The Power of Parable
Parable didn't work out. And I had a key part in that. A white paper told through story.
“Startups have an inherent flaw: they mostly fail.”
Walker Deibel
Part 1: Answering the Siren’s Call
I sat at the head of the dining table, forearms creased by the edge of the wood, shoulders hunched to my ears. Done with my meal, I twiddled with my Oura ring and decided this moment was as good as any. Leaning forwards, spine strengthening to a brace, I gave my news: “I’m going to start another company.” I knew it was irrational. I felt crazy. I knew it would not bring levity and happiness. I didn’t know why I was making yet another turn down a rough road. “I can’t not try again. It’s like there’s something I owe myself in the journey. It’s inevitable.”
I let the truth land. I avoided my mother’s gaze to my right and my father’s to my left, choosing to look straight out the window to Laguna Beach’s back hills instead. It was April 2020. The stillness of living in my childhood home in early Covid gave me a clarity I could no longer ignore — and the push to go there.
It wasn’t their permission I was waiting on. I wanted their witnessing to bless the reality that I’d already begun. I’d been wrestling with my role at Headspace for about a year — a dream company to work for, but one that could not mute the existential angst I’d hear ringing each night. I’m not built to work one role, with one title, day in day out. I don’t do well moored. Like it or not, I’m built for the unknown.
I was being called into an odyssey. I knew because I’d heard that siren’s call before and followed it into the journey that was my first startup co-founder experience. That time, I started the venture-backed empathetic computing company Maslo. I felt crazy now because I knew the danger of following the siren’s call, and yet I was choosing to dive in again anyway.
In legends of old, sirens were mermaids who would sing ships and sailors to their drowned demise, using beauty and mystery to lure them to their traps. Some men would plug their ears in preparation; others would rope themselves to the ship’s mast heads. These were futile attempts to protect themselves from fatal seduction. Their journeys required they sail their ships through the mystical, foggy passageways where the sirens lived. But not all came out alive.
This story is long for the internet, but short as compared to the odyssey I’ve just found my way through. It is the story of Parable, the braincare venture I co-founded and led as co-CEO for over two years. Parable was inspired by my own experience with mental health, learned personally and professionally. It represented a big vision of what I believe the mental health industry still needs to evolve into its next chapter to help people thrive. But before Parable took form, the call to set sail came from an even deeper truth within me that I wasn’t willing to admit until now: I needed to test myself. To see how far I could go. To prove to myself it could be done. Or at least, to push the limits of my own map’s edge.
We named the business after parables for a reason. Parables serve to take complex truths and bend them towards simplicity through story, often leaving you with a moral of how to live well. I hope this story allows Parable to rest in the service of becoming a parable of its own.
Part 2: Founder-Opportunity Fit
Between March of 2020 and March of 2021, I schemed on five business concepts. Visioned, strategized, socialized, tested, validated, and invalidated. I kept my job at Headspace until October 2020 and then consulted on the side as I hustled on the ideas — both on my own and in partnership with others. I worked on contract as a founder in residence for three venture capital studios: M13 Ventures (out of which Parable arose) and two others which function as the operational back-ends for celebrity brands (which I’ll leave unnamed for anonymity’s sake).
I use that word intentionally: “scheme”. Health is a core value of mine, and my first founder journey with Maslo revealed to me the fierce mental, emotional, and physical tolls of the journey — the result being that the business suffers, too. The first way to de-risk my next business was to safeguard my own care. So I prioritized being kind to myself from the start by teeing up a container. Principles to protect me in the wild. What did I really need to stay in this for the long haul?
My early guides were these:
Values alignment: This new venture would have to align with my personal interests, experiences, and values. Intimately. Mental health, movement, nature, community. (Notably: not tech. Tech is a tool of value with which I have deep experience, but not a value.)
In good company: It was Covid. I knew I’d be building alone, remotely, for a few years. I know success in this industry requires being willing to ask for help again and again — and being able to give it when others make asks of their own. I know that while I love my independence, I do better working amongst people. I wanted community to be the strategic advantage — for me, and for it.
