Personal Learnings From My 1st Startup

My first startup just exited. There are many many learnings for me to reflect — running a business, product development, hardware development, hiring, sales, deal negotiation... As all the emotions have settled, I want to take this moment to write down my personal learnings, which would hopefully help my future self or someone else who is looking for answers.

Make my voice heard

“You have to know it (confidence), not just feel it” ~ Pastor Vita Petrus at Image Church

I’m not lying or exaggerating — in this modern world, there is still a lot of resistance towards women in business and technology. Statistically, I encounter gender and race discrimination about once a month at work. Sometimes, it is not about the intentions but the assumptions people make when you are a female and non-white.

During the first few years with this startup, when the 3 founders were being introduced to someone or a company or mentioned on media, my name was always the 3rd one. A client came to our office and shook hands with all the male founders and employees, but skipped me. Once I was meeting with a technical team at a big company and I introduced myself as the CTO. One engineer said to me, “Why do you call yourself CTO? I would just call myself co-founder in your case.” But my male co-founders were okay to…