Failure provokes a lot of responses in people.
When you fall flat on your face, it’s an embarrassing thing that makes you want
to hide in a hole and never come out—at least, that’s how I react when I say or
do something dumb. That’s why I’m not the future CEO of a major tech company.
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| Photo Credit: She Started It/IMDb |
But the young women profiled in She Started
It, a documentary airing tonight on Fuse TV in honor of International
Women’s Day, are future tech leaders. In the film, from documentarians Nora
Poggi and Insiyah Saeed, women from around the world try to their way in
Silicon Valley and other tech hubs, over the course of two years of filming.
They are immigrants, college dropouts, child prodigies, online shopping
aficionados, business app developers, but most of all they are women struggling
in a field hostile to them.
Each of these women fails to some degree, but
they all share one key thing in common, and it’s not a love of technology.
They’re all tenacious in a way that you don’t see in your day-to-day, 9-to-5
life.
Take Thuy Truong, for instance. Thuy, a
27-year-old Vietnamese-American who builds a collaborative-drawing app for
tablets and smartphones, is, by her own admission, not “a social creature.”
English isn’t her first language, a complication that combines with her natural
inclination toward introversion. And, of course, she’s a woman from Asia trying
to build a business in the Bay Area’s tech sector, which is as white-male-dominated
as a picture book about American presidents circa 2008. So when she has to
present her app at a seminar/fundraising event, she flings words out of her
mouth at a mile-a-minute pace. Her jokes don’t land. Her confidence is
nonexistent. She buries the lede about her app’s benefits and nobody knows what
she’s trying to sell them. It’s uncomfortable and unfortunate, and if Thuy were
most people, she’d slink away and get an office job. It’s really that painful
to watch.
But that’s all by design. Poggi and Saeed play
the long game with editor Jennifer Steinman. Thuy’s arc of solidifying her
pitch and reaching out to anyone who’s willing to offer advice and assistance
is the type of thing that gives introverts hope for success in a world that’s
not built for them. They’ll trip on many steps along the way, but at least the
staircase is heading up if you don’t turn back.
Two Arcs Going In Opposite Directions
Stacey Ferreira didn’t have the same struggles
as Thuy when she got started in the tech business. Stacey hit it big on her
first try, a company she co-founded with her older brother shortly after she
graduated from high school. By the time she was 19 years old, she’d already
secured $1 million in funding from Richard Branson. Yeah, the Virgin Group guy.
But the sophomore slump isn’t a myth. Even if
you have a great idea—Stacey wants to build a single online marketplace for
finding, buying, and selling outdoor signage space—it doesn’t mean that anyone
will buy it.
Stacey hoofs it all around San Francisco, barely
ever finding time to eat lunch in between gassing up her car and taking calls
with largely disinterested moneymen who, she suspects, would much rather be
taking calls from her brother, who is not involved in this particular enterprise.
Sexism envelops every part of Stacey’s life, and
it’s not just the venture capitalists who treat her like a little girl.
Everyone she knows, from her condescending boyfriend (he does this “aren’t you
adorable?” cheek rub at one point that’s enough to give you the willies) to her
parents, who continually dismiss the million dollars Stacey earned as a
teenager. They pressure her time and again to return to college at NYU so that
she can grow up to get a job and start a family—her mother is preoccupied with
Stacey making her a grandmother, even though Stacey’s brother is two years
older and theoretically closer to the marrying and baby-making stage of life.
If you want a master class in double standards,
look no further than an enlightening moment at a dinner table between Stacey
and her family. While her brother looks on silently, their mother goes on and
on about why it’s so important for Stacey to return to school rather than
pursuing the entrepreneur life. One of the directors peeps up and asks if
Stacey’s brother should return to school for the same reasons.
“Maybe, we’ll see,” the elder Ferreira woman
says. After all, she notes, so many successful entrepreneurs have been college
dropouts. Poggi and Saeed do no trickery. There are no edits to cherry pick
this woman’s words to point out her lack of self-awareness. It’s all one shot,
no cuts, all cognitive dissonance and lack of faith and second-nature bullshit.
With her company failing at the same time her mother spews this nonsense, it would
be enough to break someone.
And yet she keeps making those calls once she’s
re-enrolled in classes. Her company remains on life support, but it’s got a
heartbeat. Stacey’s not all, “Woe is me,” she’s, “What’s next?” She’s living
the advice given by her costar, Tran: ““If Plan A, Plan B, Plan C doesn’t work,
then there’s 23 other characters in the alphabet.”
Directors: Nora Poggi, Insiyah Saeed
Featuring: Thuy Truong, Stacey Ferreira, Sheena
Allen, Brienne Ghafourifar, Agathe Molinar
Available on Fuse TV
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