Until now, I have been pretty much on the outside of this American tradition: The tradition of building up Thanksgiving to be a great family moment and then the family not living up to it. But everyone still does Thanksgiving basically because they love their parents. I’m not gonna say here that I don’t love my parents. But it’s a special kind of love that does not involve being with them for holidays.

But this year is a big switch for me, because I’m doing Thanksgiving family drama—with the farmer.  There is family drama because the farmer has three sisters who think I have a morality problem. Like I don’t have morals.

In fact, the whole family thinks this, and those with Internet connections print out blog posts about sex acts and send them, via US mail, to less connected family members. The outcry crosses state boundaries from Wisconsin to Illinois, and sometimes, I think they are googling terms like Penelope Trunk and sex. I mean, it’s not easy to find the stuff they are finding.

Wait. You are wondering, right? What they’re finding? Here. Here’s a list of some links. And, now no one has to do any morally-compromising searches. It’s all right here:

The often-sought, ill-advised, business-trip tryst

When women get power at work, do they use it like men?

Six Sex Scenes (my 1994 master's thesis, graduate program for english, Boston Univ.)

Honestly, I like the sisters. Their ideas about how to live life seem fine. I think I’m living the same morally responsible lives they are, even though they’ll never think that. Also, the farmer’s parents are always very kind to me and my sons.  So, it seems like Thanksgiving should be okay.

But Thanksgiving in a family where there’s a family business is different.

I’ve always meant to write a post about the farmer’s business acumen. He reminds me of the most resilient, innovative startup guys I know. The only difference is that he’s not doing Web 2.0—he’s doing cows. There are pieces of the family business I’m dying to tell you about. Like, the sweetness of the farmer and his parents working side by side for twenty years to pay off the farm, and the cleverness of the farmer figuring out how to be part of the local food movement without organic certification.

When I first met the farmer and his parents I saw rolling fields, warm milk and grass-finished meat. Now I see them just like the other family businesses:  Family conflict.

Cut to the farmer’s kitchen. I am cooking the farmer’s beef and the farmer’s squash, and if you think this is insignificant, consider that when the farmer told his parents that we’re getting married, the dad’s first question was, “Can she cook?”

The farmer takes out his phone and plays a message for me from one of his sisters. They are leaving messages pleading with him to dump me. Sometimes they cry. For him, of course. For his future – like I’ll take his money and run.

Also, sidenote: I think the sisters think the farmer has enough money and shouldn’t get any more, so they are outraged that he wants to negotiate with his parents, and they blame this on me. (Don’t get excited: The farmer has a lot for a guy who has done a good job farming and spent almost no money in fifteen years. But I could be with an investment banker if I’m marrying for money. Believe me, a farmer is not a smart move for marrying for money.)

After the voicemails and the ensuing doldrums, I remind him that our marriage counselor (no, we’re not married, but we’re early birds catching the worm) said that his family would be a big problem for him.

He tells me that we need to call the lawyer.

This is how we operate.  I always want to call the marriage counselor to make sure the farmer still loves me. And he always wants to call the lawyer, to make sure he’s going to be able to keep farming with his parents.

Is there anyone else who needed to sign a prenuptial agreement before Thanksgiving? I did. I had to sign to make sure the parents feel certain that I’ll never get my hands on that farm while they are alive. I signed. After all, my board would go ballistic if I did not have a prenup that protected my company. So I figured, okay, now everyone is happy in business-land.

But the problem with a family business is that if everything is not done up tight, by lawyers, then everyone has different ideas about who owns what. The farmer’s family business is, I think, a mess.

So the farmer’s family is negotiating. The farmer is telling his parents that if they can’t come to an agreement then he’s selling his portion of the land and leaving.

To live at my house. Let me just say that when we tried that out—where he lives at my house and doesn’t farm—it really sucked.  He missed the farm and I kept telling him he could buy another farm and he kept saying that he misses farming with his parents. But his lawyer tells him he doesn’t have a choice except to be prepared to leave (and live as a grouch at my house). Because how else can he negotiate?

I think negotiations like these are the only way for family businesses to survive.

I used to work at my grandma’s bookstore. I worked with a cousin—Laurie. She told me I should move to LA even though no one wanted me to. Everyone thought it was a crazy idea. But Laurie explained that the job of families is to keep you in line with the rest of the family, in a predestined path that is good for the family. And your job is to create your own path.

It seems to me that often, families are complicated, hurtful and constraining. But a family that is in business together must somehow rise above that, and encourage each member to express themselves, and find what moves them, and act on that. It’s a more generous model of a family that what most families are.

So this Thanksgiving, for me, is like watching a play. I don’t have a huge stake — I just want to be with the farmer, wherever he goes. So I watch, from afar, hoping everyone can agree on how the business should be, and hoping no one mentions how much they hate what I write.

Meanwhile, I think the sisters are hoping to wait out the storm. The farmer has dumped so many women that his family can’t believe I’d have staying power. And, of course, he has dumped me 15 times, so the family does have a point.

I ask him what I should talk about. “What if they bring up my miscarriage?”

“They won’t,” he says, “They’ll bring up the weather.”

And he laughs. Because of course, I’m more conversant on reproductive rights than the weather. And no one talks weather better than a farm family.

We get into bed and talk about how we will only spend a couple of hours at Thanksgiving with his family and then we will go back to my house where we will have Thanksgiving with my Ex. (Need I say more about this situation than that the dinner with the Farmer and the Ex will be the more relaxing of the two?)

We talk about how the farmer needs to do chores in the morning with his dad. And we need to bring two pies for his mom. And we go to bed all cuddly because the farmer loves talking logistics. Farming seems like it’s about land and animals and being close to the earth, but it’s really about the logistics of land and animals as you try to control the earth.

I look at the farmer and say, “Oh. You’re so happy now because we talked logistics.” Then I kiss him and turn out the light.

The next morning, at the breakfast table, we eat hamburger because he doesn’t feel like it’s a meal if you don’t have meat, and I won’t eat pork because even though I’m with a pig farmer, that doesn’t mean I’m not Jewish.

I want to ask him about what he told his sisters about me and my kids coming to Thanksgiving.

I say, “I need five minutes to talk.”