A product that sells: The product would need to have real value and meaning that people would pay for out the gate. This was part of the container: I needed reassurance of financial safety to not feel delusional in an industry composed of smoke, mirrors, and wizards of Oz. I wanted more than a big fluffy vision. I wanted transactions. Hard cash. On launch day. To validate for myself I was not delusional.
Equal partnership: I wasn’t set on needing a co-founder, but I knew if one came along, I’d need to have an at-least-equal equity split and invest in our relationship like a marriage. No more playing second fiddle. I had struggled to find the right arrangement with my co-founder at Maslo. That time around, taking on the C.O.O. role with less equity did not feel financially fair nor a good fit for my skill set. This time, I needed to own my desire and inner knowing that I had what it took to lead an early stage startup as CEO. Yes, there was ego in this one, but also the vulnerability that came from owning my deepest desire. If a cofounder were to join, they would need real differences in skill set. EQ in spades, not just brains. And willingness to do the work of building a mutually respectful relationship.
Attractive to Investors: I wanted to devote my all to this company, which meant I needed a salary. In turn, that meant the concept needed to be high growth, so it could be venture-backed (in retrospect, this was an unnecessary constraint). With Maslo, I’d burned half my savings funding myself as we tried and failed at raising money to fund the business. I’d learned that to commit to building, and to feel safe in the chaos of creation, I needed to have money coming in to pay my bills. And to have a salary from the business before it is selling product, I wanted a hefty financial partner from day 1, dilution hit be damned.
This proved to be a good list. Until the realities of the journey presented me with tradeoffs. Then, I began to make compromises.
Part 3: Parable Existed
We all go in knowing the statistics about startup success rates and funding — they’re bad. Less than 1 in 10 startups make it. Less than 2,500 women raised $1M or more in venture capital in the US in 2022 — out of the pool of $238 billion that VC firms deployed (Morgan Stanley) . There are many factual benchmarks I can look at to objectively judge Parable’s outcome as not-so-bad, or to subjectively help myself feel better about the odds stacked against me as a woman, but it all comes down to this:
Parable didn’t work out. And I had a key part in that.
But before I go into what I see as core reasons why Parable didn’t work out, I owe it to Parable and to all her supporters to nod to the immensity of what we did together.
We brought Parable into existence. In March 2021, there was no such thing as a braincare company with a clinically valid product for long term brain health inspiring people to human well by nourishing their nervous systems through nutrition. There was no such thing as @thinkparable on Instagram or thinkparable.com with high quality educational content on nutritional neuroscience. There was no such thing as Parable Daily™ in hundreds of people’s morning teas, coffees, and smoothies. Going from a company not existing to one existing — with a team, brand, product, financing, and revenue — is a sheer feat of muscled effort and a ride along the force of magic.
Brian Davis and I, captured for Forbes, “Do You Care For Your Brain As Much As Your Abs? This New Supplement Will Keep Your Mind Fit” by Kristen Philipkoski We secured $2.75 million in venture capital funding — and developed relationships with hundreds (literally) of investors across venture capital, family offices, corporations, and syndicates. Dozens of supporters and stakeholders opened doors for us, just because we asked. Pitch after pitch, our vision of humaning well through braincare made its way into powerful investment offices and investor minds that I’m sure has inspired shifts in investing since.
We formulated and brought to market a clinically effective brain health supplement shown to improve cognitive, mental and neural health in a month’s time. Parable Daily™ safely and notably had the power to change over a dozen measures that truly matter for people’s quality of life — it lessened anxiety, improved resilience to stress, sharpened focus, and expanded working memory. Not fluff: we even have hard data from a clinical study to prove it.
We attracted thousands of customers and earned thousands in revenue. While our financial model required we attract millions, I don’t want to overlook any single customer nor any positive experience as a result of Parable’s content or Parable Daily™. It simply pains me that we cannot continue to deliver value to those customers that were benefitting.
We employed dozens in ways that enabled their genius to be of service. We were fair to our people and our partners. We honored their time and worth financially and prioritized their mental health in an industry that’s normalized taking shortcuts at any and every turn to get ahead. You can make the argument that we didn’t get ahead, but if this is given as the reason why, I will not agree with you and I will not apologize.
