Let me start this post off by saying that impostor syndrome has already been covered profusely and at length, and there’s probably nothing new I can add to the discussion, so let me stop here, thanks for reading, and sorry for wasting your time.

Ahem. While there’s already tons of advice for overcoming impostor syndrome, I find it usually falls into one of two buckets:

The first angle is clearly useless, and the second, I’d argue, is neither possible nor advisable.

Hot take: you cannot successfully fake being confident. Not to say it wouldn’t be useful if you could. Research shows that when it comes to appearing competent, confidence is as (or more) persuasive than actual competence in getting people to think you know what you’re doing. Over confidence can get you far in life. But the same studies show that it’s not enough to merely fake being confident. You have to actually believe it–you have to be “honestly overconfident.” In a fantastic piece for The Atlantic , Katty Kay and Claire Shipman write of their interview with the confidence researcher Cameron Anderson:

“Most people can spot fake confidence from a mile away.” It’s a result that’s borne out in the lab, and one I’ve validated in my own life tons of times.

If you write software for a living, then you likely spend your days interacting with people who argue with such monomaniacal vigor about optimal keyboard shortcuts you’d think they were defending their PhD theses. On top of that, if you are a woman, you probably also spend lots of time convincing people you really do know how to code. Combine these two and the fact that programming is actually hard and it’s no wonder so many of us feel like impostors. I first learned the name for this feeling in 2013, when I was a sophomore college and got my hands on Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, Lean In. Thanks to that book, I (and so many others) started asking myself, “Is the problem that I’m an impostor, or that I have impostor syndrome?”

It would be hard for me to name a single female software engineer who doesn’t wonder this on the regular (surely many men do, too–but I find it’s rarer). But this is where things get complicated, because when you know you may be suffering from impostor syndrome, you feel the need to counteract it. You come to the conclusion that the queasy feeling in your gut is wrong–that the insecure part of you is delusional–and that you should no longer let your gut instinct guide your actions. Instead, you enable manual override, behaving in the way you think a confident person would. You start conversations by listing your credentials; you find every opportunity to name drop your alma mater; you post your every accolade on social media. (I’m guilty of all of these things.) It feels like bragging, but it’s hard to tell, because isn’t that what somebody with impostor syndrome would think?

But my take is that this sort of self-promotion rings hollow. Meanwhile, in the midst of our credential-dropping, we often fail to show confidence in situations that actually do sway people’s views of us. For example, I have a tendency to give an opinion and immediately caveat it with, “but I have no idea what I’m talking about,” and, “but you should definitely Google that.” And this type of back-talk absolutely does make me appear less competent.

In other words, when we force ourselves to ignore the “delusion” that is impostor syndrome, we end up behaving in ways that don’t feel very human–and don’t come off as genuine to other humans. Meanwhile, we fail to address the root of the problem.

So what’s the solution? For me, the answer has been to focus on acquiring “true confidence”–the type that my brain and my gut both agree I should have. I’ve done this neither by repeating to myself the daily affirmation “You are great at Python developer,” nor by going back to school for my PhD. But here’s what’s worked for me.

Calibrate yourself

There’s a famous Bob Thaves quote that says, of the dancer Fred Astaire:

It may well be true that no matter how qualified you are, if you don’t come in the right package–if you’re not tall or male or confident or charismatic–that you have to work twice as hard for people to realize it. If they ever realize it.

But most of us don’t go from having two left feet to being Ginger Rogers overnight. We start our careers knowing nothing, struggle through the early years as newbies, and eventually learn enough to call ourselves experts. Yet we rarely know at any moment where we fall on that spectrum (besides, expertise is relative, isn’t it?).

Which says to me that all of us must secretly be thinking: “Some people who think they’re impostors actually are! How can I be sure I’m not one of them?”

So my first piece of advice is to try, if you can, to answer this question in some sort of objective way: how competent am I compared to my peers? This isn’t the type of question that’ll make it into the pages of any wellness-minded self-help book, but for me it’s been incredibly helpful (and not because I’m some amazing 10x programmer).