I have to tell him the duration because he doesn’t like conflict without a set endpoint. I once explained that the endpoint for personal conflict is death. But he needs something sooner.

Comment on: Thanksgiving drama on steroids: Adding a family business to the mix

But I couldn’t be happier. For one thing, it’s a sign that my company, Brazen Careerist, is doing well. Remember when the company was running out of money and my electricity was getting turned off? There was no one worrying then that I was the wrong person for the CEO position. No one cared because it looked like we were going under.

But then the media started talking about how we could be LinkedIn for Gen Y and we started moving fast. I don’t worry about of money anymore, and we are moving at a faster speed because we can see where we are going, how we’ll make money, and how we’ll grow the community.

1. Know where your strengths are.
The thing that makes me great is my writing. I have spent my whole life writing, constantly trying to figure out how to earn money writing. My favorite thing I’ve ever written is this blog. I adore the conversation, I adore the format, the never-ending research, and the self-referential links, because that’s how my mind works: connecting random stuff together all the time trying to figure out the best path to happiness. Blogging is my dream-come-true media.

But I also love building companies. So I was in heaven for two years turning my blog brand into a social networking company.

I am great in that phase of a business–thinking, philosophizing, finding holes in markets, finding holes in ideas. I never give up. I always have another idea, and I don’t mind feeling lost day after day, week after week.

2. Watch where you gravitate.
But now the company needs to run fast, to execute a model we have confidence in. I am not fast at execution—I do not keep ten thousand things in my head at one time. Here’s a good example: I flew to DC to talk with investors and had about five hours to retool our presentation to incorporate a new marketing plan. I spent two of those hours writing a blog post.

And the more responsibility I had for running a large team, trying to hit many goals at once, the less work I did. Honestly, I just didn’t know what to do. I was outside my core strength.

And I know this:  the first sign that you are outside of your strengths is when you can’t make yourself do the work you need to do.

3. Find people who complement your strengths.
To get out of germination mode and reach our launch, I needed to surround myself with people with complimentary skills. I spent two years looking for business partners before I found Ryan Healy and Ryan Paugh. The way I knew it was a good fit is that as soon as I suggested we partner, they said yes, and then had a million ideas of their own.

Then, when the company was stuck financially, I found a new board member who runs a company with $150 million in revenue. He met with me every week for six months to help me focus on cash flow.

When the company was clearly moving too fast for me to keep up as CEO, I badgered another board member to be CEO. He told me a number of reasons why that wouldn’t work – he had had two huge exits and he wasn’t planning to be CEO again, and another company wanted him to be CEO,  and he wants to watch his kids play football. These are all good reasons that I overcame, and I got him to agree to be interim CEO.

4. Do what differentiates you.
So I’m going to be Chief Evangelist. This is a great job for me, because basically, I keep blogging, and talking to the media, and I go to SXSW with my fake tan.

Most of all, I am certain I’m right about Brazen Careerist. LinkedIn is a place to display your network, not build your network. Facebook is too personal to use as a platform for managing your professional life. The way to build your network is through conversation, and Brazen Careerist is a great tool for that network-building conversation that gets you control over your career. (And hey, you should sign up!) I can talk about this all day.

5. If you really can do the job, you’ll be doing it already.
Recently, I did a live chat on the Washington Post web site, answering fifty questions in sixty minutes about how to use social media to help your career.

The chat was fun, and people asked interesting questions. It was great exposure for Brazen Careerist. But during that hour I couldn’t help wondering: Who is making sure we’re hitting marketing numbers? Who is going to hire the new head of sales?

Now I have an answer: Ryan Healy.

In any office, employees gravitate to the job each should be doing, no matter what the titles are. Sometimes we gravitate to a job and it’s not available, and we go nuts doing something we shouldn’t be doing. Sometimes we gravitate to that job and it’s such a good fit for us that we do it even without a title.

Ryan Healy has been running day-to-day operations of the company for a while now. Without the official authority. Because he’s great at it. While I am thinking of ideas and philosophizing, Ryan is always asking, “What are we getting done?”

A lot of people say they should be doing a job they do not have the authority to do. Here’s some news, though: You’d be doing it already if you were great at it. Ryan Healy is now Chief Operating Officer at Brazen Careerist because he’s already shown he can do the job. That’s how you get serious promotions:  doing the job first, in an outstanding way.

Okay. So what you can expect from me is more blog posts, because when my blog traffic goes up, it’s good for Brazen Careerist. And you can also expect to see less of me feeling frazzled and crazy and fighting with Ryan. Because I’m not anymore. I’m back in my sweet spot, and I feel so lucky to be here.

Comment on: How to find the right job for you

Here's some advice for everyone who is starting a company: Write your big press release first, before you do anything at all. And then work backwards. Map out the milestones you need to make the press release come true, and that tells you how to run the first stage of your startup.

To be clear: we did not do that. I mean, if we did, our press release would have had to say, “Ryan Paugh announces that he has just made it through two years of Ryan Healy and Penelope Trunk fighting tooth and nail over totally irrelevant details of building a social network that is a career management tool for the next generation workforce.”

Then Ryan Healy and I would rewrite that press release ten times because Tech Crunch announced that they are sick of people using the term "next generation" and Ryan doesn't want to use it but I think it's fine because it's in a different context. (LinkedIn is for gen x. Brazen Careerist is the job site for the next generation, demographically speaking. )

Then there would be a quote from Ryan Healy that says, "If I had known that we were going to expand from being a blog network to a full-blown social network then I would have never put up with the insane amount of rewriting that Penelope made me do to have a guest post on her blog."

I tried to write a normal launch blog post where I take a victory lap, but I think you know that I'm not the type. I do feel really, really proud of what we've done. Brazen Careerist is a site that lets you build your network the way it's supposed to happen: through genuine conversation.  Most of  you have watched me go through total hell to get this company off the ground. A lot of you wonder why I do it. The reason is that I truly believe that becoming an active participant in a professional community really will change your life.