A small part of the Parable crew mid-meeting, gathered together on zoom the day before limited release day. We modeled how co-CEOs both do and do not function well together. In a time when we are all re-thinking what leadership looks like, how it could or should function, and what fairness really means with respect to gender in business, Brian and I role modeled a certain way. We now have that experience and can share with others its pros and cons. I know my close partnership with Brian for over two years changed me for the better personally and strengthened me as a leader (thank you, b). I also know it was right for me to end our partnership. Both can and are true for me. This model can be offered to others still sorting it through.
We inspired thousands around the brain’s need for care — and that nutrition matters. We helped define what braincare can and should be for the market. We wrote weekly and posted near daily on topics related to our mission (humaning well), our product (brain nutrition), the landscape (neuroscience) and our personal experiences (fundraising, concussions, you name it). We landed shiny features in the likes of Forbes to enable our story to spread wide. We took the time to make sure every communication and content asset was rooted in fact — and beautiful. We know our readership bled far and wide. I’ll never know the tangible result of this effort and exposure, but I rest in the knowing that it opened and expanded minds.
Operationally, we performed our roles. We founded a company. But as chief executives, we did not perform the one ultimately required:
We did not grow — nor return — our investors’ capital.
Part 4: We err our way to mastery
The chorus beckons with its curiosity from all angles. Friends. Colleagues. Family.
“What happened?! Do you regret having left early?! Do you think this all would have happened if you’d stayed?! Are you ok?!”
When a venture ends, what of value remains? Relationships, stories, and wisdom.
Parable ultimately dissolved. That’s a legal term: “dissolution”. It ran out of money to operate. It returned no capital to its investors. Employees were terminated. Remaining assets were digitally and physically incinerated.
I’d parted ways a quarter before that moment, in one last calculated move stemming from my belief that having one CEO, not two, was the thing needed to give its leader the agility to carve aggressively — to survive. But Parable was not able to land funding in time, nor an acquisition. It could not sustain itself, either: the math of its finances were not yet trending cash flow positive, and no operator was willing to front the cash nor time required to manage it as a side gig on default alive (myself included, after deliberate consideration).
That’s the simple version. But here’s what I’ve been reflecting on as the real post-mortem takeaways, business-school style.
Our idealism around having a double bottom line complicated playing the startup game as it must be brutally played. Startups are vehicles for rapid value creation, measured monetarily, in a capitalistic structure. Taking on venture capital to finance a company comes with the pressure of growing fast. That’s not because investors are evil, it’s because they themselves are under pressure to return the original investment of their LPs. Those LPs only give their money under the trust that the VC firm will return greater returns faster than what that capital could have garnered via putting it into other asset classes — like the stock market, or real estate. Pace of growth IS the name of the game. Time and again, our idealism — whether it was around the positioning of long-term benefits, the refusal to market short-term fix messaging, or the importance of high quailty creative — held us back from brutally prioritizing things investors need to see to put in more money. We were not able to demonstrate early, meaningful traction in sales post-launch. Investors needed to see more evidence of growth to put even more of their chips on the table. And I don’t blame them.
It takes double the investment to educate on a need, and then sell the solution. The brain having nutritional needs is not a new thing, but braincare as a trusted wellness concept is still SO early for the market. As such, we were responsible for both educating about the brain, and selling the maintenance solve for it. That’s double the work, double the hours, double the people, double the money — than our competitors simply selling solves the short-term fix way. Selling a long term health benefit over a short term fix felt like swimming upstream in a capitalistic wellness lane. Typically, solving for long-term health is what healthcare should be for. Except, well, it’s not exactly doing that successfully.
We waited too long to launch. We executed a two-part launch. We opened limited release in October 2022, but waited until after the holidays, in late January 2023, for a full launch. The delay, while intentional to avoid the high CAC period typical of November and December, wasted precious time to get the learnings from being in market.
