My life story
Let me start at the beginning. A life recap, if you will.
During high school, I was a pretty artsy kid. I was heavily involved in musical theatre, dance, drama, improv, debate, etc.
HAIR: The Musical. I was second from the left.
I started an organization called Toronto Youth Arts Link which I ran for 8 years, connecting youth to opportunities in the arts.
I interned at Canadian Stage, hiring and managing a team of 75 volunteers for the Dream in High Park that happens every summer.
I’m holding the post on the left!
Basically, DEEP in the arts.
My family is very business/entrepreneurial, but I left high school wanting to be an actor. Business was a reluctant Plan B.
I auditioned for the best theatre school in Canada with a monologue about beauty and belonging where I ate half a lipstick and won a spot on the waitlist.
I also applied to the Schulich School of Business, the fanciest business school I knew. I got early acceptance with all my arts grades.
I waited til the last day but the theatre waitlist never opened up, so I ended up going to Schulich. Which I also realized after I’d accepted, was a 2 hour commute away.
I’d always been excited about uni, but when school started I began getting debilitating daily panic attacks.
I’d never experienced that before, and ended up missing most of frosh and orientation week because I couldn’t leave my house. If you’ve experienced a panic attack, you know what I mean.
After a couple of weeks, I found a coping strategy that sort of worked.
Tell yourself that you will NOT die, and spend the entire 2 hour commute focusing on your breathing.
Continually make and refine an escape plan. What happens if the subway gets stuck underground, if the bus breaks down in York Region, if your phone stops working, if you have to walk home, etc.
I’d spend the entire commute in a full panic attack, but I could at least make it to class and back.
Probably a month into this, I found a super cheesy looking PDF online about how to overcome panic attacks. I was willing to try anything at this point, including someone’s handmade how-to guide, so I downloaded it. And it worked!
My panic attacks stopped immediately and never came back.
The trick that worked to stop my panic attacks:
Instead of trying to grit your teeth through it or focus on your breathing like a lot of people suggest (and what I was pretty unsuccessfully doing), confront it head on.
Look at the feeling and say, "IS THAT ALL YOU'VE GOT? I WANT MORE THAN THIS!"
Keep saying "I WANT MORE!" not matter how intense it gets.
I did it *once* and that was the last panic attack I ever had.
Anyway, once I realized how far of a commute it was and how much I didn’t enjoy most courses, I picked my classes to minimize how much time I would have to spend on campus.
And after I got my footing that first year, I started sloooowly dabbling in acting stuff on the side…
1st year - adapt and overcome
2nd year - started the Schulich Improv Club
3rd year - started acting in some student short films
4th year - got an agent and was starting to miss some school presentations because I was filming
INTERLUDE
The summer of my 3rd year, I got a 3 month consulting internship in NYC. I shared a studio apartment with my best friend Vanja who also got a job at the same place. The person we sublet the studio from was an astrophysicist who was traveling to China to install his art in their subway tunnels.
Vanja and I would trade off each week on sleeping on the air mattress vs. the bed. We went to a raw vegan restaurant for her birthday, loved it, then tried going raw vegan ourselves. 3 days later, we binged McDonald’s and never looked back.
Payments from the company we worked for were late and sporadic, so we were always worried about if we’d get paid and have money to live.
We discovered feminism.
We went to the biggest nightclubs and were always happy to get to skip the line, but then realized we were just going 2 hours before everyone else was.
We worked during the day, then in the evenings spun up a project called Roseguild. It was a way to learn with a community, focused on a different topic each month. We had rotating educational desktop wallpapers, a featured book, and a live discussion with the author each month.
We covered the periodic table of elements, American politics, and the Tao Te Ching. Vanja did the tech work, I did the design and marketing. We had a few random people sign up, but shuttered the project shortly after 4th year started and we got busy with school.
By the time I graduated, I knew I wanted to give acting a shot. I got a part time job at David’s Tea, moved into a studio apartment with Vanja (again), and started living the actor life.
I was lucky to immediately land a leading role in a student short film called NOAH that ended up blowing up. It got millions of views on YouTube (back when that was rare), won awards internationally, won awards at TIFF, won the Canadian equivalent of an Oscar, and changed the way Hollywood made movies.
I thought that it would launch my career, I’d move to LA, get an amazing agent, and start booking leading roles. This acting stuff was so easy!
But nothing really changed.
INTERLUDE
I actually did end up briefly going to LA, where I attended Hollywood parties and had a very Hollywood fling with a producer.
Things didn’t work out, I was heartbroken, came home and developed the worst case of mono my doctor had ever seen. Spent a month bedridden and unable to eat anything but Ensure meal replacement drinks, dipped below <100 lbs, and eventually recovered but never back to my full weight lol.
Even though things didn’t work out I’m still very good friends with the producer to this day!
So - LA dreams failed, I kept at it in Toronto.
I did more short films - one that played on Air Canada flights, where I learned sign language to play a deaf girl. One that was entirely in Yiddish, where I had a language coach and won Best Actress. One indie feature that got national press coverage. The first VR film in Canada.
I kept upgrading agencies, joined the actors union, and started to do more film and TV work. Handmaid’s Tale, Shadowhunters, a movie on Amazon Prime. A ton of national commercials. I was starting to get cast for things without having to audition.
But it didn’t feel like things were moving fast enough, and I was frustrated by the lack of feedback, consistency, and direction. And 3 years in, the audition process still stressed me out a LOT.
