bem(inist): creating space along the early stage journey

At bem, we're just two women on a small team of six total (for now)– Jenny Kwan, our brilliant Founding Engineer, and myself, carrying the deceptively simple title "Head of Growth" that masks the beautiful chaos of navigating everything non-engineering. Jenny and I immediately connected on our past experiences as women within the startup community- or really, just women in the workplace. What it means to do glue work on top of your role when you’d consider yourself a high performer. How to connect with and relate to other women navigating more senior positions or those who are just getting started. And how, despite working for amazing companies in the past, we were both still yearning for so much in this area.

So, we started with our women’s panel. We brought together incredible panelists who have recently scaled high-growth companies who have not yet reached Series B funding. Folks who have scaled from the ground up and know what it means to say “Oh, I have no idea how to describe my role” because they’re doing.. everything. I was personally shocked at how quickly we filled the 95 person waitlist without much promotion, but was still a bit nervous. Would people relate to this? As someone who has oftentimes felt isolated as a senior generalist in early stage startups, I wasn’t sure. But then a memory of a past manager saying “You seem too calm,” while I was flying around the world to scale the business, kept popping up.

Then, the event was deeply connecting. What an absolute joy to learn from fellow panelists Myoung Kang from MotherDuck (who has scaled so many impressive orgs prior to), Lily Roosevent from HockeyStack, Olivia Baker from Paraform, and our amazing facilitator, a deeply empathetic and curious human being, Kim Chia from Next Legacy Partners.

Folks were honest and raw about so many things- from what they’re currently struggling with (from biking to work to managing balance and what it means to navigate hormone awareness when working 12 hour days). About the notion of "balance" when you're building something from nothing. What it means to stand up to leaders and founders, to take up space and push for things- from cultural to project and business-related.

One of the best parts for me was also watching the event form prior to that day- what it meant to have a group of female leaders come together to plan an event. It felt like a truly democratic process- including down to how we approached topics and who wanted to speak on which. Instead of inflating our nervous systems prior to the talk, we sat in a breath exercise together led by Jenny.

Safety for women and the female experience came up a lot that evening, and is something that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about for a few years now. What does it mean to have enough space to support and grow fellow women in the workplace in an early stage startup while having unlimited amounts of projects and work to do? What does it mean to advocate for them and provide a safety barrier? I know for me personally, I reflect constantly on what it means to be “senior” enough to do more of this- something I’ve failed on as recently as last week.

To be clear, it does feel scary, even for us, which I hate to admit. Will we be taken less seriously? Will we be boxed in as "women who talk about women stuff" rather than technical or business leaders? Will we alienate partners or investors? But the alternative, silence, is what makes me lose the most sleep (which does share space with late night tactical work thoughts).

However, given the event turnout, amazing questions our panelists received from those who attended, and the clear need in our startup industry to fuel more female-forward conversations (as well as my and Jenny’s deep passion for this), we’re excited to announce a few things from our bem team:

• We’re launching our new podcast series, beminist. Our first episode is launching very soon, and we’ll continue our journey of interviewing and highlighting female early stage leaders and builders

• We’re hosting a women in engineering leadership dinner in a month- please contact us directly if you’d like to join. We’d love to have you

• We are hosting another women’s panel in the late spring! This will be announced in early April

Our beminist team is thrilled to offer more space for these conversations. And we’re hiring- if you’re a female engineer or CS lead, please reach out.