🚀 Becoming a space explorer: digging into problems and opportunities as a new founder
Recently, I joined South Park Commons’ inaugural Founder Fellowship cohort. In my first few weeks, I explored different spaces by asking myself: what am I passionate or curious about? I focused on exploring new problems without pushing pressure on myself to “solve” them or build at this point. In this post, I’ll share some of the learnings and opportunities uncovered in this initial exploration.
Following my sense of curiosity, I explored six spaces:
- 🙋♀️ empowering women
- 🧠 reducing sadness/depression
- 🕵️♂️ future of news/information/media/communication
- 🎒 ecommerce
- 👑 consumer social media
- 🌱 sustainability
I first conducted research, then synthesized key takeaways. Some results reinforced what I already knew to be true, while other learnings surprised me. I found that I naturally focused on two of the six spaces: (1) empowering women and (2) reducing sadness/depression. Below are the insights that most excited me from these two spaces, as well the opportunities for further exploration that they inspired.
1. 🙋♀️ empowering women
Women continue to earn less and are underrepresented in the C-Suite, particularly in male-dominated fields.¹ The women who successfully enter fields such as math, science, and technology are more likely to lack confidence in their competence and ability. Even when they are recognized as high-achievers, women in these fields are more likely than male peers to shrug off praise or lowball their own abilities.² Beyond this confidence gap, there’s also a promotion gap. For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 85 women were promoted. The gap is worse for Black women and Latinas: only 58 Black women and 71 Latina women were promoted per 100 men.³
A frequently offered “solution” is for professional women to champion other women. One study found that women at Harvard Business School in the top quartile of centrality (central and connected to people with many contacts in the MBA student network) and with an inner circle of 1–3 other women landed leadership positions that were 2.5 times higher in authority and pay than their female peers without this combination. Meanwhile, women in their class whose networks most closely resembled those of their successful male peers (with centrality but no female inner circle) took jobs with some of the lowest authority and compensation.⁴
In the workplace, however, senior-level women who champion younger women are more likely to receive negative performance reviews.⁵ Since there are fewer women promoted to senior-level roles at every level, there are fewer potential senior-level women to champion and uplift other women. This creates overhead for existing senior-level women, who already face additional pressure and stress as compared to their male peers.
Senior-level women in the workplace are significantly more likely than men at the same level to feel burned out, under pressure to work more, and that they have to be “always on”. They’re at higher risk for attrition and are about 1.5 times more likely than male peers to think about downshifting their role or leaving the workforce because of COVID-19, often citing burn out.⁶
Taking an “off-ramp” or career break is a privilege. Off-ramping is increasingly unaffordable, particularly for women with dependents. In January 2019, 15% of women in the workforce said they would like to off-ramp but can’t afford to do so. Moreover, while 89% of off-ramped women want to resume their careers, only 40% successfully return to full-time employment.⁷ Off-ramping often comes with significant opportunity cost: rejoining the workforce is hard and, if women do, they generally earn less and have less job security.⁸
Why should we try to address these problems now? There is some early signal that we may be nearing a tipping point at which meaningful change could be accomplished. At the beginning of 2020, the representation of women in corporate America was trending up and in the right direction. This progress was most pronounced for senior management roles: from January 2015 to January 2020, women in senior-vice-president roles grew from 23 to 28%, while representation in the C-suite grew from 17 to 21%.⁹
So, what opportunities are there to empower women? Some that jump to mind are:
- Help companies, particularly those in male-dominated fields like technology, better support, promote, compensate, and retain women. This is supported by data: 26% of women who off-ramped felt their careers were unsatisfying and 16% felt their careers had stalled.¹⁰
- Help women address the primary causes of off-ramping. Causes to address include burn out, pay and promotion gaps, stalling careers, and caretaking for children or family members. 69% of the women who off-ramped said they wouldn’t have done so if their companies had offered more flexible work options (e.g. reduced-hour schedules, job sharing, part-time career tracks or short, unpaid sabbaticals).¹¹
- Offer new types of work or careers to help women have greater flexibility and an easier time exiting and reentering the workforce. The gig economy is one example of this, but perhaps there are as-of-yet unexplored opportunities to create meaningful, flexible work that will disproportionately benefit the professional women who need it most.
2. 🧠 reducing sadness/depression
Feelings of loneliness and isolation are on the rise in the U.S. digitally, and physically. More than 60% of Americans are lonely, feel left out, poorly understood, and that they lack meaningful companionship.¹² A report found a nearly 13% rise in loneliness since 2018.¹³ Loneliness is also strongly linked to mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.
