To all young women entrepreneurs, 

 

This is a short story of how I, a 24-year-old woman, has found herself in the business industry, a world ruled by men. I´m a clinical psychologist who graduated a year ago, and while studying I entered the real estate business to have a little income; that was one of the best decisions I've made. 

At the beginning I only had my grandpa´s apartments and rented houses here and there, nothing serious but you know it worked fine with my spare time. One day my university's residency was overbooked, the administrators knew I was accommodating students and introduced me to my future business partner...let's call him Ted.

 

Ted and I started working right away. That summer Ted and I did  pretty great, we booked all our rentals, and that was the start of our partnership of course I had no idea what I was getting into. Ted had this idea of revolutionising the real estate industry, so our new adventure required looking for investors, and so we did just that. At this point of the story we had worked together for about 2 years, we had made up to this point a pretty solid team, and each year we just kept doing better.

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So, after a while, Ted found a company that was interested in funding our project and also in being part of it. He made an appointment with the potential investors at their office, and we pitched our idea.We were so excited! It felt just so right,  hence we started working there. That was our first mistake. I was working another job, therefore I could only go two days a week. So twice a week I spent most of the late afternoon going into our new office and working till 10 pm.

 

It was exhausting, and things started taking a turn for the worst when one week Ted gave me a call. He told me that he was talking to the other investors and they asked him what I personally had to offer to the team, and why I had a lot of equity in the company. It  felt like a punch in the gut and a jab at my heart, but I guess it was a fair question? Suddenly, I felt I had to prove my worth. I got very anxious and was actually a little angry, because it was OUR company. Just to be clear though, Ted had my back this whole time and explained my role within our team. Albeit,the pressure was on. 

 

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