In 1990, Vera Wang opened the Vera Wang Bridal House in the Carlyle Hotel. She was 40 years old.

By conventional wisdom, she was already too late. She had spent 17 years at Vogue, then lost out on the editor-in-chief position to Anna Wintour. She'd worked for two years at Ralph Lauren as Design Director. The fashion industry's playbook for someone with her résumé was clear: leverage your connections, stay in your lane, and don't start over.

Wang herself admitted thinking, "Maybe it's just too late for me.”

But when she couldn't find a wedding dress she loved for her own wedding at age 39, her father saw what she initially dismissed: a real business opportunity.

The Opportunity

Most bridal designers at the time focused on traditional styles.

Wang asked a different question: What if modern women - especially older brides like herself - deserved gowns as sophisticated as they were?

She opened a boutique selling other designers' gowns first, spending years developing her own design skills before feeling confident enough to sell her own creations. When she finally did, she fearlessly pushed boundaries, adding red to bridal collections one year and blending black and white another.

Wang understood that the bridal industry wasn't serving the women she knew, women who were accomplished, opinionated, and uninterested in looking like everyone else.

Today, there are Vera Wang boutiques in London, Tokyo, and Sydney. She has employed hundreds of people and maintains sole ownership of a business valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Lesson

In my work supporting founders at LOUD Ventures and LOUD Collective, I see this choice constantly: follow the timeline society expects, or trust your own readiness to chase your dreams?

For Vera Wang, starting at 40 wasn't a disadvantage. It meant she brought nearly two decades of industry relationships and the hard-won confidence to know exactly what she wanted to build.

Are you waiting for the "right time”? Or do you have the courage to begin?

If you’re a business owner who needs support in finding that courage, LOUD Collective can help. Reach out here.

I’ve been hosting a 4-part Investor Spotlight Series with Cure., a healthcare innovation campus focused on supporting healthcare and life sciences entrepreneurs.

At a recent event, founders asked me questions like: Should I take VC money? How do I find the right investors? What actually gets a VC's attention?

In these questions, I spotted a pattern that speaks to the real challenges of building in a complex industry like healthcare.

Know Your Industry

Healthcare is attracting brilliant people from every sector, mostly because the opportunity is massive and the capital is real. 

That means a lot of people are jumping into healthcare without really knowing healthcare. It’s true that we need diverse perspectives and fresh eyes on broken systems. 

But if a good chunk of your team doesn't actually understand healthcare’s complexity, you're going to burn time and capital learning lessons someone else already knows.

The dilemma isn't choosing between domain expertise and fresh thinking, but building a team that honors both.

Build for the Exit You Want

Most founders optimize for what investors want to see in the near term, like growth metrics, user traction, and momentum that will get you to the next fundraise.

When our team at LOUD Ventures invests, we ask: What will an acquirer actually value three to five years from now?

Building for acquisition is fundamentally different from building for the next round. If your investor group doesn't include operators and experienced founders who've been through exits, this perspective is often missing.

The best founders think about the end from the beginning - not because they're planning to exit early, but because they understand that investor milestones and acquirer value aren't always aligned.

Who Are You Serving?

I’ll say it: most healthcare ventures aren't actually helping patients.

Maybe they're optimizing billing or improving workflows, but often they're solving problems buried so deep inside the system that the patient never feels the difference.

If the patient isn't at the center of what you're building, the impact is probably overstated.

If you spend time helping people, it’s a win, even when the world is telling you that you are losing.

That clarity - knowing that real people are genuinely better off because of what you built - is what keeps you going when things feel difficult.

Takeaways

Whether you’re building in healthcare or otherwise, here are 3 key lessons for founders:

Building in complex industries like healthcare is hard. The problems are complex, the stakeholders are many, and the path is never linear.

But if you're building something that genuinely helps people in their most vulnerable moments, you're doing work that matters. And that's worth the fight.

Most Cure community sessions are only open to members, but being a part of my community will get you to this event for free. Sign up here.

Need permission for something you want so badly?

Embrace the power of living “as if.”

There's something profound that happens when you stop treating your goals like distant possibilities and start experiencing them as inevitable.

If you visualize your future self, you start noticing opportunities you would have otherwise missed. 

You have the option to make different choices in small moments. You show up with the energy of someone who's already becoming that person.

The gap between who you are and who you want to be is closed in tiny, consistent choices that seem insignificant in isolation, but compound over time. 

And six months from now, you'll look back and barely recognize the person who was too afraid to start.

If you're waiting for someone to tell you it's okay to want what you want, this is it.

You don't need more credentials. You don't need to wait until you're "ready." You need to decide that your vision matters enough to take the first small step today.

So ask yourself: What would I do today if I already had permission? What small action would my future self thank me for?

Then do that.

Because the truth is, you've always had permission. You were just waiting for yourself to believe it.