the rooms where “it” happens.
You know about them. Maybe you’ve been in some. These are the rooms where people talk to people and make decisions that affect the lives of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people. These are the rooms where “things” happen: meeting important and powerful people, getting access to major capital, hearing early stage data or information, and more.
I didn’t want power 3–4 years ago. I thought it was corrupting, self-aggrandizing, and a path to a seat at human reality I didn’t want to experience. Now, I still think all of those things. But I know I need it.
I understand now, after years of throwing my anger at the wall and wondering why it never turned into progress, that desires coupled without power are merely dreams. It’s taken me a long time to accept that power is a necessary part of change and execution.
Especially for those on the margins, I’ll relay something our female investor said to me: “A man never thinks about that“. She’s right. People who already have pre-existing power work to keep it. But, as an identity on the margins: learning how to shamelessly network and pitch and ask is new to me.
But if we don’t, there is no getting what we need to complete the things we want to do.
MLK in 1967 had already wisely figured this out, in his speech Where Do We Go From Here, he remarks: “What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
In order to provide love with the support it needs to get to actualization, we need power.
There’s rooms with power, and I’ve been in them recently. Being in an accelerator and being a growing insurtech darling has meant that I’ve spent the majority of my June in New York, hidden away in the private rooms of bars and restaurants, in conference rooms owned by companies worth billions who are our funder’s LPs, watching Valkyrie stalk through conference meeting rooms and booths, and wondering about it all.
In the past month, it’s been said that I am female so fundraising will be easy. But also, because I’m female, fundraising will be hard. That I should dress more professional. But that I stand out in a great way that makes people feel comfortable to talk to me. That I’m smart. But I’m not smart enough and I need to rethink the number I want for the fundraise. That I’m young, and a fresh face. But that no one will trust us because we’re young.
I pushed up my septum ring and hid most of my 13 piercings. I dressed cutely corporate e-girl (I still wore star-studded platform boots), and did my best to not throw as much glitter on my face as I wanted.
In these rooms, there’s one rule: people do business with people who bring value to them. Sometimes, people do business with people who look like them.
It can be as simple as wanting a person to succeed, liking them, wanting to be associated with their brand or access to the approval of the group they represent (think of token advertising and brand deals that companies use to quench DEI concerns), wanting to know who they know, and more.
Business is relationships, truly. Especially in a legacy industry like insurance or nonprofits, being able to establish presences in front of people is the best shot you can get. That’s why companies who are the undisputed industry leader will still drop millions on conference activations: to remind you’re they’re the top.
You want to be in the rooms with decision makers. You want them to like you enough to listen, and for them to know your narrative.
There’s a template to most of it. Autistic people have been told that sales roles aren’t for them, but I think it can be a highly autism friendly job for the extroverted autistic. Talk, ask questions, identify. If you’re a match, keep going and end off with contact sharing and next steps. If not, let them leave in grace and find others.
Aside from the act of learning how to do business correctly for the first time, I struggle with being in those rooms. There’s people I really do like in there, but a couple of people who could never relate to me and have no sense of what I do. There’s people who fund things that have left broken communities in their wake that I’ve come to see. Some people are fucking snakes. Other people are worse than snakes: spineless.
More importantly, there’s a harsh reality at it for me. If the ultimate goal of a business relationship is to be liked, what happens if I don’t want the people leading the charge to like me? What if I don’t want my company to enrich them? Am I allowed to make decisions for the company based on that? I obviously grew up really struggling with the impacts that social media had on my dad losing his work, and causing a rift between me and a lot of my family through misinformation.
The stakes for women are different in business. All of the rules that people like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk do would get me instantly fired, or written off as a giant bitch who should never get money. I can’t afford to walk in and piss people off.
I know, more than most, what it’s like to live on no safety net. How terrible it feels when your dreams blow up in your fucking face because you couldn’t keep the plates spinning. The ache of not being able to provide for the people you love.
It’s a stain that forms a hunger. That hunger never leaves.
The hunger says: I need people to like me. I want to fit in. I want power. What am I willing to do to get it?
I find myself talking through an amoral lens, and don’t recognize the person who I’ve become. On some level, compromise is needed in order to achieve dreams and action. On the other hand, if ‘winning’ in business comes at the cost of losing my sense of self, which one is more valuable?
In some sense, the corporate version of you is the one that needs to be the most sanitized: you should be absolutely NOT yourself. A corporation is a faceless mass. You should be apolitical, amoral, ideally incredibly socially docile where it counts. When does the corporate you betray the real person you? Who is making decisions at the end of the day?
Unfortunately, the lines of corporate America do not stay in corporate America. There is always a throughline to your personhood. Every worker is a friend, family member, parent, lover, mentor, and more.
The people I network with and never think about again go home to families. The people I reject from job applications have tangible life trajectories that I am altering. Being in business is the closest to power that the modern person has, at least in the US where corporate interests wields more power over policy than voters. And that power doesn’t respect personal lines.
There is no clear line in the sand about where you end and corporate interests begin and end. At one of my jobs, I was asked to sign a terrible NDA non-compete with a no disparagement agreement to continue employment. I quit by sending an email saying I will not write sign it, because the people at that company were my friends and I felt it was a cowardly move by upper management. To no one’s surprise, I was logged out of my Google account promptly.
When I think about selling a sponsorship spot from Astra to a company who’s committed major ethical sins, to talking to someone from a VC firm that funds technologies that I don’t ethically support, I struggle to firmly grasp the limits of my personal values and the impact that my actions can echo on the world.
How much am I willing to be fake to accomplish what I want? If I could turn into a blander, more palettable operator, should I? How much should I leave behind my style, my vision, my values, and my sense of right and wrong?
These are questions that I stare down daily, and know I will reckon with for a long time. I want to gain power resources, capital, and allyship without enabling people who’ve caused massive harm to communities, or who do things that I think hurt the world as a whole. The edges of what that is are still unclear to me.
There are rooms filled by people who have the power to change our world. May we be brave enough to go into them, and to come out with ourselves intact.