I was really, really lonely. I was a new mom, and I had a failing marriage, and I moved to a city where I knew no one. I started blogging, and it was a lifeline to me. Not only did it provide fun, stimulating conversation, but it reminded me that I'm great at business, and I should be doing a business. Talking within the context of a community helped me find myself again, and the process of posting ideas helped me announce to the world what I am really good at, and sometimes—actually, most of the time—those things go hand in hand. (So it's no coincidence that the new launch of Brazen Careerist provides tools so that anyone can have this experience of defining yourself by posting your ideas.)

I convinced Ryan and Ryan to move to Madison to do a company with me. They knew from the beginning that the main goal for me with a startup was to have fun. And when they arrived in Madison, the thing that was most jarring to them was how weird and isolated I was. It's not how I seem on my blog. I know that. I mean, most people think I am weird on my blog but not that weird in person. The thing is that I'm actually more weird in person. So a lot of what our startup has been is all of us learning to adapt to each other (the company is basically a Penn State fraternity and me. Not kidding.)

I didn't realize I had Asperger syndrome until Ryan and Ryan kept pointing out the weirdness I have. I realized they are the same things my son goes to therapy for. People ask me a lot to write about Asperger syndrome. I am hesitant because I am still working out how to deal with it. One thing I know, though, is that friends are very very hard. People like me because I'm smart and interesting, but I am hard to be friends with. I don't quite understand the process. A lot of times people will say, "You think your blog readers are your friends, but they're not."

This is probably true, but I don't get it. The blog has gotten me through one of the toughest times in my life. Today I have a great company, solid funding, a great household arrangement, and a good-for-me boyfriend. I didn't have this a year ago. I had a mess on my hands. And I was so so grateful to have a community on the blog to talk to. The community talks about work when I want to talk about work, and the community talks about personal stuff when that's what I'm thinking about.

So. Okay. I am scared to do something now. I am telling you thank you because this community feels like my friend, even though I know it is evidence of mental oddness that I think this. I know I am so lucky to have a community that is so smart and insightful that the comments section is exciting to read. I know that's rare on the Internet. So every day I feel lucky, and what I'm scared to do is ask you for more. But I'm doing that now.

I'm doing it because I think you know that the last eight years of my career has been dedicated to building the Brazen Careerist brand and the company around it. And now with this launch, we need a lot of people to try out the idea that you can control your career by building strong networks through conversation and talking about your ideas.

If everyone who subscribed to my blog signed up at brazencareerist.com, the launch would be deemed a huge success. So, I'm asking you to do that now. Go sign up.  And then let me know what you think. And thank you so much for sticking with me through hard times so that on this really exciting day you are here to share it with me.

Comment on: All-new launch for my company. Hooray!

Here is a confession of lameness: I said I’d write the column and then I lost confidence. I thought I didn’t know enough about running a company to give other people advice.

Since then, I've spent two years running a start-up in the worst funding market in decades. After insane amounts of struggling, we have raised about $1 million, and for the first time, I do not feel panicked about keeping the company in business. We will have to raise more money, but I can see the path to that, and I think I can do it.

At the same time, I had a recent flurry of outside affirmation: Psychology Today featured me as a person who has outstanding resilience, and Self magazine is featuring me in their August “success” issue. So even though I squandered my opportunity to have a column in Wired, I am ready to give advice about how to run a start-up.

I’m going to answer the question people ask me most often: "What do I do when my company is out of money?"

Here is the answer:

1. Lay people off to save money
2. Forgo salaries to save money
3. Make a sale to generate money
4. Cut back your family’s spending to redirect money to the company
5. Kill your personal credit to redirect money to the company

All those options suck, of course. I should know. I did them all. And each time I wrote a blog post about how I was going nuts from funding, or making my family crazy from funding, commenters would tell me I look too crazy for anyone to fund.

But entrepreneurs wrote to me to tell me that they understand. Because most entrepreneurs have experienced something similar. They just don’t write about it. And investors are not stupid: They know this is what happens to entrepreneurs. That's why investors are investors and not entrepreneurs.

Lots of people told me to throw in the towel, but entrepreneurs never did. Because entrepreneurs knows that having a successful startup is really about not quitting. You never get the business model right on the first try. You never feel like you know what you’re doing, and you always have to adjust and adjust until you find what works. If you have passion and energy and faith, you keep going.

But it has to be an insane amount of passion and energy and faith, because there is no sane reason to have a venture backed start-up. A start-up does not get funding if it is a reasonable business model. A start-up gets funded because it's shooting for the moon, and investors fund companies to have a lottery ticket to the moon. So the odds are terrible that any entrepreneur will succeed. It is always a more sane financial decision to work at a corporate job for a paycheck.

If you can. If you can stomach it. Which reminds me about the advice my creative writing teacher gave us in graduate school: “If you can do anything else besides writing for a living, you should do it. Because writing professionally is a very hard life.” And really, making all career decisions is about knowing yourself.

So when you talk about how to manage cash flow, the crux of that question is a personal question: How  much can you bear suffering in order to do a start-up? Because you’re gonna run out of cash. Or worry that you are. You are not going to be able to sleep at night. You are going to start doing little, self-destructive things that add up to terribleness. Like, eat fries for sixteen meals in a row, or yell at your kids, or forget a date you made with your girlfriend.

You need to decide for yourself how much you want to do your company. It’s not rational. There is no right answer. There is infinite suffering. In exchange for that, you control your own hours, work with people you love, and solve problems in areas you are passionate about.

At some point a few months ago, everyone at my company was late on rent. I had an eviction notice, two people started sleeping on sofas, and one person had no car. But none of us thought we were shutting down the company. None of us thought that was a possibility. We knew we would keep going, we just were scared about how much worse it could get.

There's a craziness  required to get through cash-flow trouble in a start-up. There is craziness that keeps people doing a start-up long enough for them to exit the start-up. A start-up is a war of attrition. Cash flow is just one battle. And right now, I feel like I'm winning. Hooray.

Comment on: How to face cash-flow issues in a start-up

Okay. So if the gender gaps are not around these feminist favorites, then are there any gender gaps we should be concentrating on? Yes. Here are three:

1. The startup gap. Women need to be compensated at a higher rate than men if they are to give up their personal lives in order to work. Law firms accomplish this by keeping women on partner track even when they’re part-time. Corporations do this by offering flex time and other business-bending options for high-performing women who want to take care of kids.

