{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Curious as Hell","title":"Curious as Hell S01E03: No Grade 11. 170 Investor No's. The Decisions That Built the Company","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3599,"description":"Nobody would hire her. So she listed herself on Kijiji for $22/hour and built a company from that. Nine years later, she was signing exit papers, and she could not tell a single person it was happening, not even her wife. This is the version of that story she could not tell while it was happening.Bobbie Racette founded Virtual Gurus in 2016 after being turned down for every job she applied for as a queer, Indigenous woman in tech. She built it from a Kijiji posting with no grade 11 education and no playbook, through 170 investor rejections, into a VC-backed company she exited nine years later. She is now the chair of Queer Tech and the Indigenous Prosperity Foundation, and is building Tapwi, a FinTech platform for underserved founders named after the Cree word for truth.This conversation does not tell the version of the story that looks good on LinkedIn. It goes into the cost of hiding your identity, the people-pleasing trap that stalls real growth, and what it actually takes to process an exit when you cannot talk about it with anyone.Key themes from this episode:On the risk of certainty: Bobbie admits she was so fixed on where the business was going that she almost missed where it was actually heading. Certainty without curiosity nearly cost her the company.The moment she stopped hiding: A young trans woman showed up at her three-person office after hearing Bobbie on the radio and said she had saved her life. That was the day Bobbie decided to tell her story fully, every time, and everything changed.Building a culture around story: The employees who joined in the final three years of Virtual Gurus were not there for the paycheck. They were there because they had a story, and they felt it was the place where their story would be accepted.The people-pleasing trap: \"I tried to make everybody happy versus understand the risks that needed to go. And I think that's where mistakes happen.\" It was not until Bobbie stopped trying to bring everyone along that the real...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/QOEiJ2wpmDNYU0xIPG6puYq1S-K-IIeCewA8sk4jLp4/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS82NjMy/MTY0NmNjY2E1MzNh/MmExOTI0MTkyNjcy/MDYwNS5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}