I didn’t start out thinking of myself as an entrepreneur. I was a classroom teacher.
The Innovation School was founded by one of my dearest friends and mentors. She brought the business and entrepreneurial perspective, while I was alongside her bringing the education expertise. I knew classrooms, curriculum, and kids. I had spent enough time inside traditional education to know that there were things we could do differently.
As my role grew from classroom teacher to co-founder and eventually director, the lines became less clear. Running a school meant that I could no longer stay comfortably on the education side. Suddenly, my days included budgets and fundraising alongside curriculum and instruction. I was learning about boards, grants, enrollment, marketing, partnerships, nonprofit management, and sustainability. I began finding myself at conferences, fellowships, meetings, and events surrounded by founders, funders, entrepreneurs, and education leaders. And it seemed like everyone knew everyone.
Someone would mention a person by first name, and half the table knew exactly who they meant. Organizations came up, and everyone nodded knowingly. Acronyms were thrown around without explanation. People talked about conferences, networks, fellowships, and funders as if there were some shared directory we had all received. I definitely had not received it.
Coming from North Dakota added another layer of context. There are essentially no other education founders around me doing this work. I didn’t have a local network of school founders to learn alongside or call when I didn’t understand something. And accessing those networks wasn’t as simple as showing up to an event across town. It often meant spending hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars and flying across the country just to get into the rooms where these conversations and connections were happening. I was learning the education entrepreneurship ecosystem while simultaneously trying to lead within it.
That is fertile ground for imposter syndrome. It is easy to sit in a room like that and wonder whether you know enough to be there. Everyone else appears more connected and informed while you wonder whether you somehow missed an entire prerequisite course.
Then someone leans over and quietly says, “I have no idea who they’re talking about, either.” And it is a breath of fresh air. Someone admits they have never heard of that organization. They don’t know that funder. They weren’t at that conference. They don’t understand the acronym, either.
Over time, I have learned an important distinction: knowing the room is not the same thing as deserving to be in the room.
I may not have known every organization, funder, or person being discussed, but I knew education. I had spent years in classrooms. I understood how something that looks great on paper can fall apart in front of actual students. I knew what it was like to watch a child struggle within a system that wasn’t designed for him. I knew the problems that we were trying to solve because I had lived them.
For a while, I viewed my classroom background as the thing that made me different from the entrepreneurs around me. Eventually, I realized that it was one of the biggest reasons I belonged among them. The goal was never to stop being an educator so that I could become an entrepreneur; it was to bring what I knew as an educator into entrepreneurship.
That realization has made it easier to say three words that once felt much harder: I don’t know. Every time I ask a question, I learn something. And sometimes asking it out loud gives someone else permission to admit that they didn’t know, either.
I still walk into rooms where I wonder whether I know enough to be there. The difference is that I no longer take that feeling as evidence that I don’t belong.
Television creator, producer, and entrepreneur Shonda Rhimes once said: “If the door has opened and there’s an opportunity for you to walk through it, you’re supposed to be in the room. Do not deny yourself the door that opened. If it opened and you’re sitting in the room, you’re supposed to be in the room.”
Maybe that’s the lesson I’m still learning as an edupreneur. I don’t have to know everyone in the room. I don’t have to know everything being discussed. I don’t have to wait until I feel completely qualified to walk through the door.
The door opened. I walked through it. I belong in the room, and so do you.
