My story
Apr 3, 2024
Story
Seeking
Action
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Lourdes
Jun 22
Joined Aug 26, 2021
Hi, all! It's high time I shared my story.
World Pulse invitation to share 'what being part of the World Pulse sisterhood means to you' seemed to be the perfect call. I'm actually sharing it out of timeframe but here it is! :)
World Pulse has come to me at a junction in my life. A moment when I was looking for meaning and purpose after almost 12 years building and running my company. From a self employed project, to a startup to a stable business, to finally closing it down.
The whole reason behind entrepreneurship for me was economic independence.
This search for economic independence stems from my personal history. My father was sick and violent to my mom, and she left home with me several times. I lived in many different places, changed schools often, lived violent situations and abandonment, and started helping economically at an early age.
My mother was fierce in finding her economic independence to support me with no help from my father.
As I finally turned 17 I left home. A couple of years after, I left Argentina, my home country, and travelled alone backpacking for two years. In retrospective, that was a bit to learn more about the world and a lot to just run away from everything.
I finally came back out of a sense of responsibility—that I know now I learned from my mom—and saw an opportunity to make a stable living in a legal translation degree. And all that resilience built throughout the years paid off in the form of entrepreneurship.
I founded a translation platform, as I mixed my studies with my curiosity for tech. I've always been an enthusiast, self-taught, who loved software products, automations and tech tools.
I envisioned a business that was as much about community as it was about profit. However, early advice from potential investors led me to abandon the cooperative model in favor of a more traditional business structure. This decision, made under the pressure to succeed and secure funding, would later become a source of regret.
Despite challenges, I carved out a space for myself as a woman in the tech industry.
Often the only woman in the room, I managed to raise funds, secure clients, build a team, and even emigrate to Spain (I’m based there now) in search of greater opportunities, to do it all over again in a new country. This tech company gave me stability, self-confidence, huge amounts of new knowledge, and economic independance, but it failed to give me meaning.
The closing of my company wasn't just a closure; it was an escape from a race I no longer wanted to run. The myth I had bought into, of the lone entrepreneur hero, changing the (business) world single-handedly, gradually lost its allure.
I started questioning the entrepreneurship narrative—dominated by long hours, ruthless cost-cutting, a male-dominated tech world, and relentless competition—which never actually resonated with me.
I needed to reconcile my history with my 'now', and find myself.
It took time for me to understand a new lense to life. To see myself as a woman and how many challenges I was facing just because of that; to see my mother as a woman too and her struggles, to understand what that meant to her and to the experiences I had gone through in life, to understand how I had been working mainly with and around men, and how that had influenced me.
Not much after the closing, I embarked on a new chapter, pivoting towards tech and product development consultancy for women entrepreneurs like me and NGOs, to be a part of the change. This transition was more than a career move; it was a personal transformation.
It was then, in the midst of all that realization and personal journey, when I crossed paths with World Pulse. I joined the team to support the technology development, finding a place to give back all the learnings I had on building software into an impactful purpose.
I remember the first World Pulse Encourager Party I went to. A member was sharing about her experience with victims of violence at home. How she herself had lived through that and now was supporting other women to get through that. I thought how much this could have helped my mom 35 years ago. She was never supported like that. Another member shared how children that witness that violence are affected in life and how she was helping many. I thought of me in those times.
For the first time, after a while already of being collaborating at World Pulse, I started feeling not as a part of the team helping change behind the infrastructure of the community but as member myself. I was not only a part of the impact, but been impacted. I am a woman.
I am a reader of the stories shared. I'm inspired and shaped as I go through them. And took me time to share my story. Jensine and Kirthi have been loving pillars that encouraged and supported me to find my voice 💞
Every event I join, every story I read, every learning the team brings to me with all their experience, shapes me.
Now I see my skills, or anyone's skills really, not any more as tools for individual progress or to 'provide consultancy' to others but as gifts to share that could contribute to a collective good. A piece of a bigger puzzle to build together. Real change comes from collaboration, from multiple voices joining together to create a symphony of progress and change.
I’ll be eternally grateful to Jensine for having created this space, and to this community for bringing it to life every day, and of having crossed paths with this wonder-ful, wise, inspiring team at World Pulse that teaches me more every day.
My story is not just my own. It's a narrative shaped by the struggles and resilience of my mother, from a lonely girl in the middle of a storm, to a lost young woman, to a tech entrepreneur in a male dominated sector, to a collaborator in a space dedicated to amplifying the voice of women and allies for change.
I can't be more grateful of finding World Pulse in my life. I wish the same for every woman out there.