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“I got my start by giving myself a start.”
Madam C. J. Walker
Her best proof that her hair formula worked was her own bald head. She carried before-and-after photographs into church basements and told the story herself.
The hair loss came from years of scrubbing other people’s clothes for $1.50 a day. The regrowth came from a formula she mixed herself.
In 1905 Walker left Missouri for Denver with $1.25 in savings and put her own name on the label.
- White-owned drugstores would not stock her.
- White-owned newspapers would not carry her advertising.
- White-owned beauty schools would not teach her.
She went door to door, bought standing weekly ads in the Black press, opened a factory in Indianapolis and founded her own school.
By 1917 about 20,000 women worked as Walker agents.
Each bought product at wholesale, sold it at retail and kept the difference. Each could recruit and train her own agents and earn on their sales.
In 1912 she asked Booker T. Washington for a speaking slot at his National Negro Business League convention. He ignored it. She traveled to Chicago anyway, then rose from the audience as the last scheduled speaker sat down.
“Surely you are not going to shut the door in my face. I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South.”
She asked, she was refused and she went anyway.
“Don’t sit down and wait for the opportunities to come,” she said. “Get up and make them.”
In college I rebuilt Reddit in a few lines of Ruby. The man who invented Ruby shared the clone. Ruby Weekly, the newsletter its programmers read, ran it too.
I was sure one rule stood between me and a developer job: intern as a developer first.
My internships were in another field and my college sat in a small town. I learned to code alone. So I built the proof myself, a portfolio of my own projects.
The portfolio got me the interview.
Then it got me the job.
Trends.vc came next, my market research newsletter, started with no credentials as a market researcher. I published weekly reports anyway. Readers subscribed and stayed.
You apply, you queue, you hope the person with the clipboard calls your name. No one is coming to call your name.
The other move is to manufacture the start: make the job, invent the internship, assign yourself the project, build the portfolio.
I read a biography each day.
Sara Blakely was selling fax machines door to door after failing the law school admissions test twice.
She cut the feet off her own pantyhose, called the result Spanx and filed the patent herself with a book she bought at Barnes & Noble. Her pitch to Neiman Marcus was changing into the prototype in the store restroom, in front of the buyer.
Tyler Perry put his $12,000 in savings into renting a 200-seat Atlanta theater to stage his own play.
The play drew 30 people. He slept in his car for stretches and kept restaging it until it sold out 8 straight nights in 1998.
A designer named Aaron Draplin taught himself Illustrator, the drawing software, on the floor of a snowboard company. He hand-printed 200 memo books, mailed them to friends and sold 13 copies on launch day. Those memo books grew into Field Notes, the notebook brand.
- The portfolio was built before anyone hired me.
- The reports went out before a single reader subscribed.
- Blakely made the prototype before Neiman Marcus said yes.
Each yes arrived after the work existed.
Wait for the yes before you begin and you may wait the rest of your life.
Walker gave herself one start and 20,000 agents got theirs. The start you’re waiting for is one you can give yourself.
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What’s one start you could give yourself instead of waiting for it?