Co-CEO’s big flaw as a leadership model is that it does not allow for rapid and decisive financial decision making. Most primary business functions can be split and divided in swim lanes depending on skill set and aptitude except one: finance. Beginning in November 2022, I started to worry. I could see reality taking shape in Parable’s financial model. The more I saw the story of slow growth manifest, the more I hyper-focused on the math of the money and began to advocate for cuts. Brian and I weren’t able to come into alignment. It was unrealistic to take the decision to a non-existent seed-stage board.
Without an objective tie-breaking mechanism, status quo and compromises win, even if those aren’t the winning decisions for the business. Our compromise solution was to go out and raise more money. I’ve since developed a strong belief that purse strings need clear owners, which comes from mutual respect on role division, hierarchy — or both.Ultimately this is why I chose to leave early. Parable needed one financial leader and it didn’t have it in “c&b”, as we called ourselves. The company needed to be re-carved with decisiveness to save itself during the double trouble of an economic downturn and negative cash flow. My calculation to leave was not all saintly self-sacrificing. As a seasoned leader, I was increasingly frustrated at seeing myself execute in ways I believed were overly timid and way too slow. I could lead partially in title, but not fully in my truth. The decisions weren’t mine, even while they were mine. I was beyond exhausted of running a three-legged race and my frustration eventually made my need clear: I owed myself the permission to not stay long in a leadership position where I could not lead in a way I believed was fiscally responsible.
Daily™ existed between healthcare and wellness systems. We created a nutraceutical with pharma-grade efficacy, but kale-grade IP. In essence, we merged swim lanes, and didn’t play the playbook of either one that well. As our incredible lawyers reminded me time and again, Daily™ was in the swim lane of “wellness”, given its nature as an herbal product. We couldn’t exclusively protect its IP and as such, the product is inherently more risky as an investment — because others can copy it. Given we went nature-based — even though we were using potent herbals in very efficacious forms — we weren’t on the right track to become a pharmaceutical or prescribe-able medical intervention, either. Without jumping through the regulatory hoops into healthcare, we couldn’t get those who really understood its power — scientists and clinicians — to vouch for it or prescribe it through B2B channels, even if its validity as an intervention was just as solid, if not more so, than some medications. Those clinicians who did recommend it did just that — recommend it (not prescribe it) — at their own risk.
Daily™ cost too much for the market. While it was more than fair considering the cost of ingredients, customers want cheap. Unfortunately, that's not possible with quality ingredients that have clinical efficacy for brain health in a holistic formulation that combined mental, neural, and cognitive benefits. We probably should have made 3 SKUs instead of one — if only for pricing reasons.
Daily™ needed a crisper claim set to sell. We were committed to the vision of “long term brain health” and for us, that meant caring for the brain in full. While innovative in its vision, that proved to be an Achilles’ heel — consumers ultimately will want to feel the effects of a product, or measure outcomes. Without the ability to provide either, I fear our high level messaging was too heady, too complicated, and fell flat.
CPG is a “one shot innovation” in the sense that when you create the product, you don’t have much agility to shift what it is, who it’s for, and how you talk about it without creating an entirely new product. Creating a supplement means printing packaging with a supplement facts panel on it, with certifications that take months to receive, and regulatory messaging that takes thousands of lawyer dollars to validate. Innovating in CPG is very different than innovating in tech, where updates are typically much simpler and faster to test and deploy. While you can decisively iterate on a CPG product in time, you need more capital to go through the product development process and physically create (print, cook, mix, manufacture, ship) the next version.
We invested our dollars too heavily up front in static brand, preventing our ability to invest in dynamic creative production. The real creative lever this day and age is the ability to rapidly produce and test thousands of iterations of ad creative. We didn’t test and iterate fast enough on paid marketing spend (and should have started way sooner) to figure out what worked to get people to click “buy” before we had to claw back and conserve capital.
