Innovative Solutions for ADHD Executive Functioning Challenges

H: You have a very interesting life story and, origin story. But we're here to talk about being a person of color, a female, a founder in a male dominated, very bro market. And you are the person who is led not by the dollars, but by passion and purpose and creating something of significance for people with brains like ours. How shall we tell the story, you begin.

G: Oh, gosh. Well, first of all, I would say, that concept of male dominated, let's go ahead and, like, trash that. It's male saturated but with a 90, what, ninety five percent failure rate for founders, I would say it's far from dominated, and the struggle is real.

H: Yeah. Tech is where so many people think it's gonna be easy, fast, fun, lucrative AF. They're gonna be, like, hanging with the other bros. They're gonna be creating all kinds of nonsense like the fuckerbergs and the rest. But in truth, most startups fall flat, whether they're in this industry or not. So what compelled you because I know you are a person who is led by passion and purpose. And when you are obsessed with an idea, you're unstoppable. Were you at all daunted by creating something in tech, or did you just blow right past any self doubt?

G: So I dropped out of high school, because school was boring and I wanted to study my own things. And what I wanted to study was brains. And that's kind of what got me to this point of wanting to build tech, a post industrial concept of, software development was wanting to continue to understand brains. But the philosophy that made that kind of possible for me with no technical background was the idea that the laws of physics are real. Like, the laws of physics are static, but absolutely everything else is bullshit.

H: You decided to opt out of things that didn't make sense to you at an early age. Most of us and you and I are in different generations and had different backgrounds, but most of us grew up being told that you need to get an education. You need to complete that education. The purpose of the education is to lead towards gainful employment. You need to pick and stick. You need to find the career path. You need to try to move up the freaking ladder and last as long as you can, hopefully, all the way to retirement.

That is a grossly outdated concept now, and especially for people who are neurodivergent. The notion that we would be able to just do one thing from the beginning to the end of our life, Like, just fucking kill me now. But you decided, you know what, school doesn't make sense. Not because you couldn't hack it, but because it wasn't interesting enough. I am curious to know if you had family support for that or if they wanted to throw you out.

G: Oh, so, I mean, if one of the reasons I dropped out is because I didn't have family. So my stepdad got sick, he was in hospice and my mother left the family. But before that, what made the decision so easy to drop out is that when I was originally diagnosed with ADHD, for white kids, it's ADHD. For white boys, it's ADHD for, you know, brown and black girls, it's Oppositional Defiance Disorder.

H: It sure is.

G: Back in the nineties and so I was diagnosed with Oppositional Defiance Disorder, which meant that my institution was clinically justified to preemptively punish me. We all know what this is, this is why the vast majority of black boys with ADHD are in jail.

H: That's right.

G: Rather than getting cares because that's the name of the diagnosis that they get instead. But at the same time, I was also diagnosed with high IQ, the ninety ninth percentile. So in elementary school, they would essentially prance me out for testing to show off at knowledgeable contests and to do all of these things to earn the money. And then they would prance me back into my classroom, consistently keeping me from recess because with my autism, I wasn't socializing well. And with the, oppositional defiance, it was like, well, it's because it's your problem, you're just a bad kid. So I learned really, really early that no amount of submission is ever enough for reprieve. There's no way to do enough right? Once you submit to these systems, once you submit to power, there's no…

H: There's never a way to get back.

G: Right, exactly. You'll never do enough to get out and so it was easy at 13 to say fuck you. I'm going to study whatever I want. I'm going to keep my family together because our other option was, foster care. I was the youngest of six and just do whatever I wanted so I essentially was raised by librarians.

H: God bless the librarians.

G: I know right? So when I wanted to go to college, I pounded the ACT out. Like, it was nothing because test taking is easy. You know what they're gonna ask you and got into whatever college I wanted.

H: You wanted to just bypass all the things that seemed stupid, irrelevant, redundant, unnecessary, or arbitrary, and just educate yourself. And luckily for us, your favorite subject is the brain. Because whether you like, you are gifted, you have ADHD, and you have autism so you have a very unique brain. And so you've probably heard me say this before, but I believe neurodivergent people are the canaries in the coal mine. We're outliers and often outsiders, but what affects us more readily will eventually affect them all.

