Hi there,

It’s been a week.

I saw dead people but you’re just going to have to read this whole thing to allow me to explain.

And warning, it’s a long story long*ish but I’m fairly confident it’s worth the read.

For those who need a quick “get up to speed” TLDR;

WHAT:

Flew to San Francisco for a week to meet with PEOPLE (ie) potential investors for My StoryPro, partners, media people, former clients, Whatsapp penpals and apparently a medium.

WHY?

I’m raising a pre? But sort of seed? Round for My StoryPro and I decided to head to the land where the monopoly money grows on Redwood trees and $1M is “put it in the buster guitar case” change.

MAIN CHARACTER ENERGY

Finally got to meet Barbara IRL…a client of a year and a half, former tech VP turned business SHARK who will have 8 wellness social club locations in SF by next year and who accidentally started another business this year that is a better Boundless (the program where you live abroad with your family but they handle all the logistics and school, camps,etc..)

She’s one of my star storytelling students and now a master at weaving her personal and professional stories into her (many) business narratives.

I am so immensely proud of her and when we started working together she hadn’t even opened up one location…and now she has almost 8… oh and she has BABYSITTING on premise so you can workout and work.

If only this was around when I had little kids.

And then you might recall from my last email I had taken up this deep friendship with a woman via Whatsapp voice notes. (It’s like the start of a horror but make it tragicom Netflix series.)

Her name is Bria.

Aside from making me feel like I was at a 5-star resort all week (coffee delivered to my door each morning).

Puppy cuddles to set my day off right..

and leaving me food out when I would limp across the doorstep most nights past 10PM…

..she was my official San Francisco connector, cheerleader and guide.

Deeply entrenched and a badass at her company, she’s the boss you all wish you had in corporate and I got to be in her and her family’s world while I was out there.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into being in SF.

You sort of hear all these “things” about it being this sort of dystopian, tech-obsessed, AI-overlord*y, hyper rich, center-of-the-universe place right now.

I’m here to report that it’s all true.

For good and for bad but more on that below.

And if not for Bria’s guidance, I am not sure my trip would have had the same outcome. This place can swallow you whole.

Ok, so what did I actually take away from being out there.

1. Nobody cared about the product***wipes tear

Ok sure, potential investors wanted to know it wasn’t vibe-coded that morning and legit, but what they REALLY wanted was more info on my TODAY Show background, how I ran my storytelling agency, what I know personally about the problem My StoryPro solves for and why I believed I was the person to take this product and launch it Space X style (but make it NOT Elon thanks).

Takeaway: Anyone can launch a product or a service with a Stripe checkout in 20 minutes, so the only thing that actually differentiates your business now to someone else’s is your lived experience.

Your background isn’t just an ice-breaker now, it’s the entire pitch. Oh and My StoryPro helps you thread these stories in your life as an FYI.​

2. Do not, under any circumstance, rent a car.

Towed night one.
Two more tickets after that.
THOUSANDS of dollars later.
The SF parking police do not play.

I stood on the street at 10PM staring at an empty spot like it had personally wronged me.

It had.

And shoutout to My StoryPro member and now GOOD friend Tara for taking me to the SF impound on night 1 of my trip. We’re bound by trauma now sorry.

Takeaway: Use the robot-driving cars like your bank account depends on it. Because it does.

3. You will be bad at your pitch the first few times, ask for feedback ASAP

I teach people not to lead with the resume, the features, the what. Lead with the who, the why, the emotion.

And yet there I was, in my own high-stakes version of that exact situation, and I blanked on my own lesson. THE IRONY.

I could feel it in the first few meetings when the connection wasn’t landing. I called Elyce, a media trainer for tech founders and also a storytelling alumni of mine and I said, “help me practice please and give me brutal feedback.”

She did and it transformed the rest of my meetings.

Takeaway: You will forget your own best advice under pressure. Re-center yourself, get feedback from a trusted source and do not dwell on the meetings that didn’t go great.

4. Do not under any deranged circumstance decide to DIY dermaplane your face for the 1st time ever on the day of packed meetings.

Happened.

I took a small blade to my face to make it like a baby seal and I cut myself. Bleeding out of my cheek.

This was the first day of my trip and nothing screams “I will grow your investment” than a bandaged face and a misspelled name tag of your own name but more on that later.

Takeaway: Never be this dumb.

5. The game has rules. You will need to play them a little

An investor looked me in the eye and said, “I can’t help you unless you raise more.” BUT BUT WE ARE AI-NATIVE DON’T NEED THAT MUCH BLAH BLAH…. ***she didn’t care.

