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Explore your curiosity - Interesting people with fascinating stories.
Life consists of three things:
-The stories we tell others
-The stories others tell us
-The stories we tell ourselves.
Allyson, welcome to the show. So happy to have you here today.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1:You wrote a book. When was the moment you're like, okay, I need to write this book?
Speaker 2:Oh, that's a great question to open with. So I I actually worked in book publishing in my early twenties. I have an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia. Writing a book was always on my my vision board for things I wanted to do. I started my company in 2013, and we started as Yelp for baby products.
Speaker 2:It was called WeSpring. That's what's pivoted to Stellar, which is what I run today. And what I knew from my time in book publishing is that the most important factor is a platform. Platform. So having an audience that you can promote your book to, particularly if it's non fiction.
Speaker 2:So I had a platform all of a sudden. I had this this website where thousands and thousands of people were coming in and writing reviews of all the products that they loved. So I had this audience. We had a huge email list. We had half a million social media followers.
Speaker 2:And my friends who still worked in book publishing said, you know, you should write a book. And I had a a newborn baby and it was my second child, and was sitting around with my female friend who also had a newborn baby. And I said, I don't really wanna write a book about baby products. Like, what's the book that's missing in the market? And, you know, as a as a marketer and an entrepreneur, felt like there was really a gap in education for women on how to keep their career on track when having young children.
Speaker 2:So the origin story for me was that I was fresh out of my MBA at Columbia. I was working on Wall Street at Credit Suisse. I was doing extremely well by all measures. I got pregnant and wound up getting pushed out. And it was shocking, and I had never failed at anything in my whole life.
Speaker 2:Kind of wound up quietly leaving and taking another job, which is what was the impetus for me starting my company originally, like that Can desire to be out of
Speaker 1:you tell us a little bit about what that quote unquote failure looked like? What was the pain points? What was the changes that happened with the baby? And what did that environment look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Wall Street is, as everyone expects, predominantly male. It's a culture of long hours. None of those things scared me. My background had been politics. Also, long hours, also predominantly male.
Speaker 2:But within my division, there was a lot of corporate red tape and bureaucratic red tape. So I was five months pregnant. I had some pregnancy complications, and I needed to work remotely. And they it was 2011, and, you know, we hadn't had the the revolution that we all experienced after COVID where remote work became the norm for most people, And no one really knew how to make accommodations for that and my my need to, you know, just be sitting in one place so I didn't have a baby So four months I was pushed out on disability leave, and I didn't get a call from anyone I worked with. It was just HR.
Speaker 2:So, like, a really shocking experience, but actually not that unusual. So after I got out there and started talking to agents and publishers about the book, and I signed a book contract with one of the big five. I ultimately started interviewing other women and found that the experience I had was actually not really an anomaly.
Speaker 1:What did you hear from the other woman?
Speaker 2:So many of them had had fairly egregious experiences as well. You know, I wound up describing it in my book, and this came from some of the other research that I was doing, as benevolent discrimination, where it's not bad guys necessarily, but it's men who are making assumptions about what it is that you want or don't. And and sometimes women who make assumptions about what it is that you want or you don't without actually talking to you. You know, some of the stories I heard were from women who outperformed their peers for the year, but because they had taken three months off, were offered 75 percent of the bonus that their male peers had gotten. So a woman who was in her job for nine months compared to her male colleagues who was there for twelve months, she hit higher numbers than he did, and she still got a lower bonus because she had been absent for those three months.
Speaker 2:So those are those are just kind of the tip of the iceberg of the stories that happen. I've done a lot of speaking about this in corporate settings and and elsewhere about how to avoid benevolent discrimination. But it's wild to think it's been ten years since I wrote that book. A lot's changed, but ultimately, you know, we're we're in an environment right now where 450,000 women are leaving the workforce this year alone. So, you know, there's a lot of work left to be done.
Speaker 1:Why do you call it benevolent?
