). The United States is one of the worst countries in the world (bottom three) offering zero paid maternity leave for new parents, often putting women, partners, and children in tricky to dire situations that don’t help with those early days of recovery and new life.

But return to work we do, and Lauren Smith Brody, the founder of The Fifth Trimester movement and the former editor of Glamour magazine, dubbed those sleep-deprived transition months after the newborn days the “fifth trimester,” or the period when the working mom is born.

So how do we navigate this ‘fifth trimester’ when we’re still in the newborn haze?

By asking for the things we need.

When Lauren Smith Brody returned to work after having her first son, she was very transparent about what she was going through. As the executive editor of a prestigious magazine, she wanted to mentor younger colleagues and change the perception of parenthood in the workplace. And after having her second son, Lauren was inspired to take her mentorship to the next level, making the shift from publishing to entrepreneurship. She wrote The Fifth Trimester, a book to help new and expectant mothers prepare for working motherhood, and now she’s moving to Phase B of the business, consulting with companies to upgrade policy and foster support of new parents in the workplace.

Today, Lauren shares her advice for new moms returning to work and her vision of ideal workplace culture. I ask her about the impetus for writing The Fifth Trimester, the shift from publishing to entrepreneurship, and what she would say to aspiring entrepreneurs. Listen to learn what friends and family can do to support new moms, the concept of self-soothing for parents, and your most important job as a woman and a new mother: getting really good at asking for what you need—both at home and at the office.

Sponsor offers, full show notes and more from the episode:

Thank you to the sponsor of this episode: Taskerly! They’re a virtual assistant company that helps busy parents and entrepreneurs get more done at work by doing the things you can outsource of don’t have time for. Check them out at www.taskerly.co and mention the Startup Parent Podcast to get 10% off of your first three months working with them.

All of our sponsor offers are available on our website for you to grab the perks and discounts offered to podcast listeners: http://startupparent.com/sponsors

And get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at www.startupparent.com/004 

Learn more about Lauren Smith Brody

Lauren Smith Brody had a 16-year career in publishing culminating in the role of Executive Editor for Glamour magazine. After becoming a mom, Lauren conceived of the Fifth Trimester Movement to help parents and businesses revolutionize workplace culture. Her bestseller, The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom’s Guide to Style, Sanity, and Big Success After Baby was released in April 2017.

#003 — "If you can parent, you can be an entrepreneur: because you don’t know anything about what you’re doing, and you’re doing the most important job in the world."

Nicole Walters is a mother of three kids and the CEO of Monetize Thyself, a consulting firm that specializes in income makeovers. I met Nicole at a conference for bloggers, and her energy and enthusiasm made us fast friends. Her unconventional path to motherhood and business ownership made her an ideal guest for the Startup Pregnant Podcast. 

Four years ago, she met the children who would become her daughters. Her concern for their well-being and safety led her first to become their mentor, dropping off meals and picking them up from school. But when their mother went to jail and the girls were headed into the system, Nicole and her husband applied for custody of the sisters.

Nicole also shares a story she doesn’t share very often: the story of her own childhood growing up in Washington, D.C., as the daughter of African immigrants, and how she came to attend prestigious private schools with the likes of Chelsea Clinton. I asked Nicole how her background prepared her for entrepreneurship about how navigating these two worlds affected her self-perception. She explained the tenets of her ‘rich friend’ mindset and offered advice around being a disruptor and a creator. Listen and learn Nicole’s secret to reconciling with ‘imposter syndrome’ and her infectious enthusiasm and storytelling ability.

Some quotes from the episode:

“I’ve started writing down [real life accomplishments] because they are moments of growth for me, and they deserve to be celebrated.”

“What kids need—more than stuff and love—is a consistency of presence. That’s parenting.”

“I will always, always, always try to do something to give back. Isn’t that what a legacy is really about?”

 “I am a hot mess, but I am a functional hot mess. That key word is the difference.”

“Failure is an event, not a person.” 

About Nicole Walters

Nicole Walters has 10-plus years of experience working with Fortune 500 companies as a client-facing sales and marketing executive. In November of 2013, Nicole quit corporate America to bring her expertise in monetizing multibillion dollar corporations to solopreneurs and small business owners. She founded NapNic, LLC, to teach clients the systems, processes, and metrics necessary for entrepreneurial success.

