What it looks like to 'run a media company'
Being an entrepreneur, particularly a female founder, is so hot right now. But do you also look hot while you’re girl-bossing? Because that’s important.
My feed is suddenly full of glamorous female founders, posing and pouting in expensive looking outfits with full glam, while giving pithy quotes about taking risks and having the wisdom to back yourself. Are there wind machines involved? That’s certainly the vibe.
There are defintely photo shoots and stylists and professional photographers and studios and a heavy use of filters. There are beachy waves and eyelashes. There are heels and they are high.
This seems to be the new entry point for female founders: cos-playing a lady boss, Devil Wears Prada style, with style being the operative word. Is there substance? Sometimes, sure.
Alongside these images rotates a merry-go-round of new podcasts hosted by female founders interviewing other female founders about being a female founders and then filming these podcasts and collabing on glossy social posts about how to be a female founder so that wannabe female founders can also start podcasts about being a female founder.
It’s all very…..glossy.
Do I sound bitter? I probably do. Although exasperated might be more accurate.
I’ve been a female co-founder for 18 years and I cannot recognise this experience in the way ‘running your own business’ is now portrayed on social.
Nor do I want to, is the truth of it. But I feel bewildered by the way entrepreneurship seems to have been diminished into homoginised hotness on the ‘gram. And I worry that other women might think starting a business means your first hires are a glam team.
I remember something similar happened with exercise about a decade ago. Instagram distilled the entire experience of moving your body into sharing a hot selfie in activewear.
The benefits of exercise to your physical and mental health were demolished by the number of fire emoji you got in the comments.
The medium became the message.
We’ve all recalibrated and that exercise aesthetic is just wallpaper now but I remember how dispiriting it felt back then when it started. It felt like the crushing weight of beauty standards were invading yet another aspect of women’s lives. Was there no place where our appearance wasn’t the leading indicator of our ‘success’?
I exercise most days and it always looks like this:
I loathed the self-objectification of exercise so much, it sparked us to create an exercise app called MOVE where the emphasis is on how you feel rather than how you look. Turns out I’m not the only one who has had a gutful of every female experience being reduced to fire emojis.
And now, the fire emojis have arrived for female founders. You now need to werk it at work.
And I hate it.
I’m not going to share examples of the content I’m talking about because then it will become about me criticising individual women.
I’m not that stupid. And that’s not what this is.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game. The players are just gaming the rules of our attention economy for their benefit and I get it. It’s a pretty, empty part of the modern hustle.
You’ve undoubtedly seen these glossy founders in your feed even if you haven’t registered the way this homogenised hotness has infiltrated the act of running a business. That’s how beauty standards work, of course. They seep into your subconscious imperceptibly making you feel less-than every time you look in the mirror.
Working for yourself is hard. It’s exhausting and rewarding and exciting and challenging and terrifying and lonely and unspeakably stressful. One thing it isn’t, is glamorous.
I don’t recognise any aspect of what I’ve been doing for 18 years in the glossy pictures and videos filling my feed. Nor do any of the female founders I know personally.
Is this now what society demands of us? It seems so. Look hot while running a businesess. Be camera-ready so you can cos-play what it’s like to build a company and grow it. Perform your job publicly - in heels and full glam - while at the same time actually trying to do it. Bon chance!
I understand how this happens, I do.
When I first started Mamamia, I would occasionally be asked by newspapers and magazines to be in career stories - not business stories because Mamamia certainly wasn’t a business in the early days and years. It was quite literally a labour of love - which I performed even while in actual labour with my third child. I have no selfies of what it looked like to load posts and resize images into the back end of Wordpress between contractions. Damn.
But anyway, now and then I’d be asked to be in these types of stories because I had a small public profile from my time as a magazine editor and the idea of a woman trying to start her own thing was novel back then. Especially online.
I would always say yes because I had no marketing budget - or any budget - so I grabbed the opportunity to let people know about Mamamia.com.au so they would hopefully come visit and help me grow.
A photo was always required to go with the story and back then, legacy media still had budgets for shoots (!) so they would send a photographer to my house along with a hair and makeup artist and a stylist who would turn up with suitcases of designer options to dress me in.
The photoshoot would drag on for half a day at least - precious hours I couldn’t be working which meant working yet again until 2am - and they would glam me for hours and then set up 45 lights and pose me in different places around my house and change my outfits and take a million shots then re-touch the shit out of the ones they chose.
This was the result.
Ok, what hot garbage that was.
Because you know what starting a business looks like?
Also crying. And earning no money. And working 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. And then when you finally decide to hire your first employees? Pressure. Intense, unrelenting pressure. Because now you’re also responsible for the livelihood of other people. And - if you’re lucky - repeat and repeat and repeat as you grow.
Or else, flame out.
So yeah. Here was the first Mamamia office in 2006:
After a few nomadic months, working in the kitchen and in my son’s room when he was at school, I finally set up a home base on an old IKEA trestle table I wedged behind the couch in our lounge room. This was Mamamia’s second office in 2007:
Any yes - the photo above is one of those magazine photos lol. I mean, who matches their outfit to their teacup. Bitch, please. But I went along with whatever absurd work cosplay the stylist asked me to do and wear because I didn’t want to be ‘difficult’ and that’s how they wanted to portray what it was like to start a business and work for yourself.
This is more accurate:
I’m in my pyjamas, with flu, working from bed because there are no sick days when you work for yourself and I’m eating some soup I just spilt after tripping over my recharging cord. And yes, I’m eating it off the carpet because I’m starving and I don’t have the time or the will to open another can of soup and heat it up.
Where’s my wind machine and my glam.
These are the kinds of images I have always shared because they are reality and it also seems exhausting to have to do your job while also looking red carpet ready.
The truth is that I would rather eat a box of hair than get my makeup done or have my photo taken. That has never been why I wanted to start a business and it never once factored into the perceived benefits or ‘fun’ stuff for me.
Different strokes. No judgement. If the glam stuff blows your hair back, have at it. But what makes me bristle and eye roll is the idea that how you look is more important - or even AS important - as what you do.
Is it personal choice? Maybe for some women, of course. Can we unscramble ‘choice’ and ‘empowerment’ (gag) from what capitalism and beauty standards reward women for in 2025? Is there a more guaranteed way to accrue status and attention? No.
When I launched the Lady Startup branch of our business (yes, the name makes me cringe today but that’s all I would change about it), to help create a community and offer practical courses for women who wanted to start a business, it was because when I looked around during the early years of Mamamia, I couldn’t find role models or blueprints for how to do it.
I was never interested in how it looked but how it FELT.
Women start businesses for lots of reasons, not just money. For some it’s about purpose for others it’s about having a creative or financial outlet away from their family or their day job.
Ironically - or maybe predictably - I wound back Lady Startup when I needed to lean further in to running my own business and I had to prioritise my time.
There are so many metrics for what ‘success’ looks like when you start a business. What seems to be a newer and more insidious addition to these metrics is fire emoji.
Programming note: please take a listen to the latest episode of Outloud - at the start of the show, we speak about the proposed ceasefire amid the escalating humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. This is a war that almost everyone wants to be over, no matter your religion or what country you live in. And for those wondering why we don’t discuss this issue on the podcast more often, we speak about that too.