Speaker 2:Benevolent discrimination? Because it's intended to help and support women. It's not intentionally malicious. It is, you know, an example, let's say two managers are talking about an upcoming conference, and there are a couple different employees who could be selected to go to that conference. And they say, oh, Jessica's seven months pregnant.
Speaker 2:She's not gonna wanna get on a plane. So they send Joe instead without ever giving the opportunity to Jessica and making that assumption. So they're doing it out of a a place of positive intentions, but it's ultimately really crushing her career.
Speaker 1:And and you talked about these assumptions. It's a tough, I can just imagine based on your example that it's a tough situation to be because on the one hand if you say, hey go do this, the employment deal will hold on, I'm pregnant. On the other hand if you don't, so, so it almost like really having good communication. That's it. Good communication is key.
Speaker 2:Would you like to go to this conference? We're looking at three of your team members for this conference and wanted to check with you and just make sure that you would be interested in going if you were selected.
Speaker 1:The easy solution to ambiguity, ask a question. Yeah, absolutely. What other kind of assumptions did you find people are making in the workflows, whether on the pregnant woman's side or on the employer's side, what were those misassumptions that you found?
Speaker 2:You know, a lot of women, so I conducted pretty extensive research for it, surveyed thousands of women, interviewed 75, found that the majority of women were really anxious about having a conversation with their employer. And then also the majority of them reported it went really well. Oh, wow. So from the women's standpoint, there is this heavy burden and concern for good reasons because there are a lot of women who do wind up getting ostracized and pushed out. So I think people make a lot of assumptions about how little flexibility they'll be afforded, but it really just depends employer to employer, like what their attitudes are.
Speaker 2:We're still kind of living in the dark ages here in The US without support for new parents, without normalizing leave as parental leave and something that should be taken equally by both men and women. I think that's one of the biggest hurdles. I have been in conversations about this all week with a number of friends. Looking at countries that and talking about countries that afford leave to women that is paid for an extended period of time. But the reality is there are very few women in leadership positions in those countries because they are leaving the workforce.
Speaker 2:So, they're not getting promoted and they're not getting the advantages and the men aren't taking that time. So, it's always heartening to me when I see male leadership taking leave when a child is born, but we don't see enough of it.
Speaker 1:So you're almost describing a trade off between European countries that can give six or even three to six or even more months of vacation during pregnancy, but then you're saying that that works against them because the leaderships in those countries kind of see that as a disadvantage. If on that one hand we want to have more leave, but we also want women to be able to achieve whatever level
Speaker 2:I think of the men have to take the leave. They have to step up and take the leave as well. And take equal responsibility for caring for their newborn children as their spouses do.
Speaker 1:So, so, okay. I'll, I'll, I'll push back on that, I'll first tell you a story. I was petrified. My wife worked in pharma and she was a medical science liaison which means that she travels for a living. We had our first baby, she had to travel.
Speaker 1:I was petrified of staying with my baby that first week completely alone. In fact we had my wife sending breast milk through an amazing company called Stock and then they kind of freeze it and they send it over, I defrost it and I was petrified.
Speaker 2:So were the women.
Speaker 1:But my point is different. My point is that that week changed my life, changed my relationship with my children and I discovered that not having mom and dad being the number one kind of an only person in that just created such an amazing relationship and I did that with all three of my children. So for the dads that are women kind of don't have another option, right? But men unfortunately opt out many times and I would advise each and every man not to opt out because it will So change your that's a little bit of advocacy from my side, but now that I've said that and kind of you know articulated my position of what I truly believe, let me let me try to push back to your your statement. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's very euphoric to think that we can kind of change men and let them overcome that fear even though that's what I was promoting a second ago. Yeah. You know, as, what do we do from a perspective of employer, from a perspective of woman, without expecting the tiger to change its spots?
