NWV Brief #21: do the scary thing

Dear Founder,

I almost didn’t go.

The Convoy Conference at Vanderbilt was meant for alumni. I wasn’t one. When the registration form asked for my grad year and field of study, I typed “N/A” and hit submit, half expecting the system to reject me. It didn’t.

I still almost didn’t go.

There’s a unique kind of fear that comes not from actual rejection but from the anticipation of it. The quiet voice that whispers: You don’t belong here. They’ll know you’re an outsider. But I went anyway.

And here’s the thing—no one cared.

If anything, they respected it. The people I met weren’t measuring me by credentials but by action, by energy, by the willingness to show up. It was a reminder: people who have actually built something—who have pushed through their own doubt, their own fire—they don’t judge. The ones who do? They’re usually the ones who never tried.

Day one, I found myself in a room with billion-dollar founders discussing what it means to be high-agency—how some people see barriers as stop signs, while others just step over them. As the panel spoke, I knew I had made the right decision. The ones who create, who push, who build—they take risks. They bet on themselves.

Beyond the panels, the real gold was in the connections. I met a data and analytics expert obsessed with complexity science, someone who might be the key to getting my product to the next stage. Conversations that would have never happened if I had let fear keep me home.

And now? I’m overwhelmed. Not with doubt, but with opportunity. Who to follow up with? What to double down on? Which insights to act on first? But I’d take this kind of chaos over the slow suffocation of building alone behind a screen any day.

So, this is my reminder to myself. And maybe to you, too.

Do the scary thing.

With vision, purpose, and appreciation,
Brooke