What is causing this loneliness? Feelings of loneliness and isolation are connected with higher social media usage; 73% of heavy social media users reported feeling lonely, compared with 52% of light social media users.¹⁴ It’s sad yet unsurprising, then, that Gen Z respondents (18–22 years old) had the highest average loneliness score.¹⁵
Feelings of loneliness are potentially further exacerbated by the content we engage with on social media. “Engagement” is a metric often used by consumer social media companies as a way to prove they are providing value. However, at Facebook, the models of what content to show you to maximize engagement also “favor controversy, misinformation, and extremism.”¹⁶ This creates a negative flywheel where this content gets more engagement, which results in more of this content being prioritized, repeatedly. For example, Facebook employees found that users who would “post or engage with melancholy content — a possible sign of depression — could easily spiral into consuming increasingly negative material that risked further worsening their mental health” and this issue was reinforced by existing content-ranking models.¹⁷
Feelings of isolation are mirrored by actual isolation and self-segregation in the U.S. by political party lines. People are physically living in partisan bubbles, meaning Democrats self-select to live near others Democrats who share their political party affiliation and views; the same goes for Republicans.¹⁸ This co-location with only those with the same political party is nearly ubiquitous and agnostic of whether U.S. residents live in a city or suburb or rural areas.¹⁹ This self-segregation along political party lines in the physical U.S. seems to mirror the isolation and echo chambers that exist in the digital world.
There is no great alternative to social media for news. Traditional media can also perpetuate problematic narratives around minorities and people of color — if they even bother to cover them. Researchers at the University of Leeds shared reported that minorities received very little general news coverage in the U.K., but figured prominently in stories with “specific news agendas, notably immigration, terrorism, and crime.”²⁰ Brands and media advertisers are not doing much better in terms of diverse and inclusive representation. For example, an analysis of 27,000 Instagram images showed that the fashion industry’s Black Lives Matter mea culpa resulted in little to no change in representation of people of color.²¹
The pandemic has accelerated the general increase in loneliness and isolation. This has been a challenging time for U.S. workers, who face an increase in mental health issues.²² For example, 75% of U.S. employees struggled at work due to anxiety caused by the pandemic and other recent world events and 80% would consider quitting for a company with a greater focus on supporting mental health.²³ Employees that shifted to remote work are also experiencing new challenges. According to a recent survey: 4 out of 5 remote workers find it hard to “shut off” in the evenings, 50% cite sleep patterns interruptions, and 45% say they feel less mentally healthy while working from home.²⁴
So, what opportunities are there to reduce sadness/depression? Some that jump to mind are:
- Promote wellness as a lifestyle by creating shared experiences that bring people together and build bonds. There are already a lot of different approaches to this — from Peloton and Strava to BetterUp and Headspace — so figuring out a unique, significant problem to solve or insight is critical.
- Create an environment that rewards engaging with diverse thoughts and people and helps them disengage from unhealthy media habits. This seems like an extremely challenging but potentially rewarding endeavor. Companies like Clubhouse are already creating forums for potentially diverse groups to interact, while others like Dispo are attempting to introduce consumption constraints; anything new needs to meet an unmet need and answer the questions: “why this? And why now?”
As Founder/Investor Sari Azout recently tweeted:
What’s next?
I’ll continue to deep-dive into these two spaces. I plan to generate deeper insights into pain points, then begin to converge on more specific problems, markets, and opportunities. This will hopefully lead to testable hypotheses and ideas, and create a flywheel of testing and learning, increasing my velocity as I engage in this process and move from the “idea” to “build” phase.
Thoughts, feedback, advice, questions, or words of encouragement?
Please feel free to reach out on Twitter.
Finally, a special thanks to Zorayr Khalapyan for the suggestion to write about this and Amit Sankaran, Asad Akram, Jen Yip, Kate Yuan, and Leon Lin for the thoughtful feedback, edits, and support.
[2] Ibid.
[3] https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/women-in-the-workplace
[4] https://hbr.org/2019/02/research-men-and-women-need-different-kinds-of-networks-to-succeed
[5] https://hbr.org/2018/09/dont-underestimate-the-power-of-women-supporting-each-other-at-work
[6] https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/women-in-the-workplace
[7] https://www.amanet.org/articles/time-outs-take-an-increasing-toll-on-women-s-careers/
[8] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/business/economy/women-jobs-economy-recession.html
[9] https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/women-in-the-workplace
[10] https://www.amanet.org/articles/time-outs-take-an-increasing-toll-on-women-s-careers/
[11] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/1020600/facebook-responsible-ai-misinformation/
[17] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/world/europe/harry-meghan-media-race.html
[21] https://qz.com/1971689/fashion-brands-arent-keeping-their-instagram-diversity-promises
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid.