VCs talk endlessly about why there are so few women running venture backed companies, but it’s incredulous talk. The reason is that VCs don’t pay women more. Here’s the bottom line: If you take a man and a woman doing the same office job and the same parenting job, the man will think he’s doing a good job at parenting, but not the woman.

This makes genetic sense. The men had to think the kids were fine when they left the cave to hunt. Or else they wouldn’t leave and no one would have eaten. The women had to think the kids always needed more attention. Otherwise, the women would say, “This is good enough” and then the kids would starve or get eaten by lions.

How this translates to the VC world is that you need to spend TONS of time away from kids doing a startup. For women to do that, they need to be compensated more than men. Other industries have done it in order to benefit from women's brains. The VC world should follow suit.

2. The orgasm gap. People who have orgasms do better at work: they earn more, they hang out with higher powered people, they are better at public speaking, and they walk with a more confident gait, which, of course, inspires confidence.

So we need to pay attention to the orgasm gap, which Hannah Seligson reports in the Daily Beast: "Women are shattering political glass ceilings, surpassing men in the workforce, and even winning Indy-car races. But there's one area where the gender gap has proved particularly stubborn: The orgasm gap."

Paula England, a professor of sociology at Stanford University, says, "The orgasm gap is an inequity that's as serious as the pay gap, and it's producing a rampant culture of sexual asymmetry."

Where does this orgasm gap come from? Probably the amount of effort expended in bed—and who's expending it. England's study found that women give oral sex to their male partners in all contexts—from casual hookups to serious relationships—at significantly higher rates than men do. (Hat tip: Sepideh)

And if you’re wondering how this pans out across generations, things seem to get worse in the younger crowd—Caitlin Flanagan reports in the Atlantic that girls are giving blow jobs just to get the boys to shut up.

3. The fun gap. As soon as men and women start aging, the men are happier. Maybe they have had more training on how to have fun. But life is too difficult for any of us to wait to have fun. So we should all start learning to have some levity early on, and this is the damage of the fun gap.

You can see the gap at the bar. Alcohol makes us have a more broad imagination and do a wider range of things. So why is it more acceptable for professional men than professional women to go out with friends and get drunk? Why is it okay for men to get drunk in order to have an easier time hooking up, but it’s not okay for women? This is such a serious problem that New York magazine calls the gap the the last frontier of feminism.

It’s clear that women are spending more time following the rules than men, and people who have more fun actually do better in life: their fun snowballs, and the more we enjoy the more we get of what we enjoy.

It starts in kindergarten, where the girls sit in their chairs and pay attention in class, and they socialize in the lunchroom. The boys, on the other hand, have spent the first five years of their lives turning everything into a gun or sword and cannot be contained in a classroom atmosphere.

Yes, these are generalizations, but as the mom of two young boys, I have never heard any parent disagree with these generalizations, (and it's official that boys are six months behind girls developmentally by kindergarten). I did not buy guns for my sons. I didn’t have to. They can use anything. And I remember as a fourth grader thinking, (from the back of the classroom, where all the strong performing girls sit because they don’t need help from the teacher) “Wow, the boys sure are doing poorly in school.”

The problem is that the boys are having all the fun. Women are doing better than men in school but school is not what makes kids successful at work. What actually prepares you for life is athletics, aiming high, breaking rules, playing video games. Girls should do those things more. Then, as they grow up, they should spend their time figuring out how to get more orgasms.

Comment on: New gender gaps for the new millennium

1. Focus on something you can control.
You might have noticed that my blog posts are very frequent right now. It’s a way to cope with the funding drama. I have so much control over my blog. And if I obsess over the traffic statistics then I have that crack-head feeling of immediate feedback, and it feels good, and even if half the people are telling me how much they hate me: Traffic is traffic.

Another part of the out-of-funding routine is fighting with Ryan. When I am totally focused on running the company, and I’m not worried about payroll, then things go smoothly and Ryan and I have great conversations about the future of social media and the future of resumes and where we fit.

When we run out of money, Ryan and I focus on our cycle of miscommunication: I say something rude that I don’t know is rude. Ryan gets defensive because he isn’t able to say, “That’s rude. Please don’t talk like that.” I have no idea why he is defensive, he just sounds like he’s up in arms about nothing to me, because if I knew I had been rude in the first place, I would not have been, so of course I don’t know. And when he is up in arms, I yell back. And then he says that I am impossible to deal with because I’m rude and I yell.

So we did that fight routine last week at least twice. I lost count. But I know that the first time, Ryan said, “You know what? Sometimes I hate you so much I have to restrain myself from punching you.”

My jaw dropped. I did not expect him to say that. And then I said, “I feel the same way about you.”

The second time, Ryan Paugh yelled out from his office, “Shut up! Both of you shut up!” And we did. (Though I think Ryan Paugh felt like it was hopeless that we might actually stop, so he took a walk to the coffee shop.)

2. Take time to talk about what's still going well.
So today I sort of kept to myself except that I had to go meet a board member to talk about the funding. The board member, Erik, is so fun to visit because he has this huge, stable company, and this gorgeous lair where he has an office and a secretary and a shiny deep-brown meeting table that my papers slide across while we figure out how to keep my company running. Erik is a great board member for a lot of reasons, but maybe the most important is that he’s so stable. Brazen Careerist needs a lot of things, but really, it needs stability.

But before I go into the board meeting, I remember that I have been named one of the top 30 women running Internet companies.

I call Ryan Healy. He says, “What is that site? I’ve never heard of them.”

I have not heard of them either. But the women on the list are amazing. Arianna Huffington, Caterina Fake, Michelle Malkin. I am happy to be there.

There is one more good thing about today. Flowers. Another bouquet. From a blog reader. I think he might be in love with me. But whatever. He leaves great comments, and now he sent flowers, and the flowers make me happy. They make me want to sit at my desk and write one more blog post.

3. Accept help, but continue to exhibit your strengths.
After my meeting, it’s 2:30 p.m. — Violin time. I leave to do school pickup, and Business Week calls. It’s a conundrum. Should I talk to Business Week and be late? Or should I risk that Business Week uses a different source because I was unavailable?

I take the call. I try to summarize all my ideas about intergenerational offices in five minutes, and I try to hide sort of out of the way of my son’s view, but he sees me. The rest of the call is about me getting off the call.

