This is not meant as a humblebrag, but I've been a guest on plenty of podcasts by now, Reader. And while some interviews I felt went better than others, I never thought "Uh-oh, I don't know if I want this to air" afterward.

Until a couple of months back.

Melissa, a great mindset coach I know, had announced she was launching the Founders’ Fears & Failures podcast to normalize mental health struggles + redefine failure in the startup ecosystem and was looking for guests.

“I know something about that,” I thought, and raised my hand.

The “failure” (and those are some very heavy quotation marks)? The kickass coworking space and community club for women, CoWomen, I had co-founded. After three years, I made the super-duper hard decision in 2021 to step back from my role and, in the same year, CoWomen had to close its physical doors – the pandemic was the main reason, big surprise.

Sitting down to chat with Melissa two years later, I thought enough time had passed to process it all. In some ways it had, but our chat turned out to be a lot tougher than I had thought:

🌀 It reminded me of the vision and mission that we had, that I still fiercely believe in today.
🌀 It brought back a lot of memories of all the great women I got to meet and the fun times we had (especially all the shenanigans with Hannah and Sara, the best co-founders anyone could wish for).
🌀 It resurfaced a lot of the conflicted feelings I had that led me to step back and what I would have loved to do differently.

Even writing this brings up a very bittersweet feeling.

So after we recorded and even listening to the episode now that it has aired, I almost regretted it and even considered not sharing it.

🔹 Because it's not just my story – it's Hannah's and Sara's and all the people's that were part of the CoWomen journey.
🔹 Because it doesn't have a clean, simple happy ending.
🔹 Because it's still heartbreaking that something you believed in so much and which was doing such good, with the potential to become extraordinary, just … didn't work out.

In short, because it's an imperfect story.

But hey, that's kinda the definition of life, and pretending all stories end in happy-ever-after is unrealistic and yeah, also kinda toxic. Especially in the start-up world, which has enough of that as it is.

So if you want to hear my one-sided story from how CoWomen even got started to the moment I realized it wasn’t the right fit (there's a fun story here about that time I hid during an event I was part of hosting), and how I overcame this so-called “failure”, the episode is live now:

Here's to sharing the hard stories too 🥂,