Blind Plea - Introducing: Confessions of a Female Founder with Meghan

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

We’re excited to introduce you to Confessions of a Female Founder with Meghan, a new show from Lemonada Media. As Meghan, Duchess of Sussex builds out a business of her own, she’s getting advice and insights from a handful of amazing women who have scaled small ideas into successful companies. These fly on the wall conversations will no doubt inspire anyone who’s interested in turning their own entrepreneurial dreams into a reality and anyone else who just wants to hear what really happens behind the scenes.  We’re going to play you a little sneak peek of the first episode, featuring Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of Bumble. After you listen, search Confessions of a Female Founder wherever you get your podcasts, or head to: https://lemonada.lnk.to/confessionsofafemalefounderfdSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Megan, and I'm so excited for you to hear my new podcast, Confessions of a Female Founder from Lemonada Media. I'm sitting down with female entrepreneurs and friends to uncover what often goes unseen when building something great. The setbacks, the sleepless nights, and the laser focus that got them to where they are today. We're diving into the type of insights everyone wants to know as they're building a business. And even if you're not, don't you want to see what's happening behind the scenes? And I'm able to tap into all of this wisdom from them as I'm building my own

business as ever. So we're going to play you a little sneak peek of the first episode featuring my friend Whitney Wolfherd, founder of Bumble. And after you listen, you can search Confessions of a Female Founder wherever you get your podcasts, or you can find a link in the show notes to take you there. I can't wait for you to listen. I'm sure the first time I ever heard about you was in Time Magazine being the youngest self-made billionaire, female billionaire. Huge. What on earth did that feel like? Well, you know what's funny is like at my on paper richest, I was my inward poorest.

What does that mean to you? That means that what it took out of me to hit those milestones actually robbed me of my real wealth. The ability to connect with myself, to take time for myself, to focus on my physical, mental, spiritual health, to focus on my relationships, to focus on the things that actually make you the wealthiest in life. So while my financial wealth on paper was this like crazy headline and like world record thing, whatever, it didn't even matter because all these other buckets were so low. And so what has been beautiful, and I wrote a letter to myself over the summer actually,

our stock hit an all time low. And I wrote a letter to myself that day and I said, today is one of the best days of my life. I said, because my other buckets of wealth are so overflowing. Oh, makes me want to cry. It just doesn't matter what a stock price is today. It's not how I measure my worth. But what made you in that want to write a letter to yourself? How would that become a part of a practice for you?

I just thought, you know, I better clock in and I better check in because I want to remember this day. I want to remember this day. I want to remember that I got to a place of self growth where on a day that should feel like the worst day in terms of riding the waves of success, right? Things always go up and down. And I just remember I wrote myself a letter and I just said, this is like the best day ever. I have healthy children. I love my husband. It's beautiful where I am. I hiked. I meditated. Like I just reflected in this moment of gratitude of all

the things I do have. And I think it's a really good reminder to people that you have to take stock of how you measure your happiness, your wealth and how you define it. Take stock in your actual stock. That's right. I think it's amazing how evolved you are. It takes a lot of years for most people to be able to have that level of wisdom and an internal compass. It really does.

And I mean, especially when you've spent a career doing the work, the business work, how would you approach that? Or what advice, I guess, would you give to people who are listening that say, okay, well, you're saying you felt so depleted and the buckets were so low or so empty and all these other categories, but it's because of that you were able to still get to this number and get those metrics and isn't that the goal and then you could fill up your cups again? Would you do it differently? Totally.

Totally. And I think, you know, the one thing I can offer to the world is actually a blueprint of, hey, don't take this route to the top of Everest. It's not worth it. The view is not worth it. Don't do it because the one thing you can never get back is time. It's your precious time. And the amount of time, Meg, that I wasted on being stressed, being miserable, being overwhelmed, being paranoid about what shoe was going to drop. You know what? I actually think I would have been more successful had I not been like that.

But can you turn it off? I say this because last night I was just, you know, when your brain goes in a loop, those 3 a.m. loops and it's just like you can't stop overthinking the thing and how are you going to address that and oh gosh, but that packaging and I want the packaging to look like this and that's not the unboxing experience I had in mind and how are we going to pivot and does it matter? I think you have to really take a deep breath and say, you know what? How big of a deal is this? And I would size it up. Yeah. Is this going to matter? I used to use the rule

of nine, so I like the number five better. So like, will this matter in five minutes? Yes. Is it going to matter in five hours? Yes or no? Is it going to matter in five days? Yes or no? If it's not going to matter in five years, like throw it out the window. Who cares? Like if this is not going to be a defining issue in your business, your life, your family in five years, like you'll be fine. And so when you're ruminating in the middle of the night, you're like, oh, but the box came out the wrong texture. Well, is that a problem in five months? Like not really, because you can switch that box. You can get a new box in the next few weeks.

Right. And will anyone else know what the box was supposed to look like? No. Right. That's the other piece, but I think so much of it, especially at launch. Yeah, I get it. Trust me, I get it. And first impression and the pressure.

I try to compartmentalize it and say, okay, all I can control is this extension of my essence and my aesthetic and what I want to share with people. But I think in that focus on the details, at what point can you release some of the attachment to it, right? To be completely attached to the process and attached to the intention, but in some ways detached from

the outcome. I mean, you have to detach from the outcome. You have to. It's a little bit like the way we talk to our children. Did you try your best? Did you really give it your all? If you didn't, if you missed the meetings for the packaging and you let it slide till the final hour,

then yeah, that's not great. But if you gave it your all and you really, you know what, you did what you could, your team did what they could, and this is the way it ended up, it's going to be good. It's going to be great. And I also think that candidly, energy is everything. And I think if you're so stress launching, your customers will feel the stress. And so it's almost like shake it off. I'm not comparing our customers for our businesses to the way our children pick up on energy,

but there's something deeply intuitive and brilliant about the way children can read energy. If you're stressed, children can feel it. I also feel that there's an intangible and visible energy attached to launches, attached to products, attached to all of this. And so you kind of want to do a happy dance for your products and send them out the window because that happy energy is going to land in someone's kitchen counter and you want that for them. And so I think it's kind of like, just shake it off.