Speaker 2:So, are you asking about culturally, how do we get companies to adopt this? Or how do we get men to take
Speaker 1:leads? I think it's all three, right? It's promoting men to understand that there's actually a huge opportunity here. But then on the other hand, companies need to have the environment to support it, but then women also in their own way advocating and in a way they're also making a move inside their own relationship and saying hey I would like a slightly different dynamic.
Speaker 2:Would say that it's the only way to achieve any kind of equality.
Speaker 1:Okay. So which What path people are we talking about?
Speaker 2:So, I mean, I have I have male friends who were afforded four months of paid parental leave. Mhmm. And they staggered their time. So Mhmm. One of my friend's wife took off six weeks after the baby was born for physical recovery.
Speaker 2:She was home then, and then he tagged in for six weeks. She went back to work. And then they switched off until they had used all their leave. I have another friend whose wife was able to take six months and then he got four months. So one parent was home.
Speaker 2:It's very hard work being home alone with with an infant. It's exhausting. And women tend to shoulder most of it. And I think if you normalize a father being that involved in those early days and having sole responsibility for it, it really levels the playing field across the board. And it changes the dynamics in the relationship.
Speaker 2:I mean, I
Speaker 1:This one this one is, I think, life changing. Talk because I felt that in my experience. What do you mean by changes the relationship? Because you're talking about between the the the couple. Right?
Speaker 1:How does it do that and what happens?
Speaker 2:I don't even know that I could begin to count the number of women in my life who believe that they are the CEO of the family and experience being the CEO of the family and their partner is a direct report, not a partner. So they're doing all of the thinking work around, okay, it's time to get a new batch of hand me down clothes from a friend and get the new clothes off. We need to plan these doctor's appointments. The birthday party is in four weeks. We need to get the invitation list for it together.
Speaker 2:That mental load of invisible work winds up falling on the woman, I think, because it's absorbed so much in those those first three months where she's the one who's reordering the diapers and, you know, my family, we called me the chief procurement officer, that everything that came in through the front door, I had anticipated the need for and purchased and gotten into the house so we had it when we needed it. And that doesn't wind up getting wired unless you are the primary parent for at least a period of time. The other stat that's kind of thrown me for a loop recently is that seventy percent of divorces in The United States are initiated by women. And in the books that I have read about that, it is very heavily rooted in frustration around inequality within the household.
Speaker 1:So we described the problem. When you make this shift to kind of equal caring or equal responsibility, when you're taking that, I love that you call it invisible because it really is, when you take that invisible load and you split it in two, what happens to the relationship between the couple?
Speaker 2:You know, what I've seen, very honestly, it doesn't happen a ton. One of the factors there is is what we call maternal gatekeeping, where the woman feels like one's gonna do it as well as I would. It's like that group project, like, mentality you have when you're younger in school of like, ugh, I gotta do it all myself because no one else is gonna do it right. You know, the page on my website, my book website again, it's been ten years since I've thought really deeply about this when I wrote it. But the page on my website that still gets the most traffic is about how to divide household responsibilities.
Speaker 2:And all of these people every month continue downloading this work, like this worksheet that I had created that actually lays out all of the things that go into keeping a house running when you've got an infant, when you've got older children, and, like, actually writing it down. And, you know, I talk about it when I when I've done workshops about this as, dividing responsibilities rather than assigning tasks. Right. And I think assigning tasks is what happens so often within families. But if there's a division of responsibilities, like, you're in charge of everything medical related.
Speaker 2:I am in charge of everything school communication related. You're in charge of booking, like, weekend childcare. I'm in charge of coordinating with daycare. So there's there's a lane that you're within. Like, you're in charge of Christmas.
Speaker 2:I'm in charge of birthdays. Really, really helps delineate that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Can ahead and conquer.
Speaker 2:A lot of a lot of people have spouses who are really hands on. They're doing bedtime. They're doing school drop off. They're, like, shuttling around to the sports. But again, if it's the woman who's who's like researching all the sports and finding all the camps and doing all of that, she still feels ownership for it.
