When a senior editor from Forbes called my office to verify the financial details of my company before putting my face on the cover of their next issue, the valuation they were calling about was $50 million. If you want to understand how that number came to exist, you have to go back to the very beginning. You have to look past the conference rooms and the pitch decks.
You have to look at a twelve-year-old girl who understood, early and with great clarity, that if she wanted to survive in her own house, she would have to treat her childhood like a cold business transaction. My father Richard and my mother Barbara were not poor. They were wealthy.
They owned a successful commercial real estate firm in an affluent suburb where the neighborhood association specified the acceptable shade of your lawn. Imported Italian leather sofas that nobody sat on. Annual trips to the Swiss Alps.
Matching European SUVs in an oversized driveway. A picture-perfect upper-class American existence, at least from outside. Inside those walls, there was a dividing line so thick you could choke on it.
On one side stood my younger sister Clara. On the other side was me. Clara was three years younger, and I want to be clear: she was never the villain.
She was simply a child born into sunlight while I was somehow permanently assigned to the shade. If Clara showed a passing interest in watercolors, my parents hired a private art tutor and converted the guest room into a studio before the week was out. If she mentioned horseback riding, the best leather boots and a premium stable membership materialized before dinner.
They anticipated her every desire as if she were royalty, curating her life to ensure she never experienced a single moment of friction. My experience in that same house, breathing the same air, was different in every way. If I needed new sneakers because the soles were separating, my mother would sigh, cross her arms, and deliver an hour-long lecture about financial responsibility.
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