The analytics-crazed field of software development has tools for doing just this. One engineering manager I knew kept a dashboard that analyzed the code commits of all his team members and computed their relative productivity (I’m sure glad he wasn’t my manager ). I’m not suggesting you use this Orwellian gauge as a measure of your self-worth, but if you have at least some way of objectively measuring your standing, you can better identify whether your insecurity comes from imagined or real performance differences. And this, particularly in the world of tech, is important, because non-objective measures abound.

You don’t need a college degree in Computer Science to be a successful coder, but taking the traditional university route did give me one irreplaceable perspective: seeing first hand the differences in the way I think about myself, versus the way my classmates–who would eventually become my coworkers–thought and talked about themselves.

Switching into Computer Science as a sophomore, I was already “behind.” Lots of my classmates had been coding since they were in utero. The field is vast, and I had no idea what people were talking about most of the time: Arch Linux? Lambda functions? emacs? Neural networks? And it wasn’t just the lingo that intimidated me. It was also that my classmates had such strong opinions! Why was it so important that I give up my Macbook Pro for a computer with an operating system that couldn’t hibernate or play audio? Why did I have to write code in a text editor with no graphical user interface that was built in the 70s? I had no idea, but I was convinced it was what legit programmers did.

“The thing you don’t realize,” my friend Raymond, a precocious coder two years above me, said, “is that they spend all this time arguing about things they don’t know anything about.” It took me three years of CS education to realize that so many of my classmates were, indeed, casually spewing bullshit, and there really wasn’t any good reason to write code in emacs. (#vim4life)

It’s often easier to become close friends with the classmates you’re pulling the same punishing all-nighters with than it is with your co-workers. And because of that, I saw this pattern play out time and again: a friend speaks at length and with authority about quantum computing, but on further interrogation reveals their entire background knowledge boils down to four Tweets. Their standards for how much they had to know about a topic in order to argue about it were much lower than mine. Which gave me the impression that was a lot further “behind” than I actually was.

The plural of anecdote is not data, but the data do support this “confidence gap” across gender lines six ways to Sunday: in the lab, women thought their performance on tests were worse than men did, even when their scores were the same. In one study, women applied for promotions only when they thought they met 100 percent of job qualifications; men applied when they met just 60. This phenomenon is one of the most repeatable results in psychology.

I’ll always remember applying for internships junior year when my then-boyfriend came to me distraught that he’d been rejected for a role as an Android developer.

“But Frank*,” I said, “you don’t know anything about Android development.”

To which he replied:

“And without this job, how will I ever learn?”

I’ve seen another common variant when my female coworkers are asked if they can complete a task. In one meeting, a project manager asked (the only other) female engineer on our team if she could build out a feature.

“Maybe? I don’t know… I’ve never worked on anything like that. I’ll have to ask my manager about it.”

I’ve never in my life heard a male coworker say anything like that. It’s not that my male coworkers claimed they could do everything. It’s just that they usually placed the blame elsewhere–on complicated software or incompetent coworkers–rather than on themselves. But more often, they’d just say yes, assuming that whatever they didn’t know they’d be able to learn on the job.

Unfortunately, I can’t give you an exact formula for learning how you stack up, but I will say the most useful “calibration exercise” I’ve ever done was becoming an interviewer. In my first job at OkCupid, I routinely reviewed resumes from applicants who listed such achievements as “trained and deployed neural networks at scale” or “built a compiler from scratch” but that, when fingers hit keyboards, couldn’t write a for loop to save their lives.

In other words, if you let your opinions of others be swayed by those who can talk the talk, it’s easy to feel that you’re further behind than you really are. In this way, finding a more concrete measure–whether its lines of code committed, performance reviews, or a candid conversation with your manager–can be useful. Maybe no one measure is perfect, but together they can paint a clearer picture.

Of course, at the end of this calibration exercise, you may learn something that you don’t like. Maybe that means you do need to spend time garnering experience or studying hard to level up your skills. No shame there. It’s an actionable insight. And, if you discover that you really are bad at something, despite hard work, that’s okay, too. I’ve never been happy in a job I didn’t feel that I was good at. But I have stayed in those roles longer than I should have because I spent so much time thinking I just had impostor syndrome. The right move for me has always been to pivot to something that suits my strengths better. Or, of course, you could simply say fuck the competition–you like the job you do and that’s all that matters.