The venture studio model equity stake, while well-meaning, was deleterious as the company took off. I can hem and haw about my own ownership stake in the biz and the dilution hit I took. Ultimately, I had accepted dilution before Parable even started by going the route of a venture studio. Recall from above: I had picked “In Good Company” as an initial strategic choice when starting off to build Parable. But this is what I didn’t see: when the cap table is crowded so early, the optionality required to bring in new strategic aids (like a celeb figurehead to spike growth in our marketing) is not really there. I believe there needs to be a way for strategics — who for whatever reason are no longer providing value in the way they’d originally intended — to own up to that reality and change their ownership stake in response, for the sake of the venture’s survival. But that’s not how this industry works. Capturing big, early stakes in businesses IS how the big bucks get made. We were not able to navigate this, and I do attribute the demise in part to the reality of this structural rigidity. For the record — this one’s systemic. I do not blame any individual investor, VC, or corporation for this reality, but I still believe the industry as a whole would do better by finding a way to re-normalize outsized early ownership stakes that haven’t owned up to their value. This would allow new strategics to come in, provide the value add, and not dilute other owners to the point of it no longer being worth their time and efforts.
Part 5: How to Rest in Peace
“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
I spend an inordinate amount of time reflecting on my experiences — some would say, too much. It’s why I must write — articulation is catharsis for those learnings’ definition, simplification, and release. I reflect to allow some deeper intelligence within me to integrate the density of overstimulation, exhaustion, shame, regret, sadness, and anger into a cohesive new thing. A burning coal, alchemized, into something that can be held, traded, handled.
My odyssey with Parable is now complete. The ship made it far, yet sunk out at sea. I am not yet resting on a safe, dry shore, but I trust enough in myself and the world to know I soon will be. Beyond sharing my experience in post mortem business learnings, I’ve personally needed to understand the experience in a way that goes deeper than story.
While my opportunity cost was high — I literally could have made millions had I pursued a different corporate employment path or had Parable actually worked out — Parable did benefit me. It gave me proof that I could do some version of “making it” — which I thought meant birthing a business from idea to dollars coming in. Mission accomplished in that sense. But wow, the cost. My soul is so tired.
The plot twist was this: “making it” — what I thought I set out to accomplish — was ill-defined. Turns out, it had nothing to do with birthing a business, raising the capital, or doing all that was recognized as shiny.
“Making it” for me happened in February 2023, three months before I left Parable. I wrote a post about my experience #fundraisingwhilefemale that went viral on LinkedIn.
That post, written in 45 minutes one morning, was the result of a “fuck it” kind of mood. I was two years in to putting every shred of what I had on the table. I let everything in my life bend to Parable in importance, with two exceptions: I refused to burn my savings on the company, and I refused to give up my workout each day. But I was aching. My personal life was non-existent. I barely saw friends and family. I lived alone, having moved to Colorado August 2020. On average, I worked 12 hour days, 6 days a week, regularly clocking 20-30 zoom hours a week sitting cramped in those stuffy WeWork phone booths. I was optimizing everything in my life like a machine for the sake of one goal: Parable must survive. And in the process, I’d been choking myself, roped to the masthead of my own creation.
I was in the thick of fundraising. I’d pitched over 200 investors and completely exhausted from the amount of effort I was putting in. The morning I wrote the post, I just couldn’t go through the motions. At 5:30am, I looked at my calendar on my phone in bed, fully stacked with pitch meetings, and I rebelled. I surrendered to my exhaustion and canceled everything up through lunch. My frontal lobe literally hurt from the amount of zoom pitches I’d been having, without any downtime to process and reflect on any of them. All I wanted to do was sit at my kitchen counter, alone, in my PJs, with no obligations, and write. So that’s what I did.
45 minutes later, I hit publish on the post. It gave voice to the dissonance I felt so clearly in my own body. It didn’t even feel that vulnerable, because it just came out of me so easily, cathartically, and true. My words had the effect of a dead canary being spotted in a mine. Symbolic, they gave evidence to the poisonous gas that exists in the caverns of fundraising, with so many other founders raising their hands and heads and likes in relieved “me too”s. As it flew through the internet the next few days, I received hundreds of public and private messages in response, media requests, speaking gigs, even friendly investors wanting to hear the Parable pitch — massive affirmations of my experience.
It was incredibly energizing to have simply seen a result. Here I was for months, hustling to death trying to do everything right, and having it result in nothing. And here I was one morning in my PJs, doing something that felt trivial, easy, energy-giving, and cathartic at a time of immense exhaustion, seeing it fly through the world in a way that was clearly serving the collective. Hmm.
