Can you feel it coming in the air tonight?

I now understand the importance of being able to do so: it provides critical context to build a rapport with others, it affects being able to work on what gives you purpose, and it helps you find your tribe.

Our product is so much about creating a place where professionals and industry as a whole can build an authentic identity and use it to represent themselves. This need really hits home for me personally, and has greatly affected my life, my career, and the choices I have made along the way. This is why it is important for me to be open about my own journey, so others will feel comfortable to do the same, and hopefully can learn, commiserate, and continue down their path, knowing that it is possible to do things differently.

Understanding the power of being myself in a professional setting took years of exploration as an entrepreneur and as a person. Hell, I am still learning and will be everyday for the rest of my life, that’s part of the point.

When I wake up, my insides feel strong. For the first time, I feel like we are on the path to doing what we’ve been meaning to do. There’s nothing technical about our initial product that’s never been done before, but this time it’s being approached differently, it has context. It’s coming from a place of true vulnerability and sincerity.

This is the first time since starting the company in October 2013 that I’ve felt this way.

You would think I had the perfect recipe for success — I grew up in Silicon Valley, and at my core, I am an entrepreneur. But to find a place where I feel strong, it took me uprooting my life to a new state, doing lots of things that made me feel uncomfortable, and learning how to be vulnerable even in the face of great risk — a trait that absolutely did not come naturally to me.

My path has been long and difficult (we will get to that in other posts), and not out of laziness, lack of drive, or ignorance; it’s because I chose a nontraditional route, which made it difficult for me to find a commonality with my professional community, to communicate smoothly, and excel.

Not nontraditional in the “I’m a unique butterfly” kind of way. I just approached work differently than those around me (yes, even entrepreneurs). In the corporate world, I didn’t align with focusing solely on the bottom line. Startups were all about growth to sell for big money. (I get it, I’m generalizing, but even so, many companies claim to care, but at the core of how they function and the choices they make, clearly don’t). A traditional path left little opportunity to properly represent myself, my intentions, and my passions. I was always trying to explain myself to others (and doing a shitty job of it), who didn’t fully understand my work ethic or my goals.

Something I’ve noticed throughout my career — in the architecture industry, and then in the startup industry — is that there’s no way to show who someone really is. For example, an employee could do poorly in one environment and thrive in another. Whether they are a “bad” or “good” employee at the end of the day can’t be determined on performance alone, because there are so many more factors that come into play: culture, management, understanding why they are doing something. You have to take into consideration both the context of where that person is in relation to their core beliefs.

The startup dream was to break this mold, to build great things that help and inspire. But I feel we have come full circle and now have created a startup ecosystem of entrepreneurs pushed down paths with data points that don’t fundamentally matter — i.e. Get all the users.

There are some great founders out there working hard to start breaking the mold, to pave a new path. Each has lessons the next can take and so on. I am here to do my part — whatever that turns out to be — and I am lucky to have the strength of my community behind me.

We’re starting SD6 to break the mold. In a phrase, we want to lower the barrier of building rapport between professionals in a splintered industry.

Cannabis is the most exemplary representation of the problem we are solving. This industry has been incredibly intimate up until this point, mostly operating out of one geographical location with a very small, secretive community. Now it’s growing at a global scale, quickly, and that inevitably causes friction. How do you keep up that rapport?

The key to that is looking at my personal journey — I struggled to build rapport because I did not share many commonalities with my professional community. The cannabis industry is growing at a rapid pace, from a small group to a global economy, and it’s become much more difficult to cultivate connections with trusted individuals and businesses.

Rapport is built by finding a commonality to start from. That commonality has to come from a real place, which is why authentic representation is so important. We want to provide the cannabis industry with a validated source where professionals can ask questions and share information. It’s about filtering forward the content that is going to have a commonality with what matters to you.

Why does this matter to you? We think it’s important to be able to bring your true self to a professional environment. (We’re not talking about inappropriate behavior, but rather the fact that we are all human beings with flaws and personalities). What that signifies is trust. Do you have a work environment that you feel like you can “be yourself” in? How did you cultivate that community, and how did you foster that within yourself?

Feel free to start a conversation in the comments below.

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