Talk the talk

It’s important to calibrate your abilities against your peers not just so you know how “good” you are, but also so that you understand how your peers (who are sometimes your competition) are representing themselves. No, you don’t want to lie on your resume and say you’re C# expert when all you’ve written is “Hello, world.” But at the same time, if everyone on the job market is listing themselves as experienced C# developers with only a year of experience, shouldn’t you be using that as the same bar for yourself? In fact, if you don’t do this–if you hold yourself to a higher bar–you might be inadvertently misleading folks into thinking you’re less competent than you really are, because you’re using a different scale.

Credit: Dale Markowitz

Overselling your abilities is unwise and feels “icky.” But when you really understand how people with your abilities represent themselves, you may find you speak with more confidence naturally, simply because you feel it’s honestly deserved.

And on the topic of talking the talk, here’s another tip: don’t unnecessarily undercut yourself. As stated, I would never advise someone to try to sound like they’re more knowledgeable than they are. But that doesn’t mean you should go out of your way to kill your credibility.

I’m guilty, often, of being so afraid of being “found out” that when I say something like,

“I have 8 years of experience with Python,”

I also tack on:

“But I don’t know anything about Flask or Django or how to author a pip package, and I don’t know the difference between Python 3 and Python 2, and I’ve never used the collections package, and sometimes when I laugh too hard, I pee myself a little bit.”

My fiancé once asked his dad for advice on asking out a girl who was “out of his league.” His father replied:

“Let her figure that out.”

For me and many of the women I’ve spoken to, we are so afraid of saying something that turns out to be wrong that we’re willing to massacre our credibility right up front to avoid that possibility. This is unnecessary. If you say something wrong, someone will look it up and correct you, or maybe they won’t. Big whoop. Just don’t try this on Twitter.

You’re smart even if you don’t know about Kubernetes

Maybe this is the most important tip of all.

For most of this post, I’ve suggested actions you can take to feel like less of an impostor – to change the way you think of yourself, and the way you present yourself to others. But of course, there’s a lot about the way people perceive you you simply cannot control, especially when bias is involved. As a woman in tech, I will always struggle to convince folks I’m competent, and their reactions will always make me feel less so. Plus, sexism aside, tech is filled with lots of jerks, and many more people who aren’t jerks, but that occasionally speak like them. I don’t know how to change that.

But I do think there’s value in recognizing when you’re talking to a jerk, so you don’t internalize this as a flaw in yourself. You cannot reasonably go up to Vint Cerf, the inverter of TCP/IP, and expect to have a debate about network protocols in which you don’t get totally schooled. But no matter how much or how little you know about a subject, you always deserve to be spoken to like a smart person. When I wonder if a coworker is talking down to me, I ask myself, “is this how that person would speak to me if I were Richard Feynman?” Because Richard Feynman doesn’t know about Kubernetes, but you’d never explain something to him like he were a hapless dummy.

Of course, when you identify you’re being talked down to, there’s not necessarily much you can do about it. But sometimes identifying the things you can’t change gives you more time to focus on the things you can.

But what do I know?

A very big thanks to Sara Robinson and Anu Srivastava , two of my wicked smart and thoughtful coworkers, for feedback on this post.

* “Frank,” you know who you are.

An entrepreneur’s guide to long-term marketing strategies amid COVID-19

While lowering the cost to human life remains of utmost importance during the COVID-19 outbreak, the virus is also fiercely impacting businesses across the globe. In the United States 17 million people, 10% of the workforce, filed for unemployment in a three-week period, and the OECD projects world GDP growth will fall to 2.4% in 2020.

Lacking the deep pockets and credit lines that more established corporations can fall back on during times of economic disruption, the startup community will surely be jarred by the rocky economic road ahead.

While taking stock of company assets and liabilities, founders may be inclined to drastically decrease marketing spend, reactionarily pivot their core marketing strategies, or cut out their marketing initiatives entirely. This would be a mistake.

Companies would be wise to stick to long-term marketing strategies that work. Remaining consistent, and making small adaptations to long-term marketing strategy is no easy task, however.

Here are three areas entrepreneurs should consider in their efforts to remain true to their brands and come out stronger on the other side of this crisis.