I buy my son his favorite after-school snack: Gatorade and KitKats. I tell myself it’s an example of optimistic spending that only a top-30 entrepreneur would do.

We go to the violin lesson and I want to tell you I love violin, but I don’t. I love the idea of the Suzuki program for violin. It teaches self-discipline, and perseverance, and working well in a group. I love that my son is getting all this, and he’s so proud and works so hard, and I love the teacher.

But look. I’m out of money in my company and that’s really all I have to think about for the half-hour they practice for his group recital. I am getting anxious about maybe not getting funding and I’m biting my nails.

Not biting sort-of-casually biting. But biting like I would imagine a serial killer does when he is trying to distract himself from thinking about the badness. Like, biting with way too much enthusiasm. And on top of this, I really really like my son’s violin teacher and I worry that she is going to see me biting like a crazy person and not want to be my son’s teacher.

And then I don’t have to worry about the biting anymore, because he is unfocused and too squirmy, so I scream at him: “Put the violin under your arm and take a bow!”

Has that ever been yelled at a child? It’s not normal. I know. And I know he is just anxious for his recital. The violin teacher gets very nice after that. To compensate for me being a psycho: This is how we are a team.

There is an hour break before the dress rehearsal. We go to the bagel shop for a snack. I have already prepared myself mentally for this snack. Normally, if I am having a bad day, I will have four bagels. But then I would be fat. Really. Four bagels can do that to you. They are like sponges in your stomach. So I told myself no bagels. Not even one, which would be okay, if I could actually eat only one.

To cope, I check my email. There is a note about me talking to CBS. I call them while my son is in the bathroom. They want to do a story about how Gen Y and Gen X don’t get along.

I tell the guy from CBS that I manage five people in their 20s and they would all be happy to talk about why I’m annoying. The CBS guy is shocked. I give him Ryan Healy’s phone number. Things go very well, of course. I know what I can count on Ryan for.

4. Hold things together, of course. But be okay if you can't.
After my son has eaten two bagels, he is not chatty. So I look through my purse for something to do. I find the form for signing him up for classes to help him stay organized. By the time I am done filling it out we are late for the rehearsal and he tells me that I am unorganized.

I help him get his recital clothes on in the bagel bathroom, and we are not the last people to arrive. We wait. I take my son to get his violin tuned and his teacher says, “Black bottom.”

I say, “Huh?” Then I say, “Oh. Shit. I can’t believe it.”

There are 100 kids ready to play their violins and only one of those kids is wearing khaki bottoms: My son.

Luckily, the violin teacher reads my blog, so this is not a huge surprise to her. And we acknowledge that I do have a second chance to get it right since this is only the dress rehearsal.

I almost cry. But I tell myself that if I’m not going to cry about running out of money in two days, then I'm not going to cry about khaki pants. I tell myself to focus on being a top-30 entrepreneur: Success does not come in a linear fashion.

My son and I wait for the teacher to call his group. And I am trying hard to not get blood on his shirt. Because his shirt is actually the proper shirt to be wearing, and my fingers are actually bleeding from aggressive bites.

So I am really overwhelmed now, between the violins and the fashion faux-pas and the blood, and then an investor calls. Yes. In the middle of violin even though I am certain that every investor I talk to knows that I am with the kids in the afternoon because they all bitch about it in a subtle way like, “Oh, that’s great,” with body language like, “She is fucked.”

So I ignore the investor's call because on my death bed I don’t want to remember the day I took a call during my kid’s dress rehearsal.

The teacher calls groups to the stage by the piece of music they are playing: "Allegro! Gavotte! Song of the Wind!" It looks like The Price is Right for the cultural elite, and the kids are walking up, nodding to their teacher as they go.

Each kid has a teacher there, except for my son, who has two. Because this program is really about the parent teaching the child and the teacher teaching the parent and the child and parent bonding through music. And that ended for us the time I got so frustrated that I broke my son’s bow. Well, actually, the fourth time. So now we have two teachers. And when investors want to know why my salary is not the same as all those god-forsaken 22-year-old guys that Y Combinator funds, I want to say, “You try running a startup and teaching your kid violin. Violin lessons cost way more when you are running a startup.”

Okay. So there are 100 kids together on the stage playing. And it’s stunning to see.

For a minute I forget that I am running a company that is running out of money.

All the parents in the audience are motionless; those tiny violins all together sound like a chorus of angels.

My son comes back to me in the audience when he’s done. I say, “I’m so proud of you for working so hard.”

He says, “Are you proud of me for playing perfect notes?”

I say, “No. You don’t need to be perfect. You need to just keep trying every day to be your best. And you are doing that. You should be happy for yourself.”

And he says, “You are trying to be your best every day, too, Mommy. You don’t need to have everything be right. You should be happy for yourself.”

I cry.

Comment on: Tips for coping when your startup is out of cash

To really get tips for being a CEO with young kids, you'd have to hang out with me for a day. Like, last Tuesday. Which was just another day of being a parent and running a startup. Except this day starts at midnight. When I decide that I am not going to go to sleep because I have to get up at 3:30 a.m. to drive to Milwaukee to catch a plane to Atlanta at 7 a.m. And here’s the first tip:

1. Get sleep. The kind that is not warm and sweet.
I decide I’ll stay up late and work but what I find is that I’m mostly eating. First coffee. Then coffee doused in sugar. Then peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which I covet each morning I make them for school lunches. But normally I restrain myself.

I see now I’m too stressed for normal restraint, so I go to bed.

My three-year-old is in my bed. If I get in, he will snuggle and whisper “I love you” in his sleep. But when I get up to go to the airport, he’ll have a fit, because what kid wouldn’t hate to wake to his mom leaving his house in the middle of the night?

To shield my son from childhood trauma I take him out of my bed and put him in bed with my ex husband, who is sleeping in the bedroom down the hall so that I can leave on business trips.

2. Be great at business travel. But get out of it whenever you can.
I set the Blackberry for 3:30 a.m. And when it wakes me I feel like I slept for ten seconds. But this crappy itinerary was my idea. Because I was so excited to go in and out in one day and not have to stay in a hotel.

