Happy Black History Month {{first_name}}!

I’m committing to showing up here more consistently and would love your thoughts as I do. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much pressure there is to PRESENT right now and how paralyzing that can be.

Your deck. Your website. Your LinkedIn post. Your

I’ve fallen into it, too.

And I keep coming back to the same thought: a lot of what we’re doing is optimized for attention and not understanding.

Decks, posts, newsletters—they’re all useful. But they’re meant to support deeper conversations, not replace them. The question I keep asking myself, and the founders I talk to, is:

Who actually know your work well enough to talk about it when you’re not in the room?

That feels like a gap for a lot of early founders right now.

If you can’t name 3 people who could explain your work without you in the room, the issue usually isn’t messaging; it’s that you’re doing too much of this in isolation.

One small shift that may help:
Instead of sending your deck or overview cold, start with a conversation. Talk through the idea. Let someone ask questions. Notice where you stumble, where you ramble, hedge, or lose people. That’s most likely the part of your story that needs tightening, not the slide formatting.

This is why I feel so passionate about what we’re building - space for founders to talk things through. Out loud. with HUMANS. People who’ll push our thinking, help refine our language, make intros to move our work foward and hold us accountable. It’s hard to shortcut understanding when you’re with other people. That’s what our Founder Dinners are designed to create. Our next one in NYC is on February 24.

If you’ve been stuck refining instead of connecting, this room might be valuable.

More soon,
Kelly

If this note resonated, forward it to a founder who’s been polishing instead of pressure-testing.