“Use a scalpel not a sledgehammer” on your long-term marketing budget

Rand Fishkin, founder of inbound-marketing software firm Moz and market research startup SparkToro, recently tweeted : “Have to make marketing cuts? Don’t use a sledgehammer, use a scalpel. Otherwise you could cut revenue-generating channels and spend… Revenue that’s saving people’s jobs.”

Mr. Fishkin’s statement makes sense. Startups should analyze all of their marketing channels and the performance levels of each to make informed decisions about which long-term marketing strategies will continue to work during a recession, and which can be scaled back or re-tooled.

Companies that lower advertising budgets — or eliminate them altogether — during a recession put themselves at risk when economic uncertainty subsides.

An analysis using data from the Profit Impact of Market Strategies (PIMS) database, a comprehensive, long-term study of strategic business units (SBUs) in thousands of companies, showed that businesses that lowered ad spend during a recession saw “sales and income fall by 20-30% over the next two years as a result,” according to AdWeek .

On the contrary, John Quelch, Dean of the Miami Herbert Business School at the University of Miami and Katherine E. Jocz, former VP of Research Operations at the Marketing Science Institute, found that increases in marketing spend by businesses during recessions have “boosted financial performance throughout the year following the recession.” Furthermore, analysis of the PIMS database by marketing experts Alexander L. Biel and Stephen King found that businesses which increased ad spend during a recession increased their market share as the recession subsided.

Startups with low access to capital may find it more difficult to aggressively market during an economic slump, but by remaining calm and analyzing channels that provide positive ROI for the company, founders can better direct resources.

For startups with little-to-no marketing budget, there are other options to cut costs including partnering with a non-competing brand in a separate product category that targets the same consumer segment as your company to share advertising costs, and internal content creation on your own website’s blog.

There are also funding options via accelerators such as Y Combinator and 500 Startups, in addition to competitions with potential investors such as the SXSW Pitch in 2021 or Tech5, organized by Adyen and TNW. If your company is performing well in the downturn, be sure to communicate that to investors too.

The worst thing a company can do during a downturn is go completely dark.

Focus marketing efforts on core products and customers

During times of economic uncertainty, entrepreneurs could be forgiven for completely re-focusing their marketing strategy, product lines, or even customer base, in an effort to make much-needed but nevertheless short-term gains. (To be clear, this does not refer to the thousands of businesses who have graciously re-tooled their operations to provide much needed personal protective equipment (PPE) to healthcare workers fighting COVID-19).

This strategy is shortsighted and could prove detrimental. Instead, entrepreneurs and marketers should focus on the value proposition of core products and double down on marketing efforts to key customers and market segments.

HubSpot, a publicly traded marketing software company, was just two years old when the 2008 recession hit. According to their first sales person, Mark Roberge, their biggest challenge during that crisis was communicating that HubSpot wasn’t just a “nice to have” product, but rather a “must have” one. By centering attention on its core product’s value proposition (“more quality sales leads”), and not being lured in by short-term gains, Mr. Roberge and the rest of his team were able to lead the company out of the recession and continue to snatch up market share.

Companies that offer a range of products or services should take stock of experimental or low-performing product lines, and consider pausing marketing initiatives for these in order to focus long-term marketing efforts on products or services core to the company.

Additionally, during tough economic times, it is wise for entrepreneurs to recall that it costs less to keep a current customer happy than to find a new one. Furthermore, Mr. Quelch and Ms. Jocz remind businesses that “loyal customers are the primary, enduring source of cash flow and organic growth,” and should focus their marketing efforts on them accordingly in a downturn. Silicon Valley business coach Barbara Shannon is telling her clients that there is a tremendous opportunity right now to build lasting trust with their communities, and Invest Ottawa, an economic development agency for the tech sector in Canada’s capital, is reaching out to community businesses impacted by COVID-19 with resources in a show of solidarity.

Part of keeping loyal customers engaged in the time of COVID-19 will mean being empathetic to their current financial situations. Startups, especially those that provide products or services to their peers, should be cognizant of the new economic realities of their core customer base and strive to fulfill the old Silicon Valley ethos of providing more value than you ask for in return — that value proposition should be conveyed in your marketing campaigns as well.

Communicating your appreciation to loyal customers through promotions or referral programs can help establish trust and ensure their allegiance when times are good again. However founders must be aware that excessive discounts can lead customers to devalue your product in their minds, negatively impacting their willingness to pay more when prices return to normal.