At my gate I write a blog post, and I feel really good that I can do it at 5a.m. in an airport on no sleep. I send it to my editor and tell him I’m a star for sending it a day early – usually I send it an hour before I want to post it.

Then the flight is delayed. Then it’s broken and delayed. Then it’s probably not happening. Then I see that I will not get to my meeting if I wait for the next flight. But another airline has four, gloriously direct flights that get there in time. I am happy.

Until I hear that the cheapest ticket is $1200. So I call Atlanta to say that my flight was cancelled and I can’t get another.

3. Go to the office when you could go home. Go home later with impunity.
I want to go home and sleep. But I go to the office because we are getting ready to pitch to VCs. We have a lot of great ideas for what we are building for the community. And we are obsessed with the news that Gen Y is not using social media at as high a rate as Gen X is.

I spew the statistics about how bloggers are higher earning and higher educated than most people, and the average Twitter user is nearly 40 years old. We see our spot in the world, and we draw on flip charts and make PowerPoint slides, and then the nanny calls.

And I remember that since I’m not in Atlanta, I can take my son to his T-ball game. So I leave. Here’s something Gen Y really hates: when Gen Xers bolt out the door early to deal with their kids.

4. Prioritize. And keeping the kids from screaming comes first.
I pick up my sons and they want shorts for T-ball. I’m happy about this because I can run in the house for their shorts and check my twitter feed, which is hard to read on my Blackberry.

In the house I grab a diet Coke and the fridge light doesn’t work. I am so focused on shorts that it takes me two more light switches to realize my electricity has been turned off.

Then I remember that paying the bill was on my to do list. Somewhere. Under blogging and investors and T-ball. Yes, I know this is totally irresponsible. But the bill got too big at the end of last year, when my company was not paying salaries and I was not paying most bills.

Also, last week I took half the money for the electric bill and bought my six-year-old a new violin. I told myself that was OK because the violin teacher said his fingers were missing the notes because the violin was too small, and solving that problem seemed more important than paying the electric bill on time.

So I go to T-ball. Because it’s way easier to deal with no electricity when kids are consumed with swinging bats at each other.

5. Get as much help as you can afford. But there will never be enough.
I call the house manager, who has written “pay electric bill” on a post-it maybe ten days in a row, and I tell her the lights are off. She gives me a plan for getting electricity back the next day. Her plan entails paying the bill in person, and stopping at the grocery store for treats, and going to McDonald’s Playland, so the kids are quiet while I’m on the phone with the electric company.

The six-year-old asks what we’re doing. I say, “The Internet is turned off. I have to turn it on again.”

I know this is very serious to him. Because he is consumed with watching YouTube to find out how to win levels in Super Paper Mario on the Wii.

He explains to his younger brother, “This is serious. If we don’t fix the Internet, Mommy won’t be able to work. And neither will her helpers. And people will not see penelopetrunk.com.”

6. Don’t be sneaky. Kids always catch it.
Once I pay the bill, the sun is almost setting, and I need a plan for being in the house in the dark. The house manager makes a plan: Go to a hotel.

But I don’t want to because the kids will know something is wrong. I worry they will be messed up from living in an unstable household. They will grow up wanting to work at the same job at the same company for 60 years because my unstable startup life made them crazy.

So I get them very tired at Playland. They run and scream and I almost pass out on the table because now I am going on three hours of sleep in 24 hours.

Then I take them home to perfectly choreographed sequence of pajamas-book-bed just before the sun sets. They fall asleep and don’t even notice there’s no light.

Then I realize that I didn’t get flashlights. So I get the Dora the Explorer flash light out of my six-year-old’s room and wave it around a little to test it. He asks what I’m doing.

I ignore him.

He goes to the bathroom to pee. He says, “Hey. The lights don’t work.”

“Yeah. I know. Just pee and go to bed.”

“Hey. My bedroom lights don’t work.”

I ignore him. I tuck him in and kiss him and I tell him that it might be very dark if he wakes up in the middle of the night, but he can call me.

“Did you not pay the bill for the lights?”

WHAT??? How does he know this? Bills? He knows about bills?

I say, “Yeah. I forgot to pay the bill. But we paid it now. And the lights will be on tomorrow.”

“In time to play the Wii before school?”

“Well. Um. No.”

“You forget so many things. You never forget your work things and you always forget the house things. No mommy forgets more than you do.”

Then he says, “Mommy, I’m scared. I don’t know how dark it’s going to get. And the house will feel haunted. And what if I can’t see you?”

I get the kids out of bed. I decide we’ll go to a hotel.

I grab the essentials before the sun goes down in our house: Stuffed animals, my laptop, my purse, and gel from my dermatologist to squash breakouts. Because people like to read falling apart in stories and words. But people start to worry if they see the falling apart in your face.

Comment on: 6 Tips for being a CEO without ruining your kids’ lives. I hope.

People ask me how I picked Wisconsin. The bottom line is that I wanted to be able to support my family and take the wild risks that come with having a startup. Supporting a family in NYC or Silicon Valley is insanely expensive especially for someone who has no cushion to fall back on during the months when funding is tight. (Which is a major reason you see lots of Silicon Valley startups from twentysomething men with no expenses and few startups from women with kids, and heated discussion on TechCrunch about salaries for founders who can't make ends meet.)

So, here are some things to think about when you know you are going to do a startup, and you know you are going to move.

1. The first stage of a startup is constipation, which can happen anywhere.
The beginning of a company is slow and meandering. You have pretty much no idea what the company is or what you are doing with it, or if you even picked the right partner to do it with. You sit in a room and argue for a while. And you throw in the towel ten times. And then go get it and try again. You develop a bunch of revenue models that are either so lackluster that they are not worth your time, or so outstandingly huge that they are not believable.

During this time, it does not matter where you live. You are not hiring. You are not pitching your business because you don't have a pitch. And you are probably not spending much money because you know the near future does not include a lot of money coming in.

2. Angel funding is about fun, and you can get money in any state.
Angel funding is local. You will need to get your first funding from people who live near you. This is because angels typically do not need more money—after all, they are investing in a crazy, half-baked idea that has a one in ten chance of making any money.

