other people in...
other people in my class who were class clowns, they weren’t girls. It was me
and a bunch of boys. I think there’s that same sort of personality that makes you
want to do something like start a company, and you can’t do something like that
without wanting to be exposed.
I’ve kind of retreated a bit. I want to be exposed less now. But I’m more
confident in what I’ve done. I’ve always identified more with guys at school and
I’ve always been competitive with them. If you try to figure out the single thing
that made us get to where we are now, it’s my competitiveness with Ben.
When we were in high school, I was practically failing out of my classes. I
hated school. It wasn’t that I wasn’t smart, but I just didn’t care about math and
science. My English and history grades were great, but everything else was horrible.
And then I started going out with Ben and he was valedictorian. I went
from a D average to hanging out with the valedictorian, and I thought, “I don’t
want to be considered the stupid one of us,” so I brought my grade point average
up in the quarter from a D to a B+.
In college, we were always competitive in every class we took. I’d get pissed
off because he was a math major and I was an English major and he decided to
minor in English and then he’d come into my classes and there were a few
where he’d do better than me. I’d say, “Stay in your own field!” But the thing
was with the business, too, I wanted to be successful and he wanted to be successful
at the same time, and so we’ve been competing because we have to be
better than each other.
Livingston: Any other reasons why there aren’t more female founders?
Trott: People do ask me that all the time, and I have to step back and try to figure
out why it is. I’m at a weird age group where I haven’t been in the industry
for a long time and I haven’t seen it first hand, but then it’s like, “It can’t be a
problem because I’m here.”
If I’m forced to think about women who are in this field, I can’t usually. But
I know there are. Many women are in marketing or design. I think marketing
and design are a lot harder to learn than engineering. That’s my opinion. People
put value judgments on engineering like, “There are more men; therefore, it
must be a smarter field that women should get into.” I don’t think that’s the case
at all. I say, look at women, they’re strong designers and strong at marketing and
communication. That’s a harder skill to acquire in life. Being able to write
and being able to figure out what people want in their product, how to sell it
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