The Other Side of the Table

I've told you about this night before - my first investors' night with the angel group I joined, the far side of the table. Last week's Memo was the first half of it.

It was about a feeling I've built most of my life on. You say yes to something before you know how to do it, then out-work what you don't know until it starts to click. And walking in that night, I was certain I'd need it all over again. I know how to build a company's revenue; I don't know how a term sheet works - so I came with my beginner's notebook open, braced to learn the whole thing from scratch.

The bet still holds - it always will. But I wasn't the beginner I'd braced to be.

Founders came in one after another and did something I recognized instantly - stood up and tried to make a room believe. And somewhere in the first pitch, I realized I wasn't lost at all. I knew what I was looking at. I could feel which parts of a story were solid and which were hope wearing a nice suit. I could tell, almost without deciding to, when someone believed what they were saying and when they'd only rehearsed it well.

None of that was on any syllabus. I knew it because I'd spent twelve years on the other side of that exact moment - the one standing up, trying to make a room believe.

And somewhere in there, the night stopped being about the founders in front of me and quietly became about the twelve years behind me.

For twelve years, if you'd asked what I was good at, I'd have said revenue. Sales. Growth. Building teams. Those were the skills with names - the ones on the resume, the ones with a number attached. But sitting on the other side of the table, I understood those were never really the skills. They were just the shape my skills happened to take, inside one company, in one job.

Underneath them was quieter stuff I'd never once thought to name. Reading a room. Knowing what makes a person believe - and what makes belief real. Hearing what's true underneath a polished story. Feeling a pattern before I could explain it. I'd been building those for twelve years. I just never saw them as things, because I'd only ever watched them do one job, in one place. They didn't look like skills. They looked like Tuesday.

Here's what I keep turning over, and I think it's true for more of us than just me: you can't see your most valuable skills while you're still inside the thing that built them. The job that grows them is the same job that hides them. They fuse so tightly to the context - this company, this team, this title - that you stop seeing them as skills at all, and start mistaking them for the furniture. It takes walking into a room where none of the furniture is yours to finally see what you'd been carrying the whole time.

Last week I had dinner with Olivier, my old boss. At one point he said, gently, "You still haven't fully let go of AppTweak. Only time will do that." And he's right - I haven't. So much of what I built there, I still carry with me every day. And the honest thing is, I love how familiar it all feels. Part of me wants to keep going deeper on exactly what I'm good at - keep honing, keep sharpening.

But there's another part I'm guarding just as carefully: the one that doesn't want to narrow back down to the thing I already know how to do. I want to leave room for creativity. For curiosity. For the stuff I haven't thought of yet. And I think Olivier's right about the time, too. As much as I'm learning and meeting new people right now, I don't think the full new perspective on what's next arrives on a schedule. You have to make space for it - and let time do the rest.

Which is making me rethink what reinvention even is.

I used to picture it as starting over. A blank page. Becoming someone completely new, doing something totally different - a baker, a coffee shop owner, something entirely out of the box. I'm starting to think it's almost the opposite. It's not about erasing what you were. It's about finally seeing everything you'd already become - and then giving yourself the time, and the space, to find out what it's for next.

I'm still a beginner at plenty of things, and I'll be one for a while. But I didn't walk into that room empty. I just hadn't met half of what I brought with me.

What have you been building all this time - without ever stopping to name it?

See you next Friday, -Laurie 🤍