So the angels are investing in a startup to have fun. They think the entrepreneur is cool, they think the idea is sexy, and they will tell their friends about it at cocktail parties. There are some things you cannot buy in life, and one of them is street cred. But angels try to do this with their startup investments.

The good news about this is that there is angel money everywhere because, in every state there are some rich guys who want more spice in their life. As a person who had to pitch her social media company in Wisconsin without using the word blog, I can tell you with certainty that angels do not need to understand your business to be able to sniff out if you're the real deal. They invest because they like the person. You can get that funding anywhere. If you are likable.

3. If you stay small, you can stay put.
Most companies do not get huge. This is because most companies never even get off the ground. (Not that this is a huge problem. Of course, failure is productive, and you'll learn from it.) But most companies do not grow to be 50-100 people. If nothing else, that number of employees is usually out of the sweet spot of the founders who are managing the company. So they usually sell or go under before they get huge.

If you are not going to get big, you do not need to take in venture capital. And if you are not going to take in venture capital, then you don't need to be where the big VCs are: New York and California. There is also the talent issue – if you need 50 developers who are great with Ruby on Rails, that's gonna be hard in Tulsa. But finding three, that's possible. Especially if you can train one or two.

4. If you live in the boondocks, you need to fly.
There is research from Babson College suggests that traits that make a successful entrepreneur do not point to a single personality type per se—a very wide range of personalities can do a good job starting a company. But what differentiates successful entrepreneurs is networking skills.

So while you don't need your network in your backyard (which you would have automatically if you lived in Northern California), you do need to be able to fly to your network frequently. The network you can build by just showing up in California or New York is unprecedented. And while LinkedIn is great for getting a bus dev guy, it's not great for meeting entrepreneurs and swapping stories. You need to show up. I try to fly to each coast once a month. I book myself back to back for three days and then I return to Wisconsin to decompress.

5. Live in an expensive place only when you need venture capital.
Most of you will not be going after venture capital. You simply will not have a business idea that warrants that kind of investment. And in that case, you will be bootstrapping for a long time. And it's a lot easier to bootstrap in a place with a low cost of living.

There will be months when you cannot pay people. There will be days when you worry you can't pay your own bills. You will fall behind much faster in Silicon Valley than you will in Iowa. And a big reason that startups fail is because the founders don't keep going — searching for what will work. Living somewhere inexpensive gives you leeway: a way to have a decent lifestyle while you're gambling that a dream will come true.

And, just like Facebook, and many, many other startups, if you do get to a point where it's time to get huge, you can open offices in Silicon Valley.

So, how do you decide where to live? Well, I took a bunch of research about what makes us happy and I concluded that living in a city where there is a low cost of living gave me more flexibility to create a life that was right for me. There are trade-offs in every city, but the most expensive cities demand the most expensive trade-offs.

And, one more thing: You should move where your family is, or where there’s anyone you know and love. Work does not matter as much as being close to people you love. So if you're still determined to do a startup in New York City, maybe you should relocate your loved ones as well.

Comment on: Starting a company in Silicon Valley is stupid

This is enough for him to have a private jet and be King of Madison (Wisconsin), but not enough for him to get a lot of respect in Silicon Valley. A quote from my advisory board member who lives in Silicon Valley: “For big VCs, $50 million is a rounding error.”

So Brian is not looking for people to mentor or boards to sit on because he is consumed with running his fourth company, Alice.com, which will compete with Wal-Mart and Target.

I do not tell Brian that I will have a hard time ever missing a trip to Target to shop at Alice because Target has such great clothes that are so cheap they are almost free.

Well, actually I did tell him that. And I told him a bunch of other stuff, because I decided that I need him as a mentor. Eventually, I got him to agree to be on the board of my company. Here’s the process I took to convince him to help me. And these are good steps for anytime you have someone you’d like to ask to be your mentor:

1. Don’t be discouraged by lack of response.

The way Brian operates is that he doesn’t talk to anyone in Madison and I had to send him fifteen emails before he’d have lunch with me.

Later her told me that he gets so many invitations for lunch that he doesn’t even respond until someone sends him two emails. “They have to show a little tenacity,” he says.

2. Find the person’s weakness, so you know where you can help him.

When we had lunch I opened by regaling him with stories of my dating life, to make him feel a little unstable and vulnerable. And then I launched into how he needs to help more entrepreneurs and he is helping no one in Madison and it’s not enough to be great at building companies. “You need to be great at building communities of people building companies,” I told him.

He looked at me with an incredulous stare.

“It’s more fun that way,” I said. “We’re doing this for fun, right? I mean, you do not need more money. So there is no rational reason for you to be working insane hours for another company. And I do need a lot more money. And it would be much safer for me to go to a Fortune 500 company and draw a big salary than take a risk on a startup. So we’re both doing this for fun, right? And it’s more fun if you help more people.”

Brian pointed out to me his companies made several people in Madison millionaires.

Immediately I wish I had met him earlier. Like, when I was scooping ice cream at 31 Flavors and I could have been getting him coffee in exchange for stock options.

We come to an agreement that he will help me because he wants to be a good and giving person and I promise him that I will be fun.

3. Be real. No one wants to mentor someone who is perfect.

I then proceeded to be totally not fun by running out of money, being moody and difficult, and totally pissing off my lead investor who is also one of his investors. To the point where Brian told me that he couldn’t be associated with my company. Because we were in too much trouble.

He would not agree that he said that. I am summarizing. But this is really the crux of the whole problem: He is the paragon of diplomacy and I am not. And I need to be. Because we live in a small town. And all angel funding is local.

But while I was melting down, he was paying attention. For the first time, I didn’t have to chase him – he was genuinely interested in how I was getting out of my mess.

4. Remember that good advice is harder to find than money.

Speaking of melting down over money, you’d think it would be totally annoying to me that he’s not putting money into my company. Because money is local. And he is local. And he is money.

We talk about this over lunch. And he is paying for lunch. That’s a good start.

It’s our third lunch. I pace myself for topics to cover. I try not to think about the fact that he gets a little antsy at the end. Like, he just sort of gets up when he’s done. Other people kind of wind down the conversation. Or do something like fold their napkin. He just stands up. Sometimes I’m mid-thought.