Sponsor offers, full show notes and more from the episode:

Thank you to the sponsor of this episode: Aeroflow Breastpumps! Aeroflow Breastpumps makes the process of getting a breastpump covered by insurance easier for new mothers. Head to http://Aeroflowbreastpumps.com/startup to sign up with them today. 

All of our sponsor offers are available on our website for you to grab the perks and discounts offered to podcast listeners: http://startupparent.com/sponsors

And get the complete show notes with episode quotes and photos at www.startupparent.com/003

Learn More About Nicole

Nicole’s Website

Nicole on Facebook

Nicole on Periscope

Nicole on Twitter

Resources

ConvertKit Conference

Seth Godin

Startup Parent

#003 — "If you can parent, you can be an entrepreneur: because you don’t know anything about what you’re doing, and you’re doing the most important job in the world."

Nicole Walters is a mother of three kids and the CEO of Monetize Thyself, a consulting firm that specializes in income makeovers. I met Nicole at a conference for bloggers, and her energy and enthusiasm made us fast friends. Her unconventional path to motherhood and business ownership made her an ideal guest for the Startup Pregnant Podcast. 

Four years ago, she met the children who would become her daughters. Her concern for their well-being and safety led her first to become their mentor, dropping off meals and picking them up from school. But when their mother went to jail and the girls were headed into the system, Nicole and her husband applied for custody of the sisters.

Nicole also shares a story she doesn’t share very often: the story of her own childhood growing up in Washington, D.C., as the daughter of African immigrants, and how she came to attend prestigious private schools with the likes of Chelsea Clinton. I asked Nicole how her background prepared her for entrepreneurship about how navigating these two worlds affected her self-perception. She explained the tenants of her ‘rich friend’ mindset and offered advice around being a disruptor and a creator. Listen and learn Nicole’s secret to reconciling with ‘imposter syndrome’ and her infectious enthusiasm and storytelling ability.

Some quotes from the episode:

“I’ve started writing down [real life accomplishments] because they are moments of growth for me, and they deserve to be celebrated.”

“What kids need—more than stuff and love—is a consistency of presence. That’s parenting.”

“I will always, always, always try to do something to give back. Isn’t that what a legacy is really about?”

 “I am a hot mess, but I am a functional hot mess. That key word is the difference.”

“Failure is an event, not a person.” 

About Nicole Walters

Nicole Walters has 10-plus years of experience working with Fortune 500 companies as a client-facing sales and marketing executive. In November of 2013, Nicole quit corporate America to bring her expertise in monetizing multibillion dollar corporations to solopreneurs and small business owners. She founded NapNic, LLC, to teach clients the systems, processes, and metrics necessary for entrepreneurial success.

Sponsor offers, full show notes and more from the episode:

Thank you to the sponsor of this episode: Aeroflow Breastpumps! Aeroflow Breastpumps makes the process of getting a breastpump covered by insurance easier for new mothers. Head to http://Aeroflowbreastpumps.com/startup to sign up with them today. 

All of our sponsor offers are available on our website for you to grab the perks and discounts offered to podcast listeners: http://startuppregnant.com/sponsors

And get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at www.startuppregnant.com/003   

Learn More About Nicole

Nicole’s Website

Nicole on Facebook

Nicole on Periscope

Nicole on Twitter

Resources

ConvertKit Conference

Seth Godin

Startup Pregnant

Startup Pregnant on Facebook

Startup Pregnant on Twitter

Sponsor the Podcast

#002 — Thirty percent of talented women drop out of the workforce, not because they want to, but because the way work looks is outdated, flawed, and fails women and families on a regular basis. And a full 70% of those women would still be working if they had access to better (or any) workplace flexibility.

What would it do for our economy and businesses if we weren’t losing so ambitious, committed employees so rapidly? The corporate world is stuck in a structural model that is a relic of the post-Industrial era. Today’s guest on the show is an entrepreneur building a simple, yet  revolutionary answer that makes the world fit women—rather than trying to make women fit into the world. 

Annie Dean is the Co-CEO of Werk, a company that pre-negotiates flexibility with top companies and creates a standard model, with definitions, of what flexibility looks like in the workplace. For too long, the idea of flexibility has been poorly defined, and they quickly changed that.

Annie shares her belief that flexibility is the future of feminism. Her company seeks to create compatibility between the objectives of the employer and the needs of the employee via simple modifications to the structure of work. Too many women are quitting or opting for less ambitious roles in a forced choice between career and care, and Werk is on mission to update company policies to reflect modern realities and provide women with the opportunity to reach the highest ranks of leadership.

