The Female Founder
An interview with the woman behind The Brand!
Welcome to The Female Founder’s apartment. The ceilings are lined with dentil molding, which you know because when you walked in, she pointed up and said “When I first saw this place, I fell in love with the dentil molding.” The wallpaper is covered with tiny illustrations of teeth, frosted cakes, eggplant Emojis, and dollar signs. There is a lamp that looks like a baguette. There is a bookshelf that makes the books look like they’re defying gravity — it’s just an illusion. There’s a chandelier that looks like Meadow Soprano’s head. “Kooky, right?” The Female Founder asks, as she widens her eyes at the camera .
If it feels like you’ve seen this space before it’s because you have in T, Apartment Therapy, on a cheese startup’s blog, on dog bed startup’s blog, on a laundry detergent startup’s blog, on her Instagram Story, on her Twitter, on her own startup’s blog.
The Female Founder asks you and your crew if you want coffee. She walks over to the mirrored coffee maker that looks like it was taken out of the box yesterday that sits on a counter covered with tiny tiles with different mushrooms painted on each one. She moves it to the side, and unplugs her phone from one of the twenty various colored phone chargers plugged in around the apartment. Within minutes, a delivery person knocks on the door with trays of coffee. She tips them from her phone.
“My home is your home, you should all come to my next women in tech dim sum!” the Female Founder tells your crew as she distributes the coffees. You’re all confused about what world in which that would happen, but smile and nod, checking the time on your phones and watches, wondering how long The Female Founder usually takes to get ready for interviews.
Most of you have moved to the den. Lighting has been set up after finding a way to work around all of the mirrors - shaped like the word OPTIMIZE, the inside of a mitochondria, a profile of Michelle Obama. Two of the camera people sit in what look like vintage school desks but re-finished with shiny mustard-colored acetate. You all sit patiently, and flip through the oversized books on the coffee table: “Silver Lake Style”, “A Photo Tribute to Steve Jobs”, “Not Your Mother’s Jell-O Mold”, “Margaret Thatcher Through The Years”. What taste.
The Female Founder is hunched over herself on the couch in a way that makes her look both smaller and larger than she actually is. A charging wire crosses over the couch and plugs into an extension cord. She kicks the wire off of her ankle while typing away at her phone. “Slack, sorry,” she tells your crew, wincing. “How many conversations are your team sending at 8 AM?” laughs the interviewer, nervous or astonished. The Female Founder sits up straight, and beams. “The Brand advocates for over communicating transparent feedback and status updates...at all hours.” She seems to be reading an invisible teleprompter. “Our company culture embraces those who are up early and go to bed late because they believe in The Brand.” The Female Founder apologizes that she keeps plugging her phone in in-between interview questions, and owes it to checking inventory, CX cases, press mentions, operations progress, and her calendar.
She fails to account for the hours spent in bed this morning staring at other female founder’s social media presences.
You pivot, and take a walk into The Female Founder’s bathroom. A hairless cat sniffs at a heating vent on the floor. The bath mat seems to be hand embroidered with the word “boss” in various languages. You let the cat stay in the bathroom and watch as it paws at the vent, clanging with pressure from the old brownstone pipes. The heat smells like metal, burning plastic, Santal 33. A small cigar box embellished with the word “Power Lunches” sits on the table between the toilet and the sink. Inside are colorful matchboxes - Hotel Pellicano, The Harvard Club, Carbone, and The Beverly Hills Hotel. You close the box, wash your hands, look in the mirror, and realize there are framed cutouts of The Female Founder in all different press interviews around the bathroom. Headlines scream, “The Female Founder Secured Another $45M in Funding Before Year Close”, “The Female Founder on Why Startup is a Dirty Word”, “Don’t Call Her a Girlboss: Meet The Female Founder.”
After drying your hands, you return to the den and realize you missed something while you were in the bathroom. The interviewer pulls you aside and asks, “Is there a basement or something? If we're going to record sound, I have to turn off whatever is causing this humming". The Female Founder hears her and looks down, furiously typing away at her phone and computers. The chargers continue to tangle at her knees and wrists. She keeps looking up at the crew apologizing, in between frenzied voice note whispers and keyboard shortcuts. The Slack messages full of abbreviations from dozens of employees in different chat rooms. “This is what I get for choosing to live alone in a pre-war Brooklyn Heights building!”
“Is there a landlord or maintenance person we can call?” asks the sound guy. “I can go down and check it out myself if you have access.” The Female Founder stares blankly at her screen, the cat moans in the other room but it doesn’t sound like a cat. Is she thinking of a phone number? Remembering where she left the key for her basement? Recalling a missed rent check that her landlord has been asking for? She stands up and puts her hands on her hips, which combined with her Ms. Hannigan pajama pants, makes her look more like a Tisch drama student than an entrepreneur who has raised $100M and employed a full stack of employees whose smiling faces are all over The Brand’s site. “You know what? Let’s go on a field trip,” she tells the crew, her coffee stained grin getting wider as the morning turned to early afternoon.
She leads you and your crew to her guest room closet, pushes her fluorescent fur-lined winter clothes aside and opens a door. “You want to see where the magic happens? We’ve never shown this to any press. Exclusive!” She leads the crew under beaded bags and old wool skirts, down a narrow staircase into the basement. “Meet my all-female team!” she gushes.
A cloud of nail polish fumes, molding coffee, and overheating energy drinks meets your group as you approach the bottom of the stairs. The basement is filled with rows of desks where 20-something year old women hunch over laptops, wearing dirty pastel sweatshirts embellished with The Brand’s logo on the back. Their desks look identical: laptop, charger, phone charger, company water bottle, headphones, chapstick, lip gloss, lip balm, gum. Their thumbs are cracked, bleeding, with nerve-induced bite marks on their fingernails.
The computer batteries whiz, the printers print, the layered noise of podcasts and e-books and Top-100 pop music sounds much more chaotic up close than the noise that was dully buzzing through the vents.
“Welcome to The Brand!” they lethargically cheer with forced smiles as your team stands frozen, pointing their cameras at the dim basement. The Female Founder holds her hands underneath her chin and beams, shaking her head in pride. She stares at the camera and says confidently, “I’m so proud that we live in a world where women can build anything.”
Part two of my fiction series.
Love,
Emily