Speaker 2:And I think just really mindful division of labor is how you avoid that. But, like, I'll also say candidly, I think it's really hard to survive the early childhood years intact, not just because of what's happening within the couple, but because ultimately we don't have the societal supports here in this country that make it easy and seamless. Like, you know, we've all said it takes a village, but there's really not much of a village, particularly here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'll make a few points of advocacy. One is that, and this is from my own personal experience, not from your research, when you as a dad participate and it's not just mom or whatever the family arrangement, just one person doing everything, then you suddenly have a team working on a problem and you know there is a little bit of gatekeeping that happens on mom's side but that to me it takes two to tango right because mom is like well you're not doing anything, I dunno if you're gonna be successful, but dad is like, well, they're not letting me so I'm not gonna try. Well, both of those things are wrong. Dad needs to try.
Speaker 1:Mom needs to let dad Yeah,
Speaker 2:of course.
Speaker 1:And what I found is that I, you know, my wife, she left to a conference, whatever it was, and in that week that mom wasn't home, I sleep trained the kids. And it was done and she came back. Now that me trying, mom kind of not there and I guess letting me try by no other, you know, then she came back to that success and she was like woah, like something happened here that I wasn't able to achieve, So teamwork, not to be too, makes the dream work.
Speaker 2:Makes the dream work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So there's something wonderful in the fact that, you know what, some problems in child rearing are incredibly difficult and different approaches and working together and kind of letting go and be like, you know what? I don't know what to do here. Why didn't you give it your best shot?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is a wonderful dynamic. That's the first point that I would make. The second point that I would make is that if mom or or whatever is not doing a 100% of the work and is completely exhausted, suddenly mom has the time to sleep. This is going to start to affect the partnership in a very positive way because what we found out is that well, you know, you know now mom is getting re energized because dad's doing the work and then well you know we're both kind of have more energy to do things together.
Speaker 1:So now suddenly date night came into the picture. I found it had a profound impact on the relationship also which became much improved in addition to the kids getting the benefit because now they're sleep trained, now they're getting kind of this dual support from the parents, you know, in different ways I'm sure it will manifest with different parents, but the value just seems to be all around.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How old are your kids, Ari?
Speaker 1:So right now these stories are obviously load old, sorry, right now they are 13 is the oldest boy. I still remember my mother-in-law shouting at me from you know downstairs, Hurry, what are you doing to the children? And I was just trying to sleep train them, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then the daughter is 11 and then my youngest raptor is six. The one we're still trying to figure out together.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I think there really is something that is so profound about those early years because they're so depleting. And when I talk to people now about the book that I wrote ten years ago, it feels like there's a really big missing piece there, and that's the self. I wrote a book called How to Keep Your Good Here's the Plan. It's a how to keep your career on track during pregnancy and parenthood, but that's suggesting that the only two things that you are focused on in those years is your career and your family.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:But if you ignore the self during that time and aren't engaged in, I mean, I hate the term self care, but self care like actually getting time with your friends where you're not talking about children, being able to enjoy some travel, just having alone time, meditating, yoga, like outdoor time, all of those things where you can be the full human that you are and not just someone's employee or entrepreneur or whatever your your work hat is or someone's mom or dad. That's the piece that felt missing when I looked back at what I put out there in the world. I like to joke that the sequel is called Burn the Plan. Because I think a lot of the things that we that we've kind of assumed about the way families should exist are actually quite broken.
Speaker 1:One of the points that you kind of mentioned, give me some creative license here because I'm expanding on what you're saying, keep me honest if you disagree. This idea of self care, women and men too, we sometimes think we need to be superheroes, we need to do it all. The point that I made with my wife that really worked and kind of resonated is like, no, you need to take the time to recover so you have the energy to be the person you want to be. If you're exhausted and you're burning yourself from both ends, you're not going to be successful. So you need to let go in order to do a good job and you know, I just wanna be awesome all the time.
