Part 1: The Stage, The Stumble, and the Real Lesson
April, 2022.
I had been used to standing in front of audiences, with my 100+ teams and vendor keynotes and spotlight events with 1000s of peers in the audience.
I’ve run workshops, coached hundreds of founders, helped raise millions, built strategy decks that moved capital.
But it had been six years since I last stood under the stage lights.
I left my corp role back in 2016, where I began working heads down on my venture firm, GetFresh Ventures, and our first portfolio company, an e-comm brand as the test-bed for the Growth by Design model.
By design, I was most sequestered to my little basement warehouse sitting around inventory and our order Ops team.
Then during the pandemic, sitting mostly at home, connecting over video conference.
But here I was, at a real stage, with real humans watching, and a real clicker in my hand.
And I blanked.
Not entirely. But enough to know it.
Enough to feel the surge of disorientation that reminded me …
