Outside validation: You can sell yourself all day long, but sometimes it’s more effective when other people sell you (aka your references). An investor is much more likely to be interested in your pitch if he or she has already heard about you because people are excited about what you’re doing. Great references (or a glowing introduction) never hurt.
Uniqueness: This is where it comes down to your idea and how good it is. Taking someone else’s idea and adapting it for a different demographic isn’t really an idea, so good luck finding someone to invest in NastyGuy.com, your idea for a site that sells badass clothing to dudes. In whatever you do, you’re not going to stand out unless you think big and have ideas that are truly original. That comes from tapping into your own creativity, not obsessing over what everyone else is doing.
Turnoffs:
Overconfidence: You need to be passionate and excited about what you’re doing, but don’t be so blinded by it that you’re unrealistic. If you’re saying things like “No one has ever done this before,” it usually just comes across as cocky or, worse, uninformed. As a #GIRLBOSS you should always be confident—and absolutely sure—about what you know, but humble about what you don’t.
Talking about how soon you plan to exit: This might work for some people, but most investors are in it for the long haul. It’s for the same reasons that I don’t like it when I ask people where they want to be in two years and they answer that they want to own their own fashion business. People like to see evidence of commitment.
Typos and general unpreparedness: Yeah, this is just basically a turnoff for anyone, everywhere.
PORTRAIT OF A #GIRLBOSS:
Jenné Lombardo, Founder of the Terminal Presents; theterminalpresents.com (@JenneLombardo)
I get my hustle on every day. For me it’s family first, paper second. Growing up, I always wanted to have my own office—I thought that epitomized success. I also always wanted something that was mine. Something that was tangible, which I could look at and say, with pride, “I did this.”
When I was growing up my family lost a lot of our money and I was forced to go get it on my own. My work ethic is partly fear-driven—I never want to be without financial stability again. Also, I want to be on Fortune’s “40 Under 40” list. (I’m too old to make Forbes’s “30 Under 30”!) I feel like I take risks every day, and the biggest risk I take is on life. Without risk there is no reward and no change. How boring would this world be if there weren’t people out there like Rosa Parks, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs? There are two types of people out there—those who do and those who don’t. If you are a risk taker, you have to feel comfortable in knowing you could fail. You have to have enough confidence and conviction to go full force even if things don’t work out. For us risk takers it’s an occupational hazard. If we fail, we get right up and try again. Just doing is reward enough.
I am creative in almost every aspect of my life, particularly when it comes to solving problems. Whether we chose to believe this or not, there is a solution to everything. It’s all a matter of perspective and how willing we are to be flexible when it comes to our point of view. I don’t see things the way a trained eye would. In fact I question everything—how can I make this better, how could we be operating at maximum efficiency? It’s a blessing and a curse. Challenging convention and not accepting the norm is a world I have come to live in. I read everything and I ask a lot of questions. You won’t get anywhere just talking about yourself. Listen. It’s one of the greatest gifts you could give to yourself.
I’m constantly inspired by everyone I work with and the tribes we assemble. I am inspired by youth culture. I love knowing everything—what they are wearing, what they are listening to, what apps they are using. Kids are the future. If I wanna stick with the future, I gotta stay close to the game.
My advice to #GIRLBOSSes is: Create your own job. Become the master of what you do. Fully immerse yourself in your culture. Be humble: You are never above having to pack boxes. Never forget where you came from. And always be polite. Good old-fashioned manners can get you very far.
10
Creativity in Everything
Every child is an artist. The problem is staying an artist when you grow up.
—Pablo Picasso
At age three I was a speaker. When music played through our living room stereo, I stood in the corner like a statue with my mouth open, pretending the sound was coming out of me. At age four I was a camera. I took pictures with my eyes. I framed my photo within my vision and blinked my eyes to snap the shutter of my memory. Since that time I’ve been impersonating inanimate objects at every opportunity. But don’t call me a wallflower.
Early experiments in selfie photography and top hats.
My creativity began to crystallize as a teenager, when I got my first camera. At age eighteen I got hit by a car while riding a borrowed bike to dumpster-dive for bagels. That sucked but I got enough settlement money out of it to take myself to Portugal and Spain (I spent the rest on an electric guitar). It was on this trip that I became obsessed with seeing the world through a lens—and returned home with more excitement than ever for photography.
Armed to Bless
A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.
—Diane Arbus
Soon after my trip abroad, I enrolled in full-time photography classes at City College of San Francisco, where I learned to develop my own negatives and expose my own prints. For our final project we had to shoot a series of some sort, and I decided on a Russian Orthodox Church down the street from my apartment. The building was tiny, and from the outside you could hardly tell it was a church at all. It was the architectural equivalent of a loner.
I felt a kinship to this humble outsider church in the middle of San Francisco’s metropolis, so I knocked on the door and asked Mother Maria, the nun who lived there, if I could take some pictures. I grew up Greek Orthodox and still have an appreciation for the sights, sounds, and scents of the faith, which I think helped gain Mother Maria’s trust. It turned out that she hadn’t grown up Orthodox but had chosen the faith. My conversations with her were pretty powerful—I knew so many people who had dropped out of society in so many ways, but here was a woman who had looked the world in the face and decided, in the purest way possible, that she wanted none of it.
Mother Maria was a badass.
The Russian Orthodox faith eschews any sort of luxury, which means the entire service is spent standing. In Mother Maria’s view, the world outside the church—which she called the “worldly world”—was a place full of gluttonous distractions that kept us from discovering our true spiritual selves. She invited my worldly self in nonetheless, allowing me to photograph her and the church. The photos didn’t turn out that great; I still had a lot to learn.