That one post, combined with the way I carried out some experiments in fundraising in the months after, gave me new self-awareness and new swagger. It imbued me with the calm confidence that came from the recognition of what I was good at and what I did have energy for. No amount of out-working, out-smarting, or general muscling would ever have the power to replace what I naturally have energy for, which clearly has benefit to others.
That’s when it hit me: this was the map’s edge I’d been searching for all along. The reason the sirens called. The reason I followed them. To have found the thing that comes naturally, easily, and joyfully to me — and to have it be needed. Sure, a pot of gold would have been nice. But it was unmistakeable: the end goal of my original odyssey was this, here, now.
Venture-scale business-building appealed to me from the beginning because it felt like the key to unlocking grand creative power. I’ve desired so deeply to make things that matter, at scale. It had felt like my agency to create in the world was limited to figuring out how this finicky 1% of the 1% gave out its raw stuff — capital. But that desire to create in a way that’s grand, to make things that matter, at scale, comes from a belief that one kind of expansiveness is better than another. That impacting one million people through one product they take with their breakfast is more important than impacting one hundred people in a way that changes the shape of their entire lives. I orient to impact differently now.
I no longer feel dependent on a certain kind of investment capital to unfurl my creative power in the world. I no longer feel dependent on hooking myself to a specific outcome, or identity, to affirm or patch self-worth. When tested in such deep ways, I discover what I’m good at — and what I’m not. With limited energy and resources, I gave myself the compassion and permission to sharpen my own edges in ways that felt risky for a woman — I got blunt, unapologetic, funny — heck, even a bit selfish. The whole mission of this company was to human well, for the sake of health, especially mental health. What irony to realize my attachment to it was the thing standing in the way. I still held fiduciary responsibility, but landing VC funding was no longer a thing Cristina had to do to survive. Leading Parable well was what Cristina owed herself to be in integrity. And that meant one thing: fix the leadership problem first, to fix the finances.
Most importantly of all, the experience gave my intellect evidence that the core of what had been missing had nothing to do with intellect. My intuition was powerful. My ability to perceive and feel, powerful. My ability to say “this is enough,” powerful. My ability to elegantly translate emotions like anger into articulate expression for the readership of others, powerful. Powerful because it was easy, more natural than thinking, and unique.
This thing called intuition, it clearly deserves a seat at the table — at very least. Perhaps in time, it even deserves to be that board’s head.
Above, I’ve shared my business learnings. But my real learnings have nothing to do with business. Looking back now, I see certain turning points with painful clarity. There were many micro moments in which I heard my intuition speak to me, through pangs in my gut, clenches of my shoulders, inward folded clavicles, or a guarding of my heart. Moments when my body was directing me, but in a language undiscernable. I had been numbing her, forcing her to quiet, shutting her down with the thing that felt safer: the brain. And great goddess is that limiting.
“I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.”
— Henry David Thoreau
The nervous system is body-based. A supplement is not enough. The body’s brain does not just live between the ears. There is intellect beyond reason lying dormant in the meat of our bodies and the magic of the language in which it feels. The technology of the human body is measureless in its immensity. Our physicality means we have needs. Needs, that when nourished, unfurl the genius our worlds have yet to see.
I will take myself back out into the world with the creative force I know I possess, to some new mission, tribe, battlefield, or birthplace. Long ago, I chose to put my all into this life. To sail with the sirens. To gladiate in arenas — if they need me. I do not yet know why it is I do this, but narrative is not what I owe nor need. My body and brain, partnered, simply know what it is I am built to do — in this moment, now, and this moment, next.
Whatever journey is in front of me, I know I’ll navigate it differently. Less hesitantly. More intuitively. From an embodied understanding of the unique power true to me, I’ll feel my way through.
“The nervous system is body-based. A supplement is not...” What a way to capture the sum of it all. You are a beautiful writer, thanks for sharing that gift (and learnings) with us all. ❤️🙏🏻
Totally love the image of the lamb... and grateful for your candid bravery and vulnerability