Arianna Taboada is a maternity leave researcher and expert. She helps entrepreneurs build their own maternity leaves when neither work nor country provide support. In this interview, we talk about everything from grief to loneliness to overwhelm, and how to create your own framework to make it through the transition to motherhood.
“I worked for myself, so I didn’t have any institutional maternity leave. With my first kid, I was just graduating from graduate school when I got pregnant and it was a very uncertain time. So I basically scraped it together doing freelance consulting and just made it work.” — Morra Aarons-Mele on having three children and running her own consultancy.
What does it take to leave a career in venture capital to join a shipping startup—in between your first baby and second baby? Today we get to interview Renee DiResta, co-founder and Director of Marketing at Haven. Renee worked previously in Venture Capital, and before that, on Wall Street. To join a startup with two small kids required some specific negotiations.
What does maternity leave look like when you’re an entrepreneurial, small-business owning woman? There isn’t a roadmap or a public narrative about what it means to have this transition to motherhood, and more importantly, to working, business-owning motherhood. Here are three common barriers women run into, and how to overcome them.