Why I'm Building a Network for Chronic Entrepreneurs in Austin
I couldn't find a room in Austin for accomplished professionals who also live with chronic illness. So I'm building one downtown. Here's the whole idea.
- There was no room in Austin for people who are both high-achieving and chronically ill, so I'm making one.
- This is peer to peer, not medical. A lot of us have been failed by the system already.
- Home base is downtown Austin, where I live and where the monthly gathering happens.
Here is the room I went looking for and couldn't find in Austin: accomplished people (founders, ex-operators, people who ran real teams and real numbers) who also live with chronic illness, sitting together and talking straight about both.
Not a support group. Not a mastermind full of people optimizing their morning routines. A peer group where I don't have to explain the achievement or the illness, because everyone already gets both.
It doesn't exist here. So I'm building it, in downtown Austin, where I live.
The gap is specific
Austin has no shortage of entrepreneur energy. The Austin Chamber will happily tell you we're one of the best startup cities in the country, and the data mostly backs it up. But walk into almost any of those rooms and the unspoken assumption is a body that always cooperates: 7am coffees, standing happy hours, "just push through the quarter."
And the chronic-illness communities I found put me in a chair as a patient, first and always. Symptoms, systems, coping. All real. But they treat the most ambitious part of me like a distraction from the important business of being sick.
I'm neither of those defaults. I built a career through serious rooms (the kind of corporate and finance work where you learn what real rigor costs) and I did it while managing a body that keeps its own schedule. I know I'm not the only one in this city living in that exact overlap. The overlap is the whole point. It's why I named this Built & Unmasked: what holds a whole life up is often the part no one sees.
Why this is not a medical site
Let me be blunt, because it matters. This is peer to peer, and it will never be medical.
A lot of us have been burned by providers, dismissed, mislabeled, billed into the ground, sent home worse than we arrived. So when I want help building a life and a business around an unpredictable body, I'm not going to a site written by the same institutions that failed me. I want the person two chairs down who figured out how to run a board meeting on four hours of sleep and a flare. That knowledge doesn't live in a clinic. It lives in us.
The people who failed you are not a trusted source on how to live around what they failed to treat.
Who I'm building this for
- You've built something real, a company, a P&L, a team, a hard-won career.
- You came up through serious work: top-50 corporate, strategy consulting, finance, or your own venture.
- You live with chronic illness and you're done performing "fine."
- You're in Austin, close enough to make it downtown once in a while.
Many of the people I most want in the room are women. Men who genuinely fit belong too.
What happens next
Two things, starting now. There's this blog, a new post regularly, always rooted here in Austin, always in my actual voice. And there's a monthly gathering downtown, built for real bodies: seated, quiet, come and go as you need.
If you've read this far and felt the click of recognition, that's not an accident. Come find the room. I'll keep building it either way, but it's better with you in it.