I am one of the most socially awkward people I hang out with, so it takes a lot for me to be making remarks about someone else’s social retardation. But the truth is, though, that entrepreneurs are often described as quirky, and Brian’s weirdness makes me trust his advice more.

Brian gives great advice about the nuts and bolts of running a company. After all, once you’ve done three, you have to have sort of a system for going the distance, right? He is great for keeping me focused. I am always thinking about the future – where is human resources going? Where is generation Y going? Where is blogging going? I am asking the huge questions instead of “Did anyone call Deloitte to find out what they are posting on Brazen Careerist next month?”

Brian says something like, “What are you doing to make sure that everyone in the company is focused on the same vision?”

5. In the end, you want the mentor to care about you as a person.

I knew things were going well when we were talking about how to make payroll and Brian said, “Wait. One more thing. You have to get rid of that farmer.” (And I’m thinking, “Brian, when you are walking through the parking lot for your private jet, why don’t you look around for someone better for me to date?”)

The great thing about Brian is that he’s exited enough startups that he can afford to be light. For isolated moments. Most entrepreneurs are anxious during the early phase of a startup. Obsessively focused. Tweaking models often. Praying something sticks.

Brian is steady though – he knows he’ll figure it out. When it comes to building a company, Brian has the perfect combination of calm and excitement. And in the end, I think he might be my mentor for being lighthearted and calm. Or faking it.

You should try to get a mentor like Brian. But since you probably won’t get one right away – after all, you need at least fifteen emails – you should subscribe to his Twitter feed. Which I love. It’s a peek into how a startup unfolds in an entrepreneur’s brain.

Comment on: Get your next mentor by being slightly annoying

This is a problem because our company has been out of money, pretty much, since November. We have revenue, but not enough to cover operating expenses. So we’ve all given up a portion of our salary for a while now. And we stopped paying rent. And we didn’t pay freelancers, (which meant that for the past months, any time something broke, it was very high stakes because we couldn't hire someone to fix it.)

The lack of money got so bad that one day I was driving to Chicago to meet an investor but the company credit card (which is really Ryan Healy’s credit card) was declined. And I didn’t have money for gas. So I had to drive back to the Brazen Careerist office and get money from Ryan Paugh, who is the only person in the company who has any sort of financial cushion in his life. But he only had $20, which is not enough to get to Chicago, so the investor had to meet me in Milwaukee. And buy me lunch.

The no-money thing has also been stressful at home. At first I cut back on stuff that was not a good idea. Like, cut back on the vet for our two new kittens, and then it turns out they are not that new, at least to the world, because one got the other pregnant. And now it’s really expensive because we have to have a cat abortion.

So I looked for more innocuous cutbacks and thought of my ex-husband. I am supposed to be paying him $250 every month for two years. But he already sort of lives in my house anyway. Because I’m nice. And I thought maybe he wouldn’t notice it if I didn’t pay him that. Or he wouldn’t say anything. Because he’s nice.

I also cut back on the cleaning woman who comes every day. Please shut up about how it’s a luxury. Anyone who has a stay-at-home spouse has someone doing a quick clean up of their house every day. Also, it’s pretty hard to have an ex-husband in and out of my house every day if I have to clean up after him. And, a clean house is so important to women that it is actually a good indicator of whether or not she’ll want to have sex. Women like having sex more when their house is clean.

Not that anyone is having sex in my house. Well, except for the kittens. But my point is that cleaning is important.

I also thought it would be good to decrease household help because the other night we were having dinner and my six-year-old found an apple seed. He said, “Let’s save this til the spring and then plant it and grow an apple tree. And we can water it every day. I mean, we can pay someone to water it.”

Okay. So I told myself cutting back expenses is an okay thing to do to keep the company going.

And then we got funding, but we are not allowed to use the funding to pay debt. So all the months that people have been expecting to get back pay, they are wrong. That’s not happening. And, also, all the freelancers are not going to get paid.

The investor tells me, “Oh, this is fine. Treat your stock like Monopoly money and give it to the freelancers.”

This does not sound right to me. So I call the guy on my advisory board who is plugged in to all things Silicon Valley. He tells me that paying stock is generous. He says a lot of companies would just not pay. Period.

I am still scared, though. I was a freelance writer for five years, and I got so frustrated when people didn’t pay.

But I called one of the freelancers we owe money to and asked him if he’d take stock and he confirmed what my advisory board member said: Stock is surprisingly generous and startups screw people over all the time.

Great. Now I’m ready to make the rest of the calls.

Things go pretty well. No one is happy. But we have always hired freelancers we adore, so we have good relationships — well at least we do at the beginning of the calls.

Then I get to my SEO guy. He is a nut. First of all. Let me tell you a little about the SEO world. It happens after dark. I don’t know why the SEO guys don’t sleep, but they don’t. Also, it’s always guys. I think because SEO runs a lot like the mob and the mob is all guys. Really, think about it. Who are the top Diggers? Guys who never change out of their pajamas. And who is ranking on Google for top search phrases like “buy guitar lessons right now” or whatever. That’s right. Guys who never change their pajamas.

So, anyway, my SEO guy is very gracious about the stock. And I make a note to myself to maybe stop twittering about how he’s a crazy person. But then he calls back and says, “Uh. Could I have links instead of stock?”

Really. He tells me his plan to dominate the world by having his various web sites rank high on Google for odd business term searches. And, then, after he shows me all the places on my blog where I mention the perfect business phrase for linking to him, he says, “Um. And also, you know that post about your first date with the farmer? I’d like a link there, too.”

Yep. That’s right. My SEO guy has a gardening site, and apparently my farmer page is one of the most popular pages on the Internet for this one, specific word, which he does not want me to tell you because he thinks you will then develop a site yourself to leverage traffic from this word.

I go to the board meeting with Ryan and Ryan. We report that we got the debt off the books and we’re ready to take in the money. And I am feeling sort of good. Like we’re turning a new page in the life of our company. And snow is thawing, and I’ll draw a salary again and I’ll get some cute spring skirts. In fact, I’m hoping maybe I’ll get enough money to revamp my whole wardrobe: Does anyone want to buy a link on that farmer post?

Comment on: For a startup, money doesn't solve problems, it just changes them