Speaker 1:That works against us.
Speaker 2:A 100%. Yeah. And and there's this, like, societal construct of guilt, particularly mom guilt around, like, when I'm not with my children, I'm a bad mom. When I'm not working, I'm a bad employee. If you're doing neither Smash of those things
Speaker 1:that one. That because that's a huge can we just smash this? When you're not with your kids working, you are showing them an example, especially if you have a daughter, of how to be an independent, strong woman about having a career. You are should not be feeling guilt that you're doing your job.
Speaker 2:I mean, I had a therapist who said don't should on yourself, and it's hard to should on yourself or should on other people when those are messages that you've absorbed for so long. I call it performative parenting, and I feel like it really emerged in the the late aughts with the the, like, pervasiveness of social media, where suddenly you were just deluged with images of people and the, like, beautiful things that they were doing with and for their family. And it creates this inferiority complex, and I contributed to it. Like, Pinterest? Oh, god.
Speaker 2:The things that Pinterest did to women to make them believe that, like, the little birthday parties they were hosting for their children needed to be themed and curated and, like, elaborate and involve rainbow fruit skewers. And, like, that's what drives everyone to exhaustion, this sense of performative parenthood. And, like, what if just, like, good enough parenting was was enough because it meant that you're recharged and replenished when you're spending time with your kids? I'm I'm no longer married. I am with my kids 50% of the time.
Speaker 2:I am an infinitely better parent because half of my time is spent without any parenting responsibilities. And I think there are lessons that can be taken from that for families to say, like, okay, every Monday night's your night. Do whatever you want with it. Every Tuesday night is my night. I'm gonna do whatever I want with it, and there's no guilt, and, like, it is it is my time to do whatever I care about, and I actually think it should be more than one day a week.
Speaker 1:No, I love that. There's huge power in the divide and conquer strategies. There's huge power in just having a plan, like what day is the me day? What day is the us day? What day is the family the day where we spend time with the kids and you know having dinner together as a family but then having dinner just date night just the couple together.
Speaker 1:Those things are incredibly powerful and it's incredibly easy to forget about them and not do them And I've, I've made that mistake for years. So I definitely am not perfect on this vertical. I apologize. We went so deep on this topic because it's-
Speaker 2:We haven't talked about entrepreneurship. It's quite a passion
Speaker 1:for me, but the, the thing that brought us together was Tech Stars and specifically the FounderCon conference that that we had recently, being both of us mentors. And I think in our case, keep me honest, both of us are actually also Tech Stars entrepreneurs, not just mentors.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I did New York in 2013.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. I did the the Stanley Black and Decker program in also in 2019. It's the same year you
Speaker 2:went in. Oh, twenty thirteen for me.
Speaker 1:Oh, thirteen. Fair enough. Yeah. Okay. Old Reading my mind.
Speaker 1:Good So job so being a mom, a dad, and being an entrepreneur is maybe even more difficult than being an employee. What did what did that look like for
Speaker 2:you? So, there was a lot of self sacrifice in those early years, and also to an extent, I sacrificed a lot of time with my children when they were pretty young, because I had gotten advice from a female mentor of mine, like, work really hard when your kids are really little because those are the years when they can be supported by anyone. It's when they are a little bit older, and of course, I was still spending time with my and engaging with them and loving them, but it's when they're a little bit older that you need to have more freedom and flexibility to engage in their lives. So I started my company, which was WeSpring then and is now Stellar Now, and started working on it when my son was less than a year old. I did Techstars when he was 0.5.
Speaker 2:I got pregnant toward the end of Techstars. So I was I was out raising around pregnant, which is its own hellscape of an experience. And, like, with my daughter, I took four weeks of leave during which I was still working, like, on my phone while nursing a newborn baby. But I carved out the time that made sense for me to spend with them. Usually, was in the morning.