So because our tolerances are low, because our sensitivity is high, we have to figure things out for ourself because the neurotypical people don't know what to do with us like, you defy all the categories. So it makes complete sense to me, you had to figure yourself out. You had to figure out what you enjoy, what you're passionate about, the difference you wanna make in the world, and you had to just break out of the systems and continue to do so and you're and you're continuing to do it now. It feels a lot of that long ago right? Like, you've literally always been this way.

G: Yeah. Absolutely, much to my mother's chagrin. And, actually, the reason I started studying brains was not because of my own. It was actually because of hers. I was originally, obsessed with not becoming like my mother. She was extremely abusive, particularly, to me. Obviously, I was the only one like me in my family and, I just wanted to know how do I not be like that? And that's when I started studying neurochemistry, biochemistry, things like that. But it wasn't until I understood maternal attachment in college that I started to think about other ways to apply this, to simply bring more people into themselves. As I heard more and more people go, oh my gosh, I can't believe, you're so capable after everything you've been through. I'm like, this was the fun part like, these are the moments that I stole back from everything else that I had to do.

H: And luckily for us, you've decided that your mission is to build adaptive tools that will end executive functioning challenges in the workplace for people like us. Now you're an entrepreneur. I'm an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs have a lot more freedom to create the conditions that suit our body, mind, and brain. When you're in the workplace, you have a lot less control over those things, and most of us don't wanna ask for conditions. So with all the books, all the podcasts, all the apps, all the tools, all the project management systems, all the things that many of us have spent way too much money and time purchasing, partially using, and then discarding and going off in search of the next one. What is it that the productivity industry is not understanding about neurodivergent brains? What are we missing?

G: Anything, no one was ever interested in neurodivergence. Like the entire system and conceptualization of productivity today is based on industrialization. We have a capitalist mentality of three profit avenues. You're either going to profit the greater system through the education industrial complex, through the prison industrial complex, or through the military industrial complex. And that has been evolved from agricultural, has become essentially the military industrial complex.

You can see kids that used to inherit their family farms are now inheriting their family flags and, you know, being, profitized that way. And don't get me started on how that pipeline now leads directly into the prison pipeline when they get too old or too burn out to participate in that pipeline. But whatever the case, concepts of cognition, cognitive function, and productivity have all been designed to figure out how to maximize.

H: Output.

G: Output. Thank you.

H: It can be monetized for the business owners and the shareholders.

G: Exactly. And that has never been how brains work, how communities work, or how people work. And now we have this post industrial world where we have an opportunity to not just reconceptualize healthy cognition, the kind of cognitive, symbiosis mind, body, spirit interactive symbiosis that leads to self actualization, like a post industrial self actualization, but we can build tools. We can augment that path through technology, just like we've done it for ecologies, just like we've done it for communities.

You know, there's no difference between laying out a city and laying out a path for success. It's going to wind. It's going to have corners. They're going to be dead ends. I mean, driving through Minneapolis, St. Paul is terrible, but it works. It's a whole culture right? We can build tools that help us figure that out about ourselves so that we can have our own beings and then participate in the space that we share together that we call reality in more self fulfilling, more plastic, more self fulfilling ways?

H: I think people with ADHD, people on the autism spectrum, people with dyslexia, just different kinds of minds, often feel they're not productive. And what I see and as a person who's part of this community, who works with people in this community, what I see is that when we're doing something that's of interest to us, when we're doing something that, we care about, that we feel adequately prepared for. We can be incredibly productive. The amount of output when you're in a state of hyperfocus on something that you are really obsessed with is phenomenal, and nobody can come close to us. But we also have periods of time that we literally cannot get out of the starting blocks no matter what. And there is probably no app, no tool, no medication even that can change that. What are some of the ways that you see technology being able to assist us in both those things? Because you and I both we've talked about this, we know how to hyperfocus.

In fact, we can't stop ourselves from hyperfocusing when it's something that we're obsessed with. But hyper focus isn't always a good thing because you can spend way too much time pointing your brain at the wrong thing right? If you're pointing your brain at the right thing and you hyper focus, voila, you're getting a lot done, you're getting tremendous productivity. But pointing your brain at the right thing isn't necessarily automatic. What do you say for people who have ADHD or autism who are feeling apathetic, who are feeling lethargic, who are feeling really kind of despondent and even despairing right now with this current state of things. And because of that, they cannot force themselves to do the things they need to do.

