Lady Business: Megan Rapinoe, Samin Nosrat, and the power of repetition
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the seventy-fourth issue, published July 11, 2019.
Unknown Unknowns
“When I had to close my business, I realized that I finally knew how I should have started it. I wish I knew at the beginning what I knew at the end.”
That was a woman I spoke with this week, who had spent several years trying to get her first company to break through. Eventually, she realized, she had to cut her losses -- even though, in the irony of failure, at that point she was a far more experienced entrepreneur than she had been at the beginning of her startup.
Which is a little obvious, of course, and even fetishized in the startup universe. (Fail fast! The cult of failure!) But it’s something I’ve been thinking about in relation to some joyful things this week, thanks to a couple of very successful women who have built triumphs atop past failures.
First, Megan Rapinoe and the World Cup champions she leads, who in the past several days pulled off several incredible feats, aside from that whole winning-at-sportsball thing. They managed to turn the July 4 weekend into an occasion to feel patriotic and proud of our country on an international stage; they trounced the Tweeter-in-chief; perhaps most astonishingly, they somehow got crowds of European sports fans and downtown New Yorkers to turn “Equal Pay” into mainstream chants, and headlines.
They haven’t won their equal pay yet, and they probably won’t in the short term. The U.S. women are splitting $4 million in FIFA prize money for this astonishingly overpowering victory, and are estimated to take home about $250,000 each. Last year, the French men who won the male World Cup split more than $38 million in prize money, or more than $1 million each.
But with their lawsuit and their public swagger, these women are playing the long game for their successors -- none more so than Rapinoe, who has alternated between calling out and praising the US Soccer officials she and her teammates are suing. Meanwhile, she’s also made some extremely savvy personal financial decisions that build upon recent history. While it’s not fair to say that her 2015 predecessors “failed” to get the money they were institutionally denied, Rapinoe and some of her teammates saw that injustice, and decided to start a business to get a bigger cut of the profits of their success:
She and three veteran teammates had the foresight and audacity to start a clothing company before the World Cup to make sure they could capitalize on winning it. That is because after winning the 2015 World Cup, the players made millions for U.S. Soccer by playing in a victory tour—but not much for themselves. Rapinoe didn’t want that to happen again.
Or there’s the delightful chef and author Samin Nosrat, who I got to interview a couple of times over the past few months, and who is just as much thoughtful fun to speak with as you might expect from watching Salt Fat Acid Heat. The new issue of Inc. has my article about her, which stemmed from a conversation we had in December about restaurant culture and what has and hasn’t changed post-#MeToo and Ken Friedman and Mario Batali and and and and….
Back in December, Nosrat was not super optimistic about the industry culture -- in part because, she says, sexual harassment aside, there’s often an ongoing expectation of nastiness and aggression in high-powered restaurant kitchens. It’s a pattern of behaviors that she said she had participated in when she was in her 20s and running a kitchen full of “mostly [white] men who were mostly older than me and were not prepared or willing to respect me or listen to me. The only way that I knew how to get them to do what I needed them to do was to be mean to them. Then that become this cancer that basically ate me and my coworkers.”
For that and for other reasons, including some overbearing investors, Nosrat told me how relieved she was when that restaurant closed -- and how she never thought she would willingly manage people ever again:
When it was done, I was stoked. Like, "Yes! No more! I want to be a writer! I never want to have employees again." It was too much responsibility. It was too terrifying. Too hard.
Except that now -- after teaching, and running a monthly market that she eventually closed, oh, and becoming a bestselling author and New York Times columnist and Netflix star -- Nosrat is starting a new company again. She’s hiring employees again. And she’s very open, and dare I say inspiring, about how her previous failures and negative experiences have given her the tools to, this time, know what to do from the start:
And here I am, 10 years later. Starting my own company--terrifyingly. But this time, I have a lot more power. I can be much more careful in whom I choose to work with, so I can be sure they already have some of the same values.
…Luckily, I'm now mature enough--and I go to enough therapy--that I usually don't take out my feelings immediately. But I still have them. We all move forward. We all keep learning. It doesn't mean that anyone's perfect. It doesn't mean I never lose my temper. But it means having the self-awareness to say to somebody, "I'm sorry I did this."
I don't know if I'll spectacularly fail. But I do know this: How I treat people, and how we treat one another, and the feeling around what we're doing--that's the most important thing.
Lady Bits:
--There are so many dreadful things about the Jeffery Epstein case, and what his wealthy and well-connected friends are accused of helping him do to dozens of young girls, that I’m taking some silver-lining satisfaction in things like this profile of dogged Miami Herald investigative journalist Julie K. Brown, who spent two years investigating and exposing Epstein and his protectors. And in things like the mounting scrutiny of his network, including the current U.S. Labor Secretary and 81-year-old scratchy-lingerie expert Les Wexler, CEO of Victoria’s Secret parent company L Brands, which has seen its stock price fall over Wexler’s friendship with Epstein.
--“‘An embarrassment of riches,’ Disney quips as the waiter rearranges plates on our small table: ‘The story of my life.’” Wealthy “class traitor” Abigail Disney + the Financial Times’ “Lunch with the FT” column, two faves together.
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