Organizations such as WeWork Labs have introduced programs in recent years to improve loyalty, with the goal of having startups grow and remain active with WeWork at various stages of their lives.

Companies that aren’t distracted by short-term marketing gains for non-essential products and focus their limited marketing resources on conveying the value of core products to their loyal customer base will be better positioned for success as soon as the economic situation rebounds.

Keeping your eye on the long-term doesn’t mean ignoring the short-term

Startups would do a disservice to themselves and to society if they completely ignored the COVID-19 outbreak and its devastation in their marketing and communications strategies. We’re not robots and nor should we be.

Part of being engaged with customers who are facing new realities amid the crisis is sharing your experience and expertise while remaining sensitive to the changing needs and emotions of  people during these uncertain times.

If founders are going to conduct marketing related to COVID-19 — which is totally ok but should not supplant long-term strategy — they should keep the following two things in mind:

First, businesses should stay in their lane when it comes to giving COVID-19-related advice.

Whether on your own company blog or via publication on outside media, founders and marketers should refrain from providing healthcare advice if they are not qualified health experts. This is not only dangerous, it could have a severely negative impact on your brand. As former MIT marketing professor Mark Ritson eloquently put it in a recent column in Marketing Week , “The first lesson of the coronavirus crisis that now engulfs us is to shut the f*ck up and let the experts guide us.”

Instead, founders should only share valuable expertise as it relates directly to their company, industry or community.

Second, now is not the time for public relations stunts. It’s the time for genuine help.

As the novel coronavirus spreads across the globe, thousands of businesses are stepping up to help produce much-needed PPE and other supplies for hospitals and testing labs racked by the outbreak.

For example, startups in New Orleans like Entrescan are working with Scale Workspace to 3D print face shields for local hospital workers, and a 13-year-old Chicago boy who is part of a network of 100,000 printers on 3D Printer OS, a software for 3D printing, has created filters for masks. Los Angeles blockchain startup Vottun recently partnered with Oracle and PwC to create technology that records and verifies COVID-19 test results, while VivaAir Labs, an airline innovation lab for the travel industry based in Latin America, is holding a startup competition with a cash prize for ideas to safely revitalize travel after the outbreak subsides.

However, some businesses are coming under fire in the media for half-hearted relief efforts, or repackaging current products or offers in a humanitarian light when not merited.

For example, Tesla was recently embarrassed for announcing that it had procured 1,225 much-needed, FDA-approved ventilators for hospitals. In desperately short supply, ventilators are used to help stabilize patients whose lungs are severely affected by the virus. News reporters would soon uncover that what Tesla actually delivered to hospitals were BPAP machines, non-invasive ventilators that people with sleep apnea use, not the type required for intensive care units.

Also, many providers of work collaboration and communication software, such as teleconferencing services, are getting pushback from the media because they marketed their freemium access and free trial solutions as social good initiatives during the outbreak when shelter in place orders moved much of the world’s workforce online.

As businesses take on more responsibility for the overall betterment of society, startups should be encouraged to help solve the world’s most pressing issues, and they should be recognized when they genuinely do so. But short-sighted PR stunts or crafty marketing campaigns during times of real societal distress will have a negative impact on a company’s long-term marketing strategy, and should be avoided at all costs.

While we are living through a disease outbreak the scale of which we haven’t seen in over a century, and the true economic impact of the virus could potentially not be revealed for years, it is helpful for startup founders to reflect on past economic crises to help them guide their businesses through this one.

By being surgical with marketing budget cuts, doubling down on messaging for core products and customers, and responsibly acknowledging the current crisis in your communications while not being enveloped in it, startups will come out stronger in the end.

This article was Co-Authored by Jim Glade

To raise funds, or not to raise funds? That is the question

Stats from Crunchbase show that more than 1,900 seed and series A investment rounds happened in June – August 2020, despite it being the peak of the coronavirus. Even a pandemic couldn’t discourage entrepreneurs from seeking capital to fund their dreams.

