- First off: I think I’ve done a bad numbering in some of these recent weeks, because I wanted to write about what I actually did on July 13/14, but apparently I’ve already counted that week? Counting, man, a hell of a thing.
- My good friend Maeghan who aside from being a top drawer human being and tswift fan is an amazing professional contact (and I don’t deserve her one bit), connected me with the European Innovation Academy (EIA) to do some technical mentoring for them. They run a pretty neat incubator-like program, where they teach university students how to get from startup idea to feature work, to sort-of implementing and finally pitching to VCs
- I was a bit terrified of doing this because I think of myself as having no startup experience, but it turns out a lot of the things I learnt running small projects inside of Google really apply and I was kind of really good at it? I know, self confidence, who saw this coming.
- Related: I’m trying to be a little less self-deprecating professionally. I deal with social anxiety by telling jokes and being wildly self-deprecating, but I’ve noticed when people just meet me and don’t know me at all, they don’t know I’m joking and I come off like an incompetent weirdo. This is a big change for me because I hate confrontation and being assertive, but I need people to know I am actually a badass. C’est la vie.
- Observed anecdote: the teams that were predominantly women were on top of their shit and kicked ass. The teams that were predominantly men, OR had a very loud and uninformed men in charge were super behind and not doing super well. This makes sense because we know women are particularly good at organization and doing homework, but tragic because we also don’t have a ton of women leading startups.
- We were in Tahoe for the week and my local friend Jessica somehow tricked me to go to 3 (THREE) days of yoga classes. Two of them were hot and disgusting, and one of them was aerial! What’s even more disgusting than the amount of sweating that I did is that I enjoyed them? Who am i.