Good morning! House Republicans want to investigate Liz Cheney, the Gisèle Pelicot case comes to a close, and a founder built her company while redefining her own gender identity. Have a peaceful Thursday.
- Founder story. In March of 2023, Margot Blouin founded Cadstrom, an AI startup that aims to help electric engineers build hardware correctly on the first try. She met her cofounder and started raising $6.8 million in seed capital. At the same time, she was transitioning her gender to live openly as a woman for the first time.
Transitioning as an adult or experimenting with gender presentation is hardly unusual in 2024, but Blouin’s role as a new founder and CEO in an overwhelmingly white male—and, often, conservative—industry added extra layers to the process.
She describes her transition as a deeply personal journey that came following a period of severe burnout and a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. “It was difficult for me to sit at a computer for fun, nevermind for work,” the self-described longtime electronics fanatic says of her mental state before transitioning. “I was pretty broken.” After starting to transition, she began to experience joy again. “On the one hand, you have anxiety, but on the other, I’d been feeling better than I had in a long, long time,” she says.
Her anxiety came from a fear: founding Cadstrom was her “life’s work,” an idea that came from her own experience building electronics and encountering delays and “respins,” or design reconfigurations, required of their printed circuit boards. “I had to sit back and think, am I going to be able to accomplish that if I transition? Or am I going to be giving up that dream?” she says.
Instead, the reverse was true. She says if she hadn't transitioned, there's no way she would be able to build a company today. The 31-year-old first shared her new name and identity as a trans woman with friends and family, then with her cofounder Scott Bright about seven months ago. She told Cadstrom’s small team of five, but asked them to keep addressing her by her former name until she came out publicly; she didn’t want to put them in a situation where they didn’t know what to call her in front of a customer or investor.
Similar situations arose throughout the process of building and funding a company. Blouin recalls deciding what to tell investors while scheduling pitch meetings when she took time off for throat surgery related to her transition. “That was not something I was ready to talk about with everyone around me,” she remembers.
Once, Cadstrom was selected by the organization Quebec Tech as one of the most promising startups in the Montreal region, where Blouin is based. That morning, Blouin laid out her suit to wear. But when it came time to get dressed, she couldn’t bring herself to put it on. “I just thought, I’d rather not show up at all,” she says. She instead wore an outfit she felt comfortable in and gave her presentation at the evening’s event. The only response from the group was to ask how to address her.
“I used to joke, ‘I’ve got to go man up,’” she remembers—her way of describing going to work surrounded by people who she wasn’t yet ready to tell. “That was fundamentally hard,” she says. Before transitioning, Blouin already openly identified as queer, which helped her find investors—Bison Ventures, Innovation Endeavours, and A12 Incubator—who were supportive when she later told them about her transition. She looked around for trans role models in the tech industry, but didn’t find many; she did connect with one VP at Microsoft, where Blouin used to work as a program manager, who served as a resource.
Yet while Blouin's immediate circle was supportive, the same can't always be said of broader society or even her industry. Over the past year, trans people were often wielded as a political flashpoint among Republican politicians in the U.S.—and by Elon Musk, an unavoidable figure in the electrical engineering world. Blouin sees herself as an "ambassador" of sorts, often meeting people who have never, to their knowledge, encountered a trans person before. "People with a science and engineering background tend to have a mindset where they're open to new ideas," she says. "Sometimes they need some help. They have questions, but when questions come from a place of love and support and trying to develop understanding, I think that that's a wonderful growth opportunity."
Blouin believes that the skills of a founder and CEO—demonstrating leadership and confidence, putting people at ease—helped her navigate her transition in her professional life. Yet she argues that her transition is not so different from any other challenge a person might be dealing with alongside their work, from a family issue to a breakup. “Everybody has things going on in their lives,” she says. “Transitioning was mine.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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