G: So I think the most important thing for all of us to realize right now is it's not fair and that does matter. People with ADHD and autism tend to be 20 to 30% more productive than our neurotypical peers on average. But again, we're calling productive the producing of profit margins for another entity. It doesn't feel like it because it's not fulfilling. And when I say it's not fair, that's what I mean, you deserve to be fulfilled, to feel fulfilled. That is a basic human need, to be accepted within a community as you are is a basic human need. And when you're constantly giving and doing and this is, again, why I ended up just leaving academia is because I realized early on that nothing I produced, no matter how much I gave or how much I worked or how much I did, how much pride I brought to people who never showered that pride back on me, it was never enough.

And that's exactly what so many people who are feeling burned out right now are feeling. We may not have the words for it, but that's what it is. You are productive, you are capable, and you don't need to be. You deserve to be fulfilled and so I want people to start separating those two things. The tools that I build will not solve these energetic or emotional problems. They will not solve the problems of meeting people's basic human needs. What they'll do is take off the cognitive load so you can fight. That's what I want so they're two separate solutions.

H: But this is quite audacious, especially now. I wanna know how you are dealing with being a person of color and a female who has been seeking funding and in the tech industry. Because our pre chat about that is, like, literally blew my hair back, and I think it may be the most valuable part of this conversation today.

G: Sure. Well, I did that thing that is, like, terrifying to founders. I got funded. I got into the Techstars program. So going back even further, I've been working with neurodivergence for years. I've been studying brains literally all of my life, and I essentially woke up last January and decided that the best way to have the impact that I want is to take all of the things that I've built for people and for myself over the last, you know, decade and a half and turn it into technology with no technical background, no coding skills. Like, I kept having men come on saying that they were going to partner with me to do this and then disappear. So I had to learn how to code and build the first version myself.

H: You taught yourself how to code.

G: I taught myself how to code. It's just logic, it's not that difficult. And with the tools that we have now, it's really just figuring out how to write the best AI prompts. I mean, wait till you see what I've built over the last three weeks. Whatever the case so I built the first version the very first version was actually on note cards.

H: Oh my gosh. I love that stuff.

G: Because I just had no idea how to code. But I built the first version, got about 400 regular users and discovered that they were only using the tool in case of emergencies and so I figured out…

H: Wait. Wait. What would be an emergency?

G: An emergency was when they cannot start. And that's when I realized that task initiation and the development of these, that's what informed the pillars of productivity, time, tasks, and temper. So the time that you have your time blindness and how that weighs in, the anatomy of the specific task versus your affinity at any given time and your hormonal balance, your whole holistic wellness at the time. And that's why my tools integrate with health apps is to show you, hey, when you've had seven hours of sleep, you're actually more productive than when you've had nine hours of sleep. And, hey, I also noticed that you only need nine hours of sleep when you are under hydrated by 20% or more right? So these are the things that my productivity tools do.

I don't care how much you produce. I care about people being well, and I care about neurodivergent people knowing exactly who they are, exactly what they want, and changing the world with it. That's what I care about. That's why I'm obsessive. That's why I went completely to zero, fired all of my staff. Sorry, guys, I love you, and I want you back. And kept doing this anyway because I cannot imagine giving my children a world that is not imbued with the greatness and ideas of neurodivergent people and their justice drive and their creativity and their demand, their righteous demand to feel fulfilled.

H: When they are empowered, when they understand it is not optional, it is not negotiable, it is your fucking birthright like everybody else. You're not just here to take up space. You're not just here to perform labor for the benefit of others. You actually have a right to be fulfilled by what you do. And now let's figure out what that is so you can do it and what kind of conditions you need to create so that you can do it. And if you, like you, Mina, couldn't find a preformatted place that provided that for you, you figured out how to build it for yourself, and now you're inviting others to share it with you.

