out of it.
I think it’s really important that you have a realization of what’s important.
You can’t stress over things that you can’t necessarily control. Even though we
can control the success of the company to a certain extent, you have to be grateful
for what you’ve got. We were able to buy a house. We never thought we’d be
able to buy a house. That’s a huge thing.
Four years ago, I never thought we’d have the stuff we have now—not
material, but a company and a house and have friends and be respected. Would
I have quit? No, I wouldn’t have, because I didn’t. But we came pretty close.
I think it was even harder because of the marriage. It’s hard to be so stressed
out and not have any outlet that’s not work. But at the same time, Ben knew
what I was going through more than anybody else could in the world, and so I
didn’t have to tell him how I was feeling because he knew what was bothering me.
Livingston: Did you ever argue at work?
Mena Trott 413
Trott: It’s not like that anymore, but when we fought, we fought out in the
open. That’s one thing that people told me I had to stop. If I’m freaking out
about something, I freak out on the one person I think I can. I mean, I can’t yell
at Barak necessarily, so I’ll yell at the person that I’m married to because it’s
easier to do that.
Whenever we got into really big fights, it was always about something not
working right. And it was me. If something breaks, usually it’s going to be engineering.
It’s not going to be design, because design is something that doesn’t
break. It may not work the way people want it to, but it’s not going to be noticeable.
So I would freak out and say to Ben, “This is down! Don’t you know it’s
down? Don’t you care about the company?” But yelling at Ben isn’t going to fix
it. That’s something I realized. But it’s back to that pregnancy thing; I’ve
blocked out the really bad fights.
Livingston: Why do you think there aren’t more female startup founders?
Trott: This is the part that I always end up regretting because I set the gender
back. I think one of the reasons happens to be that women aren’t always necessarily
that motivated to prove themselves in the way that men are. It’s not saying
that they don’t have ambition; it’s saying that there’s something in our makeup
that makes us be confident more in what we are and what we’ve accomplished
independently without having to say, “I’m a founder, I’m an entrepreneur.”
When I was in school, I was always a class clown. And if I think about the