Nobody tells you that the hardest part of being a founder is not the fundraising, or the product, or the morning you open LinkedIn and find a competitor has launched the thing that was next on your roadmap.
It is that the work never tells you when you have done enough. Every milestone you reach still leaves you wondering whether you are growing too slowly, or whether any of it will truly work out.
I added to that equation by starting my business while pregnant. There are so many people saying you can have it all as a woman, just not all at once. But what happens when, for whatever reason, it does all arrive at once?
That is exactly what happened to me, because the entire reason for my business was rooted in my own experience of IVF, pregnancy loss and perinatal mental health struggles. What I have actually found is that building it pregnant, and then as a mother, made me a significantly better founder and leader.
The reason is that when your day is built around nap times and nursery pickups, you lose the luxury of deliberation. Before, I could spend an afternoon turning a decision over, gathering one more opinion, reworking a deck for the fourth time because something about slide nine still felt slightly off.
Now I have 90 minutes and I know exactly what has to come out of them. The question changes from ‘is this the best possible version?’ to ‘does this move us forward?’, and the honest answer is that the second question builds companies and the first one mostly builds anxiety.
Hustle culture sells the idea that output is a function of hours. Nine to nine, six days a week, sleeping on the office floor, as though whoever stays longest wins. Of course, I could work endlessly, the work is never truly done, but long hours let you avoid prioritising because there is always more day to throw at the problem.
Constraint forces you to be honest about what actually matters. I get more done in the nursery run gaps than I ever did in twelve hour days, and the work is better. And do not get me started on the negotiation skills my two-year-old has taught me – no executive coach comes even close.
There is a version of this that sounds like productivity advice, and I want to be careful, because it is not. Some weeks the constraint is not a superpower, it is just a constraint, and I am answering emails at 4am because too much was left unfinished before I had to spring into mum mode the night before. Both things are true at once and I would not pretend otherwise to anyone considering doing this.
Accountability feels different when your name is above the door
Then there is the guilt, for not being present enough for your business or not spending enough time with your child. What I wish someone had told me is that the guilt is not a signal that you are doing it wrong.
I spent a lot of energy early on waiting for the guilt to lift, treating it as a problem to solve, assuming that once I got the balance right it would go. I do not think it ever fully leaves. You just get better at carrying it, and the days you do notice it are usually the days you are tired rather than the days you are failing.
The other thing nobody tells you is how much clarity comes with it. I am building a women’s health app and I am also the user. Every gap in postnatal care I write a product spec about, I have stood in. That is not a marketing story, it is the most reliable product research I have ever had access to.
Ambition did not shrink when I became a mother – if anything it only grew because I simply had to work on something with purpose while being away from my child. My ambition got specific, and it got faster, and it stopped asking for permission.
Why founding a business is different second time round
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