Speaker 2:It was when they were freshest. And then I would go to the texter's office and I would work until ten or 11:00 at night. We had great childcare. It didn't make sense for me to leave and go home for one hour of exhausted child. So by the time my kids were at that age where they needed more of that engagement from me and I needed to be showing up for the school things and and, like, teaching them values, not teaching them how to eat peas off the high chair.
Speaker 2:I could be there because I had gotten to the business to a point where it was stable and flexible. And now we have, like, I have a lot of flexibility in autonomy because we're thirteen years into running a company that's profitable. And, you know, I am grateful to that woman who gave me that advice of push as hard as you can when they're really little because as long as you're getting bonding time with them, everything else is gonna be able to be taken care of.
Speaker 1:You have a daughter. How old is she now?
Speaker 2:She's 11.
Speaker 1:She's 11, same age as mine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 11 and 14 are my kids.
Speaker 1:So, 14 is the boy? Yep. Yes, minus 13, going on 14. So, let me ask you this, from your journey and your experiences, what are the things that you are teaching your daughter to kind of prepare her for the world, to prepare her for her journey? I know that there's things that I'm doing, but I feel that you know, there's so much we can do at a younger age to help them be prepared for the world, which quite honestly sucks in many ways.
Speaker 1:Yes. But we can't change the world, definitely not alone and definitely not overnight. So I feel that the minimum we can do is just prepare our kids for the reality of it. What does that look like for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah. We do a lot of we have a lot of conversations with our family about monetization strategies.
Speaker 1:That's a lot of that.
Speaker 2:That sounds funny and ridiculous. But, like, my, you know, my daughter has a bit of a, like, Sephora addiction, like a lot of 11 year old girls and wants money and, like, we dole out allowance and we're very careful in how we how we approve what they're spending money on and don't. Like, generally, if they ask for something, it's something that they need to buy with their allowance. But because she has this urge in this yen and then there are also other things going on like school field trips and various other things that, like, we sit and talk at the dinner table about, like, and, like, what are the ways that you could actually make money right now? And, you know, my daughter one of my company's clients is Bissell, the vacuum cleaner company, and we have a lot of Bissell vacuum cleaners around my house, and one of them is a little spot cleaner.
Speaker 2:And Caroline went around and I paid her a dollar for every spot in the house that she cleaned. I was like, you know, you could go door to door doing this. I started my first company when I was company. I was 10. I started a face painting business, And I advertised it in the sports club, like the health and racket club that my mom belonged to.
Speaker 2:It was just up in the women's locker room and it was those little tear off tabs. And Yeah. You know, like, I would make 20 to $40 a month painting faces at other children's birthday parties when I was 10. So, yeah, we talk a lot about that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We talk about marketing. We talk about positioning. We we talk about all of the business things. We talk about cost of goods sold. We just we've done a couple weekends where we sold cinnamon rolls, and I make my daughter contribute to the ingredients if we are doing this for her benefit.
Speaker 1:So Brilliant. Yeah. Allyson, what an absolute pleasure. Thank you for joining
Speaker 2:the show today. We we are This is not the conversation I thought we were having, but I'm so glad we did.
Speaker 1:Our audience knows that there's no prepared questions. I don't know where we're gonna go with this, but it was so much fun. Like, I genuinely had fun. We we have one question. It's a little bit of a different difficult one, because it's very personal.
Speaker 1:If you had to go back to the most difficult moments of your life, whether it was five minutes ago or fifty, not fifty, ten years ago, what advice would you give yourself?
Speaker 2:Oh man, I've had a lot of difficult moments. I mean, like, I've tuned into a deeper, wiser self, especially in the past five years, and a lot of that's a lot of personal growth work. And I think it I think, really, it comes down to just, like, keep breathing, keep moving, just keep moving forward. Eventually, all of the pain will recede.
Speaker 1:Allyson, thank you for joining the show today. My appreciate
Speaker 2:pleasure.