From Founding to Farewell: Why Your Company Is Not Your Baby.
Our lessons from blurring founderhood and motherhood.
We originally wrote this piece for and also wanted to share it with our subscribers. A period of our career overlap and growth as businesswomen involved launching and leaving a brand. It’s not the glory story you’d expect, but an honest one.
Founderhood and motherhood often begin the same way. There’s the tormenting desire to answer ‘what if…?’ coupled with the fear of what that might actually mean. When we started our postpartum apparel company in 2018, we were already mothers asking ourselves, ‘what if we could change things for the better?’ We’d both ridden the waves of idealistic imaginings and harsh realities associated with new parenthood to come out the other side and believe, deep in our cores, ‘we’ve got this.’ Despite the truth that motherhood can (and will) make you feel utterly unhinged and insane at times, it also tends to tap into instinctive wells of great power and stamina.
Thus, when we lept from the comforts of our 9-5 employment into founderhood, we did so wearing our motherhood armor and confidence. We had the learned ability to fight through fatigue, endless to-do lists and feelings of being overstretched. We knew that we could do hard things. In hindsight, we wish we had let our linkage between motherhood and founderhood stop there. But then came the lure of the celebrated entrepreneurial adage: My company is my baby.
During our years of founderhood, we used the baby analogy as our constant proof point. Our rallying cry. And, in our darkest moments, a yardstick for just how ‘dedicated’ we were to the business. We led meetings about email marketing during pregnancy loss. Missed countless holidays and vacations with our families. Texted about low-priority work issues within hours of visiting the hospital for stress-induced ulcers. We talked a big game about supporting mothers, but we failed to recognize the impossible standard we were setting for ourselves and for others. By equating founderhood with motherhood, we created a culture among us where self-sacrifice was seen as the ultimate badge of commitment, blurring the boundaries between personal and professional.
This behavior isn’t unique or constrained to founders who are also mothers. Among the male or non-mother entrepreneur population, it might be more readily recognized as ‘founder mode’ (a.k.a. obsessive control). Isn’t it interesting how ‘my company is my baby’ and ‘founder mode’ share the propensity for celebrated beginnings as well as problematic unravelings?
But founderhood is not motherhood, just as creation is not always birth. Founding a business is an act of agency, strategy and foresight. It requires consciously building something, step-by-step as you test, iterate and choose the best course of action. Motherhood, by contrast, is a deeply biological and emotional transformation. One you can prepare for, but never fully control. It is about surrender as much as it is about shaping. Using analogies like ‘my baby’ to describe our businesses perpetuates a notion that we, as founders, must be as emotionally tethered to our company as we are to our children. But that emotional weight is unsustainable. Businesses can be handed off, sold or scaled to others; children cannot. Separating the two helps founders detach from their business enough to avoid burnout and cultivate the clarity and resilience necessary to make the most effective decisions.
By reframing how you see your company– not as your ‘baby’ but as a creation you shape methodically– founders can give themselves greater freedom to change, fail and evolve. This perspective can help us see our business not as a defining aspect of our existence but as a chapter in a much larger story. By conflating founderhood with motherhood, we undermine the unique, incomparable nature of each. And we set the unrealistic expectation that our business must mirror the unconditional love and unyielding connection of parenthood. At first, we found the overlap motivating. It drove our ‘in it at all costs’ mentality. But businesses, unlike babies, need a degree of detachment to thrive. They require pragmatism as much as passion, call for strategy over sentiment and, above all, necessitate a relentless adherence to accountability. They are not fragile infants to be coddled but dynamic systems that demand clear-eyed decision-making and adaptability. And, should those systems become compromised over a sustained period of time, the most powerful thing may be to let go and know where to focus your stamina.
Exiting our business enabled us to free ourselves of an ownership we couldn’t wholeheartedly stand behind. What had once been a springboard of purpose and drive had become a source of frustration and misalignment. Staying would have required an unhealthy level of devotion that no business, even the most successful, could ever justify. And in the end, it was that same misplaced analogy that made it so hard to see when it was time to step back and acknowledge that businesses, unlike babies, are meant to thrive without us. Walking away from your child is never an option. But businesses afford us that choice. Sometimes, the best thing we can do—for ourselves and for what we’ve built—is to let go. In doing so, we reclaim the space to focus on what matters. And make it matter, more.
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