Arshiya Kherani

You’re reading The Messy Middle: weekly deep dives on building a business, storytelling, culture, and the hard decisions behind what to pause, prioritize, and pursue. 💸 Maybe It’s Not Your Pitch Deck Last week, I was in Riyadh speaking on a panel at the Women Shaping Wealth Summit about who gets to design the innovation economy. Somewhere in the middle of our conversation about what investors actually pay attention to, both investors on my panel said some version of the same thing: the...

You’re reading The Messy Middle: weekly deep dives on building a business, storytelling, culture, and the hard decisions behind what to pause, prioritize, and pursue. 💡 You Don’t Need Another Good Idea You know that feeling when you sit down to work on your business, open your laptop, and somehow end up with more things to do than when you started? You were going to work on one thing. Then you remembered the partnership you need to follow up on, the offer you’ve been meaning to revisit, and...

You’re reading The Messy Middle: weekly deep dives on leadership, startups, identity, politics, and how to make high stakes decisions that are intentional and in-line with your values. 🤩 Are Celebrities Our New Moral Guidance? The internet has been absolutely wilding out this week over Macklemore, Ed Sheeran, Pink, and a growing list of artists taking sides after Macklemore spoke about Palestine during Sheeran's tour. The very short version: Macklemore spoke up, venues pushed back, he was...

You’re reading The Messy Middle: weekly deep dives on leadership, startups, identity, politics, and how to make high stakes decisions that are intentional and in-line with your values. 💸 Who Gets To Decide What’s Worth Existing? I was on a panel a few weeks ago called Capital As Activism, and one of the questions broke my brain: If government funding is fragile and traditional markets keep failing the people who need them most, how do we actually move from passive resistance to real economic...

You’re reading The Messy Middle: weekly deep dives on leadership, startups, identity, politics, and how to make high stakes decisions that are intentional and in-line with your values. ⚡ The Jolt The other day I jolted awake at 2 am and couldn't fall back to sleep. My mind was racing with open loops and irrational fears: what if I don't close the client tomorrow? Why didn't I negotiate this differently? Did I respond to that email? My credit card payment is due and I still need to get paid...

You’re reading The Messy Middle: weekly deep dives on leadership, startups, identity, politics, and how to make high stakes decisions that are intentional and in-line with your values. 💸 How Do You Get Capital Behind A Big Idea? Earlier today, I spoke on a panel: Capital As Activism, and while preparing for it, I found myself thinking about how much of my career has involved making the case for things traditional markets don't always know how to value. Before I became an entrepreneur, I spent...

You’re reading The Messy Middle: weekly deep dives on leadership, startups, identity, politics, and how to make high stakes decisions that are intentional and in-line with your values. 🧠 The Best CEO I Ever Worked For The best CEO I've ever worked for started every Monday morning company meeting with a personal story. Of course, he would share a company update and KPI recap after, but he'd always anchor the time together on a story, sometimes from his personal life, sometimes from his career....

You’re reading The Messy Middle: weekly deep dives on leadership, startups, identity, politics, and how to make high stakes decisions that are intentional and in-line with your values. 🧠 What Summer Slump?! In my business, August has historically been a bit of a slow month for me. To be fair, last year I was getting married in August (!!!), and the year before that was year one. Nonetheless, I'm absolutely surprised by how busy this month has been! I've had my hands in a bunch of different...

You’re reading The Messy Middle: weekly deep dives on leadership, startups, identity, politics, and how to make high stakes decisions that are intentional and in-line with your values. 🟥 Even Worse Than Communism We had the Kornacki Cam on in our living room for about 7 hours straight last night. We kept telling ourselves they'll call it any second...but it was almost midnight PST when AP News finally called the historic win: Abdul El-Sayed won the senate primary for Michigan last night by 1...