SAYge Real Founders: Trusting Your Intuition
Meet this week’s founders
I am so excited to kick off SAYge Real Founders with two incredible founder stories and a conversation on trusting yourself as a founder. Shruti Shah is a YC and venture-backed founder turned investment partner at Symphonic Capital and Melissa Bowley is the founder & CEO of Flourishcare, one of Shruti’s portfolio companies! I just love these two ladies, their stories and how they are intertwined. Watch the youtube videos below, or take a listen on the go through the podcast links. If either of their stories resonates and you’d like to dive deeper, click here for an email intro!
Scroll down for more on the topic of trusting yourself! Also join our chat group below for some founder real talk.
Shruti Shah was cofounder of YC backed MoveLoot and is now a partner at Symphonic Capital. She discusses her journey as a female entrepreneur, including the experience of Y Combinator, the impact it had on her business, real challenges she faced and hard lessons learned from navigating growth and venture capital fundraising. Shruti emphasizes some important lessons learned that she now imparts on founders that she supports through Symphonic. Namely, learning to trust yourself and the vital role that taking time to self-reflect plays. Listen to the podcast
Melissa Bowley is Founder/CEO of Flourish Care. Inspired by her own experience as a mother, Melissa recognized the gaps in maternal healthcare and set out to address it. She shares her journey as a female founder in the women's health space and inherent challenges in securing an ultimately successful round of venture capital. She emphasizes the importance of finding the right investors and staying grounded in your mission in order to navigate the daily rollercoaster. Listen to the podcast
Trust your gut.
If there was one recurring theme I heard from interviewing all of the incredible female founders so far, it was this. Trust your gut. It’s so funny because it sounds so simple, yet it is one of the hardest challenges for (especially female) founders. Shruti shares a unique perspective on this from both her time as a founder, figuring out how to do it, and now as an investor recognizing the importance of trusting her portfolio founders’ instincts.
“At the end of the day you are running your company. You could ask five different people and they might give you five different answers. Your job as the entrepreneur, and I think excellent entrepreneurs do this well, is to take all those inputs and sit with your thoughts and make a decision that feels right to you. Given you have limited data, but you’re closest to the business. It’s a hard thing to know.. to acknowledge that maybe your instincts are right and you need to speak up about them..”
“The reality is [as an investor] I’m not in the day to day with any of our portfolio companies. I get to hear snippets or snapshots of things that are going on. I get to ask questions… but I’m not close enough to know what the 100% right decision is. Frankly as a founder you may not know 100% what the right decision is either, but you have a gut instinct because you’ve been able to build what you’ve built so far. So I think sometimes it’s also about learning to trust yourself… It’s not something that always came naturally to me or easy to me. I think sometimes as women we have people pleasing genes that make it even more difficult.”
But how?
Ok, so trusting ourselves is super important, but how do we do it? How do we learn to trust ourselves when so many parts of our upbringing and even societal culture tell us we shouldn’t? I asked Shruti this question and she says the answer is anything that gets us out of our head and into our body. This could range from therapy to journaling or simple breath work. She said an integral component of this is that it gives you space to self-reflect.
“Self reflection helps you become more aware of who you are and what you’re good at. I think that then just further aligns you with your ability. You become more of you. The more I’ve taken the time to do reflection or therapy or physical activity, the more I feel I know who I am and what I’m capable of.. and also aware of what I don’t know and where I may need help or support making a decision.”
Staying grounded in who you are aligns with Melissa’s experience with trying to stay true to her core purpose. She notes this is especially important through the inevitable (daily) highs and lows.
“At the end of the day as long as I have integrity, I know we have the right mission and we are building something that’s going to increase access to this, people can say what they want, investors can say what they want. I know in my heart this is going to make a difference.”
SAYge Pro Georgiana Danet teaches women around the world how to get in touch with this inner reflective part through meditation, yoga and breath work. I love the advice she offered on trusting ourselves by staying grounded in purpose. (Also below is a link to an article she wrote that has 5 different holistic breathing exercises to try)
Thank you Shruti and Melissa for sharing your authentic journeys and ways you have overcome your toughest challenges. Check out some resources and tools below to help you stay grounded and trust yourself as you continue your journey as a female founder putting something great into the world!
Spread the real support. Share this post with other female founders!
