A graphic example of how hard this is for women (WARNING contains explicit language and imagery)

It has been fewer than 72 hours since Pearachute aired Shark Tank, and 3.3M viewers watched as we got a deal with Mark Cuban. Since, it has been a whirlwind of kind words from friends, months worth of registrations within hours of airing, and lots of storytelling of how the deal ultimately fell through (I wrote about it vaguely here, if you’re interested).

I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve built at Pearachute since we filmed in June of 2016. At that time, we were just in Chicago and had fewer than 10,000 spots on the platform. Today we’re in 5 markets with over 350K spots. We’ve generated nearly $1M for mostly women-owned businesses, and we’ve created an experience brand that brings families closer together.

I’m honestly pretty comfortable with how the edits portrayed me. It was painful to watch myself at times, and, admittedly, I’m still cringing over the “other person’s dime” comment, as I am forever grateful to our GiveForward investors who believed in me and our vision for changing the way people care for each other. And, that quote did not honor that bond.

I knew that there would be random comments on Twitter and Facebook about my pitch, my shortcomings, Barbara’s uninformed opinion of me as an entrepreneur. I even honestly anticipated comments about my appearance, having seen what my sister experienced when she was on Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style a few years ago. But I never expected to be home with my son coloring and suddenly look down to see this:

While the comment in any medium is scary, it is particularly terrifying to receive it over text sitting at home. I’m still shaking a little as I wonder if this is masked number of someone crazy who lives in Chicago or really someone in Northern California. I keep asking myself Could they be following me? How did they get my number? They called me “Des,” do I know this person?

Unfortunately, I found after a quick search that I have exposed my cell phone number quite a bit over the last 18 months. When you’re founding a company, it’s so easy to use your cell as the most reliable form of communication. And in launching our recent equity crowd-funding campaign, I used the number in our Form C filing, as it is the one on file for our C-Corp registration.

As I typed the paragraph above, I realized that I’m perpetuating the same mantra of so many victims of harassment, blaming myself for putting myself in a position to be harassed. But it’s not my fault — it rarely is any woman’s fault.

There has been so much written this year on gender inequality and how hard it is for women founders to get funding. So far in my journey, I’ve been lucky to find investors who believe that the problems I’m solving are big enough and important enough to back. But I’ve also been groped under tables, texted late at night, and blatantly ignored in board rooms next to my then co-founder, a male.

I thought with experience and maturity I’d outgrown the discomfort of those moments — moments when I wanted my company to be successful so badly that I just thought that was the price I had to pay for being in this boys’ club. I hoped that I’d reached a level in my career where that wasn’t something I’d have to put up with anymore.

But I have to be honest, this text message has knocked me down a bit, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s ever going to get any easier. Will we ever be able to raise money without this dark shroud hanging over us, blocking the light that we bring to the world?

The simple truth is that most women’s businesses don’t fail because the founders made mistakes. They fail because women don’t raise enough money to make it to the next level. And things like this text message make it hard to raise, not because I think this message came from an investor but because experiences like this shake our confidence, rob us of our power, and remind us just how far we still have to go.