Laura McCann

If it's really your calling to be an entrepreneur, it's quite a journey of self-discovery and introspection and kind of peeling the onion, but it is a very challenging journey financially, emotionally, and energetically. If you fall in love with your idea, your idea will take you all the way wherever you need to go to figure out what you haven't figured out. We start businesses thinking we'll make money or have a great idea, but I've done many businesses at this point, more than four, and none of it is that. It's usually a completely different thing - it's sort of a self-discovery journey. So be clear about what's motivating you and how you're going to do it. A lot of people come on this journey and they've never managed anyone or built anything, and I wouldn't detract them from being entrepreneurial, but what I would say is you have to be really good at a lot of things, because that's gonna save you the time and the money and get you further along. With AI, you can come up with any business idea you want and really have it think it through better than even a board of advisors, but that doesn't mean you understand what it feels like to live in the building of something. That's the really hard part. It's like having children - it breathes, it lives, it's always awake, it's always wanting you.

AI is really changing everything and is the biggest thing that's gonna change how we do everything. It gives us the ability to do a technology play cheaper, faster, and integrate that framework into software development, whereas a lot of people built software 10 years ago and they have a legacy system. As a CEO, AI is a huge way to rethink how you get things done, how you do them faster, cheaper, but it's a different way. It doesn't mean you have fewer people, it just means everybody is better and faster and doing more. That's been a really interesting thing on how to build a company in these days with that as a framework for project management and tasks.

For me, it's always been when you're doing a business, you have to ask yourself: are you doing something that is really making you happy? Is it your sweet spot? Is it what you do well? And then also, can you align all the things that you need in a business - capital, people, ideas, execution - to actually create an opportunity for yourself and the client? I really have a framework more around energy and consciousness now, which is figuring out how to vibrationally be aligned to attract all the things that I want. I have enough experience understanding what I know how to do, what I do well, that I can get more aligned faster. My transition to wellness came because I definitely did not want to be in fashion for all the reasons, especially with fast fashion and the whole manufacturing climate footprint. Wellness was something I had to work on for myself after my own journey with health issues from being such a hard, driven, ambitious career person.