Today we discuss the public’s response to Werk, from the backlash from both liberals and conservatives, to their highly discussed piece in the New York Times and how Annie faces the challenge of changing the narrative around women in the workplace.

Sponsor offers, full show notes and more from the episode:

Thank you to the sponsor of this episode: Meet Edgar! Grab your free two-week trial of Meet Edgar, a social media scheduling tool that allows you to create content once and re-use it as much as you need, at http://ed.gr/startuppregnant.

All of our sponsor offers are available on our website for you to grab the perks and discounts offered to podcast listeners: https://startupparent.com/sponsors/

And get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at https://startupparent.com/002.

About Annie Dean and Werk

Annie Dean spent six years in corporate law, negotiating billion-dollar real estate transactions for institutional lenders and equity owners. After giving birth to her first son, Annie realized that the expectations and pressures of 16-hour days at the firm were setting her up for failure. Ever the overachiever, she co-founded Werk to repair the leadership pipeline and make the workplace compatible with parenting.

Werk Website

Werk on Facebook

Werk on Twitter

Werk on Instagram

Resources

Books by Anne-Marie Slaughter

Startup Parent

Startup Parent on Facebook

Startup Parent on Twitter

Sponsor the Podcast

#001 — Four reasons why we decided to start a podcast, and why we need new stories of work, parenting, pregnancy, and entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship and parenting are filled with deep, difficult, and joyful lessons about what it means to be a person and make work in the world.

“We are just trying to figure it out one day at a time—one sleep-deprived, coffee-fueled, bleary-eyed day at a time.”

No matter how much prep work you do, there is no way to anticipate the singular experience of having a baby or starting a business. In fact, there are a number of parallels between pregnancy and startups, and this podcast explores those intersections with the hope of learning what the two worlds have to teach each other. Along the way, we’ll talk about reinventing the way we think about parenting and work.

In today’s episode, I give you a bit of the behind-the-scenes about who I am, and why I started this show. In 2014, I interviewed with One Month, the Y Combinator venture-backed startup focused on teaching people tech and coding skills, to join their rapidly growing team. While I interviewed, I was transparent about my plans to start a family. Eight months in I was promoted to VP. One month later, I realized I was pregnant. So today, two years later, I bring One Month founder and CEO Mattan Griffel on the show to discuss the perceived risks of hiring women who want to start families, and why he realized that this false cultural narrative is actually limiting himself in the search for great talent.

This desire to start a new story about what it takes to grow businesses and babies — and the overlap between entrepreneurship and parenting — was the impetus for starting this podcast. In today’s episode, I talk about the main four reasons I made this podcast a reality, including

1. The flawed narrative of what it means to be pregnant as portrayed in popular culture,
2. The backwards methodology of startups that are self-described as disruptors,
3. Why it’s important to create new ways of working, and
4. Why I ultimately needed to find and listen to other women’s stories to root myself into the place and sense of what it meant to be a pregnant entrepreneur, and then later, to become a working parent.

I share the highs and the lows: Vomiting into a grocery store at Whole Foods. Feeling my little one kick for the first time. The sense of isolation both at work and in the company of moms-to-be. Using this as a springboard for launching my next project, then company. Reckoning with colleagues and city-dwellers who didn’t pay attention or notice made me dislike the city’s seeming lack of empathy.

This podcast is the start of a conversation about the overlap between entrepreneurship, pregnancy, and parenting. Listen in to why we got started, and I’ll also tell you about some of the inspiring people you’ll meet in the first series to come up ahead. The goal of this podcast is to interview 100 women in a rich tapestry of stories. Along the way, I hope you’ll enjoy discovering the similarities between starting a business and starting a family, and together, we can transform the way the world looks when it comes to working and parenting.

About Sarah K Peck, host of the show

Sarah K Peck is an author, startup advisor, and yoga teacher based in New York City. She’s the founder and executive director of Startup Pregnant, a media company documenting the stories of women’s leadership across work and family. She’s a registered yoga teacher (RYT-200), a 20-time All-American swimmer, and an entrepreneur. Her writing has been featured in more than 70 different blogs and publications, and she’s spoken at Harvard, Penn, Berkeley, the University of Virginia, and at conferences around the globe. She’s currently writing a memoir of working in the tech startup world while pregnant