I went up, she came down, my deck got passed somewhere I still don’t fully know. I have been told this advice a few times in the past months and I have rolled my eyes at it.

But hearing it in the flesh across from people I respect… I am now listening.

Takeaway: You don’t have to love the rules. But to get to the higher purpose of your mission, you have to know when to bend. Being rogue is great. Being rogue and boxed out of the rooms that matter is not.

6. The power of IRL meetings is unparalleled

SF works like a telephone game.

I went into the week with 5 confirmed meetings and left with double that.

Half the people I met while I was out there in organic situations.

When someone said they couldn’t meet I offered to COME TO HER HOUSE and to my shock she said, “sure…let’s do it.” I need to get off my freaking computer and get in front of people.

Takeaway: Someone’s sloppy seconds might be your soul mate. If someone isn’t into what you’re doing, ask them who might be. When you’re in person, the pass-along effect is so much easier. And if you’re not feeling VERY cringe, you’re not putting yourself out there enough.

7. You will be so tired you might spell your own name wrong.

I was on a list for an invite-only gathering of women in SF in someone’s insane house.

We had name tags.

I couldn’t understand why everyone was squinting at mine and assumed they couldn’t read the cause that I am most passionate about: refugees/women and children displaced by war. NOPE.

It was my NAME. I forgot the C.

Takeaway: SIGH.

8. The people across the table need you more than you think.

Talking to people who have a lot of money or who could change the trajectory of your start-up in an instant is a weird feeling of “imbalance of power.” Except it’s really not.

I had to mentally center myself so many times on-the-fly and remind myself that most of them have never built anything themselves. Or have cared so much about something they talk about it online and face judgment from strangers.

Having money doesn’t make anyone better than you.

Takeaway: Stop shrinking in rooms where you think the power is sitting across from you. You built something real and that is rare and they also need you… probably even more.

9. The rooms confirmed what I already knew.

San Francisco right now is loud, brash, and very masculine.

It’s also hopeful, gorgeous and buzzing with innovative energy.

The ruling class of tech right now isn’t particularly interested in humanity…but there are pockets of people who are and it’s my job to find them. My StoryPro is the direct antithesis of all that is happening right now but it’s needed more than ever. ​

Takeaway: Nothing clarifies your mission faster than sitting across from the thing it exists to disrupt.

Share this with a friend!

10.The mental work is a much bigger part of all of this than I ever realized.

Bria had booked me something for my last afternoon when her husband couldn’t make his Reiki appointment.

I thought Reiki was that cup massage and was READY to zone out.

How wrong I was.

For three hours I sat across from Brandi, an energy worker, who kicked off our session telling me “a man had entered the room with me.”***wait HUH?? **where are the rose petals and massage oils!?!?

This is an entire post in and of itself but what transpired over the course of the next three hours is the most spiritual, inner work experience I’ve ever had.

The man “in the room” was my biological dad who has a different last name to me and wanted to tell me something.

I never speak about him anywhere, yet in the first 3 minutes she said something that she couldn’t have possibly known.

I went cold and my entire body started goose bumping from my head to my hands.

I’m not that “woo” and have in fact felt spiritually void for a while now….but I also know that I’m preventing myself from going to “a higher place” and haven’t been able to fully work it out in therapy this past year.

I did 5 years of therapy in 3 hours.

I am not here to tell anyone what to believe about any of that.

What I will tell you is that I sat in that room and felt, more clearly than I have in a long time, that I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

Hence: I saw dead people. It was a lot.

Takeaway: The strategy and the hustle are real, but they are not the whole thing. The hard emotional stuff of your life will all come to surface when you are trying to do what you should be doing on this Earth. It’s a sign that you are on the right path so make room for dealing with it so you have the emotional stamina to go the distance. I’m going to stop lest this be an actual novel but I have so many more thoughts.

And yes I will be going back to SF in the fall so if you know of anyone who would be interested in what I am building with My StoryPro, send them my way! **see telephone game point above.

Oh and starting next week, I’ll be sending some emails about a BALLER workshop me and Vee are running at the top of October.

It’s all about how to bring trending topics and your real life moments into your work in a way that actually lands, the way we did it at the TODAY Show, where you could pitch the same story 50 different ways as long as it was pegged to something current.

We will also be building an AI workflow alongside you (using other tools that are not My StoryPro) to help you see your life in a different way.

All My StoryPro members get this for free. For everyone else, there’ll be an early bird special coming and it is GOOD.

More details next week.

If you actually read to this point, I am cheering you with a cocktail. It’s probably a real one on my end.

As always thanks for being here and I hope that my notes lands at the exact time that you need it too.

XO
Patrice