Topping From the Bottom
Lessons in building Founder relationships from BDSM
“Listen,” he says, his arm wrapped around my neck, his lips nearly touching my ears, “none of this dominatrix stuff, we should just be together you and me.” We’re in a dark cocktail bar I frequent often, the bartender eavesdropping on our conversation smirks at me and raises his eyebrows, then goes back to rinsing glasses. He knows me and so knows that this will be a futile exercise for this scruffy man in his novelty printed button-down shirt and startup logo-branded hoodie.
“That’s not how it works darlin,” I say, placing my hand on his face and gently pushing it backwards, “The reason you like me, why you think I’m ‘interesting’ is because I put that I’m a domme on my Tinder profile, it’s why you messaged me. It’s not a switch I turn off cus you’re nervous.”
“It’s just that… You just don’t understand the pressure I’m under with everything we talked about, if anyone found out that I did that…”
“I’m just saying I get it, the pressure, and I’m also saying you need to relax.”
Improving your relationship with your Founder
Oh Founders, the adorable creatures who are a breed unto themselves here in the Valley, a kind of ubiquitous archetype of Silicon Valley’s Richard, vacillating wildly between rash decisions and developing rashes from indecision. I find this group of people so engaging to work with that I’ve actively chosen jobs for the last 6 years where I work directly for them because it lets me do for a living what I enjoy most: scale someone else’s dream.
Being a dominant partner in one’s romantic and sexual interactions affords you a great deal of responsibility for those underneath you. Usually we perceive “topping from the bottom” or having the submissive partner offer unsolicited feedback on what they want as a “bad” thing in kink, but I know from experience that it can sometimes be really helpful to have your submissive partner actively work with you to improve your communication. This is why I know that no matter what your title or pay-grade, you can take real concrete actions to improve your relationship with your own professional top, your Founder.
Please note: for the remainder of this piece I’ll be using “Founder” as an interchangeable term for any key leadership role that holds a similar constellation of responsibilities within a company.
Negotiate and clarify boundaries continuously
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing you know,” I jabbed gently at my date with a laugh, pulling the rope back from his hands and continuing to pass the rope between my hands. After our first round of cocktails I had invited him downstairs to a kind of low-key happy hour for the younger kinky crowd in San Francisco. I had brought a short length of rope in my purse for some light skill-share in bondage, and he was busy steamrolling me through my wrist tie by claiming he saw a professional dominatrix do it differently.
“You know part of the deal is that you have to trust me right? That’s kind of how this whole thing works,” I chided him politely while looping the cat’s paw knot back around his hand. “Rope bondage is about planning ahead with the length you have versus the individual dimensions of the other person’s body; you have to wait and see what I have in mind before you start back-seat shibari-ing.”
Smart people often have very good intentions when they start interjecting with feedback in situations where it’s not requested or required, and it’s important to get that this can be grating regardless of its helpful intentions in the context of a Founder/team relationship.
I hear a lot of complaints from my engineering teams especially about “whiplash.” This generally refers to being suddenly asked to change gears on a project or scrap it entirely because a Founder comes back and prioritizes an initiative or sprint changes that seem counter-intuitive to what the team has come to know and think is important about the direction of the product.
Founders are often at the behest of demands that are not known to or monitored by the teams that report to them. They have to meet with board members, shareholders, funders, and respond to a wide swath of incentives and externalities on behalf of an entire team. Founders should of course continuously work to be more transparent with their teams about these externalities, but we don’t often have the time to wait until that managerial skill-set is developed to act on those insights.
Give your Founder the benefit of a doubt that what they’re asking for is important, no matter how opaque the reasoning seems at first. Take the extra second to think about why you might be asked for an entirely new report or to focus critical time on an initiative that you thought was a lower priority. Maybe someone on the board might have asked for it, maybe they’re acting on a critical course-correction that isn’t visible from your seat.
Even if this new priority is very inconvenient for you, I recommend the same advice for Founder relationships as I do for friendships or romantic relationships: if it won’t matter in a month, don’t fight about it. When you don’t overreact, your Founders and indeed your entire team learn that you only wield your political capital for the shit that matters. When you come at this from a place of being on the same team, asking “why it is needed?” or “how do we know it’s worked before?” are questions, negotiations that are welcomed as being a helpful clarifying exercise to them rather than being adversarial.