When a director I’d worked with invited me to build a startup in the film tech space with him, I was excited to jump on board. I’d be coming on as COO, helping to build FilmYeti, a robot agent for film crew.
It was a bridge between my union, agency, and film experience + tech and startups. And it was ultimately the beginning of the end of acting for me. I loved how much control I had, how I could see cause + effect, make decisions, see growth, and be involved in all parts of the startup building process. It gave me a lot of things I’d been missing in the film world.
I also started dating and living with my director-co-founder, which became a very intense experience.
We built FilmYeti for ~3 years. I ran our sales process, getting contracts with Rogers, Wattpad, Boat Rocker Media, and international production houses. I also built out a roster of 1700+ vetted film freelancers.
In the end, we couldn’t raise money, couldn’t scale, and basically were barely running a lifestyle business. We decided to shut the company down in Dec 2018. My relationship also ended and I moved out.
I wasn’t sure whether to start applying for jobs OR start another company… and having run a startup, I knew how hard it would be. I decided I would only start another company under the following conditions:
Had to have a co-founder
Had to raise money
Had to build a dating app
That seemed super unrealistic to me. I’d never heard of anyone wanting to build a dating app, finding a co-founder is notoriously hard, and I saw the struggles of raising VC money. So I started applying for jobs.
But also… I decided to put my desire to start another company out into the universe precisely ONE time, just to feel like I’d tried. I mentioned it casually at a startup event I was hosting, and afterwards a stranger came up to me and said…
“Hey, I need to introduce you to my friend. She’s just about to launch her dating app.”
And that’s how in Feb 2019, I met Niloo Ravaei.
She would become first my co-founder and then my best friend. I joined her to build Hello Iris, an AI matchmaker that worked over text message.
✅ Co-founder
✅ Dating app
3 months into our partnership, we got a coworking space together. It was a nightclub in the evenings, an open space during the day, smelled like Axe, and cost $75/mo. Perfect.
After another month, Niloo left her job so we could both be FT on Iris. A few months later, we got accepted into Techstars AI, a well-respected startup accelerator that also provided venture funding.
✅ Money
I’d gotten my impossible trifecta of startup requirements.
We moved to Montreal for 3 months for the Techstars program and, in Dec 2019 (exactly 1 year after shutting down my previous company) did demo day in front of 100s of investors.
Once the program wrapped up, we went back to Toronto. Then we realized - it was just us two, we could work from anywhere in the world! So we decided to go to Brazil for two months, Feb-April. Our plan after that was Europe, then LA.
We launched our product from Brazil in February 2020, and then…
Covid hit.
World shut down, all Canadians come home, etc. etc.
We tried waiting it out (our product’s whole goal was to have people meet IN PERSON), but months passed and nothing changed.
We didn’t want to build an app for virtual dates, so we spent 1.5 years trying to pivot and find a new use for our technology. But nothing quite made sense. Either the business model didn’t work, or logistics, or it wasn’t inspiring to us.
Niloo and I were now in our late 20s and starting to reconsider what we wanted from our lives. We were thinking about families, having more free time, hobbies, money lol. Building a startup (even if it became successful) no longer seemed to fit, so we shut the company down in 2021.
A chance email to an old friend led to me coming on board as Chief of Staff at one of the fastest growing ad agencies in the US. I built out hiring processes, planned the first in person retreat during Covid for an international team, built out performance reviews from scratch, an internal incubator, etc. etc.
It was my first time making serious money. After a year of being VERY comfortable I decided I needed to shake things up, and Gemma came into my life.
At work, I quickly grew into the Head of People role. What I loved most about it was my 1:1 conversations with the people on the team - whenever they came to me to talk through issues, or ask questions, or with help making decisions.
Sure, I was really good at building processes and structures, but I loved my 1:1 work the most. Seeing the impact a good question, another perspective, or a good listener could have on someone was magical.
INTERLUDE
When Niloo and I were working on Hello Iris, I’d considered becoming a therapist. We spent every day (literally) for YEARS talking people, love, connection, self-discovery, growth. But I didn’t want to do the 6 years of therapist school only to start my career from the beginning, and I also didn’t think I wanted to work exactly on the topics therapists work on. So I never *really* considered it.
Then I got a chance to work with an executive coach, Brian Wang and WOW.
Working with Brian for 6 months had a huge impact on my personal and professional growth.
The skills he brought as a coach were similar to the ones Niloo and I had developed in our years of working together. It also covered my favourite parts of my role as Head of People.
I didn’t want to be a therapist, but maybe I could be a coach one day!
As the economy turned, I lost my job in Jan 2022. I ended up taking the agency on as a fractional client, and that ”one day” ended up coming very soon.
That break gave me the perfect opportunity to do what I do now…
Coaching 🙂
I spent the first 7 months honestly not doing anything. Taking a break. Spending time with Gem. Enjoying the summer.
And in October 2022, I began building my practice in earnest.
I love this definition of coaching:
“Coaching is helping someone to have the life they want while becoming more of themselves.” - Toku McCree
And that’s what my work is about. It’s what I’ve spent my entire life learning how to do for myself. And what I now help others find.
What I care about most is joy, fun, connection, authenticity, energy, in-person community, and living in alignment.
If those are things you want more of in your life, book a free call with me.
Let’s talk 🙂