I want you to tell us a little bit about why you had to fire your staff and continue to work on your own because it's specifically related to kind of how we have to sell our souls to get funded and what you give up. Like, people think I just need to get investors. I just need to get angel investors. I just need to get funding so that I can be first to market with this thing, and I need to do this and I need to do that. But you learned a very important lesson, let's just say you were reminded of a very important lesson that you have learned many times over your life. That they're that when you are taking money for something, they're taking something from you in return, and you decided it wasn't worth it. Let's talk about that for a couple minutes.

G: That's an absolute fact. So I did try to raise after Techstars. I got into the Techstars program about six months into this journey. And frankly, I got a little bit spoiled because Anastasia Simon was the talent finder, whatever that word is, for the Techstars Atlanta program. And I took a meeting with her that I almost didn't take because I was so embarrassed, my cofounder had left. I was two weeks behind on the development of my tool. I had no money, no prospects, everything was falling apart.

And I took that meeting with her and told her absolutely everything, everything that I just told you now. And that I would have it out in two weeks and that I would reapply for the next round. And she goes, no, you're a founder and that's how I got into that program. And sure enough, I had it out two weeks later and about a month after that, I had 400 users. So I got really spoiled with being seen as a talented, driven, capable person who's gonna do this one way or another.

H: Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Why does why was that spoiling when it sounds to me like, honestly, Mina, that was a no brainer. She saw the qualities in you. She saw the drive. She saw the commitment. She saw the passion. She saw the determination, and you owned, you know, the cringe, the embarrassment, how you thought you might be perceived. You managed your rejection sensitivity, and you overcame whatever resistance or doubt she had by showing her your magic. So why were you spoiled? It sounds to me like you showed up and you earned that spot.

G: That's what I would agree. I would totally agree with that. But if you're on LinkedIn or you're in any of these, like, startup communities, it's constantly how to perform for investors, how to dance on stage, how to and I don't care like, I want to. I understand that this is an important part of developing a tool back in the nineties, but I don't care. I'm not a performer. I'm a founder and a scientist. I have a pitch deck that will walk you through the important points of my business, but I won't perform it for you and that's not a pride issue.

It's just that I am focused. And if I have to spend all of my time begging you to be part of a community, begging you to see my potential, I'm sorry. I'm back there in that first grade, fifth grade classroom knowing that it doesn't matter how successful I am. Because I'm like putting out by myself, I'm putting out new versions of my tool every month, like complete revamps. And this is what they're talking about. Hey, this is your founder, move fast, break things, call people.

I'm taking like 20 calls a week, not right now. 20 calls a week at first from customers, potential customers. Tell me about your day, just tell me about your day. Having people go and actually convincing people to go and record an entire day. And then just watching that over and over. If you're an investor and you hear me tell you, this is how I'm building my company. This is how I'm building my tool and the software doesn't matter. It's the algorithms that will be the baseline for every software from now on. And you don't like that I don't seem submissive enough or starstruck enough that you call yourself an investor.

I don't have time for that. I have to go figure out how to code, I can't do both. I don't have time for both. So I went to absolute zero, fired all my staff and I'm happy building my tools by myself, learning new tools. Like I'm learning new AI, I'm learning new technology, I'm in multiple classes building. I'll release the full web app of this tool with all of the backend integrations, data structures, and ready to start patenting in about three weeks from now and I started two weeks ago.

H: You probably could have done it their way. You were introduced to it. You were introduced to the model. You probably could have done it their way, and you probably would have been successful. Because if you care enough to do anything, Mina, I know you well enough to know this, if you care enough to do something, you will be successful. Otherwise, you can't be bothered. You're either going for the full vision or you can't be bothered. You're gonna do something else. So I do not doubt that you would have been successful no matter what. But what's really coming across to me, and I really, really wanna emphasize this for the listeners, is that when you think differently, it really doesn't make a whole lot of fucking sense to try to conform to the norm, to try to do it the way other people have done it, even though it's maybe made them wildly successful, even though they may be neurodivergent too.

Because for you to and here's an AI expression, unlock your potential for you to be able to unlock your gifts, for you to be able to really leverage your ADHD and autistic strengths, your giftedness, you really have to do it your way. You have always done it your way. And I think the thing that's most impressive about you to me is that unlike many women, you have uncoupled from people pleasing and permission seeking at a much younger age than many of us do. And it's, you know, you just can't be bothered with the song and the dance. You just can't be bothered with the dog and pony show. You just can't be bothered with people telling you, you need to do this. This is the way it's done because all that does for you is say, oh, yeah, watch me. And then you go on with your disruptive ass self like you've been since you dropped out of school.

