Are we still making women choose 🤔

Hi there,

A few weeks ago, I attended the Tory Burch Foundation's first annual Founders Circle, a gathering hosted for current and former Fellows, and I left thinking about how much has changed since I became a Fellow in 2019.

At the Tory Burch Foundation's first annual Founders Circle a couple weeks ago!

A pandemic. Tariffs. The complete rewiring of how consumer businesses grow. Paid acquisition costs that doubled almost overnight. A generation of founders who rebuilt their entire model from scratch, most of us while also becoming mothers for the first time. We have navigated things that nobody had a playbook for, and the women in that room are standing more resilient than ever because of it, not in spite of it.

The event itself was one of the most intentionally designed gatherings I have ever walked into. 85% of the vendors were women-owned businesses. The food, the venue, the production. Tory has always put her money exactly where her mission is.

Tory Burch with Vivian Tu (@your.richbff)!

And something happened in that room that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

During a session called Intentional Ambition, one woman started crying. Then another. Then another.

These are some of the most accomplished women in the country. We are not falling apart. We cried because someone finally asked how we were actually doing, and the honest answer had been living underneath everything for so long it just came out.

In the hallways, at dinner, in the quiet moments between sessions, the same theme kept surfacing no matter what we were officially talking about.

Motherhood at the cost of ambition.

Not loudly. Not as a complaint. Just this quiet, persistent feeling that even at this level, even with everything we’ve built, we were still feeling forced to choose. Between being present for our kids and continuing to build. Between the business and the family. Between the life pulling at us and the one we’d worked so hard to create.

And here's what I want you to understand about us female founders: we are just the most visible version of something almost every woman I know is carrying.

The Fellows have the accolades, the networks, the business grants, the stage. And we are still navigating the exact same guilt, the exact same exhaustion, the exact same impossible arithmetic of a full life that most women navigate every single day without any of that. The working mom who gets home after a twelve-hour shift with nothing left. The woman who has been taking care of everyone around her for so long she can't remember the last time someone asked what she needed. The one who is doing everything right and still feels like something essential is missing.

We are all doing a version of the same thing. But what surprised me is that I left angry not because my fellow founders were struggling. It was that the answer everyone keeps reaching for is still "do less." Slow down. Something has to give. As if the solution to being a woman holding a big life is to make the life smaller.

That is a failure of infrastructure.

To me, the answer lies in designing your life around how you are actually wired. Building routines and rituals that work for you in whatever season you are in. Leaning on community instead of grinding through it alone. Creating the daily practice that holds you together in the hard seasons so you can keep going, keep building, keep showing up fully for the people who need you, without slowly disappearing in the process.

And it hit me - this is who I’ve been building Silk + Sonder for seven years for. It’s why Michelle, who spent nine years as a stay-at-home mom, used it to rediscover her passions and re-enter the workforce. Why Rachael told us Silk + Sonder was one of the first things to bring her joy since losing herself in motherhood. It’s why Kyra, who had struggled with high-functioning anxiety for 25 years and tried everything, told us nothing worked the way the journals did.

Because the women of Silk + Sonder chose a daily practice built around how they're actually wired, that gives them five minutes that belong entirely to them before the rest of the world gets their attention.

I left with pride of everything I’ve accomplished with Silk + Sonder thus far but I also left with sorrow - that so many women might continue to choose “less” for themselves because they didn’t find the system and tools they needed on time.

If you’re finding yourself in the same boat, it’s time to say yes to you. See this as your sign - I’m here to help you every step of the way.

My mini me and I networking!

By investing in yourself, you’re helping me show everyone that we don’t have to choose between being a present mom and a badass founder ;)

With so much love,
Meha Agrawal

As seen in - Business Insider | CBS | Forbes | Huffington Post