A lot of people have come up with frameworks that might work for you to accomplish this end, like “radical candor,” which says that caring + honesty = a kind of positive bluntness. Either way, you must be trustworthy at speaking up when it actually hurts, reinforcing yourself as a reliable source of information and meaningful feedback.
Be patient when they’re having a hard time giving up control
Both as a manager and a domme I’ve often both prided myself on and been burdened by being a type-A control freak. There’s no rush quite like being the architect of an amazing experience for someone who is relatively new to kink, surprising and delighting with sensations, words and fantasy that leave you both pounding with endorphins. Then comes the time that your partner sort of outgrows your preferences, push back with their own newfound interests and desires, and the resulting rush of insecurity in the wake of their developing independence can be debilitating.
As an employee at a high-growth company, your job will change very, very often. The gist of it is that in a well-matched job, eventually you fill up the space you’re in, and it’s time to give your responsibilities to someone new while you move on to grow even bigger. I’ve done this maybe a dozen times now, and it doesn’t ever get easier.
This process of giving away your job is painful when you love your work, and and I think people who work for scaling startups forget that this pain affects to your Founders too.
Many Founders are first-time Founders, and so they often honestly never thought this far ahead; they thought they would always have their hands wrapped around the critical working pieces of their company for as long as it remained alive. In their private time, I promise you that a lot of hours of sleep are lost to the fear that they will not be able to fix the things that go wrong if they can’t see or touch them.
This continuous process of letting go is one of the closest bonds you will share with your Founder. It is one of the most acute, most identical emotions and processes you will experience together in parallel, and it will bring you closer together if you acknowledge it and make it part of your working relationship.
Ask your Founder how they’re doing, talk about how exciting and strange and challenging the experience is for you too. Bring up milestones, discuss changes in your role as they happen during your check-ins, talk candidly about what you’re afraid of. It gives your Founder permission to feel it and talk about it by sharing your own vulnerability, and it can in so many ways lift off the isolation for both of you.
Identify the motivations in micromanagement
Micromanagement is actually one of my favorite implements in my repertoire as a dominatrix; for me it means telling a submissive partner what to do for our mutual pleasure not only in the bedroom, but also day-to-day. This can include everything from telling them what to eat, when and how much, when they are allowed to orgasm, what they’re allowed to wear, how often they’re required to check in with me for assignments. This is also why I know firsthand that micromanagement is a form of sadism, and things that are sadistic in a consensual arrangement are just plain painful in a non-consenting one.
Founders are out of the office a lot, depending on the kind of company and what stage you might be in. When they are back in the office, what seems like a molehill of an environmental or personality issue from other coworkers will plague them in with the crushing weight of a mountain.
I’ve seen a lot of teams interpret this as bitchiness or fussiness, and don’t get me wrong, some Founders (like any proportion of the population) do have shitty, needy personalities. Most of the time though, a Founder plaguing you with something that seems stupid or minor is almost always someone expressing a fear or need improperly. For example when my Founder says:
- “The way this slack channel is used is inefficient.” What he means: I cannot find information and fear I will miss something.
- “This noise in the office is distracting.” What he means: I am worried I will not meet my personal deadlines, and the stress is making it difficult for me to concentrate in normal settings.
- “You should have written that email to X stakeholder this way.” What he means: I know I hired you to know better than me on some things, but I didn’t understand this and need you to teach me.
It’s going to require sometimes that you have saintly patience. I am not always good at this on my best of days, but if nothing else remember our lessons from kink’s use of the “traffic light” system in safewords: saying the word “yellow” means “I am at my limit for the intensity of this activity, but I am still ok,” saying “red” means stop.
If your submissive “yellows” more than 3x it’s time to stop the scene and talk, and if you exchange more than 3 testy Slack messages with your Founder on a conflict, it’s time to grab a room and have a 10 minute conversation.
Employ a vocabulary centered on choice:
One of my favorite kink classes I ever took was from a well-known couple here in the Bay Area that, in addition to hosting events and producing kink media, teach a lot of really wonderful accessible protocol classes for our fetish community. “Protocol” refers to a kind of set of suggested rules and vocabulary, even names or titles that we use for play that helps us to feel like we’re communicating within the context of our roles. It helps us “feel like” we are being heard while keeping one of us as the dominant and the other as the submissive partner.