I think it’d be fair to say that investors have been more cautious than usual as markets have softened globally as a result of COVID-19. Entrepreneurs should be able to seek the money they need to ensure the success of their business. However, many of them have trouble deciding whether it’d be a good idea in the first place…

Dealing with VCs can sometimes feel like you are embarking on a treacherous journey because you may be at a disadvantage when it comes to negotiating a good deal. However, seasoned serial entrepreneurs will tell you that it is possible to get capital as and when you need it, without sacrificing your future options. You should know precisely what you are in for before you step into the fundraising process.

Having run several companies, worked as an investor, and raised funds from prominent investors, such as Boost VC and Natalia Vodianova, I’m often asked whether it’s a good idea for budding entrepreneurs to look into VC funding.

As someone who understands the ins and outs of venture capital, I can tell you that each company has its own set of circumstances. So, if you are asking whether your business should or shouldn’t raise capital, I won’t be able to give you a yes or no answer. Instead, I recommend the following simple and practical framework to figure out what’s right for you.

Your appetite for risk

Are you a low-risk/low-reward entrepreneur who wants to grow one company for 20 years? Or do you consider yourself a high risk/high reward entrepreneur who prefers to develop 4 different companies for 5 years on average in a fast-growth mode?

If you chose the first option, the answer is simple — you probably won’t need venture capital investments. You already have enough time and patience to take the company to your target profit/valuation with available resources. Who knows, you may just be able to make it right around time for your retirement!

But if you choose the second option, how long can you keep your focus on one company before switching your attention to other projects? According to my observations, it usually takes 3-7 years for entrepreneurs to move from one company to the next. If that’s your case, you’ll need funding to propel your business to success.

Your financial targets

Are you aiming to have full financial freedom as quickly as possible, or do you want to focus on short-term investments and gradually make your way up?

If you want to be financially independent within 5-10 years, you will most likely need venture capital investment. But if you are willing to wait 20 years or more — then keep at it because you can do it without the help of VC. But you should make yourself comfortable because it is going to be a long wait!

It’s interesting to note here that there were 273 mega-rounds, i fundraising of $100 million and more for tech businesses last year. So why not stake your claim in these mega-rounds that are creating more startup unicorns with bigger valuations than ever before? That could’ve been you!

Your market growth rate

It’s essential to know your market’s YoY (year over year) growth rate. These numbers will come in handy when assessing the company’s performance and estimate the future growth prospects, ultimately helping you to make investment decisions.

At the same time, you must also figure out how quickly this YoY can be commoditized and if there is a risk of competitors taking a share of your growth. Also, how fast are the multipliers growing, if the EBITDA is growing or declining and how external factors like a pandemic might affect it.

It is essential to know the answers to all of these questions to understand the opportunities available to you. This way, you’ll know when and how much capital you need to raise to make the most of your situation.

Profitability or breaking even

Don’t worry about either of these things just yet. The fact of the matter is that profits can be the enemy of success for a startup. This mentality can cause startups to lose the growth rate momentum and market share.

Founders often think that getting to the break-even point validates their business model. The reality is that they made thousands of times less than what they could have if they had made it to a liquidity event (exit/IPO) without the focus on profitability.

Aiming for profitability makes you complacent and less willing to take a risk. In fact, I firmly believe that you should reconsider working with investors who put too much emphasis on breaking even.

Why does this happen? Let’s start with the basics. A startup is a team of like-minded people who are after maximum capitalization (CAPITALIZATION, not profit). Consequently, any delay in this path jeopardizes the existence of the startup as a whole.

Only an inexperienced investor will bug you with the question, “So, when is break-even?”

Of course, the focus on capitalization growth, by all means, implies healthy unit economics, which means that the company will be able to make a profit when it becomes the leader of its market, with ARR from $100 million.

It’s very rare, but there are exceptions to this rule. For example, when a SaaS grows at the specified rate, increases capitalization, and also manages to get a positive EBITDA, all at the same time. But I have hardly seen this happen.

In conclusion

Venture capital can wait, as made evident by the fact that in 2019, the median age of companies raising funds was 2.9 years .

Raising funds isn’t easy, but examining and analyzing the above points can help entrepreneurs make sound financial decisions on when to approach investors and how much to ask for. Also, look into alternate ways of raising money, such as debt financing or crowdfunding.

Finally, encourage your team to set goals that can help minimize risk and evaluate reward potentials. And use this guide for the practical insights it offers about ways to improve your business and financial standing.