Alas, I packed up my life into a suitcase and moved to Germany.
As the news of my departure trickled through the tight roots of Gainesville, Fla., I’ve had a lot of conversations with the same root question:
Why leave behind a growing business?
What I’ve had trouble explaining is that my decision to move on has nothing to do with the growth of my business and has everything to do with the growth of myself.
I dove into entrepreneurship early and unprepared. Without a single business class under my belt nor a Steve Jobs book on my nightstand, I started building a company. I was freshly 20 years old, a human smorgasbord of half-honed skills, inflated self confidence and a desire to do something, anything, to learn more and be more.
What I lacked in experience I made up for in what can only be described as grit.
Grit withstood missing out on my senior year of college, coveted by most Americans as one of “best years of your life.” Between dealing with a failed Kickstarter campaign, a best-friend-turned-business-partner-turned-neither walking out and the ceaseless struggle to develop a viable revenue model for digital media, there wasn’t time or energy for a graduation photo shoot on the Gator football field. As grad photos of friends popping champagne bottles clouded my Facebook newsfeed, I allotted myself 15 minutes to cry it out in the office conference room late one night. I then wiped my eyes and watched a tutorial on Intuit Quickbooks bookkeeping.
Grit allowed me to withstand the annual exodus of young talent. While throngs of peers packed up, left Gainesville and started new lives consisting of big cities, fancy sounding degrees and young professional happy hours, I settled in with friends a decade older than myself and strived to find new joy in the same familiarity of a small town.
Grit welled up when I realized that business is tough, but being a young woman in business is mind-numbingly tougher. I’ve experienced the epic Groundhog’s Day of meetings where I step into a conference room and prove my intelligence and competency to white middle-aged men over and over and over. I’ve had potential clients feign interest in a meeting, only to try to turn it into a date halfway through. I’ve had investors recommend me to cheesy girls-only leadership camps and try to introduce me to their sons. I’ve stooped as low as wearing fake glasses to important presentations.
Grit slowly appeared through those shapeless “blah” weeks, or sometimes months, where nothing seemed to be happening in business at all, neither good or bad. Call it startup stagnation or the phases of the moon, but the “What is this all for? What if it all fails?” questions seem to bubble up like clockwork when you’re at the helm of the ship.
Grit helped me weather my first lawsuit and the naivety-ruining lesson that the legal system doesn’t care that you’re only 22, that what they taught you in journalism school was incorrect or that you really are sorry. “Only really successful people get sued before they’re 30,” people would joke. I would try to laugh as I wrote checks giving away our hard-earned dollars to faceless lawyers in some far-off skyscraper.
Grit pushed me to not only show up, but to be present, day after day for the teams of young people that took a leap of faith on my idea. I did my very best to support them as they slogged through the quagmire of their early twenties; they wrestled with the hypocrisy of wanting to follow their hearts and wanting to fulfill Mom and Dad’s expectation for stability and security, they dealt with the crippling anxiety of not knowing what their “passion” is or how to find it, they harbored fear that despite the fruits of a privileged life in America, they aren't sure what it means to be happy. We didn’t just face the struggles of building a startup together, we faced the struggles of growing up, too.
Some of my proudest moments were not closing big sales or seeing campaigns go viral, but rather seeing people on our team bloom into first-time entrepreneurs with larger-than-life ideas, creativity and confidence. It’s been an honor to send those same people out of the startup nest and onto their next great adventures at small newspapers, tech-giants and everything in between.
It is all of these moments of grit that have turned my attention inward to see that at the end of the day, that the growth of the business itself is nothing more than an irrelevant detail.
It has been, and always will be, about my own growth.
So as the dust settles on my new life in a new country, I realize that Gainesville served as the ultimate breeding ground for the grit I have come to rely on so fiercely. And I know that this next journey will uncover even more uncharted territory of my character.
In truth, I am not leaving Gainesville nor my business behind, but rather taking them both with me for an adventure around the world.