What Agency and Grit Unlock

FIELD NOTE 003 · AGENCY + GRIT

What women founders taught me about taking action, working through constraints, and finding a way forward.

Years ago, I became preoccupied with a question: Why were small companies bringing products to market that much larger organizations could have created themselves? Large organizations had research capabilities, technical expertise, established relationships, access to capital, and people who understood the categories deeply. Yet I was watching smaller companies enter the market with ideas that felt fresh, relevant, and closely connected to what consumers wanted. They often had fewer resources and less experience, but somehow they were finding a way forward.

I wanted to understand what they were doing differently. That curiosity eventually became The Beehive Product Launch Podcast. I started the podcast in 2014 and spent the next few years talking with women who had built products, services, and businesses across a wide range of industries. Some had extensive experience in the fields they entered. Many did not. What interested me was not simply what they created, but how they managed to create it when so much of what they needed was not already in place.

Again and again, I heard stories that followed a similar pattern. A woman noticed something missing in her own life or in the lives of people around her. She searched for a solution and could not find one, so she decided to create it. That decision did not suddenly give her manufacturing expertise, distribution, financing, legal knowledge, or a network of people ready to help. She had to figure those things out as she went.

The founders I interviewed talked openly about the uncertainty that came with that process. They dealt with manufacturers who required more volume than they could afford, prototypes that needed to be reworked, inventory that tied up cash, retailers they did not yet know how to approach, and entire areas of business they had to learn from scratch. Many were also working through fear and doubt while trying to convince other people that an idea that existed mostly in their heads could become something real.

What struck me was how often the answer to a missing capability was a relationship. They found someone who understood manufacturing. They asked a retailer what it would take to get on the shelf. They reached out to designers, attorneys, financial advisors, engineers, other entrepreneurs, friends, and people they had never met before. They did not always have the resources to build a traditional team, so they built networks of people who could help them solve the next problem.

One of the themes I wrote about repeatedly while producing the podcast was collaboration. I saw founders with no prior experience in a particular industry make progress because they were willing to admit what they did not know and then find someone who did. In one episode summary, I wrote that success seemed to depend on “reaching out to find and connect with the people who can help you.” In another, I reflected on how entrepreneurs often think they have to do everything themselves, when building relationships may be one of the most important parts of building the business.

That was very different from the environment I knew inside large organizations. In a corporation, much of the infrastructure already exists. There are people responsible for legal, finance, research, manufacturing, sales, and marketing. The challenge is often figuring out how to get all of those capabilities aligned around an idea. A founder has almost the opposite problem. The alignment may be simpler because the vision is concentrated in one or two people, but many of the capabilities do not yet exist around them. They have to assemble what they need.

That distinction changed the way I thought about resources. I had assumed that the clearest advantage of a large organization was having more of them. That is still true in many ways. But resources are not only things an organization owns. They can also be accessed through relationships, partnerships, knowledge, and a willingness to ask for help.

The women I interviewed were constantly creating access. They also challenged another assumption I had absorbed over the years: that expertise determines what is possible. Many of these founders had been told some version of “that won’t work,” “that isn’t how this industry operates,” or “you don’t have the background to do this.” Sometimes those warnings were useful. Experience can prevent expensive mistakes, and constraints are real.

But sometimes “this is how it is done” had quietly become “this is the only way it can be done.” The founders were willing to test that distinction. They asked questions. They sought advice. They learned the rules, but they were also willing to question whether every rule applied to what they were trying to create. They searched beyond their immediate industry and geography for people who could help. The rise of the internet and increasingly global supply chains gave many of them access to capabilities that would once have been much harder to reach.

None of this meant that persistence guaranteed success. Some ideas should change. Some businesses should stop. Some constraints cannot be worked around. The lesson I took from those conversations was not that determination makes anything possible. It was that the absence of an obvious path does not necessarily mean there is no path. Sometimes you have to build it. That may mean finding someone who knows what you do not. It may mean approaching the problem from a different direction, testing something small, asking a better question, or creating a partnership that gives both sides access to something they could not accomplish alone.

As my work later expanded into startups, nonprofits, communities, and makers, I kept seeing versions of that same lesson. People closest to a need often have ideas, knowledge, and motivation but lack some of the resources required to act. Somewhere else, another person or organization may have those resources without being connected to the need. The opportunity is often in the connection.

Looking back, The Beehive changed the way I understood innovation because it showed me what happens when people cannot rely on an established system to carry an idea for them. They improvise. They build relationships. They learn. They ask for help. They create pieces of the system as they go.

I started those conversations wanting to understand how founders managed to launch things that larger organizations sometimes could not. What I came away understanding was something broader: progress does not always begin with having everything you need.

Sometimes it begins with seeing what is missing, believing it is worth pursuing, and finding the people who can help you build the path forward.