Notes From The Ugly Talk

The Mistake That Almost Ended It

On Tuesday night I sat on a panel at Venture Lane in Boston called The Ugly Talk, part of a series, moderated by Deveney Williams and Sunny Side Up. The theme was the mistake that almost ended it, and the room was full of founders and investors who came to hear what went wrong. I sat beside Marita Genebashvili of Climatic and Nathaniel Sugarman of Pearl Cohen, and our three stories came from different companies and different industries, and kept circling back to the same handful of truths.

My mistake is still fresh. On January 13 of this year, my cofounder and I dissolved Rêve Health, the precision health company I had poured my money, my effort, and my heart into. In about a year we expanded into ten states, which meant we needed institutional funding to keep going, and our team did not want to take it. So we went our separate ways. It sucked. It was one of the worst things that has ever happened to me.

Simplify, Simplify, Simplify

We had good help along the way, including Tim Ferriss, who mentored me. At one point we offered three protocols, and Tim told me to cut them down to one. Simplify, simplify, simplify, and keep testing. We did, and sales went up.

Founders are wired for addition, and so is almost everyone else. Researchers at the University of Virginia tested this across eight experiments, published in Nature, and found that people asked to improve a design, an essay, a recipe, or an itinerary reach for additions and overlook the option to take something away, even when taking away is the better answer.

Crawl, Walk, Run

Tim said something else more than once: consolidate. Crawl, walk, run. Without institutional funding you do not have the means to expand, so slow down and focus on one product, one audience, and one thing. Nail that, and then grow. I knew it in my gut too. Still, our burn rate ran well ahead of our revenue, which is normal for a healthcare startup that has been in market for a year, competing in functional health against companies with far more funding.

Being two women founders made that harder. In 2024, all-female founding teams in the US raised $3.7 billion in venture capital, while all-male teams raised $154 billion, according to PitchBook. And growing too fast is the most common way startups lose: the Startup Genome Project studied more than 3,200 high-growth startups and found that 74 percent of those that failed did so because they scaled prematurely.

So many of us at the early stage are trying to change the entire world, and we simply do not have the bandwidth, in time or in money. It can kill your company. It can wear you down emotionally and physically, too.

When the Thing You Chose Falls Apart

I put my career first for most of my life. Part of not having children was the fibroids, and part of it was that I chose my work, again and again. A startup becomes your baby in a way a corporate job never does, so when it falls apart, it feels like you failed, and when the thing you chose is gone, it can feel like there is nothing left.

After Rêve closed, I stopped using the tools I know how to use. I was sad, I stopped working out the way I used to, and the meno pot moved in. It took all of my strength to get up in the morning and rebuild. By the time I was up another ten or fifteen pounds, starting again felt almost too hard, and I looked exactly the way people assume a woman over 50 is supposed to look.

The Discipline We Give Everything Else

I know I am not the only one. Maybe you spent years raising a family and running a household, or caring for a parent, or building a company. Maybe it was a surgery, a loss, or a year that knocked the wind out of you. At some point you chose everyone and everything else, and the discipline you bring to your work, your family, and your home stopped reaching your own body.

The failure of a company was a hard chapter, and it did not make me a failure. The same is true of a body that has been put on hold. You can take the wisdom and the hardship from what happened and build something new.

Like a Phoenix From the Ashes

From Rêve, I took the parts I can do best as someone who is not a medical professional: exercise and nutrition, the work I am certified in and have lived for decades. I minored in exercise science at UMass, taught aerobics at the YMCA for years, and trained clients one on one. Fitness was a side passion until my two surgeries in 2022, when my health moved to the center of my life.

That is why I built Lumine. It asks you to decide, every morning, that it is a great day, and then to take one small step toward greatness: one movement, one meal, and one mindset, aligned with the moon and the season. Lumine Root, our new four-week program, follows Tim’s advice for my own life and yours. Crawl in week one, walk in week two, and by week four you are running, with a small circle of women and me in your corner every Thursday.

Thank you to Deveney, Marita, Nathaniel, Venture Lane, and everyone who came with good questions and better stories.

Lumine Root begins January 7, 2027, limited to eight women. Join the waitlist at luminemethod.com. Building something of your own? Book a call with me.

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