How then does the submissive partner help guide the top? How do you provide feedback, even positive feedback, in a way that keeps the power structure intact between you and your Founder? This couple used the following as the dominant flogged the submissive partner with a short leather flogger.
As a substitute for “yes” or an ask she wanted to make from the dominant partner, she said, “If it pleases you Sir, I can [take harder hits with that flogger.]”
As a substitute for “no” or a request to stop a behavior (note: different than a safeword) she said, “Not unless it pleases you, Sir.”
Note that the two statements she uses here are nearly identical, and this requires the dominant to listen carefully to which one is being said. Over time, this kind of feedback makes an awkward interaction within a relationship where one is “supposed to” decide everything into one that is more balanced, and that requires active listening on both parts. This is a dialog I often try to replicate with my Founders.
Certainly I do not use deferential language like “if it pleases you” to a grown person in a professional environment. But “Not unless you think it’s critical for this sprint” can be a way to push back, give a “no” to your Founder while still asking for detail and acknowledging their final say on the outcome.
Respect the Dynamic
Fundamentally the Founder/team relationship is a power-exchange relationship in its own right, and any kink dominant will tell you that little can work between the leading and following partner in a fetish scene unless this division of roles is respected for the duration that you have negotiated. This is no less true with your Founder.
Unless you have founded the company right along with them, this is their company, not yours. Those are the prevailing rules of this game, the set roles within this dynamic. Founders have the ultimate right to be wrong. It is their company, their reputation and clout within this industry, and often even great sums of their personal funds on the line.
You must respect that your Founders generally have the final say in decisions affecting the company, or find a different business.
I know so many people will read the above and violently disagree with me. “I’m on the cap table as well,” you say, “what happens here matters to me too.” I agree with you, it absolutely does. However, having a stake in the company is not mutually exclusive from it not being yours.
It also doesn’t mean that you can’t disagree with your Founder, or that they aren’t incapable of incorrect or even irresponsible decisions. It means that this is the kind of company with a funding structure where key decisions by their nature will mostly have to float up to the people who took the initial risk to create it, as they hold the ultimate responsibility to the board, investors, and customers to keep it alive. It is your (really really fucking important) responsibility to inform those decisions to the best of your ability.
So, the next time you are flustered with where things are going, put your head between your knees, breathe deeply and repeat after me: It’s not my company.
Once you can accept the very nature of this arrangement, as when people agree to the organization of a Dominant/submissive arrangement, you will find that it is truly, incomparably liberating; you will find it is a space in which your best work can occur. “Knowing your role” provides you the freedom to excel and to push that excellence upward. It ensures that both of you can pay full attention to the responsibilities that you are each committed to in tandem.
If nothing else, you will know that even when you disagreed with your Founders, you did your job exceptionally well. I can tell you firsthand that if you can do this you will end up with a body of work and personal references that will carry you far in your own career even if the company evaporates underneath you.
Power-exchange and workplace consent
I get that there’s something really unnerving about reading a female dominant write what seems, at a glance, an insistence that we should be “deferential” in our work with mostly male Founders.
I believe every person deserves to feel that even though we all must work, it is still our right for work to be a psychologically safe place. Realistically you are not by yourself responsible for unmaking a world’s worth of imbalanced institutions just to do what you want to do for yourself well. Your role as the employed still entitles you to the ability to freely give or withhold your consent, and access to whatever you personally deem to be fulfillment.
There’s a reason that we so often use the word “dynamic” to describe the relationship between a dominant and a submissive in the fetish world. It not only refers to the exchange of words, tasks, and decisions in a scene or relationship, but also conveys that there is within each partner an entitlement to this consent; it’s not just one partner taking from the other. This exchange is “dynamic” in that it is an active movement that allows you to both develop together. I know that so many of the communication lessons I’ve learned from my own submissives have carried through to my relationships with my Founders for this reason.
If you can actively see yourself as working to grow and thrive within this power relationship with your Founder instead of against it, to teach and reinforce these principles from your place in that relationship, then you will find yourself at the very least more capable of communicating your needs and expectations than a grumpy CEO on a Tinder date with his wrists tied to a table leg. Happy bottoming!