G: Right and I think that's important. And I think building pathways, consistent pathways for us to do things like that is vital to the whole ass future that I'm giving to my kids, that we're giving to our babies. And it's like, I totally believe that if I wanted to follow this path, I could absolutely do it. Social things, they're just equations. I can figure out how to perform my tech stack or how to perform whatever. But then I'm not working on what I care about. I didn't set I didn't start this company to raise money. I started this company to solve this problem. And when I found out, because it's not what they tell you at first, they just tell you how to do it. And if you're really gonna build a major company, you go and you raise money. I've never met a founder who sat down and said, damn, I'm so glad I have all these investors. Not a single one. Talking to people who have raised 2 10, $50,000,000, I've never heard anyone go, this is exactly what I needed. No, they burn out in two years and lose their companies, 90 of them do.

H: And a lot of them, Mina, commit suicide.

G: Exactly.

H: Because the rate of mental health conditions, ADHD being one of the most predominant ones, as well as autism, bipolar, like, touched by fire right? Most entrepreneurs and many in the tech sphere, have these neurodivergent brains. We are more sensitive, things that affect other people affect us more. So if we're just going for the purse, if we're just jumping through the hoops, if we're doing all the things that we're told to do because that's the way it's done, we may get the prize. It's not going to land the way it does with someone else because I've never met a neurodivergent founder who feels that money is their prime directive. It's like the money comes because they're following their passion and purpose, because they're making a difference, because they're creating something of value then the money comes. But if you're just going for the money, oftentimes even when you get it, you're not satisfied with it. It literally does not scratch your itch.

G: Right and then you get founders who and that's another thing that I've seen and something that I did. The big mistake that I did was question when I did get investment from techters. I questioned my ability and I hired a development team. And frankly, even though it was a great development team, they did a shit job and I have to rebuild the whole last thing and now I'm broke right? And no matter how much cash you get through investment, you hear this from founders over and over. It doesn't matter if it's a hundred thousand or a hundred million.

That's the story, throwing dollars where customer calls belong, trying to pay for marketing to market a tool that doesn't do the thing yet right? And I understand that, and I kind of pitched this. And I think that instead of having investors invest the way they do in series a, series b, series c companies, for start ups, for early founders precede and cede, it should probably be more like a salary. Like, you get these angel conglomerates together, start up a start up an ecosystem and pay salaries and, you know, guide that testing, guide that development, and let people focus on their passion. Huge, I think we'd have wildly different results from startups.

H: That's so fucking disruptive not surprising it's coming from your brain. But you know what? It makes so much sense to do it that way. You know, we are almost out of time, and I wanna make sure we get a chance for you to say what your app is. And can people still get in, as a beta user and actually contribute to this becoming what it's meant to be?

G: Absolutely. So Better CEO is a machine learning supported adaptive productivities tool. It's an all-in-one software to help you go from I hate my boss to a hundred thousand dollars or more right using this tool. Go get on my email list right now, It's betterCEO.app. Download the mover mobile version, play with it for a little while. Email me and tell me what you love and what you hate about it. Because here in a few weeks, you're gonna get what I've built. And what I've built is a full web suite of tools that are designed specifically for you and that adapt to you and that teach you more and more about yourself.

We're taking the cognitive load off of the constant things that you have to do, like memos for your taxes and making sure that you're staying up to date on your state registrations and things like that. All of that's already scheduled for you so that you're not losing track of those things and streamlining the process of developing your offers, your first offers, meeting your first clients, delighting your first clients because you have the skills. You have the exceptionalism. We're taking all of the crap off of you so that you can express those things more easily and learn about what's exceptional about you as you go along. That's Better CEO, that's what I'm building now. But go ahead and download the mobile version so you can see the difference.

H: If you know you're different and you know you're meant to leave your mark on the world, do it your way and do whatever it takes to figure out what that is.

G: You'll know it's the right thing because it's fun.