Coffee with the Senator

-- by Jessie Gabriel

Let me set the stage. I’m sitting at the head of the table in a conference room at the offices of Turning Rock Partners (a private credit fund and All Places client led by the inimitable Maggie Arvedlund). Down each side of the table are truly remarkable female entrepreneurs. Women who have launched, failed, launched again, grown, and exited restaurants, beauty businesses, private credit funds, hedge funds, fragrance brands, beverage companies, venture capital funds, and fashion labels. These women are here for a roundtable discussion on female entrepreneurship hosted by All Places. I look to my right and halfway up that side of the table, seated between two founders, is the United States Senator from the Great State of California, Laphonza Butler. 

If you had walked into that room at any point that morning, you would have heard the Senator or one of the entrepreneurs speaking on the challenges we’ve all faced in building our businesses. Many of these challenges have nothing to do with us being women, but many of them do. We talk about fundraising, about trying to convince men and women to back us. We talk about those questions so many women get about who the real brains are behind the operation, about who takes care of your kids. We talk about the casual brushoffs, the promises to support followed by ghosting. We talk about practical things like hiring and managing employees, how to provide benefits consistent with your values when you’re a small business, and why it’s so hard to match diverse businesses with private contracts. 

We also celebrate, because women are amazing and resilient and glorious. We talk about those game-changing moments when your brand launches in Target or Sephora or Whole Foods. When you get your first anchor investment. When you get to write a big check into a company that is expanding reproductive care. 

Let me be clear (do I sound like a politician? Repetition of that phrase led directly to me no longer watching Meet the Press), this was not an empty conversation where we all talked a whole bunch and the Senator nodded her head, while looking knowingly at her Chief of Staff (shoutout to Marvin!) about when to pull her from the event. This was not that. This was some whole other thing, previously unknown to many of us. This was a back-and-forth with someone in national politics who really cares about these issues. Senator Butler not only can speak with education and empathy on what it looks like for a woman to run a successful business, but she is also (get ready for the real shocker) a politician who listens. Listens. She spent two hours with us and the vast majority of that was not her speaking. 

It was also clear that she wasn’t doing this as some kind of PR stop. She wanted to discuss next steps. How do we take all the intelligence in this room and transfer it into the policy arena? How do we make sure these voices are being heard when it comes time to innovate for this community? How do we harness the enthusiasm from that one morning before we all get sucked back into the chaos of our everyday lives? It is doable, and we are doing it. We are gathering and organizing and drafting. We will have actual work product that will be shared with people who matter. This wasn’t just an event, it was the start of something big. 

Now, how does something like this happen? Like so many things, it’s a combination of doing the work and being lucky. We are doing the work in this space alongside the All Places community. We mean what we say when we talk about gender equity. So when someone wants to have a genuine conversation on that topic, we’re a good choice.  

Then there’s a bit of luck, in the form of meeting Christina Carrica Haley (also a female entrepreneur) at an event hosted by Full Picture (thank you, Desiree and Liane!). Her brain is hypervigilant when it comes to connection. When you talk to her, you can easily visualize one of those three-dimensional webs of neural pathways firing. She makes things happen. 

When you’re running a company, you think a lot about how you describe what you do. Lately when I’ve been thinking about All Places it’s struck me that we are the law firm model of the future. Consumers want to spend their money in a way that aligns with their values. We want to know more about the businesses we’re supporting by purchasing their products. Do they care about what we care about? That’s not something that has traditionally been part of the legal industry. But it is now.