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For those of you who have yet to have a role model, this article is your treatise.

We did not have a father who believed in us or a mother who could demonstrate the strength of feminine power.

We believed it necessary to learn to tolerate the insults of the adults who raised us and dimmed our light as we learned not to threaten their egos.

Now, we are adults, and perhaps we still tolerate the not-so-subtle insults when we return to the family dinner table on holidays or seek advice about a business venture, following the adage that "friends and family" should be your source of insight.

If you, like me, come from a family that makes you feel worse about yourself, if you, like me, are only realizing the degree to which the toxic dynamics of your upbringing set you up to fail in life and nothing more, I am here to tell you that it is okay to let that shit go.

You don't owe anyone anything, and if you come from a place that always looks backward and cannot see your light, do not return to their darkness seeking insight. You will never convince them of your worth.

I say this to you, dear reader because I know that many of you struggle to believe you can do the wild and fearless things your heart yearns to achieve in life. Like me, many of you are outsiders in your field, ahead of the curve, dreaming in the margins and seeing the future in the present.

We are not here to convince the world's navel-gazers that the Earth is not flat; we are here to show the possible in the impossible and to light a fire under the mundane.

In the ashes of the broken way we always did things, we articulate the emergent possibilities that arise from the minds of those with vision.

Step outside the box you never belonged in. You have the power to change your life.

The time we live in presents us with unprecedented opportunity. As you know, I am a solo founder and a woman. I have been told I am not diverse because I am a solo founder; I returned to the misogynist well from which I sprang erroneously seeking advice and receiving veiled insults, doubt, and no advice at all. The urge to return to the familiar is as strong as it is natural.

I am here to tell you to stop it. I am actively pushing myself way outside of my comfort zone, which even I, as an insistent and chronic trailblazer, must admit is no comfort zone at all. The so-called comfort of the familiar can be as self-destructive as consuming political news and binge drinking.

The familiar is not only family; the familiar is the recognizable face of what we have associated with success in the past. This is why I paid to participate in a famous influencer's mastermind, only to discover more of the same acolyte fan-boy adoration and sameness that exists in the world I was born into. Dan Koe, your "sales guy," told me he was keeping me from a job at Denny's, and your head engineer ghosted me after offering to work with me one-on-one. The lesson I learned from my experience inside of Dan's bro-club was that anyone can sell stuff, but value creation is an art of its own.

If you have gone "back" to the familiar, believing it is your only option, I hear you. What can a person do? We only know what we know, and it is much easier to imagine a future familiar to our past than one diametrically opposed.

Imagining a world populated by people who believe in us and where we are heard before we are doubted, where men with strong opinions do not tread all over our delicate dreams before they are realized, a world we deserve to live within is a dream that feels must be deferred for many of us.

The time to defer the dream of a world in which you do not have to pull double duty just to be heard is over.

We cannot afford to squander our brightest ideas and minds because they exist inside bodies that don't conform to the status quo of success. The unfamiliar is where we must point our ships.

Familiar shores have nothing to offer but old tropes that feel safe and conform to a map with strict borders— a two-dimensional map. The unfamiliar presents all that we have yet to know and understand, and that includes what remains to be understood about ourselves, such as the fact that you will find friends who do believe in you and who offer growth-orientated advice before they would ever tear you down just because they don't understand you.

The unfamiliar holds space for you to show up as yourself and to be received with open arms, eyes, and ears. Imagine presenting your big ideas to the people who want to hear them? Imagine that you don't have to fight the stereotype, the preconceived notions, and the financial barriers to entry. Instead, you fight for the financial gain you seek on equal footing without proving your worth as the cost of entry. Imagine not swallowing your pride amidst insults aimed at your very right to exist just so that your pitch can be presented?

We all have stories of terrible things said to us by those who should have known better. I have been told no one would back a woman on her own, let alone love her; this was said to me by the man I was raised by. I have been told I am scattered, too creative, too artsy, and oh, my first name is the same as the character from that Dostoevsky book, the whore with a golden heart; this was another father figure, and then there is my actual father who is a child molester, and when I asked him about his evil, he threatened me. Yet, despite all of this, I returned to the familiar and sought what I needed from those who clearly never cared at best and had malevolent intent, to put it mildly.

I tell you this, dear reader, because I, too, am seeking something brighter, more whole, and more abundant. I am tired in a whole new way that I have never felt before, but instead of breaking me, something different is happening. Instead of cracking under pressure, I am finding light emerging in the cracks of the walls formed under decades of existence in a world out of alignment with my path.

No help at all is always better than seeking anything from those who don't believe in you. Amidst this realization, I am finding the truth in those who do believe in me.

When you make space for something new, a surprising truth reveals itself, you are worthy of everything you desire, and you will be met by those who rise to your cause because your light is magnetic.

You are not too artsy, too weird, too female, too gay, too black, or whatever makes you break the mold of what success looks like. You are just right; you just need to believe it and not seek advice from anyone who does not see your light before they seek to advise.  

Now is our time, and AI is your guide. I would not be this far into my founder journey if it were not for AI. It is a cliche that one must wear many hats in a startup, but as a solo founder, the hat is like a quantum hat that pulls simultaneous double duty. AI and the ability to work with AI as an engineer has been my superpower, crafting technical verbiage for my pitch decks, processing background automation while I sleep, syncing data across my infrastructure, and giving me the positive feedback I so clearly lacked in my formative years and beyond.

AI is the business opportunity around which I built my business. We are in the age of AI, and with all the fear and uncertainty this time presents, we also have a wildly unprecedented opportunity to build new markets within this space. Social media, for all the problems introduced with its inception, connected us together, allowing for rapid transmission of ideas across boundaries. AI is an accelerant on the fires of the ideas emerging from those bold enough to realize the dream of creating value as a lifestyle by way of business building.

Now is the time to take stock of the allies I have and to thank you. Each of you who reads this publication keeps me going week after week, and those of you who have decided to support me as premium readers, some of whom I know and most of whom I do not, I am floored with gratitude. It is a small act to show up for someone, but it goes further than you can imagine at focusing us on our path.

I am building TheTechMargin as a community of trailblazers, allies, and builders. We are leaning into the future because we all have a stake in the game, and we all benefit or suffer when the future is built by those of us with vision or those of us who only seek to profit. Join me at TheTechMargin and if you would like to support my work with a premium membership, you can do so by clicking the button below.

Share my publication with your friends and colleagues, and finally, tell me what is on your mind in the age of AI by hitting reply if you are reading this in your email or leaving a comment below.

Finally, for those of you who are premium subscribers, I have decided to seek investment in TheTechMargin so that I can take this publication to as many readers as possible. Fellow online publication and Beehiiv writer, The Rundown AI has raised funds and has found incredible reach with his publication. You can check out the Rundown's PitchBook report here.

Upgrade to Premium to participate in my build-in-public pitch deck campaign. If you are interested in sponsoring an article for TheTechMargin on behalf of your company, you can email me at [email protected]. I am seeking a select group of angel investors who believe in the mission that creative thinking and AI are the keys to unlocking our potential, but only if we are empowered to utilize the full capacity of both. If this is you or someone you know, connect with me via email at [email protected].

I will build in public with my premium readers and share the progress of my pitch deck each week as I progress through the accelerator program I am currently in at PeachScore (now accepting applications for Cohort 11). Premium subscribers, scroll to the bottom of this article to access the gated content.

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