{
  "Gem": "We need more women founders on offense\nA response to Glossy from Glossier’s former comms lead\nAshley Mayer\nAshley Mayer\n\n·\nFollow\n\n5 min read\n·\nNov 1\n5K\n\n\n115\n\n\n\n\n\nI read Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier in one sitting, as soon as it was published. This wasn’t a casual read. I had previously run communications at Glossier, and from the moment I opened that millennial pink cover, I was on high alert.\n\nPerhaps that’s why my first feeling after finishing the book was relief. The communications profession trains you to prepare for the worst, to expect the unexpected. But there was very little new reporting in Glossy. The author, Marisa Meltzer, stitches together decades of Emily Weiss and Glossier lore, much of which she had observed firsthand as a longtime follower of the beauty industry. For Glossier fans, this would mostly be a fun, gossipy read, populated by characters they knew from Instagram.\n\nBut after relief came discomfort. Emily is critiqued throughout the book for being too private, for not wanting to talk about her personal life, for sometimes refusing to go on the record. Marisa first approached us about a book project in the spring of 2021. She said she wanted to write comprehensively about the state of beauty, a follow-up to Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, and planned to speak with founders and leaders across the industry, along with makeup artists and consumers. We had worked with Marisa in 2019 on a feature for Vanity Fair and found her to be smart, fair and fun; we encouraged Emily to participate.\n\nI left Glossier just a few months after that first interview, and had found my way to an entirely new career chapter by October of 2022, when the publisher’s announcement revealed that the book was a “tell all” about Emily — to the apparent surprise of the Glossier comms team, some of the investors and team members interviewed, and Emily herself (she was on parental leave at the time). That context helps explain the book’s opening scene where Emily breaks down crying when meeting Marisa at the Crosby Street Hotel. And it makes it much harder to swallow the author’s criticisms of Emily’s wariness and desire for privacy. In related news, Amazon just announced it’s doing a TV adaptation of the book.\n\nAnd while Glossy isn’t another female founder “takedown,” it also isn’t a book that would be written about a male CEO. The dominant critiques of Emily focus on her privilege and ambition, two traits I can’t imagine being used to undermine the successes of her male peers. Marisa is a savvy Glossier historian, but her writing gets weirdly personal when it comes to the company’s founder. In her prior book, This Is Big: How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World — and Me, Marisa shares her own experiences with diet culture alongside Jean Nidetch’s unlikely entrepreneurial journey, and in doing so, humanizes her protagonist even as she grapples with her legacy. In the case of Emily and Glossy, however, Marisa’s presence in the book often has the opposite effect.\n\n“Sometimes dealing with her could feel like talking to the prettiest and richest girl you knew who deigned to give you her attention, only to realize her goal was to get something from you.”\n\nIt would be easy to take the wrong lessons from Glossy, as many already have. The “rise and fall” narrative arc of the book, echoed in so much of the press around its launch, doesn’t match the reality of Glossier’s business, which is apparently doing quite well. A recent article in Fast Company looks at how Emily is portrayed in Glossy and wonders aloud whether women founders are better off just building under the radar.\n\nSo let’s set the record straight: There is no chance Glossier would be where it is today if Emily had tried to blend in, to be unremarkable. In fact, there’s no way she would have been able to build Glossier in the first place if she hadn’t laid the foundation with her own online presence and beauty blog, Into The Gloss. No leader is perfect, Emily included, but Glossy should not be read as a cautionary tale. It should be an example of what’s possible when women aren’t afraid to be ambitious. It should be a reason to be visible despite the very real personal costs. And it should be a reminder that achieving this level of success is incredibly hard, and the path is never straight.\n\nThis matters far beyond Glossier. When even the most successful women leaders are picked apart, there’s a widespread silencing effect. Making the decision to keep a low profile isn’t an irrational response, at least on an individual level. But in the aggregate, in an ecosystem where women-only founding teams get just 2% of venture capital funding, it’s devastating. I’ve had conversations with founders who are in the earliest stages of company building and already feel like they have a target on their backs. For women of color, the pressure is even more intense: the smaller the group you belong to, the more you are held up as the representative of that identity. Of course, awareness is not a meaningful growth lever for every business, and not every founder needs to be a public figure. But for startups where it’s an advantage, and for leaders who have the aptitude, the opportunity cost of keeping your head down can be the difference between failure and survival.\n\nI perhaps naively hope that a silver lining of today’s particularly challenging startup environment is that we’ll all have less energy for scrutinizing women leaders outside of their business decision-making. When everything is up and to the right, the most interesting stories are the flaws and failures; that’s no longer our luxury. But maybe the more realistic hope is that women founders recognize there’s really no way to thread the needle of others’ expectations, and so they stop trying, en masse.\n\nWe need more women founders on offense. And I think that means going on offense with them."
}